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Some will care, some won't, and, to be perfectly fair, most will never even realize that anything controversial is happening. Still, the continued tightening of the noose around big-budget PC titles brings questions about the platform's long-term viability back into stark contrast against the comparatively hassle-free experience of consoles.
It's a Friday afternoon, and Scott Foe is in a hotel room, 27 floors above the streets of San Francisco. In two hours, he'll be unveiling his latest project to the press. It's billed as "the highest production value mobile title ever."
Today marks the retail release of Grand Theft Auto IV. If many analysts are to be believed, the latest installment in the lucrative but notorious franchise will sell as many as nine million copies. And if certain politicians and activists are correct, it will almost certainly lead to widespread youth depravity and violence. But if the authors of Grand Theft Childhood are right, parents actually have very little reason for concern.
I like open world games - in principle. Granted, the worlds are never really open; most max at around small-town size. But compared to the games in which you're stuck on a single stretch of road, where the colors change occasionally to signify you've moved to a new area, games like Grand Theft Auto feel like vast universes.
The videogame industry has an increasingly significant problem, and as a consumer you may not be happy about what game publishers have to do to solve it. In business speak, publishers need to expand their revenue streams and explore new avenues for monetizing their properties. In short, they need to find new ways to get money out of your pockets.
Piracy is a hard topic to discuss reasonably and rationally in a public forum. It is a polarizing issue, revealing deep divides between consumers of all media forms, and an even deeper divide between the public and the industries at large that find themselves under siege.
The potential of video games is limitless, and their value understated in a culture that is, at best, grudgingly accepting of their existence. ... And yet, like so many media-fueled discussions of the past decade, the debate over the place of gaming in Western society has been forfeited to the extremes on both sides.
Of all the things game journalism is, vacation-friendly it's not. Barring the special case and the odd mental health day, I typically manage the week between Christmas and New Year's. The majority of the industry goes dark then, so it makes sense for me to drop off the grid, too. And it's during that week that I get to be a gamer.
Just in time for March Mayhem: Developer's Showdown, here's an update on The Escapist's game industry power rankings!
I don't know precisely why the move to a rural environment propelled us back into the digital Dark Ages, nor why I was never quite able to replace my computer or console systems, but between the ages of 13 and 18 the most advanced technology available to me was a piece of equipment that fed silage to our cows. ... My life for those five years became very different, and as I look back, very rich.
There was a time when reflecting on months of cumulative grinding and dungeon crawling wouldn't have phased me. Now, a 15-hour play-through of Mass Effect feels overindulgent.
I'd never have believed it a year ago, but I've become the very creature I once subconsciously scorned and mercilessly slaughtered in Alterac Valley: the casual gamer.
It seems that every cycle the industry forgets how much it costs to launch a next-gen console. ... It takes a few years to have a big enough install base in any generation to give developers and publishers the kind of safety net with which they are familiar. The good news is that a few years of growing install bases are increasing sales as the cost of development drops.
Among the pile of dirty secrets that I keep locked away ... is the fact that I love sequels. Occasionally they disappoint me, just as any game holds the potential to disappoint, but by and large they constitute some of my most anticipated and loved games. Being able to slip into a familiar environment with instantly recognizable rules and mores is like relaxing into a warm bath.
The gulf between the developers of independent titles and of big-name titles is not as great as it seems, and with the budgets on AAA titles soaring, being able to pull from a talent base that has experience with actually selling games improves the stock. It is a curious symbiosis that this generation is defined by high costs and high prices, but it's also defined as the tool of revolution for the independent movement.
This week's gadget issue got Team Humidor's robot parts all a-twitter, and after a heated debate (which was liquid-cooled, thank you very much!) our cybernetic hive mind is happy to introduce to you six of our best loved and/or most coveted gadgets going into the new year.
