Paul McCartney indicates that when he was growing up, access to musical media was only accessible via radio and records. Now, however, music is everywhere and he hopes to reach a whole new generation with a game project he’s working on.
“It’s a fascinating market,” said McCartney. “A new computer game sells so much better than a new CD these days. Young people will hear my music for the first time in a game.”
Source: express.co.uk
Capcom has announced that Dragon’s Dogma will release on May 22, 2012. The company also announced that the game will also feature the first opportunity to try out a demo of Resident Evil 6 before its release November 20, 2012.
“Retail versions of Dragon’s Dogma will contain a redeemable token that will allow owners to download the Resident Evil 6 demo,”:said Capcom. “Purchasers of the Xbox 360 version of Dragon’s Dogma will be able to redeem this token and download the Resident Evil 6 demo globally on the Xbox Live Marketplace for Xbox 360 60 days earlier than any other platform starting on July 3. The demo for owners of the PlayStation 3 system version of Dragon’s Dogma will go live on the PlayStation Store on September 4 in North America and Japan and September 5 in Europe.”
Those pre-ordering will receive special offerings particular to certain stores. GameStop will have the ‘Pawn Upgrade Pack’ while the ‘Armor Upgrade Pack’ will be offered through Best Buy and the ‘Weapon Upgrade Pack’ will come from Amazon.com.
This console hardware generation has been going on for a while, and this has benefited certain developers. While Epic Games is one of the companies that has benefited from the delay of new hardware, founder Tim Sweeney notes that it comes with certain disadvantages.
“We have been able to ship three Gears of War games on the same generation of hardware, each one with dramatic improvements over the last and a two to three-year development cycle,” said Sweeney. “So it’s been a very good thing for a game business today. With each new title, there is a bigger and bigger Xbox 360 installed base of users, so the games can sell more.
“On the other hand, it gets harder to generate the same excitement from the same hardware. That is when the new hardware is justified. But then you reset the installed base to zero and it’s a lot harder to sell a lot of games again,” he added. “So you should only replace the hardware when you can make a dramatic leap in quality, not just 2X or 3X. It has to be huge and fundamentally new.”
Of course, Epic has its fingers in a lot of different pies right now, and while Epic is heavily invested in console games, they’re spreading out to other areas as well. “With every console transition, people ask if there will be another console transition or another successful console platform,” said Sweeney. “We are betting big that there will be. If you look at games like Call of Duty and Gears of War, it’s clear that console is the pinnacle of the gaming experience. so we are investing heavily with our engine and game development efforts for the next generation of console technology and games.”
“But at the same time, we actually see this wonderful thing happening where the mobile platform and web platforms are getting to the point where they can run a AAA game,” he added. “One consistent game engine technology can run across console, PC, mobile and web games. We’re really happy with that position. It lets game developers target lots of different platforms. We have shipped Infinity Blade of iOS. We have announced a new game Fortnite for an entirely different audience, more casual. It appeals to a wider audience than a hardcore game like Gears of War. We are branching out, but we tie it all together with AAA production values.”
Source: VentureBeat
Zynga has gotten dinged a lot for copying other company’s games, being called out by Buffalo Studios in particular for their game Bingo Blitz. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus is striking back, saying that game incorporated elements of Zynga’s Poker Blitz and deflecting on the issue of innovation and copying game design.
“I think people in the industry are defining innovation different from the way we are,” said Pincus. “When you define innovation, you have to define what problem are you innovating against. The problem we are innovating against is how do we get a billion people to play together. That’s what we want to solve for. We need to innovate as an industry to make that happen. That’s a worthy goal. I think we are innovating as an industry and Zynga is contributing massively to it on many, many fronts.”
Source: VentureBeat
The Mass Effect series has been credited with one of the better narratives in gaming. While the story seemed meticulously crafted, many parts of it were composed piecemeal.
“With ME1 and 2 we kind of cast some lines out into the next game that we knew we would have to think of something with. We didn’t know what exactly, how it would happen, but we knew what we had to do,” said executive producer Casey Hudson. “We would start a plot point, you know on a character level or on a macro level, knowing that, ‘okay in the second one it’ll change this way and in the third one it’ll change this way and it’ll be resolved’ but we didn’t know exactly how. Some things we had pretty specific ideas for how it would work but as we moved forwards we add more detail and start condensing things down into specifics.”
Hudson responded to a question asking if Mass Effect 3 ended up where they thought it would be by saying, “I think it’s a similar thing where we know we’re going to have to resolve certain things and we have ideas about how we’re going to do that, so we know from 1 we might say. ‘yeah this particular large storyline We’re gonna do this particular thing with it and now we’re gonna resolve it’. But the people and the back-story might not exist for it until we make ME2 and we go ah! These are the people who need to be in that position at that time, to do these things.”
