Complete with the previous suckage of Rock Band being priced extensively high, two pieces of news have filtered through the internets to reach MCV. Looks like they’re good for something after all.

First off, is EA trying to take over Take Two. Again. It’s going all the way, with the Securities and Exchange Commission, moving on a hostile takeover bid with $2,152,261,826 (£1,082,688,758.60, correct at time of posting), therefore paying $26 a share. The filing can be found here.

Secondly, once more, EA is stroking it’s ego again, as the new CEO is saying that he wants Electronic Arts to be known as the greatest games company of all time. He wants to make it comparable to the games industry as “Disney is to aniationa, and NBC is to television.”

He added: “Above all, I’m trying to bring great quality and innovation back …I’m also trying to drive us towards a variety of new business models, whether it be subscription or micro-transactions, or advertising-based.”

OK, so first off, I’ve had a quick flick through the filed document, and their first bid on T2 was to be effected on or before “12:00 midnight, New York City Time, on Friday, April 11, 2008″. Their next one is to be affected one minute earlier, on the following Friday. From this, it’s glaringly obvious that they want to get this over and done with before GTAIV comes out on April 29th, so they can cash in. This also links to the next one.

EA is banging on about how they want to be the best of the best, and let’s face it, things aren’t looking too good. However, they do have recent successes:

• Army of Two
• Comment and Conquer series (Tib, RA and others).
• Crysis
• The FIFA license.
• The Harry Potter License.
• Madden NFL
• The Simpsons Game (To coincide with the movie, of course)
• The Sims License.
• Skate
• The Burnout series.
• Ultima Online

These cannot be denied as successes; they are. However, the problems they have overshadow these, despite being fewer in number:

• The Rock Band controversy (Excessive price).
• The Battlefield controversy (Paying extra for more powerful weapons).
• Shutting down acquired studios if a badly performing game was released consecutive to acquisition.
• They used to force their employees to work up to 100hrs a week. Now, thanks to a class action suit, they get paid hourly.
• Removing licenses from the general domain, to EA exclusivity. This added to the swan song of the Dreamcast.
• They edited Wikipedia to make them sound better in the eyes of the reader, without going through Wiki moderators to ensure the changes were neutral.

All in all, it is getting to a point where EA is becoming the big fish in the little pond, as it is simply swallowing all competition up, or taking their licenses, making them exclusive, and going home. They may have used Battlefield as a marketing model, but it proves that the gaming community won’t stand up for that crap anymore.

Electronic Arts needs to realise that there is one demographic that will never follow them entirely, simply because of who they are and what they do: Gamers. There are EA fanboys who will follow the company through a fire to prove their devotion, but the gamers will tell them (as has been evident) where, when, and how they have gone, or are about to go, wrong. Not to mention, we inadvertantly hold EA’s pursestrings. Hence why they changed Battlefield’s weapon purchasing to a ‘jump through the hoops’ system.

Tags: electronicarts, ea, army of two, cnc, fifa, crysis, harry pothead, nfl, simpsons, skate, burnout, ultima online, rock band, battlefield, wikipedia

Many people are starting to side with their favourites to win the console war. If we take the Wii out of the picture (I still say it’s not a games console by definition of the typical audience), it leaves us with Microsoft vs Sony; the Xbox 360 vs the PS3, Jasper vs Cel, RRoD vs 80010514. Still not having sampled the ‘delights’ of a PS3 yet, I really can’t make an objective decision. But company wise, Microsoft, in my opinion, is the lesser of two evils.

But we still have people that declare ‘MICROSOFT WILL WIN!’ or ‘THE PS3 WILL RULE!’. And these people aren’t even fanboys. They are members of the industry, highly charicatured in order to fit the overactive needs of his article. But I’ll let you in on a little secret.

There is a 50/50 chance that they will be right. But their thinking is dead wrong.

We define a games console by it’s games, yes? The 360 has Halo3, Gears of War, Mass Effect, and more. The PS3 has what out at the moment? Nothing of obvious merit. There is Lost Planet, but that’s a late port of a timed exclusive, and CoD4 was something of an out of the blue, in terms of popularity with the general gaming audience. I for one didn’t see that coming.

Anyway, back on topic, the Playstation3 doesn’t have any of it’s really big games out yet. No killer app, as a geek would say. The exclusivity is no longer there. And none of the multi-platform games have had the pull to be a system seller. This is all about to change, come April 29th, June 12th and September of this year.

April 29th: The date that many people are just waiting for; the release of Grand Theft Auto IV worldwide. Retailers have bundled it with consoles, and this data will add to the decision of who will win the console war, because the playing field will be equal. You either buy the PS3 with GTA IV, or you buy the 360 with GTA IV.

June 12th: The date that even more people will empty their wallets. June 12th is when Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Sony’s card up their sleeve, and the final instalment to one of the greatest game series of all time, will be released. This series has spanned 20 years, and it will all be over on June 12th. Will Liquid finally get killed off? Will Solid Snake finally submit to FOXDIE? Even Hideo Kojima himself has stated that all questions, mysteries and happenings will be answered, uncovered and explained. Can you tell I’m juiced about this game?

September: The month that Little Big Planet comes out. LBP is something of an oddity, and will complete the crowd of niche gamers, hardcore gamers, and cred gamers. It’s hard to define this game, but when a self-confessed 360 podcaster starts talking about it in such a pure light, something is up.

Only after these three occurrences will the Console War have any chance of being won or lost, and only then will predictions be valid. Jasper-Chipset 360s will be out, all but eliminating the RRoD and the one gaping wound in the 360’s skin will close, making things all about chinks in armour. Blu-Ray will be in full swing, now that the HD-DVD format is gone. In November, both Gears of War 2 and Resistance 2 will be out.

At the end of this year, the playing field will be level.

I daresay, that at the end of this year, the Christmas haul will in fact be the teetering of the balance, and the butterfly that starts the tornado.

Be ready, my friends. Because this year is going to be good for gaming.

Tags: sony, microsoft, ps3, 360, jasper, falcon, zephyr, cel, hd-dvd, blu-ray, gears of war, resistance, metal gear solid, little big planet, gta iv, mgs4,

Last entry, I went into how console gaming has changed in the last two generations. Now, I’m going to go into PC gaming, and how that has changed over a similar time frame.

PCs have come a long way in the past few years. Broken the Gigahertz barrier, made Dual/Quad Core processors, and yet we still use them for the same things. Internet, Work, and Gaming. However, since the leaps in technology, we find ourselves in a somewhat unique situation, that gamers on consoles do not have to worry about.

The situation, quite simply, is that there is a two-tier system for PC games, and which tier you are on depends on how powerful your computer is. On one end, we have the ‘System suckers’, where the games are meant to be run on absolute behemoth machines, overclocked and with water cooling. Examples of this are Crysis and Supreme Commander. Hell, Supreme Commander 2 is waiting for better computers to run on. This tier gets the best of the games, and probably will always do so, simply because the people who play them continuously upgrade their computers, draining their wallets while doing so.

On the other tier, we have the budget gamers. These are people with good to modest PC specifications, that have considered gaming as something they definitely wanted to do, but didn’t want to spend large amounts of money on keeping their computer on the cusp of technological innovation. I myself am on the higher end of this tier, with my 2.3Ghz AMD64 Athlon X2. With a few, notable exceptions (Dawn of War: Soulstorm being the most recent, having somehow managed to stay in the charts for two weeks after it’s release), the rest are either budget re-releases, or just small-studio games that have as little substance as they do graphical style. Don’t get me wrong though, there are good games around that these types of users can enjoy. They’re just not around on Disc. They’re on the internet, as Flash games, the flash version of Portal being an excellent example of simple graphics and creative ideas.

What PC game developers need to realise, is that there is a massive market for the average user. Referring back to Dawn of War, that has the more modest specification of many games, but still outsold it. Not because of a brilliant ad campaign, but because everyone could play it who had a half-decent computer. Hell, develop a low-spec version of a game as well as a high-spec, and see which one wins out. Because even though the high-spec would sell more to begin with, you can pretty much bet the farm that the low-spec would sell on a more lengthy timescale.

Tags: pcgaming, crysis, supreme commander, portal: the flash version, dawn of war

I hoped that I would have some news to post today, but since Friday either tends to be new releases, or an otherwise quiet day of the week in the gaming industry (because people want to play games on Friday night, amirite?), which leaves me very little to talk about. Even the papers are keeping quiet.

So I’m going to have to write this from scratch, on personal opinion. I’m going to stick to console gaming, because PC gaming is a whole different kettle of fish, and as such needs to be handled differently.

If you had said to me during the reign of the PS1 and the Nintendo64, that two generations later, gamers would no longer be the kids who have nothing better to do, or geeks that constantly reach for the top score, I would’ve laughed at you. Or asked you what you were smoking, and if I could have some. Yet, this is exactly the situation that we find ourselves in today.

The Wii and DS have, together, changed the idea of gaming from something geeks, children, and people who make money from the industry take part in. Now, a gamer is, quite literally, anyone who plays video games. As much as I would like to criticise the Wii for making ‘the new hardcore’ (as GamesRadar so aptly puts it) people who wouldn’t have bothered with a 360, or even a PS2, I can only commend them, because they have done what was deemed impossible until the Wii’s release. However, this new casual audience were not aware of the amount of shovelware around, and as such wasted money on Wii games that are essentially the same as each other, with a few slight differences. I look mainly to minigame collections for this, as the Wii and the DS seem to be the only bringers of this kind of ‘entertainment’. This in itself has set the gaming industry back at least one generation.

(All generalisations of gaming consoles will exclude the Wii from this point on as, quite frankly, it’s not for the typical definition of a gamer)

Buying a games console is now no longer a matter of what games you want to play. It’s more what experience you want. If you are a big fan of playing online, the 360 is really the only option. If you’re a film buff, have a massive LCD TV, and want to watch Hi-Def content, the PS3 is the only option, since HD-DVD lost to it in the HD-Content war. Buying a games console still weighs the games as a huge section (since exclusivity inevitably brings console sales), but the other specifications are also weighing on the decision, something which was almost entirely absent previously.

The whole idea of gaming has changed since the days of the fifth generation as well. Once again, if someone had told me that I could play against people in a different continent in real-time, I would’ve once again asked if I could have some of whatever they were on. Back then, it was just you, the console, the game and the TV, in a constant slog to finish the game, get the top score, or just have a blast. The integration of the internet into consoles (starting off with the ill-fated Dreamcast) was to revolutionise the whole idea of console gaming, and bring it’s multiplayer onto a par with that of it’s Desktop-based cousin.

Many now take for granted (unless you’re an Xbox Live Member, when you’re constantly reminded that your subscription is about to expire) that when a game is bought, you can just pop the disc into the tray, and go up against people across the world. Granted, there are exceptions to this (Mass Effect, Bioshock and Project: Sylpheed to name a few), and indeed there are multiplayer-only games (such as Warhawk and Team Fortress 2) where your only option is to go up against other people. However, an online multiplayer is often the standard. Games sales can now be broken by the strength (or lack thereof, more aptly) of it’s multiplayer, something that would never be considered before this generation.

Because of gaming’s constant exposure to the media, through high-profile advertisment campaigns, and more intrusive journalists (oh the irony), gaming now has a ‘public’ face, which is seen by all, but only believed by the non-gamers, and those that are casual gamers. The killing of Stefan Pakeerah was, without doubt, the single event that thrust gaming into the spotlight, and even now, has constantly been daubing it with the ‘Irresponsible and Graphic Detail’ brush, continuously having the actual happenings blown out of proportion, or outright ignored (A recent Commons session in the UK proving this), as well as making politicians (Read: Keith Vaz), lawyers (Read: Jack Thompson) or anyone else (Read: Cooper Lawrence and Anne Diamond) believe that they can stand up against this ‘evil’ industry, and win, turning Manhunt, Bully, and Mass Effect, into Raving Rabbids, Brain Training, and Project: Rub (Notice how all the ’safe’ games on physical medium tend to be on Nintendo’s consoles?), gaining public and critical acclaim while doing so.

The state of console gaming today is more as a topic in politics and news than anything else. The name of video games is constantly dragged through the dirt, and it annoys me to see it happen, when I have no voice to defend it with.

Going off on a tangent here, this is the exact reason why I started this site. Every time there is a news story on video games, nobody talks to the gamers. Well, now I have a voice, and when even half the world’s gamers take similar action, then the media will see their folly, and listen to us.

Tags: videogames, politics, xbox360, ps3, wii, ps2, dreamcast, n64, ps1

So I’ve been reading the current issue of gamesTM (issue 68), and I’ve come across the big feature that Sony is apparently going to dominate this year. Hell, they even devote a two page spread to the picture they already put on the front page, with the article being six pages long. So I have to ask myself what all the fuss is about.

Well, the article itself goes into some detail about the previous keys to Playstation’s success (The use of DVD being the main one), and then it looks to the future of what PS3 has to offer. And honestly, it doesn’t feel like it’s that much. They also go on about how the PS3 has got almost 1m in sales. The 360 has almost reached 2m, and the less said about Wii’s sales figures, the less zeros I have to type in (Srsly, the meme of the DS and Wii printing money; not a joke).

They also go on about how the PSP is also helping, with it’s integrated services (PSP Play, Downloading demos from the PS3 to the PSP, as well as the hyped ability to download Blu-ray movies to your PSP), yet in the same paragraph they also acknowledge that the DS has the upper hand in terms of games. I can understand why people will buy the PSP because it has UMD capabilities. And let’s face it; who wouldn’t want a portable movie player with them to keep them entertained? But, in the same vein, will ‘gamers’ (ie people who want to play video games, not hardcore gamers) want that tech-savvy, media playing PSP, or get a DS like everyone else they know so they can play online against each other?

Neil Long (Editor at MCV) says that Sony’s secret weapon is it’s online service, saying that we should “…expect a real scrap between the two [Xbox Live and the PSN] over the next year not just in gaming but also in the wider entertainment space. Movie and TV downloads are just the start. Home represents something of an unknown quantity at the moment, but it could have limitless potential.” As much as I would like to agree with him (with Home being delayed over and over again, we full well know it’s a case of ‘When it’s done’), how many PS3 owners say PSN in the same breath as PS3? Compare it to the amount of 360 owners that will say ‘Xbox Live’ in the same sentence.

Further going into what he said, I highly doubt many people will want to download movies and TV shows. The people who will want to do that will either be film/television buffs who prefer the DVD to the digital download anyway, or the geeks (myself included) who can either watch the TV shows online (thanks to systems like 4oD, and BBC’s iPlayer), stream the films (Veoh, and Youtube being the main culprits), or just downloading them themselves, even if it is just to copy the film onto the PS3 to watch it on their TV. Couple that with the state the UK’s broadband network is in today, and I predict the people who will prefer to download compared to DVD rental (If the items are available for the same price) will be few and far between.

And the so-called ‘Industry Opinions’ go on. Leo Tan (UK PR Manager at Capcom) goes on about how he’s giving himself a mental handjob at the prospect of more PS3 - PSP connections. He specifically notes Lost Planet’s sales figures as a reason why Capcom won’t exclude themselves from PS3 activity. I can respect that he’s basically saying that Capcom will play the field to get the best sales, but a Japanese game of this caliber (in the sense of media-exposure), on a Japanese console is going to sell like hot cakes, regardless of quality. It took thirteen months for it to be ported (and this copy of gamesTM was released on the 20th of March), so how they can quote sales figures after a maximum of three weeks, and call them a trend, is beyond me. Plus, I would love to see a solid figure on how many people have a PSP as well as a PS3.

Dan Griliopoulos (How on earth do I say that?) says that the end of the Hi-Def war will “…increase the install base massively, as will PS2 gamers finally moving to the next generation”, as well as going on about it’ll eventually be more profitable to develop games for the PS3 first, and when it gets down to figures, the machine is plainly more powerful and reliable compared to the 360. That last statement I cannot deny at all. The reliability for the 360 is abhorrent, and has since made mainstream media. The machine is more powerful, and has the potential to do more, I can agree with that. The problem is, the PS3 is making gamers rely too heavily on their previous successes, and just take their word for it. They destroyed HD-DVD by strongarming their studios, and those around them, to go into Blu-ray. Somewhere in the article, it says that the PS3 is the cheapest Blu-ray on the market. What does that say about the PS3? That it’s either reasonably valued compared to all the others (and I mean all the others), or it is full of substandard hardware that other vendors don’t want to go near. Or, the previously true answer, that they’re losing money per console, hence why so many versions are about. And I ask you this, Dan, how on earth are gamers, who don’t have backwards compatibility on their consoles, supposed play their PS2 games? Keep the PS2, is the answer. But what made the PS2 so successful other than the DVD compatibility? You could sell your PS1, buy a PS2, and still play all your PS1 games.

And here’s the finale of Opinion. Nick Jones (Editor in Chief of PLAY) smacks out some figures for us. “Sony sold 120m PS2s Worldwide. To date, some 25 million next-gen consoles have been sold… that’s 90m people who trust the PlayStation brand”. Let me poke around at that math:

• 120,000,000 - 25,000,000 = 95m. Not 90m
• The PS2 went through how many price cuts in seven years?
• Have you ever considered new gamers getting into the business?
• The Wii isn’t next generation. It’s casual gaming, and as such are 90% new users.
• I bought a PS2, but I don’t trust Sony/PlayStation as far as I could throw my PSone.

Somebody’s either really mincing the figures, or he’s twisting it. I vote the latter. Especially since he continues on about how the PS2 is making “…an assault on the multimedia side of the market”, quoting the Blu-Ray win in the Hi-Def war (Again? Be original, please!). Blu-Rays are more expensive than DVDs, almost everyone has a DVD Player of sorts. You do the math (mainly because I don’t trust Nick’s calculator). And then, here’s the best part, he says that GTAIV is the game many are waiting for and “…however many download exclusives Microsoft throws at it, people will go for what they know: the PlayStation brand, the console on which they fell in love with GTA.” Oh dear God.

Just to clear things up, I am planning on getting a PS3. But I’m waiting for a game. And it’s not GTAIV. No chance in hell. Name an exclusive. Not Killzone 2. Not LittleBigPlanet (although it does look top notch). Yup: Metal Gear Solid 4. THAT is the system-seller. Sony lost the GTAIV exclusivity, and with all the deals cropping up for people to buy it on the 360 (See here), they’re not going to sell that many to multi-platform gamers.

I didn’t want to say it, but this has made me force it out: Nick, Dan, Leo and Neil: Please stop sucking up to David Reeves. It doesn’t look good.

Then it goes into System-selling games. Let’s take a look:

• Echochrome: …WTF is this? Linerider in 3D?
• Killzone 2: ‘Said Halo 3 don’t worry you. Instead you offer Killzone 2. But Killzone 1 sucked before, so what made you think we wanted more?’ says enough.
• LittleBigPlanet: Looks good to me, although it’s a concept I’m not sure I could learn to love.
• Afrika: PKMN Snap on the PS3. Picturing Africa’s animals. Enough said.
• WipEout HD: Not a system seller. Same stuff, different tracks. Well, I lie; online play will definitely be fun.
• The Agency: Listing an MMO as a system seller? Wow.
• Resistance 2: The sequel to a launch game is a system seller? Wow, once again.
• SingStar: SCEE’s ace in the hole for casual gamers. But, what casual gamer is going to spend £299 on a console, then buy this game for it, if they can’t sing?

A rather abrupt end follows, to start an in-depth article on pre-production. All in all, this has just proved that people are jumping on the hype wagon. Only this time, they are forced to get out and push.

Tags: sony, ps3, playstation, ps2, psp, scee, gamestm