Mark Hamill has officially called it a day on the Joker voice which is a role that he’s made his own for near on two decades. For people of a particular age / interest in Batman, his Joker voice is pretty much the definitive characterisation for the Clown Prince of Crime, first appearing in the … Continue reading
Filed under F2P …
How Many Players Did City of Heroes / Villains Have Before Going Free-to-Play?
I wasn’t going to do this any more. I wasn’t going to look at NCsoft’s quarterly financials, yet again track how City of Heroes / Villains had yet again dropped in terms of revenue, make a guesstimate of how many players it still had, then move on to some other bete noire. I wasn’t going … Continue reading
DCUO: Up, Up and Free-to-Play
As expected, Sony Online Entertainment have announced that DC Universe Online is going free-to-play (F2P). Starting in October – roughly 9 months following the subscription-based launch of DCUO – players can get back into Gotham and Metropolis with no money down. I could point and mock and make fun of some of the patently ridiculous … Continue reading
Great Moments in Game Advertising, Part 3 – Celebrity Endorsement
The great thing about MMO / online game advertising is that allows for so much creativity. Or if that fails, copying a known character and have them endorse the title by virture of proximity… then hope the original IP owners don’t see it. Okay, the White Queen may not be Marvel’s most well-known character, but … Continue reading
DCUO: Price Drop (Maybe) For Australia, An Empty Cash Shop And Still Not F2P
I’ve already made fun of Sony Online Entertainment for pricing DC Universe Online weirdly in a lot of places that weren’t the United States. This might have changed with SOE’s recent price drop for the all-in-one Station Access pass, where you now pay US$19.99 to access all of SOE’s game stable (there are some details, … Continue reading
City of Heroes / Villains and LEGO Universe Go Free-To-Play
Both City of Heroes / Villains and LEGO Universe have announced that they are heading towards free-to-play / freemium payment models in the near future. This adds them to a list that has swelled recently to also include Age of Conan and Fallen Earth. This highlights to me perhaps an unexpected impact of the F2P … Continue reading
Insert Coin To Continue: Perfect World Buys Cryptic Studios
Atari has sold Cryptic Studios to Chinese online game developer Perfect World for €35 million (US$50.5m), pending the final factors of the deal coming together. I’m sure it will, which is why they announced it, so Cryptic’s ownership will be transferred over and thus Cryptic will continue under its third master after NCsoft (sure, not really … Continue reading
The Trials of UnSub: Super Hero Squad Online
Gazillion continues to confuse me. According to some sources SHSO has officially launched and is now taking player money, but there is no big announcement of launch on either publisher Gazillion’s main site or on developer The Amazing Society’s site (but go look at The Amazing Society’s site, because it has a very clever home … Continue reading
Gazillion: Marvel Universe Gets Bendis; Suprise! Super Hero Squad Online Launches
Following up from a previous post, the lead writer for Gazillion’s Marvel Universe Online will be written by the prolific Brian Michael Bendis, as expected. What also came out of the event was that the game will be free-to-play, players will play as existing Marvel characters rather than building their own and players will also … Continue reading
The Very, Very Late 2010 MMO Recap: Here Comes the New Stuff, Same As the Old Stuff
(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
World Class Villains 