Zynga is no different – but it thought it was, and some investors believed it. Zynga is a games company. It’s important for it to keep its back catalogue healthy and thriving, but ultimately, if it wants to grow, it has to generate hits. Farmville is back catalogue – a comfortable set of laurels to rest on, and nothing other. Zynga, like any other media company, is only as good as its last release, and only as bankable as the strength of its forward release schedule. There is a sense that the company and its investors thought that the social graph and F2P business could change that reality, but they were utterly deluded in this.
I wouldn’t be too saddened about these guys taking a fall.
I’ve recently been diving into Steam games on the latest Humble Indie Bundle. But early on I had a big problem with control input via the standard Mac keyboard. Especially in games that rely on quick, arcade-like movements (e.g. Super Meat Boy), the keyboard isn’t precise enough and ill equipped to handle the bangs and keypresses of an average gaming run.
Enter the Mac app Joystick Mapper. For $5 on the Mac App Store I plugged in a PS3 Dualshock 3 controller via USB, mapped several buttons and directions to some keyboard and mouse commands, and I was ready to go. It makes a huge difference. Highly recommended.
Been enjoying this long-form feature over at Polygon giving perspective on where gaming is heading. It’s subdivided by major focus, with one major piece released each day this week. So far I’ve read about AAA games, indies, mobile, and how the demographic of gamers has changed.
It’s long, but if you have to cut down what you’re after, start with Russ Pitts’ piece on the AAA side of the industry. It’s scary breaking down Activision and Ubisoft’s numbers.
Really cool, very in depth history of puzzle classic Tetris and its evolution across platforms. Once again, The Verge and its sister gaming publication Polygon have published a compelling long form (two thousand word plus) feature article. It’s a nice break from the usual bite size reporting that dominates online journalism, and hopefully it’s a trend that will continue.
Pretty fascinating breakdown of Diablo 3 addition. Author Alex Curelea asserts the game’s problems stem from its (real life currency based) auction house.
(While I can’t compare my addition level with a twelve year old game, Diablo 3 certainly has done something right; I log a few hours every week, a significant dent in my already busy schedule.)
E3 discussion continues on the 6/12 edition of the Giant Bomb podcast. Skip to the one hour mark for some thoughtful criticism of several big game press trailers: The Last of Us, Tomb Raider and more.
We arrived to our Capcom appointment, I plunked down with Lost Planet 3, and Alex Navarro was ushered over to play Devil May Cry. In a room of kiosks, there were pole dancers. It’s unclear what that has to do with Devil May Cry. The girl hired to skimpily waltz around was sitting on the floor, looking bored…
…Elsewhere, I refused to play any 3DS games at Nintendo’s booth because the company didn’t have a table with machines, and instead tethered its lineup to attractive women.
It’s disgusting to hear stories like this. It’s 2012. Console gaming is a mainstream, billion dollar industry. Yet its marketing is crazy violent, often sexist, and almost entirely targeted toward a young, hyper-masculine audience. No wonder so much of their potential target demographic is moving to gender neutral mobile platforms like iOS.
You’re presented with this white room. In the middle of the white room is a black cube. If you touch on that black cube, you’ll zoom into it. This black cube is made up of millions of tiny little cubes. You can tap away at that cube.
As you’re doing that, these words will come up: ‘Curiosity, what is inside the black cube?’ That’s when you realize it’s not just you tapping away at that black cube, it’s the whole world. The whole world is tapping away is revealing layers of this cube.
So so Molyneux to run a project like this. Here’s hoping it translates into a kick ass game.
Pay what you want and get four highly regarded games – Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery, Limbo, Amnesia and Psychonauts – for Mac, PC and Linux. Pay a bit more (about $9 at the time of this writing) to unlock four more games, including Bastion and Super Meat Boy. If you’re at all vaguely interested in PC or Mac gaming you’ve probably heard about this. It deserves the hype. I’m generally not much of a Mac gamer, but the chance to catch up with Limbo, Braid and Super Meat Boy for bit more than $10, much of which goes to charity, is a no brainer.
Act soon – there’s only one day left in this offer.
The Verge’s Paul Miller wrote a solid article on how the big three console companies will evolve:
In the game world, where the topic of “casual” vs “hardcore” gaming is still a hot-button issue, Microsoft has side-stepped and pulled its chips off the table: it’s just mainstream. When Microsoft and Sony built Kinect and Move, respectively, to compete with the then-dominant Wii, they were both making a casual play. When the backlash came a year later, as hardcore gamers felt like they were being abandoned, Sony was quick to shore up that fanbase, but Microsoft kept it casual.
I wouldn’t quite go so far as saying Microsoft is “just” mainstream but Paul is on the right track. You can substitute ‘mainstream’ here with ‘evolving’; Sony is steadfast on 3D and the hard core market while Nintendo has a multiplayer network out of the 90s and regurgitating IPs from the 80s. Only Microsoft acknowledges the mobile elephant in the room.