The countdown is on to the E3 2015 Sony keynote press conference, but in retrospect, how did the 2014 press conference really paint a picture of the year ahead?
Sony is in a much better position at this point in the console generation than it was last time out, but the battle remains heated. With no Blu-ray or Cell Processor driving a wedge between the PS4 and Xbox One, exclusives remain the key point of difference. Whether you’re a rusted on fan or yet to decide on the best machine for you, all eyes will rest on the 2015 Sony press conference and what titles we can expect from the year ahead. But how did last year’s conference stack up as an indicator of the titles we should start to anticipate?
Last year, Sony announced for the first time just the six big name exclusives, and they were Entwined, Bloodborne, LittleBigPlanet 3, Abzu, Let It Die and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. Of these, one year later three have been released, or 50%. Of the remaining three, none yet have a release date.
Elsewhere, we saw new footage for previously announced exclusives The Order: 1886 and No Man’s Sky. Again, only one of these has yet been released, and the other – No Man’s Sky – is yet to be given a release date. (The Last of Us remaster was also mentioned, but hardly can be categorised as “new.”)
On the multiformat front, Sony highlighted Dead Island 2, Magicka 2, Grim Fandango, Grand Theft Auto V, Far Cry 4, Mortal Kombat X and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. These titles fair better when considered in terms of what has actually been released, with five of the seven games – or 70% - out now. Although it’s worth noting that Magicka 2 only surfaced on May 26.
Like Microsoft, Sony’s form goes back further. The E3 2013 press conference highlighted such games as Kingdom Hearts III, Final Fantasy XV, Mad Max, Batman: Arkham Knight and The Witness, all of which are yet to release. It also detailed The Elder Scrolls Online for PS4, which just scraped out this past week.
Also Read:Episode 8 of Grab It, with 68 exclusive indie developer interviews and features.
While fairing slightly better than Microsoft in converting announcements to actual releases in the year since the E3 2014 press conference with 50%, Sony has been far from convincing. Only 50% of the titles showcased but announced prior to E3 2014 have yet to be released, for starters. If Microsoft continues to offer lip service instead of concrete plans at its conference, maybe Sony doesn’t have to change too much. But consumers are on notice, and expectations this time around will be higher to deliver on what is shown in a timely fashion.
If you are wondering who we are, we're primarily a digital magazine for the iPad focused on the coverage of indie video games. Run by the former editor of Game Informer, you'll find worldwide exclusives, but also an interactive media experience unlike any you have seen before. If you have an iPad, you should check out the free sample issue at the very least, or enjoy one of our other episodes as listed below. There is also a trailer below.
The countdown is on to the E3 2015 Microsoft keynote press conference, but a look back at least year’s big event shows just how thin it really was on detailing the year ahead.
The difference between the PlayStation and Xbox hardware is smaller than it has been in any of the previous generations, which means now more than ever exclusives are an important deciding factor for many consumers. Whether you’re a rusted on fan or still on the fence looking to make a purchase decision, the E3 press conference should be a great chance to get an idea of the year ahead and what games you will be able to play in the near future.
Last year, only five big new exclusives were announced for the Xbox One (not including the Master Chief Collection, which could hardly be called “new”). The games were Dance Central Spotlight, Ori and the Blind Forest, Phantom Dust, Crackdown and Scalebound. Of those, only two have been released, or 40% - the hardly exciting fourth game in the Dance Central series and a downloadable indie. 60% of the new announcements turned out to be a joke; a tease. Phantom Dust’s studio was shut down. And the other two games still don't have a release date. So much for building hype.
Elsewhere in the press conference, Microsoft highlighted previously announced titles Forza Horizon 2, Sunset Overdrive, Project Spark, Halo 5: Guardians and Fable Legends, only three of which have come out. Here 40% remain unreleased, but these were known prior to last year’s E3 conference anyway.
The rest of the conference focused on multiformat games, namely Evolve, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, Dragon Age: Inquisition, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Inside. Thankfully five of these seven games, or 70%, have been released, but being multiformat, this is hardly a point of difference.
This has been a building problem. Both Halo 5: Guardians, Mad Max, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Quantum Break were huge stars of the E3 2013 Microsoft press conference, and have still yet to see the light of day.
Also Read:Episode 8 of Grab It, with 68 exclusive indie developer interviews and features.
In retrospect, Microsoft’s E3 2014 performance was a true stinker. 60% of the newly announced games, one year later, still aren’t even on a release schedule, and 40% of those we were already aware of are still not with us. It’s just not good enough to get ahead in the console war. Consumers will be on notice, struggling to believe that anything newly announced at this year's conference will release in the year ahead. What will Microsoft do?
If you are wondering who we are, we're primarily a digital magazine for the iPad focused on the coverage of indie video games. Run by the former editor of Game Informer, you'll find worldwide exclusives, but also an interactive media experience unlike any you have seen before. If you have an iPad, you should check out the free sample issue at the very least, or enjoy one of our other episodes as listed below. There is also a trailer below.
There are lots of reasons why people play games, and I recently realized what it is that makes me such a fan of our medium.
It might seem a pretty simple question with an equally simple answer. “Fun” likely features prominently in many a gamer’s list of motivations. “Entertainment,” too; the delight we get from bombast and spectacle, and the joy of losing yourself in the role of protagonist in a heroic story – just as man has been doing since stories were swapped over a cave's camp fire.
Another powerful drive is “escapism.” To forget the rigours and responsibilities of the real world for a few brief hours and take on the role of the hero; the one for whom the entire world waits, expectant, ready to be saved by his or her hand.
And sometimes the appeal of a game lies purely in the “challenge.” To pit yourself against obstacle after obstacle, testing your skill and mettle in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, perhaps push the limits safe in the knowledge that failure is merely a setback and a second chance is only a button press away.
For these reasons, among many more, we game. But what about me? Why do I game?
Will paid mods being the next "microtranasations?" Grab It dives deep into the main questions that need to be answered should Valve continue with its plans to provide a paid mods marketplace on Steam.
Valve, the company behind digital distribution service Steam, must be pretty disappointed with Skyrim fans right now. After the vocal hostility to its introduction of a paid-mod model to the game's Steam community, it has a lot of thinking to do about how to tweak its approach to allowing mod creators to charge for their work. And you can be sure: there is little doubt Valve will regroup and try again - it has invested too much into the endeavour to abandon it after just one attempt - but it will have to overcome a whole lot of jaded resistance when it comes time for round two.
If you haven't been following the story, here's the Cliff's Notes summary: Valve recently made it possible for community-made modifications to the open-world RPG Skyrim to be sold on Steam. Prior to this, all mods distributed on Steam had to be free; if a creator wanted to charge for their work, they had to use another distribution service for advertising and hosting. The community response was swift, loud, and for the most part, negative.
Complaints ranged from the standard, “you want me to pay for something that used to be free?” and “modding is about creating for fun, not profit,” to more complex concerns about the revenue split. Valve took 30% of the cut; the makers of Skyrim - Bethesda - took 45%; and the creator was left with a measly 25%. Then issues with piracy arose - people other than the mod creator uploading copies of paid mods for free, or stealing and charging for mods they didn't create. Few people argued that mod creators shouldn't be allowed to make money off their work at all; the contention was instead focused on Valve's implementation of the scheme, rather than the ethos behind it.
Regardless, the uproar prompted Valve to roll back the scheme less than a week after its launch, and only days after Valve's managing director Gabe Newell publicly announced on Reddit the company's strong support for the initiative. In the wake of all the indignation and finger-pointing, there are some important points to consider; points that Valve is no doubt discussing in great detail as it revises its approach to this volatile situation:
The Status Quo Change is often a tough sell. People get used to the norm and change carries with it the fear of the unknown - the endless abyss of imagined nightmares that could lurk around the next corner. By introducing the paid mods scheme into Skyrim, a game with perhaps the biggest modding community since Quake and Doom back in the 1990s, Valve sundered the status quo with an axe, causing many players to envision an imminent future where all mods were paid and all the enjoyment they'd had in the past was locked behind a paywall forever more.
This sense of loss cuts deeply, even if it was a worst-case scenario and Valve wasn't technically depriving people of anything. Unfortunately, response to change is not always rational, as the uproar proved. If Valve wants to institute such a notable change to the current system, its best bet would be to introduce it with a new game, one that does not come clouded with a history of freely distributed mods. Like the recently released reboot of the Unreal Tournament franchise from Epic Games, which integrates a modding marketplace from the get-go, starting fresh would significantly reduce potential backlash from spurned fans.
Collaboration Many mods on Skyrim are not singular affairs. The most popular creations integrate and iterate on the works of other mod creators to produce a holistic product that is greater than the sum of its parts. This is only possible thanks to the free distribution model. Since there is no compounding cost, creators can easily collaborate to produce massive, full-scale recreations of the world of Skyrim without needing to individually handcraft new UI elements or expanding player housing; they can simply incorporate mods that already exist. For a project that is often the work of a single developer in their spare time, having access to thousands of ready-made components allows them to dream bigger and achieve more than they ever could alone. Much like Unity, or Unreal - as well as other game-making engines - all mod developers are able to reap the benefits of progress.
Money, however, complicates things. What does a creator do if they want to incorporate someone else's paid mod into their own package? Can they just buy it once themselves and go nuts? Not likely; someone selling their mod is not going to want it distributed for free in someone else's product. More probably, the two parties will have to negotiate some sort of licensing agreement... and that's a messy proposition even between big companies with highly-paid lawyers. It is doubtful that unrepresented parties would be able to reach an amicable accord - the creator of the original mod will want too much, and the applicant will be prepared to pay too little.
Even if a deal is ironed out, considering it is unlikely to incorporate a legally binding contract, there will always be the chance for exploitation from one or both parties. Policing such collaboration would be nearly impossible, even if Valve implemented a system of mediation. And that doesn't even touch upon the sticky issue of people charging for insubstantial re-skins of others' free mods...
Motivation A less immediate implication of introducing money into a pleasure-based economy relates to a psychological phenomenon known as the over-justification effect. In brief, it is the subconscious shift in a person's motivations from doing something for the inherent pleasure of it, to doing it for external satisfaction.
One of the landmark psychological experiments that helped classify this phenomenon involved young children who enjoyed drawing. They were observed happily drawing away for some time, at which point half the group was promised a reward if they continued to draw. Surprisingly, those offered the reward were less inclined to continue drawing, and exhibited less pleasure in doing so. Many other experiments since have supported the phenomenon, whereby subjects who had previously justified to themselves that they were engaging in an activity because it was enjoyable, would come to associate the activity with “work” once some form of tangible reward was introduced.
To bring this back around, a paid-mods scheme has the potential to promote this phenomenon. Modders who had previously created their mods for themselves, or for the simple satisfaction of creating something that others enjoy, will face a tough question: do I continue to give away my precious time and skill while others are charging $2 a pop for a new digital hat? Such altruism is hard to justify, and there will be many who decide to abandon the effort entirely rather than choose a side. Others will concede to the economy; why should they be the only ones not profiting from their work?
Then comes the psychology. Once a modder has been paid for their work, a scale in their mind will start to tip. Each dollar will shift the balance further and further. Before they know it, they will have built up a monetary justification for their hobby. Suddenly, the thought of making mods for free will seem ludicrous. Why would they ever give away something they could sell instead?
Of course, this is a worst-case scenario. Not every modder would succumb to the over-justification effect, and even if they did, it isn't always a bad thing. Plenty of entertainment is produced by people motivated by money. Still, it's an important factor to keep in mind. If mods start targeting the largest demographic in order to make the most money, what will happen to the core tenet of mods: creativity? Experimentation would wane, in the same worrisome fashion of big-budget AAA titles moving away from taking risks and relying more and more on market-testing and popular trends. After all, how many rough, yet ambitious, games have failed over the years due to the risk-averse nature of consumers?
Crowd-sourced Development Looking into the future, a disturbing notion arises. There has been a recent trend of PC games being released missing options, enhancements or even entire modes from their console brethren or their contemporaries. In many cases, modders have stepped up to the plate and built or unlocked these features in lieu of the actual developers. Without the work of these talented individuals, PC players would have suffered inferior ports and perhaps boycotted or flamed the developer in retaliation.
What would happen if these modders started charging for their work? Paid patches for a broken or incomplete game? Many gamers are already up in arms about some of the more flagrant DLC initiatives of recent times - on-disc DLC and seemingly-cut content among the most egregious. How would they react to the notion that they couldn't play the optimal - or merely unbroken - version of the game they paid for unless they ponied up for unofficial “patches?” Worse, what if developers began to rely on these crowd-sourced patches to resolve last-minute bugs in their games, in order to “finish” development by deadline? Post-release patches are already becoming commonplace on all platforms, with games like Halo: The Master Chief Collection requiring a 20GB patch on day one to unlock the multiplayer, not to mention the dozens of patches that game has received in the eight months since its release in order to fix its still-flaky online component. If a developer was under pressure to deliver on a timeframe it knew was unfeasible, it is not too much of a stretch to imagine the studio justifying shipping a buggy game with the reasoning that “modders will fix it.” The developer would get paid, too, so it would be win-win, right?
These issues paint a bleak picture for the future of paid mods. But they represent the theoretical pitfalls of what is potentially a likely venture. Mod makers should have the right to charge for their work if they wish; it is tough to argue against that. Unfortunately, there's a lot more to consider than that. Were the answer to paid mods as simple as that statement, this article would have been a whole lot shorter.
Grab It re-examines Monument Valley, one of the biggest indie game hits of 2014, with a fresh perspective.
Passive beauty is a tough sell in video games. Games are usually about interaction, after all. A good aesthetic can enhance the enjoyment of exploring a game's world immensely, whether it be descending into the murky depths of BioShock's Rapture, or leaping through the bright and blocky landscape of a Mario title. But the keyword there is enhance, and to bank the majority of a game's appeal on its visual character is a risky venture. Unfortunately for Monument Valley, it is a venture that fails more than it succeeds.
Monument Valley is a glorified puzzle game in which you navigate a young princess named Ida through a collection of block-based worlds from an isometric point of view, each constructed like an abstract diorama that may or may not obey the regular laws of perspective and geometry. By guiding Ida to switches and manipulating certain parts of the world, usually through sliding or rotation, you enable Ida to progress through those worlds and enjoy brief, enigmatic conversations with an odd spirit that hints at an earlier travesty and other brave adventurers that came before. The story is light and trivial; there is no arc, no conclusion, no closure. Its existence is ultimately forgettable.
The worlds themselves, on the other hand, are anything but. Cascading waterfalls, staircases that defy gravity, magic boxes that open up to different worlds depending on the method used to unlock them. The crisp colours and lush environments caused me to pause and take a breath upon each new level just to admire the scenery. The effect was even more pronounced on the levels that incorporated dynamic animation, such as the aforementioned magic box, or others that gave me the freedom to rotate the world and marvel at its splendour at my leisure. On those, there were quite literally moments where I gasped and smiled, that elusive childish wonder recaptured for a brief moment.
The problem is that those moments are too brief and too infrequent to hold up what is, at its core, a very simple puzzle game. Aside from one or two head-scratchers, the challenges in Monument Valley aren't that, well, challenging. For the most part, the task of directing Ida through each screen requires little more than moving or rotating an obvious platform segment to bridge a previously unpassable gap. The solutions often take advantage of the illusion of perspective in representing three-dimensional scenes in two-dimensions, and there is a definite novelty to that the first few times you do it. But the lustre wears off quickly, and the game attempts little else in the way of interesting mechanics during its stay.
Perhaps, then, it's for the better that its stay is as transient as its puzzles. Clocking in at around an hour or two depending on whether you get hung up on the scant few tricky segments scattered throughout, Monument Valley left me feeling rather short-changed when its credits rolled. Absent of any real challenge, the only satisfaction I gleaned was from those fleeting introductions to each new level. Too few and far between to adequately reward me, I spent a good portion of my time with the game kind of bored, just going through the motions to get to the next level. Boredom is not the emotion I typically ascribe to puzzle games.
Monument Valley is, to me, too pretty for its own good. More a diorama than a dollhouse, it makes a stunning first impression before revealing that there is very little substance beneath its surface. Calling it a puzzle game seems something of a misnomer; perhaps it would be better cast as an exploration game with light puzzle elements. Regardless, my time with Monument Valley was hardly unpleasant, but neither did I come away feeling like I'd accomplished much of anything. Like a toy store display sealed behind thick glass and a “DO NOT TOUCH” sign, Monument Valley keeps its beautiful fantasy just out of reach.
The possibilities are endless if Magic: The Gathering were to ever branch out into other franchises.
Collectible card games (CCGs) are so damn hot right now, with the likes of Hearthstone and Armello making massive waves throughout the industry. However, the undisputed king of CCGs still remains Magic: The Gathering. Since launching in 1993, the Magic series has grown in leaps and bounds. One of the biggest changes to come to the series occurred a few years ago when Magic made the jump from being a pure physical-based card game to entering the digital world. It has even reached the point where Magic is going to be turned into a movie, penned by one of the writers from Game of Thrones. You can try out the latest iteration of Magic for free on iOS by picking up Magic 2015.
Grab It, the digital magazine dedicated to the coverage of the indie game scene, was interviewed by Twitch at PAX AUS and we have the video below.
The interview goes in-depth into the history of creator Chris Stead, but also provides an insight into the production of the biggest indie games magazine ever created. Grab It Episode 8 featured 68 interviews and 68 previews on upcoming and just released indie games, including six huge features on the showcase titles of PAX AUS with exclusive images and video content. Enjoy.
What are the best video game projects funded through Kickstarter?
The crowdfunding service Kickstarter has certainly become the go-to platform for aspiring and seasoned developers alike over the past few years. Case in point, the internet has been going slightly nuts this past week for Playtonic Games’ Yooka-Layee (check out the Kickstarter here). As at the time of writing, the duo have managed to rake in US$2.2 million from 44,000 backers with no signs of slowing down.
Although there was some scepticism about the idea of crowdfunding when Kickstarter first started gaining popularity, we’ve moved past that initial period. We’re now starting to see Kickstarted games make their way into the wild. And some of those games are good. Very good, in fact. Given the phenomenal success of Yooka-Laylee, we’ve picked 15 of the best Kickstarted games that you can get your hands on right now. Enjoy!
Playtonic Games launched its Kickstarter for Yooka-Laylee (check it out here) today and 40-minutes later, the colourful duo breezed past its rather modest funding goal of £175,000 (AU$265,000.) Less than 24 hours later Yooka and Laylee had managed to amass a small fortune to the tune of $1 million, smashing through all of its stretch goals. With 43 days still remaining, the sky is the limit for these two mischievous creatures with total pledges pushing the $2 million mark from 38,000 backers.
There will be plenty of time to celebrate the success of Playtonic Games and for us to eagerly anticipate this old-school flavoured platformer, but for now, on behalf of gamers everywhere, I want to say to publishers, “we told you so!”
About a decade ago the gaming industry had a massive love affair with WWII. Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Company of Heroes and Hearts of Iron are just a few games that rode the tidal wave of popularity until the bitter end.
Once our passion for historical warfare subsided, it was replaced by something which captured the brain dead imagination of developers and gamers everywhere - zombies. The popularity of zombies has burned even brighter than that of the World War, invading games for the better part of a decade. Not only have zombies/walkers/undead been the focus of countless games, they've also shambled into experiences with completely different settings - did you ever seriously think Red Dead Redemption would get a zombies-inspired DLC?
