Ben Jones, designer at Zipper Interactive currently working on MAG, must not be receiving enough hate mail in his Inbox.  This situation will be changing rapidly, as Mr. Jones claims that compared to Playstation Network players, Xbox Live players are immature.

“I actually consider Xbox Live the more immature of the two,” Jones said. “As we saw in the beta we’ve got an audience that’s willing to communicate and willing to organize and structure, and help other people how to play the game. That’s the most remarkable thing that I saw in the beta – random people helping other players along two try and familiarize themselves with this really cool experience.”

There are a lot of problems with Ben Jones’ statement. Let’s take a look:

First of all, MAG isn’t coming to the Xbox 360 so he has no idea if players would organize and help others. If he is basing his judgment off a few rounds of Modern Warfare 2, perhaps he has a point, but having played Modern Warfare 2 on both consoles, I can say there is no difference in maturity.

Secondly, a small percentage of players on the PS3 actually have headsets because the PS3 does not ship with one. As such, far fewer players communicate on the PS3 than the Xbox 360.

As an owner of both consoles, I have seen little difference in the maturity levels of players. Plenty of idiots to go around for everyone.

Ben Jones should be more concerned about his game, as having spent the past week with the beta has left me bored and bemused about its imminent failure. MAG has no future and no selling point beyond its 256 player count. Everything else is lackluster, derivative and clunky…like every other game Zipper has made.

Source

Back when the recession first started becoming a big deal, video game industry execs loved to crow about how their industry was virtually immune to the downturn. For awhile, they looked correct. Now, after four straight months of negative numbers, they may want to rethink their rosy outlooks.

The month of June represented the largest decline since September 2000.

I can easily make the argument that most of this decline can be blamed on the horrific lack of quality games. There is a lot of crap out there right now, derivative titles that demand a rental, but not a purchase. Of the quality games that have been released over the last four months, most of them are niche products like UFC and Fight Night, which simply don’t appeal to the larger buying audience.

From the L.A. Times:

Consumer jitters about the economy, combined with a lackluster slate of game releases, led to a 38% drop in sales of game consoles such as Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3, Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo Co.’s Wii and DS in June. Hardware sales fell to $383.6 million last month, from $617.3 million in June 2008. read more…

It’s obvious when embargoes are lifted in the game industry, as nearly every video game site under the sun suddenly posts the same derivative article at approximately the same time. Embargoes are a scourge, a powerplay by the Publisher’s PR arm handling a video game, which serves no positive purpose for anyone involved. It dillutes the media for gaming sites and compresses the exposure of a game into a single day.

I mean, how many BioShock 2 previews do we need posted on a single day? You’d think a publisher would want the exposure spread out over time, keeping the brand in your head up till the day of release, but no. PR teams think it best that previews all hit on the same day. Worse, the various sites are more than willing to play along, willingly giving up whatever power they may have had. [The whole industry is so controlled by publishers that there is essentially no choice. No access = no info = no audience. Only totalitarian governments have more of a stranglehold over the media that covers them. If any of our readers have a solution as to how principled journalists and site owners can change the state of things and still remain financially viable, please let us know and we'll share your thoughts with the rest of our audience. -Ed.]

Let’s take a gander at which sites played the embargo game today, offering up essentially the same content as everyone else:

read more…