Daily News Spin — August 18, 2001 (Saturday)

Disclaimer time

Given the rather testy nature of some of the news items in today's update, we feel a need to remind readers that we (Tom Chick and Mark Asher) are freelance game writers. We have written for a number of publications and websites, but never PC Gamer or Avault. Some of our recent assignments have been with competitors of PC Gamer and Avault, namely Computer Gaming World, Computer Games magazine, GameSpy, and...is that it? Maybe. Damned Internet.

PC Gamer charging game companies for demos?

From the Fatbabies forums, an email allegedly from Imagine Media informing game companies that they will have to pay $5000 to have their game demo included on the magazine CD:

As all of us are aware, though, our industry has keenly felt the high-tech downturn of the last year. Our magazines are no exception, and we find ourselves unable to continue offering demo distribution free of cost. Therefore, effective with the November issues of PC Gamer, MaximumPC, MacAddict, and Official Xbox Magazine, we'll be assessing a flat-rate Distribution and Handling fee for each demo we distribute. This fee - $5,000 per commercial demo and $500 per shareware demo - will apply to all software selected by our editors for inclusion on our discs. It will help us defray the very significant cost of cover discs, and allow us to continue offering the proven, targeted sampling opportunities those discs provide.

Again, this fee is a Distribution and Handling fee, and applies to editorially selected disc content....It is not an advertising fee - although advertising opportunities will continue to exist on all our coverdiscs.

Avault and SubstanceTV pleasure one another

The old men at Old Man Murray take a look at a "site of substance."

August 14,2001: Avault's Editor-in-Chief David Laprad writes an embarrassing editorial lamenting the demise of G.O.D.:

It�s clear, now more than ever, that the Gathering of Developers was one of the great alternative publishers in this age of industry consolidation... Here was a group of people who loved creating PC games, and watching the Gathering disappear into the embrace of corporate arms is to feel the electric tingle of hope fade.

August 17, 2001: Former Godgames CEO Mike Wilson's upcoming failed project, SubstanceTV, names Avault its first "site of substance". News of the big announcement is also exclusively granted to Avault. And exclusively reported by Avault. Except for here.

So what's a site of substance? If Avault is any indication, it's the type of site that can drum up a highly substantive number of words - say seven thousand - to review DeathKarz. The average person has a greater chance of feeling the electric tingle of hope's sinister doppelg�nger, the electric tingle of getting hit by lightning, than ever making it through an entire dry-ass Avault article.

There's more, including an old email allegedly from Avault to potential advertisers, offering to write previews if ads are purchased. Check it out, and then discuss it in our forum thread.

More on Majestic

The San Francisco Gate has a look at Majestic. Rather than being a preview, it's more of a look at the game post-release. Interestingly, the game "that plays you" seems to have some pacing problems. Namely, some players are frustrated at having to wait for new content.

The hours of standby can be frustrating, akin to reading a suspense novel that periodically shuts its cover in mid-chapter. In part, this is a marketing strategy: If players complete a two- to three-week episode too quickly, they'll be left waiting as long as a month for the next episode to begin. This is problematic, considering players pay $9.95 a month for access to the game.

A 23-year-old player from Los Angeles who goes by the handle Nogwater says that although he finds the standby times tolerable, he resents "only being able to play for 10 days and then having to wait another 20 days for the next episode to come out. I figure that if I'm paying monthly for a game, and they claim that it takes 20 to 30 days to finish each episode, I want to be able to play for at least 20 days out of the month."

Interesting article.

Bruce Shelley on game design

Gamasutra has the article:

Presenting the player with interesting and well-paced decisions is the rocket science of game design. Players have fun when they are interested in the decisions they are making, when they are kept absorbed by the pacing of the required decisions, and when they feel a sense of reward and accomplishment when good decisions are made. When the required decisions are too trivial or random, the element of fun lags. You risk boring the player and driving them out of the game. The Age of Empires series demonstrated that our customers consider automating trivial activities (queues, waypoints) a positive improvement.

However, they damned well hate to just completely automate farming for some reason.

UK game mags lose readers

Eurogamer has the story:

The latest ABC figures have shown circulation dropping almost across the board for gaming magazines in the UK during the first six months of the year. Bucking the trend were Computec's PlayStation World (up by 25% to 79,080) and Future's Games Master (marginally up at 44,853), but otherwise it was all bad news. Future's Official PlayStation Magazine lost 38% of its readers (down to 133,168) as Sony's old warhorse came to the end of its life, while their new Official PlayStation 2 title gained just 1% (up to 82,109) compared to its first three months on sale. Other Sony magazines seeing a decline include Paragon's Play (down 5% to 62,805) and Future's "quirky" PSM2 (down 15% to 44,543).

The article mentions that PC game mags fared a bit better, but circulation numbers were either flat or suffered small losses.

Wired on GOD's closing

You have to love even-handed journalism that avoids being overly dramatic:

The last hope for independent game publishing, GodGames, has closed shop -- just weeks after the debut of Max Payne, the hard-boiled officer and title character of the crime story that's instantly become one of the world's most popular, best-reviewed PC games.

The last hope! But maybe the problem wasn't the big bad publishers crowding out small shops like Gathering?

"I was never impressed with the Gathering's ability to pick hits," said former board member Scott Miller, the CEO of 3D Realms, Max Payne's producer.

What? Scott wasn't impressed with that savvy grab of the Heavy Metal license? Pair that with an expensive Quake 3 license, and how can you lose? Just in case that can't miss combo somehow manages to miss, be sure to cover your bets by paying for the KISS license and then make a game that doesn't actually have KISS in it!

Arcanum update

Troika, perhaps responding to some grumbling that was generated by the demo of Arcanum released some time ago, has issued a statement about some improvements that have been made to the game since then. The biggest change is that the interface can be toggled off, freeing up more screen space for the game. Here's the press release as posted on RPG Planet.

3am

IGN has the Freedom Force Development Tool available for download. This will allow you to create your own heroes for the upcoming superhero game from Irrational. Here's the link.

Some gamers are frustrated with the Game Boy Advance's lack of a backlit screen, according to this Bloomberg article.

Man drowns in cat bowl. Weird, eh? How about fires started by pop-tarts?

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