This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.
The EA-Land Blog has the news.
This is only a few months after the rebranding from TSO, so this is a fairly rapid turnaround from relaunch to outright closure. Looks like the servers will be shuttered on August 1st. PayPal cash-in is going away immediately.
It made it six years.
The SAI 25 Live is this new index that is trying to track the hottest startups based on an estimated valuation figure. As you look at the chart, realize these figures are in thousands, so the top of the chart is valued in the billions.
Several of the top 25 are familiar names to readers of this blog and folks who hang around the virtual worlds space:
Of course, if you are on the Metaverse Roadmap bandwagon, then the stuff like Twitter also fits into the eventual metaverse picture, via the “lifelogging” quadrant. And Meebo, which many think of as just a chat app, has had great success with Meebo Rooms, which is basically am embeddable chat room that you can put on any website — another step towards web-wide synchronous interaction.
The table is intended only to show privately held companies, so many of the big players are absent. And many of these valuations are purely hypothetical — there isn’t necessarily a buyer at that price, and the markets aren’t exactly hot for IPOs right now either. But it does serve to demonstrate the attraction of virtual worlds as a category.
It’s also interesting to me how many of the others are ones I have never heard of. Tudou is a video-sharing site in China. Ozon and Yandex are Russian. There’s a bunch of job-seeking sites, and a bunch of ad networks.
Totally not safe for work.
Not sure what the distinction is between an M and an AO game these days, but one thing seems clear — Rockstar is not hiding stuff on the disc anymore. Presumably if you don’t try to hide it, you can’t be accused of hypocrisy. 🙂
On the one hand, this is clearly puerile and likely counterproductive in that it undermines what by all accounts is a stellar game with a great script and great gameplay. (I say by all accounts because I don’t have it. And I don’t have it because, well, of scenes like this, and my kids).
On the other hand, the industry does need to be able to tackle mature content, and games with this sort of content should be allowed to exist.
I just kind of wish it weren’t so gratuitous.
Next Generation has an informative email from Russell Williams, the CEO of Flying Lab, giving the reasons why they are having to merge servers. It’s a great insight into the complex equation involved in estimating how many servers to have.
One of the items in particular caught my eye:
Game systems
Pirates’ gameplay is very organic, designed in such a way that the different systems feed into one another. In a PvE-only game, focusing mainly on content, this isn’t a big deal. But in Pirates of the Burning Sea we have systems that require a minimum number of players to function correctly, such as our economy, and they break other systems if they’re not working correctly (such as PvP). If we didn’t have these kinds of interdependent systems, we wouldn’t even be considering server merges.
