A lot of interesting and big games came out this week (the two shouldn’t always be confused) and a few are coming out next week as well. And in the next couple weeks after that. In fact, so far this season it’s felt like the trend of leaving most of the summer devoid of noteworthy releases has been abandoned. I wrote about it a few years ago in an article called, “The Holiday Crush” which was part of a series bearing the alarmist’ title “Gaming in Crisis.” It discussed the industry’s propensity to load the majority of its AAA titles into the three month window of October, November, and December in a go-for-broke tactic that hoped to take advantage of holiday-related spikes in credit card spending. It was (and is) my opinion that this was an ill-advised practice rooted in an old model that assumed most game purchases are made by someone for someone else. As in a Mother buying Super Mario Bros for their child at Christmas because it was on his list, instead of the more contemporary and accurate example of a 35-year-old kid buying Super Mario Bros Wii for himself now because today was its release date and rationalizing it all to his wife by saying it is for their children “because they have been good.”
It was a tactic practiced by publishers of all sizes which artificially created situations where Dreamcatcher Interactive’s biggest game of the year, a point-and-click style adventure was competing for market share against Electronic Arts’ latest multi-million dollar sequel in its best-selling (X) franchise. Perhaps it is the frightening volume of the excitement already building around the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, still over 6 months away, that has scared some publishers into seeing the logic that dictates that you’ll have better sales when your consumer has fewer competing distractions.
That should lead to more evenly balanced release calendars and summers filled with weeks like this one.
But decisions will still have to be made and so here are our initial impressions of this week’s games: read more…
I’m shocked…SHOCKED! that ‘game journalism’ is being called out for a lack of integrity.
Eurogamer is under attack from the developers of recently released MMO Darkfall, insisting that the final score of 2/10 is completely erroneous. Their proof? They examined the server logs of the two accounts the devs gave the magazine for reviewing purposes and determined the critic played the game for only two hours.
When we read the hostile review by Ed Zitron, one thing became apparent: he had not played the game at all. Eurogamer readers and Darkfall players are posting bullet lists of factual errors in the story. The reviewer hadn’t even figured out the very basics of the game before he wrote about it. We checked the logs for the 2 accounts we gave Eurogamer and we found that one of them had around 3 minutes playtime, and the other had less than 2 hours spread out in 13 sessions. 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:
Loading ...
Loading ...