PAX 08: The One Ups

I didn’t swing by the concert on friday night (yes, even though Jonathan Coulton was playing), although in retrospect I probably should have.

I’ve never heard of The One Ups before.  Apparently there’s a band that does Jazz/Funk covers of video game music.  That’s more or less orgasm inducing.  Video of the One Ups covering one of the songs from Chrono Trigger below.

PAX 08: Destructoid Panel

So being a self-proclaimed game blogger, I thought it might be a good idea to stop by the Destructoid panel to figure out how to, quote, make the world give a shit about my blog.  Video posted below, but these are the take home points:

• Don’t suck.
• If your a Dtoid author, you’re both super fucked up and hilarious.  I haven’t seen giant testicles in a power point slide since college.
• If you want to be really popular, you need to either blog a LOT (meaning several times a day) or be a source of independently original news, e.g. Major Nelson.
• The above only works if you don’t suck.  As a corollary, all this blogging you’re doing probably means you’re in a shitty job you don’t care about.  You should probably quit.
• Know what your brand is.  Have a target audience in mind when you write.
• Stick to your brand.  Nobody gives a shit about the fact that you haven’t posted because you’re sick, or about random news about your dog.

I think there’s some valuable stuff in there I’ll be pushing against Ghostrazor in the next little while, and I need to mull it over, but I think there’s some counter points as well.

• Not everyone wants to have a million visitors a day and be blogging professionally.  This panel sort of makes the assumption that you do.
• Again, there’s an implicit assumption by Dtoid that you need to be hilarious to blog well.  I don’t think this is strictly true either, although it helps.
• Regularity of posting is more important than frequency of posting to most people.  I have enough RSS feeds of news blogs that post every five minutes, and I don’t read most of them ever.

At any rate, even if you’re not a game blogger, there’s some good stuff in there.  And congratz to Destructoid for living their dreams.

PAX 08: Bad Horse

If you haven’t seen Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog, you won’t understand why this is awesome.  But then, if you haven’t seen Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog, you’re fucking retarded.

Yeah. That happened.

Nostalgia

In the lobby of my Office, there’s an Xbox 360 with a full Rock Band setup, several retail titles, and essentially every Xbox Live Arcade game published thus far available for people to play.  Once in a while, you’ll find someone’s kids out in the lobby playing with it while their parents finish up some work for the day.

Presently there’s two boys playing outside, and of all the games they have available, they’re playing the XBLA version of the 1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game.

I burned a lot of hours playing that game as a kid.  I guess some things never change.

Penny Arcade Expo

Having now successfully returned from Toronto without DHS dragging me off into a dungeon, time is largely sunk into being at work and getting the new Xbox Live Experience ready to go.  I will however, be at PAX this weekend, so if you’re going, let me know.

Major Nelson will be there showing off the new Xbox Live Experience, so if you don’t want to talk to me, you should at least go check that out and talk to him.  He’ll be in booth 412 at 10:30 and 3:30 on both Sat. and Sun.

Why Jeff Engel is Wrong

In today’s issue of Counting Rupees, Jeff Engel talked about why the sales figures for Braid are a bad sign for the casual game industry.

His arguement is essentially that when you do the math, Braid has sold 55k copies (according to public estimates) at 15 bucks each, which translates into $825,000.  You have to multiply this by 70% to get the developers cut, and then do a bunch of math to account for localization fees, certification, and development costs.

Jeff Engel makes the claim that in order for Braid to achieve its goal of completely financing the next game Blow wants to make, the magic number of sales Braid would have to achieve is something like 100k copies.  Jeff’s concern is that many games don’t sell those kinds of numbers.

My response to this would be that I have absolutely no doubt that Braid will hit and exceed 100k copies, that’s virtually a certainty.  Digitally distributed games certainly don’t have the market penetration that sales at brick and mortar stores do, but by the same token, the costs are significantly less.  XBLA arcade sales should follow a long tail distribution - meaning that after only two weeks of sales, the majority of the income from Braid is yet to be seen.

While it might be true that many games don’t reach 100k in sales, that’s true when you sell your shovelware game at Gamestop too, and at least there you’re not giving a cut to the retailer, another cut to bribe the retailer into showing your title promenantly for three days, another cut for manufacturing and distribution, and an even bigger cut to the publisher.

Out of Town

I’m going to be out of town for a few days, so no new posts until next week.

New Overlord

Somewhere along the line I missed this announcement.  Codemasters is making three new Overlord games, a sequel to the first for Xbox 360, an two new titles for the Wii and DS.  Codemasters, to you, I would like to say two things:

First, thank you for not just announcing Overlord 2 for the 360, Wii, and DS, branding all three games as the same, when really they’re totally different, as some companies I know have often done.

Secondly, the first game was highly amusing, but if you put in achievements that require me to grind myself retarded, again, I will be extremely displeased.  You make your game worse by doing this.  Cut it the fuck out.

Fable 2 Pub Games

I’ve managed to borrow an Xbox while mine gets repaired, so that’s given me the opportunity to check out Fable 2 Pub Games.  It’s actually pretty fun, in the same way that losing your shirt at the casino is ‘fun’.  It’s certainly addictive, but more importantly, it’s strategically interesting.

If you’re unaware, Fable 2 Pub Games is an XBLA release (for 800 MS points) which essentally packages three of the mini games from the upcoming Fable 2 into a single package.  These three games are Fortune’s Tower, Keystone, and Spinnerbox, which are variations on Blackjack, Craps, and Slot machines respectively.

Now, while these games are entertaining in their own right, but Strategically they’re more interesting.  The gimmick with these games is that any gold you win, or debt you accumulate, gets transferred into Fable 2 if/when you boot it up.  Along with this, there is unique equipment that can be won through pub game tournaments, and this equipment gets transferred as well.

 

If Fable 2 Pub Games was free… I think there would be a potential for using it as a loss leader to bring people into the retail title, although I don’t think it would work out very well.  I’m not entirely convinced that this is an effective marketing tool, especially as you have to pay, although it is an interesting one.  On the other hand, you can draw parallels between Pub Games and the wildly popular Spore Creature Creature, so I may be wrong.  As it is, I do think it’s a unique and interesting way to throw some meat to the faithful. 

If Pub Games encourages you to buy the retail title, you were probably going to buy it anyway.  But much as those who are into buying the deluxe versions of games with extras included, this works along the same line, the difference being that you get the extras 2 months before launch, digitally, and maybe it whets your appetite to buy the game at launch instead of waiting for the holiday wave.

Hell, there’s worse ways to blow 10 bucks.

Red Ring of Death - Redux

Un-fucking-believable.

I’ll have pics up shortly, but I imagine you know by now what they look like.

If you recall, I already went through this fun last year, when my system failed the first time.  You can read that saga here, here, and here.  My repaired system lasted more than an entire year without taking a dive once again.  I first noticed issues while playing Braid on my birthday, after an hour or two of playing, the system would chirp and freeze.  This happened a few times, and I had hoped it was just a bad copy, so I re-downloaded it.

Apparently not.  I got about 30 seconds into Call of Duty this morning before beginning some project work, and now my system is keeled out like an overdosed junkie.

I’d really like to not make this an annual event.

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