Whyos

Kotaku, which is usually a sensible and practical bunch of folks, has fallen into a germaphobe mindset in which they proclaim it a scandal that GameStop allows employees to take new games home and return them as new. InsideTech weighs in with the concern that employees may steal single-use activation codes that will hobble the customer’s enjoyment of gameplay. -Well, since many games are already cracked open in order to place cases on the floor, I hardly think the latter matters. Read More »

…Well, actually, it’s a bit difficult to discern cause from effect here, but either way, not a bad thing, in the long term. Just as the old media bulwarks of the game industry didn’t prosper with the growth of the business they nurtured (with the notable exception of Game Informer), neither are the game publishers. And I think that it was to some extent a symbiotic death spiral. The whole model of $60 games is daft, but the print magazines, and, to almost the same extent, online sites (IGN and Gamespot) always pushed publishers in that direction, as they rated games based upon core-gamer expectations of game depth and play duration that aren’t actually sustainable. -Despite all of the complaining that developers and publishers have done about GameStop’s used game model, and I can see the valid reasons for that, GameStop has done a bit to ameliorate the lameness of the frontline game pricing model on the console side, as digital distribution is doing on the PC side. Read More »

It was nice to get out to SF and meet with friends at the Game Developers Conference, but there were no really compelling tech stories, in terms of either vision or product, and that’s what I show up for. This may well come largely from the state of the economy and its near term effect on innovation. It seems to me that GDC now serves two primary purposes; training for big conventional PC and console games (for which it really does make sense to have a centralized function like this), and a massive game industry career-fest. Read More »

Since folks continue to ask questions about OnLive, I thought I’d follow up a bit on my earlier post, and include the information I gathered from discussions with OnLive at their GDC booth.

I liked the guys I spoke with, and they seemed open and forthright about the product, giving me the feeling that OpenLive isn’t bunk so much as the product of good technical people creating something moderately useful. But that product has, for strategic purposes, been positioned by their marketing and biz dev folks as something it truly is not; competitive with existing products or in any significant way market changing. Read More »