Facebook Games

Nabeel has a good write-up about the popularity of Facebook games (not very) over on his blog.  I’ll do a post on my thoughts about Facebook games when I finish with Chris Eliasmith’s patented Neurological Engineering Assignment of Insane Difficulty (Nothing like the sweet mix of Fourier transforms, Convolution Integrals, Monte Carlo Simulations, Matlab, Neuroanatomy, and Theoretical Neuroscience).

Rockstar comes to Steam

Rockstar and Valve announced yesterday that many of Rockstar’s games are now available for download through Steam.  This includes both the Max Payne series and the entire Grand Theft Auto series.  Notably absent is Bully.  Valve continues to do very well for itself, and at this rate, will corner the market in Digital Distribution of PC games.

XNA 2.0 Beta Released

Read the press release here.

Exciting things:

• Convert between Windows and Xbox 360 projects
• Build content separately from game code
• Networking Support on Xbox and Windows using Live
• Improved Integration
• Other stuff!

Download it here. Go make games. Dream Build Play is happening again! Go sign-up.

On Console Commoditization

Denis Dyack is an interesting character. While you have to respect someone who’s that vocal and passionately committed to his craft, I do have to disagree with his point of view on a regular basis. Electronic Arts and Dyack have both been quoted in popular press advocating for a single console that all developers can target without having to port their code.

Gamasutra published a summary of a talk Dyack gave at GDC Lyon 2007 this morning where he stated that not only was it desirable, it was inevitable. I have some major problems with most of the points he brings up. He implies that all technology will inherently become commoditized in the long run, distinguishable only by brand, and cites automobiles, cameras, and cell phones as examples of this.

Here’s a fun experiment you should try at home. Go to your nearest auto shop, tell them your indicator lights are burnt out, and you need new ones. Surely if automobiles are commodities, and are standardized, you should be able to do this. Except you can’t, in fact it doesn’t even help if you tell them the manufacturer of the car in question. You need to know the manufacturer, model, and year of manufacture to be able to nail down something as simple as indicator lights. This is true for nearly every component in your car.

Try buying a new lens for your DSLR camera. If you walk into a camera store and say you want a new 120 mm lens, but you don’t know the manufacturer and mount of your camera, you’re going to get some strange looks.

The entire industry of companies who’s sole purpose is to wrap existing software in their Java-based framework, and port it to every cell-phone known to man. This is not trivial, they need to maintain databases of all cell-phones they support, and adjust display sizes, input mappings, color depth, etc. to support this supposedly ‘open framework’. If you ever wondered why cell-phone games are such shit, this is a major contributing factor.

Nevertheless, all of these industries do have certain standards. These standards exist because it is beneficial to all of the manufacturers of these devices that they are inter-operable with each other. This is why cameras will all save in JPEG format, cars all run on relatively similar gasoline, and cellphones all connect to networks using a very small scope of protocols. There are infrastructural costs that are prohibitive for manufacturers to independently build on their own, so it behooves them to adopt standards for individual benefit. The fact that this happens to benefit the public is incidental.

I would argue that there already exists an ‘open-platform’ for game development. It’s called Microsoft Windows, and it runs on a PC. Using DirectX, you don’t need to care specifically what hardware a user has, you just write it such that it can handle a certain spectrum you’re willing to tolerate. Dyack dismisses the PC as a standardized platform, I assume he means that all PCs do not have the same hardware, and thus are not standard. This seems to be at odds with his previous statements regarding the standardization of cars, digital cameras, and cell phones, as none of the above have the same hardware either.

He’s right about one thing though. In a one console future, the publishers, the developers would win big time. This is probably why you only hear about this kind of thing from developers like Dyack who are feeling the portability pain, and publishers like EA that have to pay for it. While consumers would theoretically win, I would argue that they largely don’t give a shit at the moment. Most people are not going to buy more than one console, and certainly not all three. Fortunately for them, most games are available on multiple consoles, so it doesn’t affect them (and Dyack argues that exclusive content is becoming more rare anyway, thus making this a moot point).

Unfortunately, the people who don’t win in this scenario are the manufacturers. Nintendo’s entire business strategy is built around differentiating their hardware in unique ways to spawn entire genres of games that only work on their systems. A one console world is not a good place for Nintendo to be in, and they will fold up shop before they agree to that deal. The ‘economic realities’ don’t snuff up against real innovation, and Nintendo has been taking innovation to the bank since the release of the Wii.

If you believe the reports on hardware pricing, Microsoft and Sony both lose money on hardware. The method by which they regain profits is then by issuing licensing fees against developers who want to make games for their console. Selling commodity consoles completely undermines this business model. Game by their very nature push the boundaries of what is possible with hardware, so unless studios stop being interesting in creating beautiful photo-realistic graphics, this medium is going to require some expensive hardware, and that means licensing costs.

Unlike in the car industry, the cell phone industry, and the camera industry, console manufacturers have nothing to gain by adopting an open standard against which all game will run, and certainly have no interest in becoming a commodity - trust me. Nokia doesn’t want to be a commodity either, it’s just an unfortunate artifact of adopting standards due to prohibitive capital costs of not doing so. The console industry does not suffer this problem, and thus I wouldn’t be advising Silicon Knights or Electronic Arts to be holding their breath for the arrival of the one true platform. I know it sucks gentlemen, but unless you have a way to force the market conditions in a different direction, I would suggest focusing on making great game experiences and leave the economic talk alone.

As a disclaimer, I was not at Lyon GDC 2007, and so I may be misinterpreting the reports of what Dyack actually said. If by some bizarre artifact Denis ends up reading this, I would encourage him or anyone else who was at the talk to set me straight.

Xbox Dashboard Update

The press release for the Dec. 4th Dashboard update has some cool stuff in it. Major Nelson has released a couple of new tidbits that we’re in the press release.

One of those two features fixes a major longtime problem with Xbox Live, although it’s not expressly stated in the release.

Previously, if you decided to move to another country (I hear people do that sometimes), you were screwed to the nines. The Live Passport framework locks in the country code when the account is created, and that country code cannot be changed. For things like webmail, it doesn’t really matter. The only result is that the advertising that you get is irrelevant to you in your new country.

But because an Xbox Live account is tied to a Live Passport, this has serious repercussions. Firstly, you need to pay for your account with a credit card who’s billing address is in the country your passport is linked to. What this means is that you would need to maintain an active billing address and credit card in your old country, just to be able to continue to pay for the service.

Secondly, you’re locked out of any content you might normally have access to in the new country (e.g. if you move from Canada to the USA, you would normally now have access to Xbox Live Marketplace TV and Movie content, something which is forbidden in the great white north).

The work around in the past has been “Start a new Xbox Live account”. Yeah. That means you lose all your achievements, your gamerscore, and any months of paid access you might have had left on the account. Additionally it means that you can no longer access any games you’ve purchased on XBLA from any machine, only the console you specifically downloaded them on in the first place. If that machine should happened to, oh, I don’t know, fail in some way, you’ve lost the title.

The potent point in my opinion is this. Starting today, you will be able to re-associate your Xbox Live account with a new passport account. The question is does Xbox Live retain a separate copy of the country code, or do they simply follow the pointer to the one used in the Passport account? If it’s the latter, all problems are solved tomorrow, and ye who change countries can rejoice in the streets.

On a related note: Canada (and some of Europe) is movie rentals on Xbox Live Marketplace on Dec. 11th! Yay for being slightly less of a second class citizen.

Gamerpoints vs Achievements

I’m going to have to throw this one over to my fellow Canuck, Nerfgun.  As previously mentioned, I’m quite the dainty trollop when it comes to achievements.  There’s something quite sadly affirmating about having the game pat you on the head and give you an A+ sticker.  Must be a Gen Y thing.

I hadn’t really given much consideration to the fact that Gamerscore and Achievements are not one and the same.  In theory the point value attached to a given achievement should indicate the relatively level of difficulty for earning that achievement.  However, at the end of the day, it would appear there is no actual policy regarding how difficult something should be for a given number of points.

 And really, that’s impossible to dictate globally, because there are some games that are just easy.  A raw gamerscore doesn’t really tell you anything about the skill of a player, it just theoretically tells you how much time they spend playing Xbox 360 games.  I’m not even sure that’s true, actually - Gabe and I have nearly the same Gamerscore, and I hear he plays video games like it’s his job.

No Xbox Originals Achievements Either

I’m going to get one last one in before the DNS throws up.

Major Nelson reports that Xbox Originals aren’t going to have achievements either.  So essentially buying the game digitally will be like having a buggy version of the disc version of the game with no achievements and random crashing when you chose menu options that you shouldn’t have chosen because you’re a stupid fuck who’s not psychic (apparently). 

“These are the original games that were created before Xbox 360. In order to preserve the integrity of the original gaming experience they provide, they will have the features available at the time of their initial release”

That’s some marketing bullshit that means “We don’t want to go into the source code and modify the game because it costs more to do that, so you’re going to get a sloughed out half-experience instead”.  Achievement points cannot possibly destroy the integrity of the original gaming experience.  This is one of the only modifications you could make that would be a no risk gain.  I don’t even see a scenario around this product anymore. 

There’s an opportunity to leverage the existing platform of awesomeness and bring it up to a new level.  Developers in general are happy to release their game on more platforms if the cost is low to them.  I would expect most would be more than happy to spend a month reworking their code to operate in this environment and add achievement points to their games.  It gives people a really good reason to replay those games they once loved and to buy them through this channel instead of getting them for ten bucks used at the local GameStop.  You guys do know that you don’t get paid when people buy used games, yeah?

By feeding your customers the raw scraps from the table in an attempt to make a quick cash grab you’re hurting your brand.  Xbox Live has become a touchstone and a symbol of multiplayer gaming.  Watering down that symbol with buggy content, or rechurn of games at a lower quality than their original incarnation burns your brand.  This will result in less money long term.  Do it right, or don’t do it at all.

Xbox Originals

*sigh*

 Guys, what are you doing?

Look, I’m a PM, I understand that things get cut and you don’t always get to produce what you’d ideally like to produce.  That’s the reality of the situation.  I’m okay with the producer’s logo being a little choppy on the way in.  But if you’re essentially licensing out back catalog IP, is it really that much work to disable menu options that will cause the game to crash?  What if Word shipped with a big red toggle button on the ribbon that said “More Magic” on it. 

Do you really want to field all those calls with the answer that the player is just ’supposed to know’ not to push those buttons.  That’s not a good experience story.  In fact, it’s such a fucking terrible experience that it may threaten the viability of the platform.  I already have way, way too many awesome games coming out right now, I can wait until the mid-winter slump for my third copy of Psychonauts.  Go fix it. 

The Art of Theft

Yahtzee has a new Trilby game out, this time a stealth game, in distinct deviation from previous titles.  If you’ve been under a rock, the Chzo Mythos series of games are some of the best games available using the Adventure Game Studio toolkit and predominately feature a gentlemanly catburgler named Trilby.  Go check it out.

Kongregate

Kongregate will consume your soul and cause you to swear Oaths of Fealty.

As mentioned previously, I’m a huge achievement whore.  The concept of badges has entranced me since I was a wee Boy Scout.  I don’t take particular pride in showing them off to anyone, I just like having a record of tasks I’ve accomplished.  If you’re a fan of Newgrounds, which is the cradle of humanity for cool flash games, you’re going to lurrrrve Kongregate. 

Additionally, and this bit is kind of weird, Kongregate is the future home of a digital collectable card game.  The current manner for aquiring these cards is to complete an acheivement for a particular game for that week.  Presumably when the game is actually launched there will also be some mechanism for purchasing/winning additional cards for your deck.  Final judgement is reserved for when the game comes out.

On top of all that, It’s just clean.  Clean like Facebook used to be, you know, back in the day before they started plastering shit all over your screen like this was 1997.  Cleanliness is highly appreciated and improves the usability story tenfold.  Go check it out.

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