Valve and Apple appear to be converging on the same target – your living room. They both want to control it, which means controlling the television set. And Valve has to know that games alone aren’t going to be enough to control the TV. Continue reading
Predicting what is going to happen to the Western MMO market in 2013 seems a lot harder than doing the same for 2012. But when it comes to random guessing about stuff I only half understand, I’m going to give it my best shot. Continue reading
At the end of 2011 I made a set of predictions about MMOs and the MMO industry. This is a pretty common thing to do, but I also feel I should own my predictions and actually check how accurate they were Continue reading
In previous years I’ve spent a lot of time reviewing and writing up a year’s worth of Massively.com / other MMO sites news articles. Although this is very useful from an information point of view (particularly the “oh, I’d forgotten about that” articles) it takes a very long time. So, this year I’m still doing … Continue reading
GameSpot’s Andrew McMillen has an article up on the working conditions of game developers and why gamers should care. but unfortunately is misses its topic on a few levels and fails on its most important point – making gamers care. The first issue with the article are the games used to showcase extensive crunch times (“crunch” … Continue reading
(All you have is my word that I haven’t made any substantive revisions to this document since January 30, 2011. Trust me. I’m a blogger. For a point-by-point recap of 2010, see either the January to June or the July to December articles.) 2010 was an interesting year for the MMO industry in that it … Continue reading
I’m going to start 2011 the way I ended 2010: publicly wondering what is going on at Sony Online Entertainment with DC Universe Online. SOE looked to be in a pretty good place to develop DCUO – they had a larger IP than its competitors in City of Heroes / Villains and Champions Online, it … Continue reading
In selling Star Wars: The Old Republic to the masses, BioWare has been hammering on about the fourth pillar they are adding to MMOs: story. They see that most MMOs have exploration, combat and progression, but they are adding story to that mix which is going to make them stand out. Fully voiced story, at … Continue reading
Star Wars: The Old Republic is a high risk title because it is being developed for some good and bad reasons, and will cost too much… and because its core way of collecting revenue is currently on the downhill slide. Although BioWare has been coy about its revenue model, EA management is talking subscription fees. … Continue reading
Following on from reason number 1, the next big problem that Star Wars: The Old Republic is going to face is that it is going to cost too much.
Cost estimates for SWOR vary from the US$150m mark up to the US$300m mark, which is a big range, but regardless of its true cost it is EA’s self-proclaimed biggest project ever and even BioWare sees it being multiple times bigger than anything they’ve worked on before. The reason is will cost too much is that combination of profit, business practicality and ego I mentioned before, but the development costs are actually what could cause the most problems post launch.
To understand this, you have to look at how MMOs actually make money: box sales, subscription fees and real money transactions (RMT). Continue reading
World Class Villains 