Posts with tag: commentary
 

Fixing digital distribution
Posted at 21:56 on 1st May 2019

Digital distribution of games (particularly on PC) is a mess. We currently have a situation where buying a PC game from a specific store often ties you into accessing that game through that store’s weird mini-platform, most of which were designed to pretend to be the ubiquitous standard (and stuffed with proprietary junk). To make […]

Go to article →
 

Are Valve the baddies?
Posted at 23:27 on 9th June 2018

Valve have made an announcement about their review policy for the Steam store. This has resulted in several extremely angry editorials from the games press, who have (perhaps reasonably) interpreted this to mean that Valve intend to take an almost completely hands-off approach to moderating their platform, in the style of leading internet hellholes Reddit […]

Go to article →
 

Sega Forever
Posted at 21:48 on 1st October 2017

A few months ago, Sega formally launched their “Amazing Sega” initiative in Japan, a company-wide effort to make better use of their massive back catalogue and heritage. Sega of America’s contribution to this has been “Sega Forever”, a plan to bring Sega’s back catalogue re-releases under one unified brand, encompassing games made for any of […]

Go to article →
 

Super Mario Run
Posted at 22:16 on 5th January 2017

You may have noticed that Nintendo launched their first iOS game last month (with the Android version expected to launch imminently). Super Mario Run is a stunning debut – it’s polished, content-rich and unapologetically aimed at experienced video game players, with Toad Rally, an endlessly deep asynchronous multiplayer game, at its core (plus a set […]

Go to article →
 

COD:IW and the Windows Store
Posted at 20:35 on 4th November 2016

There’s recently been a little bit of a kerfuffle about Activision making the puzzling decision to release a separate (UWP) version of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare on the Windows Store, in which the multiplayer mode only allows you to play with other UWP players (and not with players who have bought the game anywhere […]

Go to article →
 

Exhibiting old games
Posted at 00:10 on 13th October 2016

Earlier in the year I visited the ‘Power Up!‘ games event at the Science Museum in London. I realised that I’ve been attending showings of old games (in various settings) for over a decade now. Arcades may be long dead in the West, but putting a load of old consoles and micros and CRT monitors […]

Go to article →
 

Pricing premium mobile games
Posted at 22:33 on 18th August 2015

Contrary to some reports, there is still some room (albeit a scattering of hard to reach footholds) in the market for premium mobile games. Developing and publishing a game in this category carries a significant amount of risk, and mitigating that risk requires a thorough understanding of customer behaviour and a credible plan for addressing […]

Go to article →
 

Why John Walker is wrong about VR
Posted at 02:26 on 22nd June 2015

Last week ace opinion-haver John Walker posted an editorial on Rock, Paper, Shotgun outlining why he thinks that VR Is Going To Be An Enormous Flop (in the context of PC gaming). Walker’s argument isn’t entirely without merit. I think that it’s going to take a long time (2-3 years at least) for VR stand […]

Go to article →
 

The true cost of net censorship
Posted at 19:53 on 20th January 2014

As you probably know by now, the UK government is leaning on the major ISPs to implement opt-out internet content filtering. This ill-conceived plan is being driven ahead (after a consultation process presumably akin to the tribunal scene from Aliens) to pander to the tabloid press, who can make almost as much money sowing fear […]

Go to article →
 

Xbox One
Posted at 22:16 on 9th August 2013

This bloody machine has become the Zeno’s tortoise of the sporadic games commentator over the last three months. Every time I’ve sat down to wrangle my thoughts into a coherent essay the narrative has again moved on, meaning I’ve had to junk another several hundred words of analysis. Still, things seem to have more or […]

Go to article →
 

PlayStation 4: the important bits
Posted at 23:12 on 22nd February 2013

This week’s PlayStation 4 announcement has provoked a wide range of responses, from cautious optimism to proclamations of doom for Sony and consoles in general. Business as usual then. Among the legitimate journalism there have been some sensationalist interpretations that have omitted key details and twisted what’s left to fit one of several discredited, over-simplistic […]

Go to article →
 

The Cultural Test
Posted at 20:00 on 13th October 2012

Earlier in the year, the government announced plans to introduce tax relief for the UK games industry by April 2013. For this plan to go ahead, the proposed tax relief programme has to be compliant with EU law. To this end, tax relief will be awarded on the basis of whether projects are deemed to […]

Go to article →
 

Reality is Broken
Posted at 14:22 on 16th December 2011

Reality is Broken Jane McGonigal ISBN 978-0-22-408925-8 Firstly, for those of you in a hurry: if you’re looking for a good gaming-related book to read over the holidays, I would emphatically recommend Tristan Donovan’s Replay (a deep and absorbing gaming history that looks far beyond the well-worn stories of the American and Japanese giants), closely […]

Go to article →
 

Reaction to the Syndicate leak
Posted at 18:30 on 11th September 2011

Yesterday the first details of the industry’s worst kept secret, ‘Project Redlime’ – a.k.a. Starbreeze’s ‘reimagining’ of the Bullfrog classic Syndicate – started to dribble out onto the global infoweb. The scant information that has been revealed – a product description and some screenshots – has been met with howls of derision from people who […]

Go to article →
 

Cloud gaming: the future, but not as OnLive see it
Posted at 16:22 on 7th July 2011

It’s difficult to make long-term predictions about the future direction of the games business. We can try to estimate how technology will advance based on past trends, but there’s no way to predict the inventions that will be implemented with that technology, and which of those inventions capture the public’s imagination. One thing that we […]

Go to article →
 

older entries »

Back to top