7/30 Shortcuts
Posted by Dan on July 30, 2008Another shortcuts from another day. We’ll probably have more on the Scrabulous, Blizzard, and Age of Conan stories in a later segment.
- Facebook pulls Scrabulous from US and UK servers.
- Gamepolitics has the court documents from Hasbro’s prior lawsuits over the game.
- Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) indicted in Alaskan court. The internet may be a series of tubes, but his bank account is a series of oil company transactions.
- Blizzard moves for a permanent injunction in the Glider case. Virtually Blind has the PDF of the motion.
- EA reports a $95 million loss this quarter (better than last year. Most companies post a loss this time in preparation for holiday sales). Smart investors know this is not a bad thing, and EA’s porfolio of upcoming games is as as strong as we’ve seen for any company. Also, Bad Company sells 1.6 million copies.
- Rob Pardo says: Raph Koster is wrong, PC gaming is not dying, it’s evolving. No offense Raph, but Rob’s got a better track record on this one, and the technological state of the PC gaming industry tends to agree with Pardo.
- EA acquires Shawn Fanning’s social networking site. Spore has 33% female fanbase. Battlefield Heros to integrate social networking, and EA to focus on strong launches for Heroes and Spore.
- Nintendo files for injunction in Tokyo District Court against R4 Revolution modchip sales. Gamasutra says the suit is limited only to Japan’s jurisdiction and is not aimed at western sales.
- Age of Conan developer Funcom’s stock drops by half. It’s misleading, because it’s now still above the levels it was shortly before Conan’s launch. This is both a non-issue and a big deal. It’s a non-issue because the stock price boom was the result of the Conan launch, clearly a temporary bubble, and due to correct anyway, and it recovered to a still-higher-than-pre-launch price. It’s a big deal, because it dropped by half, meaning some traders made it big on the stock, and others missed out on a big chunk of change. The drop was precipitated by SOMETHING, in this case, a huge exodus of players due to bugs, balance issues, and lack of end-game content.
That’s all for this edition of shortcuts. Tune in next time for “Son of shortcuts!”
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I didn’t say PC games were dying, re-read the article.
My disagreement with Rob is about whether single-player gaming is “a historical aberration”– and there I think the facts favor me quite a lot — especially Rob’s track record! Consider that Blizzard itself not only made its name on multiplayer titles, but an MMO accounts for 90% of the company’s staff at this point.
Hi Raph, sorry it took so long to approve the comment. Stupid Wordpress 2.6.
Anyway, I think we’ll need to agree to disagree here. Yes, Blizzard is 90% WoW, but I’d argue that WoW itself is an aberration. WoW only had the power it did because of Blizzard’s huge success with Warcraft II and III. And it only had such success on those because of Starcraft and Diablo I and II. In those games it is impossible to divorce the single player from the multiplayer. I, for one, never played more than 2 or 3 games on battle.net but played every single Blizzard game out there for the single player experience. So the real issue is whether you consider the Starcraft/Warcraft/Diablo series to be singleplayer or multiplayer titles — if it is the former, as I propose, then Blizzard certainly didn’t actually make its name on multiplayer titles.
I mean, lets look at the Command and Conquer series. It’s another staple of the RTS genre, but Westwood grew famous on Command and Conquer and its expansions, and before that Dune II. Neither of those were remotely considered multiplayer games. In fact, one of my strongest memories as a younger gamer was trying to get a connection with my friend Mark, so we could play each other in C&C multiplayer, and it never working. We ended up resigning ourselves to playing the “Bad Neighborhood” singleplayer map and timing ourselves as to how fast we could beat it.
I never played the C&C single-player campaign (yes, the original). It was straight to multiplayer — and we played it obsessively.
Diablo & Starcraft are, to my mind, completely defined by their multiplayer. Certainly that is what has driven their longevity and their popularity.
That said, Blizzard’s just announced plan to put achievements in across all their titles just reinforces what I am saying. WoW is not the aberration — connected multiplayer state is going to be the default for ALL Blizzard titles from now on, including the ones with single-player campaigns.
Even then, however, you’re taking too short a view; history does not begin with Dune II. When I cite single-player gaming as the aberration, I mean a strain of gaming that was born basically in the mid-70s and came to dominate electronic (but not all) gaming. The several thousand year history of games is undeniably and overwhelmingly multiplayer. Today, single-player dominance in electronic gaming is fading — and I expect all single-player games (of which there will continue to be many) to all exist within multiplayer contexts — such as live chat, achievements, persistent high score tables, and so on.
And even with all these technological updates and progress that we’ve undergone, the last game that I played was Dwarf Fortress II, an ASCII based single player game. There exists a controllable structure in singleplayer games that can never be duplicated in multiplayer because of the human element (captured quite well in the Final Fantasy series of games — they’re meticulously scripted and controlled right down to the last minutiae). Sometimes, I just don’t want to play against other people. You can see it with games like Team Fortress 2 and Counterstrike, online only games that yet still have people programming bots into them.
I think while games undeniably have always had a multiplayer focus (because of the human nature to want to interact with others in games), the industry will never abandon the single player who just wants to play for himself, and doesn’t care about other people. Things like achievements and high score tables don’t actually make a game multiplayer if the player still comes at it from a singleplayer mindset.
PS, if you get a chance, reinstall the original C+C plus the “Covert Ops Essentials” expansion pack. There is a map called Bad Neighborhood. You start with a single stealth tank, and an MCV, that is in the middle of a GDI base, completely surrounded by fence. You have to use your stealth capabilities as well as the construction site, to build up your base inside the GDI headquarters, then break out, expand and finally destroy the massive GDI presence that takes up around 3/4 of a huge map.
It’s epic. It’s also something that simply can’t be recreated in multiplayer.
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