Chuckles abound.  By pricing Starcraft II ten dollars above the norm, Blizzard pulled a Bobby Kotick and sold the fuck out.  Or something.

If you’re upset games are becoming more expensive because the industry is jerking to the joys of its own production values, fine.  That price points are being determined by suits instead of production costs?  Whatever.  This is addressed to the crowd that thinks Activision was behind it: You’re fucking idiots.

What can a July of 2002 GameSpot sales rundown teach us about Blizzard’s pricing history?

You mean what was then the most anticipated PC game of all-time was priced at sixty dollars?  And Activision had nothing to do with it?  Gamers have no fucking clue what they’re talking about it?  Unprecedented!

Gamers perplex me.  I’ve worked jobs where people couldn’t make ends meet because life’s necessities skeet on their checkbook.  “Necessities” such as getting their dog’s teeth cleaned, and eight-hundred-dollar rims.  So it’s amusing that ten dollars can prove such a breaking point for a medium prided on bang for the buck.

But if you’re that concerned about an impending price war, let me explain something to you: Why do athletes get paid so much? As an example, the National Football League and National Basketball Association employ revenue sharing as part Collective Bargaining Agreements with their players.  This ensures the athletes receive a percentage of all revenue (through television contracts, ticket sales, etc.) as part of their salaries.  In other words, the salaries fans bitch about are a reflection of what they spend on the product.

In other words, the sixty-dollar price tag you bitch about is a direct reflection of what you will end up spending.  If you want to be a defender of the free market, don’t buy the damn game.  And while you’re at it, you can man up and not play it at all.  But you already made up your mind on this one.  Let me know what name you’re using when Starcraft II comes out.

Addendum: Yeah, I didn’t write anything for a week.  I was sick.  Sue me.

Every April 1st, creative mongrels use the internet to wreak havoc on the human condition.  I don’t have the time for an epic April Fool’s joke.  Let me comment on another.

Teamliquid.net is “introducing” SC2ProMod: Because we already determined the public won’t watch Starcraft if players don’t play regional manager with their mineral line.  In a world oblivious to time zones and the concept of April Fool’s, where each part of the Earth operates on a different clock, people missed the fucking point:

As future reference for Starcraft III and the mind-control headset that will dumb down the game for noobs with slow fingers, it is important to remember why people would think this isn’t an April Fool’s joke.  Let’s travel back to 2007 and 2008, when the internet learned Starcraft would have a competent interface and the internet lost its fucking mind.

And since Blizzard put multiple building selection in their coffee, Starcraft II was ruined and the company was never heard from again.

Right?  Right?

Proof the free market can properly respond to consumer demand: It took Sega fifteen years to realize people still want to play two-dimensional Sonic games.

Was curious how the company would make people forget about the Sonic games for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS.  Four seconds of in-game footage in a fifty-second trailer did the trick.

If you’re not old enough to remember Sonic’s prime, The Ultimate History of Video Games clears it up: As people awaited the Super Nintendo’s 1991 release, Sega replaced Altered Beast with Sonic The Hedgehog as the Genesis pack-in title.  Overnight, the Sega Genesis became the “edgy” system.  Sony marketing teams found teenagers wouldn’t admit to owning a Super Nintendo. The successor to the most dominant video game console in the history of the American game market became the “kiddy system”.  (Sony mingling with the 18-29 age demographic? Nintendo’s unwillingness to grow up?  Any of this sound familiar?)

That was the worst Sonic game of the early nineties.  And when it comes to the next four (Sonic 2, Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles, Sonic CD), you won’t find any consensus on which game is the best.

Nobody forgot about Sonic because he couldn’t hang with Mario.  They forgot about him because Sega fumbled their console gaming business that badly. Consider 1994: Sega announces an early surprise release of the Saturn in order to get a leg-up on Sony’s Playstation, leaving the Saturn with a dearth of titles and pissing off the Monstro-Marts who got left out of this chance to sell the console.  The Saturn was supposed to be a three-pronged approach in the Sega console business, where the Genesis and 32X add-on would be casual options and the Saturn would be the choice for hardcore gamers.

Yeah.  That’s why we’re lauding “Sonic 4″ as the continuation of the two-dimensional-platformer renaissance and not the return to a legendary franchise. Now all we need is for Sega to live up to that end of the bargain.

We’re screwed.

I blew a gasket during E3 because Microsoft tried to convince me the X-Box was a revolution in graphics and online play that hadn’t already occurred.  I lamented that the era of PC gaming that built the modern video game industry was in the process of being forgotten.

If you’re looking inward at the PC gaming community, you’d have the perception that I’m a crazy internet nergin who can’t stop living in 1997.  You know, when PC gaming meant something.  This is why I act that way.

The following is our list of the top 10 innovations in console video games that [emphasis mine] revolutionized the industry within the past 10 years.

And the author lists away: Storage capacity that computer game makers have exploited since the advent of the hard drive.  Physics that pushed the limits of the first video cards.  Downloadable content conveniently monopolized by console game developers.  And most importantly: Online, head-to-head competitive play over the internet.

Thank our gaming overlords.  Without the video game console, we may be doing things the personal computer pioneered in the decade before this one.

Internet law states every blog has to have at least one flowchart.  Here you go: The history of how your favorite video game franchise became a worn-out hooker.

Angered and confused by the chart?  Read on for analysis!

(more…)

British company Datel has been using the X-Box 360’s lifespan to concoct memory units for the console. They supply more memory at a lower cost than Microsoft’s product.  You know where this is going.

Datel, who expressed disappointment over a recent Xbox 360 firmware upgrade that eliminated the ability to use its third-party memory cards with Microsoft’s console, has responded with a lawsuit.

The complaint, filed in the Northern District of California U.S. District Court, alleges that the October 2009 Xbox 360 update, and subsequent lock out of Datel products, was designed to “to exclude competition from the Xbox 360 aftermarket for controllers, and to force consumers to buy Microsoft’s own controllers.”

Datel claims that Microsoft informed them that the lockout of Datel products was an “unintentional effect” of the software update, but notes that Microsoft told G4TV that, “Unauthorized MUs are not tested for compatibility or certified for safety and compliance standards and thus could damage -customer’s Xbox 360 consoles.”

I don’t claim to be a lawyer, but believe me: I know my tech history.

From 1978 to 1980, Atari tried to litigate the upstart Activision into oblivion.  Hey, they didn’t create the Atari 2600, so what right to they have to develop games for it?  The courts called “bullshit”.  Atari’s inability to win the battle justified the third party development and subsequent market saturation that caused the Video Game Crash of 1983.

Nintendo learned from Atari’s shortcomings and rigged lockout technology into the Nintendo Entertainment System.  That didn’t stop a number of developers from cracking the tech and making horrible games for the console.  Sega went a step further, building memory allocation into the Genesis that required all games (licensed or elsewise) to display a “Licensed by SEGA” screen.  The company believed this would grant them room to kick the crap out of unlicensed Genesis developers.  When Accolade became one of them, the courts ruled in their favor, stating their engineering and subsequent game development was within the confines of fair use law.

Legal precedent has established that you are allowed to build the key as long as you don’t reverse engineer the keyhole.  Datel created a key.  It provided more bang for the buck than Microsoft’s.  So the company used a firmware upgrade to change how the keyhole works.  In that case, we’re no longer talking about Atari and Activision.  It harkens to United States v. Microsoft, the court case that declared the company’s tendency to “buy out” competitors (make a similar version of competing software and then program Windows to lock out the original) constituted a monopoly.

So uh, yeah.  Good luck with that “stall the legal process until Datel runs out of money to fight the issue in court” thing, Microsoft.

Industry analysts have spoken: People who don’t care about video games don’t buy video games.

True to analysts’ predictions, the gaming industry was not able to lure consumers in increasing numbers to retail in October. As detailed in The NPD Group’s US retail sales report yesterday, industry sales were down a cringe-inducing 19 percent from October 2008 to $1.07 billion. Hardware took a particular thumping, dipping 23 percent to $381 million, while software slipped a greater-than-expected 18 percent to $573 million.

According to a pair of analysts, October sales indicate that casual gamers are largely at fault for the continued decline in industry sales. As noted by Electronic Entertainment Design and Research’s Jesse Divnich, casual gamers haven’t returned to buy more gaming goods this year. Further, he believes this group will continue to stay away until the arrival of new hardware from platform manufacturers, such as Microsoft’s Project Natal or a new DS from Nintendo.

If I’ve learned anything from cable news, people will assert that “Nobody saw this collapse coming.”

In January of 2008, one month after starting this blog, I wrote the following:

The last time the video game industry built a sizable base of casual gamers, they called the aftermath the Video Game Crash of 1983. The last time a video game console built a sizable base of casual gamers? It appears Nintendo is about to write that chapter.

I affirmed it in December of the same year:

Here’s the problem: The two demographics Nintendo holds the keys to are not laurels of long-term success, and I believe that if things go south, the company will stick to this model.  As discussed, there’s no indication that youngsters will stick with Nintendo as they become older.  The GameCube was an extension of the Nintendo 64 model and it paid the price.  This time, Nintendo convinced parents to join their kids, and it’s so easy anyone can get involved.  Casual gamers tend to do one of two things: Look for more complex gameplay experiences or stop playing altogether.  And right now, there isn’t a single person who knows which road the older generation is going to take.

…

[A] company is using a library of tech demos and fitness software to push two million gaming consoles in a single month.  This bubble will burst, it’s just a matter of who’s caught in the blast.

After years of selling gaming consoles marketed towards younger kids, Nintendo became the heir to an aging audience and a world of market volatility. Wii Sports couldn’t guarantee success in the future.  According to VGChartz’ hardware database, the Nintendo Wii sold 23.7 million units in 2008.  Thirty percent of those sales occurred in the last forty-five days of the year.  Should holiday sales remain consistent, the Nintendo Wii will sell approximately 16.0 million units in 2009.  Yes, down one-third for the calendar year.

I enjoy waking up in the morning and knowing that I am right.  Perhaps Nintendo will announce a Wii-Mote Detonator add-on to commemorate this potentially-historic implosion.

Credit to The_Earth for the news story.

Subtract some name-dropping (Zork, King’s Quest, Ultima, Time Zone) and I can’t tell you much about computer gaming in the 1980’s.  I’m just sure nothing has changed: A world enamored with Nintendo’s “casual games”, a world that has no respect for those geeks glued to their computer monitor.

Today, that era is an afterthought, a decade of dungeon-crawlers and text-based adventure games supplanted by VGA graphics and the mouse.  Instead, we’ve granted legendary status to the Nintendo Entertainment System.  Gamers did it for a reason: We took the pick-up-and-play, single-player side-scroller and left it for dead.  That crowd has yet to find recourse.  Today’s game is competitive multiplayer, user-created content, and fancy graphics.

That is, what PC games pioneered in the 1990’s. That’s why I’m concerned the era responsible for modern gaming is being forgotten.

Top-end graphics, content creation, online play.  Where’d console developers get that idea?

As early as the 1980’s, Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior were brewed by Japanese developers’ experience with Western computer role-playing games.  During the mid-1990’s, Donkey Kong Country killed the Atari Jaguar by showing how a sixteen-bit console was capable of “computer graphics”.  Soon followed four-player deathmatch that turned Goldeneye into the Nintendo 64’s killer app…and Sony countered with Final Fantasy VII, whose pre-rendered environments and full-motion video were all compiled for use on a compact disc.

From 1992 to 2000, the personal computer witnessed the releases of Command and Conquer, Ultima VII, Star Control II, Myst, Doom, Sim City 2000, X-Com: UFO Defense, Star Wars TIE Fighter, Warcraft II,  Civilization II, Quake, Diablo, Total Annihilation, Fallout, Half-Life, Starcraft, System Shock 2, Counter-Strike, Everquest, Unreal Tournament, Quake III Arena, Baldur’s Gate II, and Deus Ex. I know I’m forgetting a number of games.  Each of those products is the cream of their genre or revolutionized it.  They are responsible for a planet where World of Warcraft, Halo, and Call of Duty appeal to tens of millions of fans.  They are directly responsible for a console war built on the compulsive urge to build the ultimate gaming rig.

And today?  Keyboards are for losers…until you need sixty dollars to buy a keyboard for the Call of Duty RTS.  Microsoft would like to thank the forces in the computer industry that made such a potential scam possible.

I’m not keen on the Halo love story, either.  It’s a good franchise with great marketing, the first console shooter with passable controls.  Of course, being the best shooter on a console is like bragging you live in the nice part of the ghetto.

If you’re annoyed Microsoft took an expansion pack and priced it for sixty dollars, fine.  If you’re annoyed the game still moved two million units on day one, whatever.  But please, stop manifesting your hatred for Halo by railing against its single player component.

Ben Kuchera of Ars Technica was critical of the game, namely on price point.  On the side, in a development that shouldn’t surprise anyone:

Does anyone play Halo to wander around an empty city, searching for items to move the story forward? Of course not, but the hub concept is used in Halo 3: ODST, and while it doesn’t add to the game, it does give the campaign an extra hour or so. That’s great, because if players weren’t forced to root around the city to find out where to go next or look for audio files that tell a side story, the campaign mode from the game would be around four hours long. In fact, on normal mode a friend and I beat the game in around four hours, meaning that without the tacked-on hub concept there would have only been around three hours of play time.

We’re on the fourth Halo game and people still complain about the single-player?  What’s the line about “Fool me once, shame on you”?  News-flash: Nobody plays Halo for the single-player.  The 600,000 people currently on Bungie.net validate that.  Purchasing Halo and complaining about single-player is like buying Wii Fit Plus and complaining the competitive play sucks.

If anyone is responsible for an industry where Bungie can lay low on single-player, it wasn’t the console shooter.  As great a party game Goldeneye was, it had a massive single-player component.  It was the near-simultaneous launch of Unreal Tournament and Quake III: Arena, shortly followed by Counter-Strike.  You don’t have to like Halo, but if you want to complain about its sub-par campaigns, start with the PC shooters that encouraged them.

(Note: This is my final entry regarding the Starcraft II trilogy debate.  I know you’re sick of it.  I’m sick of it.  Let’s get it over with.)

The argument against the trilogy is somewhere between “Fuck Kotick” and “Fuck Blizzard”.  By announcing expansion packs in advance (as though Brood War and The Frozen Throne weren’t planned), the claim is that Blizzard sold out.  If Wings of Liberty becomes the defining consumer product of our lifetime, the company will ruin it with their preplanned follow-ups.  I still haven’t heard a reason why the pre-Blizzard-is-evil, near-perfect dungeon-crawler Diablo II received an expansion pack that gutted the game’s depth.  They can’t explain this, either:

Don’t recognize the games in the front? “Insurrection: Campaigns for Starcraft” and “Retribution: Authorized Add-On for Starcraft” are glorified map packs featuring shoddy single-player campaigns and unplayable multiplayer maps.  And who greenlighted them?  The 1998, do-no-wrong, do-it-for-the-fans Blizzard Entertainment.

Insurrection was released four months after Starcraft hit shelves.  It was produced by Aztech New Media, a company whose resume was a lone map pack for Warcraft II.  That’s it.  Inexplicably impressed, Blizzard authorized the company to create a map pack for what would become the most beloved real-time strategy game of all-time.  GameSpot’s Greg Kasavin was kind-hearted in his evisceration of the product:

“Insurrection’s production quality is nowhere near the original’s. You’ll know that right away when you realize there’s no front end to the game. You access the campaign exactly how you would any fan-made scenario. And with several high-quality fan-made campaigns already available for free on the Internet, there remains little reason to own this add-on; rather, there remains only the question as to why Blizzard authorized such a lackluster product in the first place.”

Undeterred, Blizzard authorized a second add-on, released one month after Brood War.  Retribution was spawned by WizardWorks Software, a company that released mission packs for a number of popular PC games.  Oh, and Duke Nukem II.  That is, the second game in a platforming franchise that would eventually herald Duke Nukem 3-D. The verdict on Retribution?  When you’re discussing a game authorized by Blizzard, “collector’s item” is the last thing you would expect to hear.  But if you have sixty dollars, Amazon is selling.

For those of you counting, they authorized four Starcraft games in eight months.  They only made two of them.  Conclusion?  Blizzard whored the franchise to make a quick buck. Fortunately for you, it failed so spectacularly that you’ve never even heard of it. They’re the company’s equivalent of the Star Wars Christmas Special.  George Lucas won’t mention Chewbacca’s family or Life Day, and Blizzard isn’t mentioning Insurrection and Retribution.  Go ahead and deride the Starcraft II trilogy, just don’t pretend these particular add-ons never happened.