Woe be to the ones with slow bandwidth (Gaming thread 9/21/14)

So TGS has come and gone. (Light content warning.)

this is going to be short as I ended up falling asleep while in queue to play Archeage (worst roll out ever).

I don't like giving these tards any acknowledgement but they stepped up their game in harassing John Smedley (CEO of Sony Online Entertainment). First it was calling in a bomb threat to the plane he was on to this

some idiot/wanna be hacker decided to send me a picture of my Dad's grave out here in San Diego. You will be found.

— John Smedley (@j_smedley) September 16, 2014

&bulll; So we finally got actual numbers for Destiny sales and it's not good in comparison to expectations. Out of the $500m product, only $325m of it was sold. Expectations were a bit out of wack but still that isn't good with ROI and you have to wonder if it at least broke even. And with current word of mouth, I don't see a second shipment till Black Friday where I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't heavily discounted (a rarity for Activision).

• And investors weren't too happy at those numbers either with a sharp decline when those were announced. Their whole year now comes down Call of Duty.

Here is Notch's response to the sale

I’m leaving Mojang

September 15th, 2014

I don’t see myself as a real game developer. I make games because it’s fun, and because I love games and I love to program, but I don’t make games with the intention of them becoming huge hits, and I don’t try to change the world. Minecraft certainly became a huge hit, and people are telling me it’s changed games. I never meant for it to do either. It’s certainly flattering, and to gradually get thrust into some kind of public spotlight is interesting.

A relatively long time ago, I decided to step down from Minecraft development. Jens was the perfect person to take over leading it, and I wanted to try to do new things. At first, I failed by trying to make something big again, but since I decided to just stick to small prototypes and interesting challenges, I’ve had so much fun with work. I wasn’t exactly sure how I fit into Mojang where people did actual work, but since people said I was important for the culture, I stayed.

I was at home with a bad cold a couple of weeks ago when the internet exploded with hate against me over some kind of EULA situation that I had nothing to do with. I was confused. I didn’t understand. I tweeted this in frustration. Later on, I watched the This is Phil Fish video on YouTube and started to realize I didn’t have the connection to my fans I thought I had. I’ve become a symbol. I don’t want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don’t understand, that I don’t want to work on, that keeps coming back to me. I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m not a CEO. I’m a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter.

As soon as this deal is finalized, I will leave Mojang and go back to doing Ludum Dares and small web experiments. If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately.

Considering the public image of me already is a bit skewed, I don’t expect to get away from negative comments by doing this, but at least now I won’t feel a responsibility to read them.

I’m aware this goes against a lot of what I’ve said in public. I have no good response to that. I’m also aware a lot of you were using me as a symbol of some perceived struggle. I’m not. I’m a person, and I’m right there struggling with you.

I love you. All of you. Thank you for turning Minecraft into what it has become, but there are too many of you, and I can’t be responsible for something this big. In one sense, it belongs to Microsoft now. In a much bigger sense, it’s belonged to all of you for a long time, and that will never change.

It’s not about the money. It’s about my sanity.

So last month, the project head behind DF-9 Starbase said this

to this on Friday where they're pulling the plug on it

Spacebase project lead on 1.0 When we started Spacebase a year and a half ago, we knew that its continued development past Alpha 1 would be contingent on things partly or wholly outside our control. Spacebase had a strong launch in October of last year and while sales remained steady for a while afterwards, earlier this year it became clear that we would have to work towards wrapping up development. As project lead I can honestly tell you that we’ve done everything we could to keep making the game the best it can be. We pulled out all the stops we could for Alpha 6 and we’re proud of the depth it has added to the game. I believe the Goals and Tutorial Mode we’re adding for 1.0 are also a large missing piece that will lend the game greater unity and direction. We were careful not to make promises about anything on the old dev plan page, even as we hoped we’d someday get to implement all of it and more. Again this came down to time and resources, factors beyond my control.

To everyone who has supported Spacebase since or after its genesis in Amnesia Fortnight 2012, to everyone who has provided feedback, and voiced constructive criticism or even disappointment: you have my deepest thanks. With the dev time we have left we’re going to do the best we can to create something worthy of all that. This didn’t end up being a decade-in-development odyssey, but I hope you’ve enjoyed the process and find the end result fun to play.

Tim Schafer gives a response by not really answering anything other than they used Early Access as a stand-in for Kickstarter

Hi everybody. I want to apologize for the delayed response from me on recent announcement of Spacebase v1.0. Most of Double Fine’s publishing staff and I are currently attending Fantastic Arcade in Austin, TX, and have been trying our best to keep up with the situation via our phones while we’re on the road. But now that I finally have time to sit down with a laptop, I’d like to answer some representative questions we’ve seen on these forums.

Here’s the first question!

“How about an ACTUAL explanation of what happened behind the scenes?”

We started Spacebase with an open ended-production plan, hoping that it would find similar success (and therefore funding) to the alpha-funded games that inspired it. Some of its early sales numbers indicated this might be the case, but slowly things changed, and it became clear that this was looking like a year and a half of production instead of five or so. With each Alpha release there was the hope that things would change, but they didn’t. We put every dime we made from Spacebase back into Spacebase, and then we put in some more. Obviously, spending more money than we were making isn’t something we can afford to do forever. So, as much as we tried to put off the decision, we finally had to change gears and put Spacebase into finishing mode and plan for version 1.0.

“What happened to the devplan? What happened to the beta stage? How can ANY game go from Alpha 6 to a “finished” 1.0?”

In traditional development, “Beta” refers to a time when no new features are added but bugs are fixed. Things are different in early access where the game is in players’ hands at an earlier state, so the team has been fixing bugs all along as features are added. In the remaining dev time, there will be both bug fixes and new features so it’s true—calling it “beta” is a little inaccurate. But the amount of time fixing bugs is comparable to that of a traditionally-developed game.

“I thought you said you weren’t going to silently pull the plug?”

We are not silently pulling the plug. We are announcing our finishing features and v1.0 plan. I know it’s not a lot of advance notice, but we’re still here telling you our plan instead of vanishing quietly in the night.

“If you were going to end development, why didn’t you tell us sooner?”

One of the biggest lessons we have learned in this, our first early access title, is about communication. There should have been more communication to the players about the state of the game, and we apologize for that. But for us, it was never clear whether development was going to end because we always hoped that the next update would turn it around and allow us to extend development. So I suppose, ultimately, the answer was we always had hope we weren’t going to end it, until the end.

“Why put the game on sale (while internally knowing that development of the game was stopping)?”

Frequent sales are part of the Steam marketplace. We’ve had multiple sales throughout the game’s early access period in attempts to create a bigger audience for the game. As for the version of the game that people bought in this most recent sale, we are still working on it, fixing bugs and adding the final features to make the 1.0 version of Spacebase a fun and complete game.

I understand that the recent announcement was a disappointment. It was for you, and it was for us. We wanted to keep working on Spacebase for years. But Spacebase spends more money than it brings in, and that’s just not something we can afford to do any more. Set up against the expectation of the game being in development as long as Prison Architect or Dwarf Fortress, it’s hard not to find fault in the game by comparison. But we continued to sell the game, and will continue to sell the game, because we feel that based solely on its own merits, Spacebase DF9 is still a fun, clever, hilarious, beautiful and complete game.

It’s hard for me to see JP and his team get eviscerated on these forums, after I’ve watched them put their blood, sweat, and tears into Spacebase for the last year and a half. Telling you that they are hard-working and talented developers who toiled in good faith to create this unique work of entertainment probably isn’t going to change your minds about how you feel about this game. But I hope you might at least consider that no one is more disappointed than them that they will not be able to work on this game for years and years to come for reasons mostly out of their control.

We have stumbled awkwardly through some new territory with this game, and in terms of early access communication we fell short. But we are still proud of the game in the end, and are happy to have it on the roster of Double Fine titles. I hope you are able to reserve judgment on version 1.0 until it comes out, and then enjoy it for the unique and entertaining experience that it is.
Thanks for reading, and thank you for playing Spacebase.

-Tim

And with them moving the alpha as a 1.0 release, they get by Steam without them pulling it (game costs $30). #KotickWasRight

So yeah, during their 24 hour gaming stream, they finally released the new cards which takes a big dump on AMD once again. Retail is $350 and $550 respectively for 4GB reference and aftermarket coolers.

So the new best bang for the buck is the 970 with the standard 10% or so increase with the 980.

• So Oculus continues releasing devkits of the Rift with their new one dubbed Crescent Bay. Comes with a 1440p screen, 360 tracking and integrated audio.

Now, with playing with my friend's Crystal Cove headset, this is very much needed to get people into it BUT they're starting to target specs which are very much not mainstream. Even with the enthusiast crowd, asking people to go SLI with a pair of new 970s or 980s is a bit of a tall order IMO.

• So the guy behind the awesome first two Clock Tower games, announced a spiritual sequel under the working title Project Scissors. The announced platforms are: Vita, iOS and Android.

• Finally get a look at some gameplay to Resident Evil Revelations 2

• Square finally announces their cloud computing service (think what Microsoft is doing). Leave it to them to call it Shinra Technologies.

• New Final Fantasy XV trailer

• New trailer for the upcoming One Piece Dance Battle

• Even though it's not exactly the Kingdom Under Fire sequel I want, I'm still stoked this is still being made

• New trailer for the upcoming Fatal Frame on the Wii U. Getting me tingly by reminding me of Crimson Butterflies

• If you like the live action commercials or not, this Forza Horizon 2 one is pretty slick

• Arcade Heroes gives us a review of the update to the Star Trek Premium table

Disney Infinity 2.0 (PS3, 360, PS4, XBO, PC, iOS, Wii U) - Hitting everything under the sun. Except for the 3DS which I find really peculiar. Buy toys, put them on the base and play games and stuff. Do I really need to explain how these games work? Don't think i"m going to actually buy the game but I will be picking up some of those figures.

FIFA 15 (360, PS3, XBO, PS4, PC, Vita, Wii, 3DS) - Another year of a decent but not great game of footy. Never really got into FIFA myself, game flow is always off of it but if you want soccer, this is what you get outside of a bad game of PES.

Defense Grid 2 (PC) - Sure, tower defense games are now passe but this is the sequel to the one that made that run of them really good. Is it worth $25 is another matter. Might be sale fodder for me.

Gauntlet (PC) - The people behind Magika have been given the reins of the classic Gauntlet IP and from the early reviews, they stuck very close to the original concept a bit too much. Controls sound good (WASD with mouse aiming) and even if it's just a facelift, it's should still be a fun time with friends.

posted by Gang of Gaming Morons! at 02:25 PM

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