Industry

Article: Bleszinski: "Gamers Exist in a Wired World Where Ignorance is Inexcusable"

Former Epic Games Design Director Cliff Bleszinski gave a keynote presentation at the 2013 East Coast Game Conference (ECGC) Wednesday, April 24th. His keynote speech reached twenty years into the game designer's past, explored the once-emergent shareware distribution model, and then bridged those experiences with the future of gaming and its charted trajectory.

Article: We'll be at PAX East 2013: Here's Why You Care

PAX East is here! Well, basically. Close enough. I'm counting the hours til I'm awoken rudely by several intentionally-obnoxious alarm clocks (it's 14 hours, by the way), at which point the team will regroup and embark on our journey to Boston for the show. The event runs from Friday to Sunday (March 22 - March 24) this weekend.

Article: Steam Early Access: A New Community Effort by Valve

Valve has long stated its beliefs in a community-driven gaming environment, as evidenced in the tools the company has released for its own Team Fortress 2 and other titles; they see gaming as an ecosystem that can be sustained better by players than by developers, in part due to numbers, in part just because gamers are closer to the end product given their nature of being isolated from the development process.

Article: Q3 US Game Industry Sales at $2.87B; Digital Sales Surpass Physical Sales

Finally, a game industry analysis has been published that includes digital sales and transactions. The industry has endured countless misrepresentative reports that only accounted for physical product sales (which are, quite obviously, down considerably with the evolution of that new-fangled "Internet" thing—we really need to get one of those "websites").

Article: A Shallow Attempt: Smithsonian's Art of Video Games Exhibit an Embarrassment

With the Smithsonian's tasteful artistry and with the dexterous footwork of a drunken stumblebum, the Art of Video Games exhibit's Washington incursion crumbles under its own ambitious, unfocused mass. Teetering undecidedly between "user's choice awards" -- a result of crowdsourced voting -- and "a brief history of games," the exhibit feels almost rushed, or perhaps...

Article: Razer Seeking Pro Gamer Interns for Design, Marketing, PR

The company behind some of the most famous peripherals in gaming - to include the Deathadder, Carcharias, and more - has set its scope on acquiring some new talent for their design, marketing, development, community, e-sports, and PR departments. While we don't suspect many of you...

Article: Revitalizing The Game Industry's Ecosystem with New Tech

Very little is original in modern entertainment outlets, but there's always a new approach to design - it just needs to be discovered; the best ideas, hopefully, remain just beneath the surface, and many of our future advancements in the gaming industry will rely heavily on design/development ingenuity and technological advancements. The not-yet-included design features are everywhere, we're just waiting for the strategy and equipment to...

Article: Following SWTOR's Struggle to Remain Relevant

At the end of 2011's December, Bioware released their long-awaited addition to the MMORPG world with Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR). In addition to the usual MMO elements we've come to expect in these games, Bioware promised heavy focus on "the 4th Pillar" in MMOs: Story. Backed with EA's financial strength and Bioware's undoubted talent at bringing in-depth and personal storylines to their players, SWTOR was gearing up to look like...

Article: X-CON Surges Forward in Myrtle Beach

The South Eastern parts of the US don't have much in the ways of technology conventions (unless you count guns and technological advancements in the 'grits' department), but between ECGC, X-CON, CGS, and the incumbent DragonCon, we've seen evidence that there's room for...

Article: On Mobile Game Longevity and Detachment - M3CH Interview

Talking to ambitious, talented, indie developers is always a humbling experience: It takes a lot of love, skill, luck, and other impossibly complex factors to complete and produce a successful game – whether that’s defined as “millions in sales,” or, in the case of M3CH developer Small Impact, “just enough to eat.”

Article: The Style and Identity of PC Gaming Culture

Screaming into a weakened headset that's been dropped one too many times, twitching a mouse with tattered Teflon footing, and dancing from battered number keys to paint-stripped WASD keys -- all while bathed in the warm light of flickering LEDs from a nearby rig -- is an experience that can't be easily understood by 'outsiders:' It's classic, exciting, infuriating, relaxing, and embracing all at the same time. PC gaming is about...

Article: Analysis: Fanboyism is an integral part of gaming culture

The gaming industry is versatile-yet-volatile, expansive-yet-inclusive, and most of all, mobilizing for users across all platforms; openly stating one's allegiance -- even mere preference -- toward a particular platform or series almost assuredly results in an indignant assault on character and gaming credibility, depending on the environment and encompassing community. Gaming culture, as

Article: Singleplayer and Multiplayer CAN Co-Exist, Damn it!

There has been some growing concern in the gaming community - a theory that disheartens hardcore, originalist gamers like myself: are single-player games being superseded by multiplayer frag-fests? In an industry that prides itself on community interaction and the vast quantities of titles and genres, are single-player games actually becoming obsolete? Damn. I really should stop reading those forums. It's all preposterous!...

Article: Alternative Stores & Services Similar to Steam

A competitive market is a healthy market, as we know. Expressing a sense of loyalty toward any single brand or distributor is sure to end in either disappointment or highway robbery (and you won't be the one doing the robbing); I've seen it just as much as anyone else: An indie developer puts out an amazing game, no doubt worthy of many hours of play, only to have a response of...

Article: Get Even Madder - Save Your Own Damn World

I don't want to save the world. Not only am I desensitized to the world-threatening drama found in many games by the plethora of films that tackle the subject, but the world surrounding my in-game character simply isn't my world. I haven't assimilated it yet, and without any collateral to save this world I've never learned about, I can't really be bothered to feel attached. Better games will try to establish an emotional...

Article: The $60 Game is Just the Start: Game Prices Will Continue to Rise

It started out slow, as it always does: Additional package contents began disappearing from the formerly large, cardboard, game display boxes; manuals were assumed wasteful and largely unread, bombastic displays were phased out by cheaper, smaller, more flimsy plastic variations, and then the new generation of consoles hit the shelves. That key point in relatively recent history, alongside many other notable milestones of degradation,...

Article: F2P MMOG Dragonian Beta to Give Away GPUs, Cash for Testing

Mgame USA has released new information on its new free-to-play MMOG, Rise of the Dragonian (or RODE). A recent press release scheduled their second beta test for this weekend, February 11th and 12th, from 8am to 8pm PST. This will be the final beta test before the game's official...

Article: Indie Dev: Protest SOPA, Pirate My Game

Our friend and developer of Digitanks is offering his game up for free as a protest of SOPA and PROTECT-IP, the two internet censorship bills that are being combated today.

Article: Steam Uses One Billion GB of Bandwidth in 2011

With the days of physical retail hanging on by a strand, this news shouldn't come as much of a surprise to many of you: Steam's digital distribution service reached an all-time high in 2011, securing 14.5 million game registrations and 40 million accounts. Steam now has 1,800 games listed in its distribution database...

Article: First Cross-Platform MMOs Created: Play on PC, Android, iPhone, Mac

How many times have you been playing one of Spacetime Studios' grounding-breaking Mobile MMOs, either Pocket Legends or Star Legends, and thought about just how much bigger the world would be, how much more populated and how much more involving it would be, if it were populated by people who were playing the desktop...