“EA Partners Is A Murderers’ Row - Who’s NOT On This List?” at MTV Multiplayer
This is a good bit of investigative reporting from Stephen Totilo. With last Thursday’s announcements by Electronic Arts of deals with Grasshopper Manufacture and Epic Games, they now have at least half a dozen major partners, and that’s not counting the smaller companies they have outright purchased over the last couple years.
Latest Feature: Impulse Buyer
Can Stardock break into the marketplace, and will it help reduce piracy?
COLUMNS
Can Stardock break into the marketplace, and will it help reduce piracy?
Time was, I would buy my PC games from a tiny store down the road from where I lived. Of course back then, every game made came in a cardboard box so massive, with manuals so thick, that the whole process was akin to moving house. The fresh smell of a newly printed manual wafts into your face as you crack the seal on the sarcophagus - the Civilization manual was passed around my school like some kind of long-lost tome of priceless historical value. Out spill a stack of twelve floppy discs into your lap, each one humming with an ethereal resonance. Copy protection consisted of fiendish Indiana Jones-style puzzles, referencing page numbers, lines and character maps. The CD key for F15 Strike Eagle was actually buried in a tomb under St. Paul’s Cathedral. There was a three week long excavation before I could play it.
My point is that PC gaming has come a long way since then. Nowadays, we are inundated with all kinds of concepts that my younger self would find mind boggling – digital rights, subscriptions, torrents. On-line distribution. PC gaming back then just seemed more authentic. More honest.
What challenges is the PC market facing as the evolution of the media and distribution reaches and unprecedented pace? Is PC gaming dying or is it simply changing? What role does Impulse play in the future of the platform?
Distribution is Different
Well firstly, it clearly is not dying, but its perception has changed. The platform itself is in a perpetual liquid state of technological change and the games are mirroring this. Times change, and for an ever-increasing amount of PC gamers, buying a game in this age is nothing more than a singular mouse click. A single tap of a button and the entire game is streamed directly to you via the wonders of the Internet. Unfortunately, stealing a game is also as effortless, as it no longer requires ski masks and a crowbar.
And yet with the technological advances this method of distribution has received, the marketplace is still young and developing. Other than direct-from-publisher, there are few methods of buying games digitally. This is about to change, with the launch of several new high profile networks for PC games.
Valve Software’s Steam platform is the most popular service currently around, boasting that it has over ten million customers, drawn in by Valve’s own high quality games, but also by the selection of 300+ titles from most major publishers, such as Activision, Ubisoft and Take Two. It also offers competitive prices for its product, constant deals and plenty of free weekends to entice users. Steam is very conducive to impulse purchases, as my steam account will attest – I mean how many copies of Peggle do I need?
Apparently five.
But while Steam is widely considered a technological success, it has received some criticism for the store aspect of the service. Other than minor patching issues with some games, the network is robust, comprehensive, and most importantly, free. However, games are sometimes overpriced, and the selection, while large, is missing some huge areas of the market. It mirrors high-street prices too, which is unusual for an online service. Because of this, other companies are beginning to enter the digital marketplace, offering other methods for you to buy PC games online. Other, more effortless ways to take your money.
Enter, stage right, Impulse. Stardock Games’ alternative to Steam. A digital store for PC games that will have over 3 million users when it launches in the near future. Stardock is the publisher and developer behind the hugely successful WindowBlinds range of customization tools and the Galactic Civilization series of PC games. Impulse consolidates Stardock’s existing infrastructure that primarily consists of TotalGaming.net, a long-running and successful distribution hub for their products. Now they aim to compete on a grander stage, hoping to become a real and viable alternative to the Steam platform.
Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock Games, in an interview with Next-Gen.biz, indicated that he “expects rough parity with Steam and Direct2Drive by the end of 2008.” A bold claim indeed, considering the time scale. Interestingly enough, Stardock also hopes to publish a wide variety of non-games on Impulse, catering to the business user. Already signed up are their huge range of desktop utilities and windows customisation tools, which they already sell on-line, but also a number of other utility suites such as anti-virus protection software and firewalls, all from third parties.
I have become amazed at what XBLA has done in the past few weeks. It started with Geometry Wars 2, a game Jim Canapa described perfectly in the previous column (he should know, since his high scores are far better than mine). Bionic Commando, another great game I will go into detail about later, was the most recent addition. But in the middle was Braid, the first game to ever cause an internal conflict for me.
Morrowind really helped pull itself head and shoulders above the crowd by developing a realistically complicated world in such an unfamiliar setting that its players can’t help but explore every nook and cranny, finding new reasons to love it every time they play.
“Gaming’s 20 Greatest Challenges” at Edge
Colin Campbell doing what he does best. I can’t imagine coming up with this list, not to mention writing as smartly and concisely about them all. The one problem here is that he doesn’t always offer a solution to these problems, but it’s still important either way.
“THE ACTION BUTTON DOT NET MANIFESTO: A LIST OF THE TWENTY-FIVE BEST GAMES OF ALL-TIME” at Action Button
They’ve been teasing it for months, but finally here it is. Twenty-five full reviews. It’s a lot, so they’re releasing them three at a time twice a week. The three up now are all good examples of why Tim Rogers is important to the topic of this column.