Continuing the recent trend of selling old but good games for very low prices, the announcement was made late yesterday that MechWarrior 4 will be released for free. Playing one of the greatest robot war-machine games ever might be the perfect way to purge the bad taste of Transformers 2 out of your mouth. And it is hard to argue with free.
Granted, this amounts to little more than a publicity stunt to drum up press for the recently announced brand new MechWarrior title. And, hey look, it worked! Regardless, it is always a good thing for the great games of yesteryear to be made available for free or on the cheap. These games are not any less fun for being old. MechWarrior 4 still has a lot of play left in it.
There are still some answers to be given on this release. While I assume the free version will be tweaked to make sure it plays well with Vista, I cannot confirm that yet. Even if the free version is just chucked online as is, though, I do not imagine it will be long before the community hacks any Vista bugs out of it.
No firm word on release date, but it is said to be soon. In the meantime, let's hope this trend continues. There are a lot more great old games out there that could use a new and cheap release.
Showing posts with label Business. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Business. Show all posts
Friday, July 10, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Games That Never Made It: Spend the Night
Game development, particularly in recent years, is a costly and risky investment. While anyone can build low-end titles with a little time and effort, the type of game that sells enough copies to fund a studio of artists and programmers is an entirely different proposition. For a new studio, this challenge is magnified tenfold. Programmers and artists do need to eat and make house payments during the development of a new game, and that means the studio has to secure investment funding up front, while the game is little more than a concept. If a new studio loses the funding for their flagship title, it could well mean the end of the studio.
Such appears to be the fate of Republik Games, a Hollywood studio that all but shut down in 2006 when investors failed to appear. Their flagship title, Spend the Night, may have doomed itself before it ever had a chance.
At its core, Spend the Night appeared to be a cooperative multi-player dating game. The idea was that in-game avatars would find dates, and then play out those dates with another player controlled avatar. On the downside, this sounds sort of like an RPG without any character development. Alternatively, it could be seen as the logical extension of The Sims, albeit narrower in focus. Was there a market? Republik thought so.
In 2005, Glennis McClellan who left Buena Vista games to join Republik, said the primary audience for Spend the Night numbered about half the world's population. In her own words:
A social game with potentially endless replay value and immense expansion and marketing potential targeted at a demographic that had largely been ignored by the gaming industry to that time... what's not to love? Done correctly, a title such as this could have been as big as, well, as The Sims. They could have been selling expansion that included digital version of real world popular date locations... restaurants, theaters, theme parks, sporting events, gaming trade shows, etc. This title could have been a gold mine.
So what went wrong? Hard to say, exactly. We do know that in 2006, Republik announced they could not secure funding and were halting development. Today, the Republik website still features Spend the Night, but there is little information, no updates, and not much reason to think this title will ever see the light of day.
As I mentioned earlier, I personally suspect that potential investors looked at the coverage portraying this game as little more than a sex simulator, imagined trying to get it past the ESRB with a rating other than Adult, and decided it was not worth the risk. For Spend the Night to succeed, it absolutely had to have a rating no higher than Mature, else stores such as Wal-Mart would never have displayed it and the target demographic would never have seen it. With much of the conversation on Spend the Night portraying it as something more suited to an adult book store than a standard department store, the game was doomed.
This is not an unusual sage. Games die before they are born more often than we think. Spend the Night, or something very similar, may yet make it to the shelves of your friendly neighborhood gaming store, but for now the idea lays forgotten on the trash heap of abandoned games.
Such appears to be the fate of Republik Games, a Hollywood studio that all but shut down in 2006 when investors failed to appear. Their flagship title, Spend the Night, may have doomed itself before it ever had a chance.
At its core, Spend the Night appeared to be a cooperative multi-player dating game. The idea was that in-game avatars would find dates, and then play out those dates with another player controlled avatar. On the downside, this sounds sort of like an RPG without any character development. Alternatively, it could be seen as the logical extension of The Sims, albeit narrower in focus. Was there a market? Republik thought so.
In 2005, Glennis McClellan who left Buena Vista games to join Republik, said the primary audience for Spend the Night numbered about half the world's population. In her own words:
"There's a myth that women aren't interested in erotic content, which is totally untrue. Women are just as interested in sex as men are but there is little in the way of online content for this vast market. We plan to get women involved, put in features they care about, and make our game both entertaining and accessible."
A social game with potentially endless replay value and immense expansion and marketing potential targeted at a demographic that had largely been ignored by the gaming industry to that time... what's not to love? Done correctly, a title such as this could have been as big as, well, as The Sims. They could have been selling expansion that included digital version of real world popular date locations... restaurants, theaters, theme parks, sporting events, gaming trade shows, etc. This title could have been a gold mine.
So what went wrong? Hard to say, exactly. We do know that in 2006, Republik announced they could not secure funding and were halting development. Today, the Republik website still features Spend the Night, but there is little information, no updates, and not much reason to think this title will ever see the light of day.
As I mentioned earlier, I personally suspect that potential investors looked at the coverage portraying this game as little more than a sex simulator, imagined trying to get it past the ESRB with a rating other than Adult, and decided it was not worth the risk. For Spend the Night to succeed, it absolutely had to have a rating no higher than Mature, else stores such as Wal-Mart would never have displayed it and the target demographic would never have seen it. With much of the conversation on Spend the Night portraying it as something more suited to an adult book store than a standard department store, the game was doomed.
This is not an unusual sage. Games die before they are born more often than we think. Spend the Night, or something very similar, may yet make it to the shelves of your friendly neighborhood gaming store, but for now the idea lays forgotten on the trash heap of abandoned games.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Another One Bites the Dust
Matrix Online is shutting down. The real news in this story, of course, is that Matrix Online was even still running in the first place. Back in 2004 when this game went beta, all eyes were on the MMO universe. There were titanic titles just coming out or on the horizon in those days: World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, Matrix Online, and Guild Wars. And now, 5 years later, World of Warcraft is cultural behemoth rewriting the rules for community size and revenue stream while leaving all other in its sizeable shadow.
And yet the MMO field draws more competition every year. Matrix Online is not the first major title to be shut down, face serious contraction, or generally under perform expectations. It won't be the last. Still, studio after studio are foaming at the mouth to dive into the MMO space. Persistent, subscription based worlds are a dime a dozen these days, and no good businessman charges headlong into a packed and highly competitive marketplace. Unless that businessman runs a gaming company, of course. There are other ways to drive revenue, however. The Sims, for instance, gets plenty of mileage out of regular, lower priced micro-expansions. Thats a model that could work for RPGs too, I think. The Half Life Episodes already trend in that direction. Under such a model, the game could continue to live on for decades giving it the chance to become one of those landmark titles, such as Doom, Civilization, or Halo.
The MMO graveyard will continue to grow, at least for now I'm afraid. Perhaps one day sanity will return and interesting new franchises and worlds will be given a fair shot at success by not chucking them into the meat grinder of subscription gaming. Hopefully some smart developer will look for new ways to fund his studio, a way that doesn't include server shut-down dates and titles that just quit working. Like novels, games should never come with an expiration date.
And yet the MMO field draws more competition every year. Matrix Online is not the first major title to be shut down, face serious contraction, or generally under perform expectations. It won't be the last. Still, studio after studio are foaming at the mouth to dive into the MMO space. Persistent, subscription based worlds are a dime a dozen these days, and no good businessman charges headlong into a packed and highly competitive marketplace. Unless that businessman runs a gaming company, of course. There are other ways to drive revenue, however. The Sims, for instance, gets plenty of mileage out of regular, lower priced micro-expansions. Thats a model that could work for RPGs too, I think. The Half Life Episodes already trend in that direction. Under such a model, the game could continue to live on for decades giving it the chance to become one of those landmark titles, such as Doom, Civilization, or Halo.
The MMO graveyard will continue to grow, at least for now I'm afraid. Perhaps one day sanity will return and interesting new franchises and worlds will be given a fair shot at success by not chucking them into the meat grinder of subscription gaming. Hopefully some smart developer will look for new ways to fund his studio, a way that doesn't include server shut-down dates and titles that just quit working. Like novels, games should never come with an expiration date.
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