A few years back, I had a proposal for an MMO project called “Stages.” It was the idea of using virtual worlds as essentially communal audience spaces.  If you could get a live act or a video going in a virtual world, you could then offer virtual stages where the audience could actually mingle and chat with one another while watching the performance.

Of course, this is not really anything new — on a small scale, it’s happened for a while. But what I was envisioning was a platform basically built for the purpose, stripping away all the other stuff that comes with a virtual world by having the showing happening within an instance.

Read More “Sony invests in Gaia and virtual movie theaters”

Jonathan Blow has posted the slides and audio to his talk “Design Reboot” from the Montreal conference.I spotted this over on Quarter to Three, where people in the comment thread are to my mind surprisingly resistant to what Jon is saying. Among other things, the comments are made that “videogames do not have the power to affect humanity.”

If that were the case, nobody would play them. 😛

I suspect that some of the reason for the resistance is that people don’t like being told that things they love can be bad for them…

It’s the big news of the game industry today.

The upshot:

• The Blizzard name gets hurt. This is a shame. Blizz itself is going to retain its name, “Blizzard Entertainment,” but there’s sure to be some degree of market confusion and tarnishing of Blizzard’s brand, which is unquestionably the best in the industry, by having associated with absolutely everything coming out of Vivendi and Activision. Not a good branding choice — we’ll probably all call the new entity just “Activision” anyway. Or “A/B” which I will do because it is shorter to type. 🙂
• EA will probably have to respond, since this makes them the #2 publisher (!). There’s that Ubisoft purchase that’s been dangling out there for ages… In fact, it may stimulate more M&A activity across the whole industry, and more consolidation.
• It’ll be interesting to see whether EA and A/B diverge in their approaches; EA has been talking more and more about being “an entertainment company” whereas A/B seems like doubling down on traditional gaming.

The impact to employees will probably be minimal for quite some time to come. Both publishers are enormous, so everyone there is used to that sort of environment.

One states reason for the merger, btw, is for ATVI to get more online expertise. It will be interesting to see whether Blizzard’s online expertise can actually be translated outwards. After all, EA and others failed at that sort of approach.

It’s also amusing to remember that Blizzard was actually on the block not that many years ago. 🙂