Rock, Paper, Shotgun interview

 Posted by (Visited 13790 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking
Jan 172008
 

I did an inteview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun a short while back.

It’s funny, because tidbits from the interview have been picked up as news stories by various sources. And they all led with a different take on it! Over at GamesIndustry.biz, it was how the industry needs new inspiration. But over at  Virtual Worlds News, it’s all about “players will touch Metaplace soon!” About which more shortly.

One of the things is that our influences in the game industry are fairly narrow. Bioshock is one of the big hits of the year, and everyone is impressed by its core narrative influences. It’s a critique of Ayn Rand and Objectivism and all of that stuff. But if you think about it, Objectivism is common currency for game developers, it’s a nerd kind of thing. So we’re not referencing anything too far afield there, a little further afield, but not a lot. A lot of the common cultural currency is not all that diverse, and that was really hammered home for me by watching the Xbox Live trailers for the new year. I sat with my wife and she said that if she hadn’t been told that they were all different games, she would not have been able to tell them apart. They were all so similar.

China booms more, cracks down

 Posted by (Visited 9415 times)  Game talk
Jan 172008
 

Reuters reports that China’s online market grew by 23% in terms of users last year, on the back of 70 million new Internet users. But China is also going to crack down, citing in part concerns that the games are disreputable and regarded as being equivalent to opium. The tone of the quote is that of a government saving an important industry from itself.

Meanwhile, one-fifth of Internet users in China are connecting via phone.

More on 3DXplorer

 Posted by (Visited 3958 times)  Game talk
Jan 162008
 

Someone at 3DXplorer left a comment on my earlier post with some additional details. Since they’re posted here already, I figured I’d post it as an actual post since it’s interesting:

Dear Raph, Let us add a few precisions:

1) 3DXplorer princing is not going to change. The Studio is free for all. The player is free for low-trafic sites and requires subscription for high-trafic websites.

2) We agree with some of the challenges you mentioned. We work on them and will most likely show them soon, stay tuned.

3) We are sure, other online, multi-platform, multi-navigator, free tools, like 3DXplorer will be released in the future. For now, we don’t see that much. If we are not wrong, unlike 3DXplorer, the one mentioned is only running on windows, requires pre-installation, and its not yet live.

One last precision: 3DXplorer has no specific innovation claim on quality of renderring or such.

The main claim of innovation is on “3D for everyone” as there is no need to pre-install software, its multi-platform(PC/MAC/LINUX) and Multi-navigator (IE/FF/SAFARI/OPERA/…).

That maybe considered as not that important for gamers, but makes huge difference for the majority of the Internet visitors who are not familiar with 3D.

Hope this clarifies a bit.

Regards

(I believe the company is French, btw).

Updated: Scrabulous & Hasbro & now Mattel

 Posted by (Visited 5969 times)  Game talk
Jan 152008
 

In the midst of an interesting article about article about Zynga, a cross-social-network casual games platform, I see this little paragraph describing an event I missed:

Last week, the Web site of Fortune magazine reported that the two brothers in India who created the game had received a legal notice from Hasbro, the toy company that owns the Scrabble brand. Hasbro did not return a request for comment, and Rajat Agarwalla, one of the brothers who created Scrabulous, said his lawyer had advised him not to comment on the matter.

Update: Reuters says that Mattel, which owns rights outside of the US and Canada, has also taken action. 

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