'Please pay us as much as you can!'

One of the latest, most disturbing trends is to lock away some functions of the game if you buy an used copy. Publishers are getting bolder every day, so now a THQ employee has even said that buying second hand games is "cheating". They want people to pay $60 for every game.

Well, they still don't understand that some people will never pay $60 for a game. I know I never do: I wait until they they hit the bargain bin and cost 15 € (about $20) before buying anything. Anyway, for many people the basic economics for the current way of making second-hand games available is this: a kid pays $60 for a game, finds out that he doesn't like the game for whatever reason, sells it back, and then he buys another one. Do you see a pattern? If he can't sell the game, the chain is broken. A game sale disappears. Furthermore, he'll never buy the game in the first place because he knows that if he doesn't like the game for some reason, he'll be screwed. In the "best case scenario" for the games industry, he'll wait until the game costs $20-25 like I do.

Is it so hard to understand why this "preventing used games sales" will only bring harm to everyone? Also, it doesn't make any sense and goes against what we've been doing for centuries. Just imagine that you go and buy an used car from some guy. You sign the contract, the seller hands you the keys for the car... and then he says, "oh, there's one more thing. The "extra storage function" is only available for first-time buyers. That means that you should go to your nearest Ford dealership and pay them $3,000 to get the trunk key."

Can you see yourself in that situation? And can you imagine doing anything else than punching the seller's face straight away?

Was I the only one waiting for This is Vegas?

It looks like This is Vegas has been canned.

This was going to be the next game created by Surreal Software, the studio behind the underrated horror classic The Suffering and its inferior (but still pretty good) sequel, and I have to admit that I was hoping they would create another great game. But something was not right. The colossal Midway was sinking, and it looked like this game could be a victim of it. Also, to our eyes the game seemed a bit pointless. What is it exactly? A mere GTA clone? A playboy simulator? Is there anything else to do other than just go from one place to another and "party"? With no interesting story or characters sticking out, it looked like they were taking too long for just a glorified HD mini-game collection.

Maybe we were wrong. Maybe there was a great game underneath. But then again, why did they choose to show only those parts of the game? Were they really building up a whole game based on the secondary, throwaway elements that filled up GTA's world for those moments when you wanted a break from the main story?

They've been working on this game for years and they've already spend $50 million. Are they really throwing all that work away? Even 3D Realms allegedly handed Duke Nukem Forever to another developer to finish it. Can't they just release what they have as a budget title, or as a downloadable game? Maybe they won't be able to sell it spectacularly for $60, but why not for $20? I would definitely buy it.

Beyond Good & Evil 2 watch

The chairman of Ubisoft says they are trying their best to make Beyond Good & Evil 2 the best game possible.

If you read the Kotaku article, you could believe he's serious and Ubisoft is still the same company it used to be, choosing innovation and quality above the "iteration method" (running a franchise to the ground with yearly sequels, like they did with Prince of Persia). But remember, until it's proven otherwise, Ubisoft is still the same company that ruined Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell not long ago. And don't forget about their really evil DRM scheme, which always makes me think of this joke.

APB sucks... so you know what comes next

I was really hoping for APB to be great, but then I tried the open beta-thing "Keys to the City" event... and what I found was truly horrible. Awful driving, bad shooting, boring missions, long loading times... I didn't want to write specifically about it here because I couldn't even keep playing for long and you know, it was just a beta, though it didn't seem too likely that they could fix all the major problems in time for the real release.

So it's not a surprise that the game tanked, so now the developer is firing everybody. It's sad, but as I usually say, if you make really bad games you'll go under.

After getting this bad news for Real Time Worlds, a former employee has written about it from an insider perspective in the comments section of Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It looks calm and impartial enough, unlike the comment from a former Obsidian employee who crapped on the game as soon as he found the first bad review for it.

Well, I'm not against snitching, but please let a game live or die on its own terms, and then tell us. Don't land the killing blow on it... What if you are wrong? And in the case of that Obsidian guy, he certainly was.

So here's the comment in its entirety. Why not?

What a fucking mess. I’m ex-RTW.

An outcome like this wasn’t desired by anyone at RTW, but game development is a weird business. A game can play poorly right up until only a few months before release, for a variety of reasons – Crackdown was awful right up until a month or two before it came out (some would say awful afterwards, too, but I’m trying to make a point :). Knowing this, it can blind you to a game’s imperfections – or lead you to think it’s going to come right by release. You end up in this situation where you’re heads down working your ass off, not well able to critically assess your own product. APB itself only really came together technically relatively late in its development cycle (and it still obviously has problems), leaving too little time for content production and polish, and lacking any real quality in some of its core mechanics (shooting / driving). It’s not that the team was unaware of these huge issues, but a million little things conspire to prevent you from being able to do anything about them. It can seem difficult to comprehend, it certainly was for me before entering the industry – ‘How did those idiots get X wrong in game Y?’. No team sets out to ship something anything less than perfection, but projects can evolve in ways that no one seems to be in total control of. All that said, it was pretty clear to me that the game was going to get a kicking at review – the gap between expectation and the reality was huge. I wasn’t on the APB team, so I played it infrequently, during internal test days etc. I was genuinely shocked when I played the release candidate – I couldn’t believe Dave J would be willing to release this. All the issues that had driven me nuts about it were still there – the driving was poor (server-authoritative with no apparent client prediction, ergo horrendously lag intolerant), combat impact-less, and I found the performance of the game sub-par on what was a high-spec dev machine.

But the real killer, IMO, is the business model. This was out of the team’s hands. The game has issues, but I think if you separate the business model from the game itself, it holds up at least a little better. A large scale team based shooter, in big urban environments, with unprecedented customisation and some really cool, original features. The problem was that management looked at the revenue they wanted to generate and priced accordingly, failing to realise (or care) that there are literally a dozen top quality, subscription free team based shooters. Many of which, now, have progression and persistence of some sort – for free. The game would have been immeasurably better received it had simply been a boxed product, with paid-for in-game items, IMO. This may not have been possible, given what was spent on the game and the running costs, but the market is tough. You can’t simply charge what you feel like earning and hope the paying public will agree with your judgement of value. Many of us within RTW were extremely nervous at APB’s prospects long before launch, and with good reason, as it turns out.

They also failed spectacularly to manage expectations. When Dave J spoke out saying there would ‘not be a standard subscription model’, he unwittingly set expectations at ‘free to play’. When it’s announced that we’re essentially pay-per-hour, we get absolutely killed in the press, somewhat understandably. The game also announced far too early (though it kept being delayed), and had little to show but customisation for what seemed like years, largely because internally we (correctly) judged it to be the stand out part of the game. But we should have kept our powder dry. Our PR felt tired and dragged on and on, rather than building a short, sharp crescendo of excitement pre-release. We also went to beta far too early, wiser heads were ignored when it was pointed out that any kind of beta, even very early beta, might as well be public as far as generating word of mouth. The real purpose of beta is publicity, not bug fixing. We never took that lesson on board. We also made the error of not releasing fixes externally to many of the issues early beta testers were picking up, keeping the fixes on internal builds, I presume to lessen the load on QA. This simply meant that to early beta testers, it looked as though we were never bothering to fix the issues they found, when in fact, they were being fixed, simply being deployed back into beta very infrequently. This lesson was eventually learnt, but only after we’d pissed off a large number of early-adopters.

The sheer time spent and money it took to make APB is really a product of fairly directionless creative leadership. Certainly Dave J has great, strong, ambitious ideas for his games. But he’s a big believer in letting the details emerge along the way, rather than being planned out beyond even a rudimentary form. For most of the lifetime of APB, he was also CEO of the whole company, as well as Creative Director. His full attention was not there until it late in the day. This has ramifications for how long his projects run – many years, on average – and the associated cost. This, in turn, means that the business model options were constrained, conspiring to place APB in a really difficult position, commercially. Ultimately, it’s this pairing of a subscription model cost with free to play game play that really did for the game. And many of us saw it coming a mile off. I must admit I’m dismayed about the scale of the failure, however. Many of us thought APB might do OK at retail and sell a few hundred thousand, though struggle on ongoing revenue, and gradually carve a niche. But it absolutely tanked at retail I believe (though I’m not privvy to figures) I think due to the critical mauling it received. It never made the top 20 of the all format UK chart. It’s scraping along the bottom of the PC-only chart, a situation I’m assuming is replicated in its major markets. And being at the bottom of the PC-only chart is not where you want to be as a AAA budget game. God knows what the budget was, but when you account for the 150-odd staff and all the launch hardware and support, it was in the tens of millions of dollars.

MyWorld is an innocent bystander caught up in the demise of APB. Which is a real shame, because it is genuinely ground breaking, though not aimed at the traditional gamer audience. It was going great guns over the last year or so, coming on leaps and bounds, impressing everyone who saw it. MyWorld might as well have been a different company – there was very little staff overlap on the two projects, they worked under entirely different production methodologies, and because we were not the next in line for release we received very little attention from the execs (which was a good thing, to be honest). We knew that time was limited, and tried to encourage management to go the ‘google-style beta route – release a limited, but polished core feature set early, and iterate. What happens to it from here on out is not clear, but without the people who wrote it, the code isn’t worth a damn, so I can’t see the project being picked up. Management tried to get a publisher onboard to fund continued development, but the time scales involved meant that was always unlikely, despite some considerable interest from potential partners. God knows what will happen to it now the team are gone. Probably nothing. Years of my life were poured into that project, but it was a blast to make, and at least it was made public so I can point and say, “I helped make that”.

RTW tried something bold, and fucked it up. It tried to make what amounted to two MMOs at once, as well as self-publish. I have to hand it to Dave J. He’s ballsy. But in the end, we couldn’t do it, and I think the whole company will go under sooner rather than later. It’s a shame, too, as Dundee can’t absorb the level of game dev redundancies that are about to hit, which means the Dundee scene gets that little bit smaller. But that’s the price of failure, and we certainly failed. No excuses, really. We were well funded, hired some great engineers, designers and artists, and great QA guys. Ultimately, the senior management team must take responsibility. I think they had far too much focus on the company’s ‘strategic direction’ and not enough on day-to-day execution, which was where it really matters. And I think a huge part of the blame lies with Dave J, though I can’t emphasize enough how nice a man he is personally; ultimately APB has torpedoed the company, and it failed largely under his creative leadership. It has other issues (technical, for instance), but the design and the business plan are largely down to him and the board, and they are what have failed so irrevocably for the rest of us.

ExRTW

The new censorship

As you can see in the comments from users here, the Steam software forces you to upgrade your version of Plants vs Zombies to the GOTY release even if you don't want it. Yes, even if you have disabled automatic updates for that game. They have blatantly ignored the choice made by players to keep the old version of the game, following the rules set by Valve to handle Steam.

This kind of disregard for what the player wants, taking advantage of the power they hold when they fully control your access to the games, is what makes me skeptical about digital downloads. They can tamper with your game in any way they think appropriate. Now they are saying, "oh, sorry, some character in the game may get us sued so we are removing it", but at some point you can log in to your game account and be confronted with a disclaimer telling you that "sorry, a big Earthquake killed 100,000 people in California so the Quake games are in bad taste and you can no longer play them". Or maybe one day you try to play "Rock and Roll Part 2" in a Guitar Hero / Rock Band game but then Gary Glitter is arrested for molesting a child, so then the song gets patched out of the game because some parents complained about it... You know what I mean!

And then I, as a player, will yell "stop screwing me! I just want to play my game in peace! Don't take anything away from me!". But now there's nothing I can do, because in the digital era nobody can hear you scream.