gamasutra
Diagnosing Completion Anxiety Disorder
9:35AM Tori Floyd | Some of you may remember, way back in my blurb introducing myself to Kotaku, I mentioned I’m bad about not finishing games. I wasn’t kidding. I have completed an embarrassingly low number of games, and I always though this made me a bit of a freak amongst my fellow gamers. But according to an opinion piece by Leigh Alexander of Gamesetwatch and Gamasutra, I may not be quite the abnormality I thought I was. She argues that gamers on the whole are completing fewer games now than they did in the past. More »
News
Mag Announces Top 50 Developers
6:00AM Tori Floyd | A new study from Gamasutra and sister divisions Game Developer magazine and Game Deveolper Research division has selected the top 50 developers in the gaming industry today. It was based on reputation and sales data, through anonymous surveys and assessments of sales charts in the US, the UK, and Japan, the number of games released each year, and the average metacritic rating. While the sales data is handy, the all-encompassing approach taken by the study to include reputation, as well, makes this study interesting. According to Gamasutra, “the resulting report is the only multi-input empirical ranking available for game development studios.” Hit the jump for the top 20 devs on the list. More »
News
12:30PM Logan Booker | WildTangent is home not only to a games development studio, but an online publishing platform as well. Companies such as PopCap, Atari and Reflexive already enjoy the benefits of WildTangent’s Game Console, an application installed by end users that allows them to browse and download titles provided by WildTangent and its affiliates.
Gamasutra has just posted the results of a recent fat-chewing with WildTangent CEO Alex St. John. Of note is St. John’s talk of getting more “big-name developers” onboard to distribute their games first via WildTangent, followed by retail shelves:
You talked about working with Vivendi to bring some of their games to WildTangent, and you also talked about how this is somewhat of an alternative to traditional publishing, but have you been working with any developers of large-scale projects, to be able to deliver them?
AS: Yes. We’re talking with a number of what you would consider “famous, big-name developers” for taking their content online. I think you’re going to find some big-name titles released for pure online distribution — as well as boxed titles released very quickly — in the next year or so.
So you’re talking about games that have never come out before in a box on a shelf.
AS: That’s correct.
There’s no doubt that online distribution has come a long way since the days of a prepubescent Steam, and more support from big publishers is only going to help it prosper.
St. John has quite a bit more to say, and you can catch the whole interview over at Gamasutra.
Q&A: WildTangent’s St. John Talks PC Distribution’s Future [Gamasutra] More »
Big Publishers to Distribute Online First, Ship to Shelves Second?
12:30PM Logan Booker | WildTangent is home not only to a games development studio, but an online publishing platform as well. Companies such as PopCap, Atari and Reflexive already enjoy the benefits of WildTangent’s Game Console, an application installed by end users that allows them to browse and download titles provided by WildTangent and its affiliates.
Gamasutra has just posted the results of a recent fat-chewing with WildTangent CEO Alex St. John. Of note is St. John’s talk of getting more “big-name developers” onboard to distribute their games first via WildTangent, followed by retail shelves:
You talked about working with Vivendi to bring some of their games to WildTangent, and you also talked about how this is somewhat of an alternative to traditional publishing, but have you been working with any developers of large-scale projects, to be able to deliver them?
AS: Yes. We’re talking with a number of what you would consider “famous, big-name developers” for taking their content online. I think you’re going to find some big-name titles released for pure online distribution — as well as boxed titles released very quickly — in the next year or so.
So you’re talking about games that have never come out before in a box on a shelf.
AS: That’s correct.
There’s no doubt that online distribution has come a long way since the days of a prepubescent Steam, and more support from big publishers is only going to help it prosper.
St. John has quite a bit more to say, and you can catch the whole interview over at Gamasutra.
Q&A: WildTangent’s St. John Talks PC Distribution’s Future [Gamasutra] More » 
Gamasutra Catches Up With Alexey Pajitnov
9:00AM Flynn De Marco | Gamasutra has a great article up right now in which they pay a call on gaming pioneer Alexey Pajitnov. For the uninformed, Pajitnov is the creator of a a little game called Tetris. They caught up with him at the GameCity conference in Nottingham, England before a viewing of the documentary Tetris: From Russia With Love to discuss his views on such subjects as the casual gaming scene (including Katamari Damacy), his new projects and the history of Tetris. It’s some terrific weekend reading if you have some free time if only to hear the perspective of a true old school gamer on the modern gaming scene. Also, if you have never seen one of the several documentaries that follow the long arduous history of one of the most addicting games ever made, do yourself a favor and check one out. It’s an amazing story filled with more drama and intrigue than most soap operas. Catching Up Casually: A Chat With Alexey Pajitnov [Gamasutra] More »
News
Gamasutra’s Top Five Developers Of 2007
6:12PM Luke Plunkett | What a great list this is. Not for its content, necessarily (though the choices are fairly sensible), just for the fact that this one’s not about games. Instead, these are Gamasutra’s picks for the year’s top five developers. Note the following observations, which will save you precious seconds between realising yourself and commenting angrily: Nintendo are not on the list, and every developer who is released their games on the 360. 5) BioWare 4) Bungie 3) 2K Boston/2K Australia 2) Harmonix 1) Valve Gamasutra’s Best Of 2007: Top 5 Developers [Gamasutra] [Image] More »
News
Gamasutra Lists Top 5 Trends of 2007
3:40AM Mark Wilson | We love Top [fill in number] [fill in noun] of [fill in year] lists around here. And Gamasutra’s was no exception. They sum up this year’s trends with just five points. 5. Consolidations 4. Catering to the Wii Audience 3. The Rise of the Shooter 2. Indies Going Major 1. Mainstreaming of Handhelds It’s a solid list. Who would have thought that Blizzivision would be born? Or that all three of the biggest consoles wouldn’t touch handheld sales? But I’d probably swap 3 or even 4 to something more like, a “Rift between casual and hardcore gaming.” Hit the link for their pretty convincing arguments. Gamasutra’s Best of 2007: Top 5 Trends [gamasutra] More »
On the State of Game Reviewing
6:00AM Maggie Greene | Everyone’s been buzzing this weekend about the Gamespot shakeup involving Jeff Gerstmann and there’s been plenty of talk flying around in various places. Gamasutra, for instance, has a good editorial up entitled Numerals, Game Reviews, And The Game Media on some of the problems with the review structure in the gaming industry; Destructoid has a brand new look to let us know exactly what they think of Gamespot; people are planning a boycott of Gamespot and other CNet sites; our very own Crecente posed a question to all the reviewers out there: Have you been forced to rewrite a review due to advertising pressure? We’ve been inundated with examples of bad journalism, bad bosses, and big, bad, mean companies. And of course Mark Wilson wrote his own take on the problem with game reviews. There are a couple of themes from all of this, both the personal accounts that have wound up in our inbox and the wider discussion as a whole: this is nothing new and the ramifications are a little further reaching than a single reviewer, game company, or site. More »
Constructing Artificial Emotions: Game Design
8:30AM Maggie Greene | I love the essays put together by Daniel Cook (aka Danc) of Lost Garden – they’re frequently complex, but always enlightening. This week at Gamasutra, he tackled the challenge of creating strong emotional experiences via game design: it’s a powerful aspect of media and one that has been discussed in a lot of forums. He pins down the (general) problem of game design when it comes to evoking emotion – designers tend to rely on one of two methods. Either games fall back on other forms of media (”And then we show a movie of the faithful heroine being stabbed by the evil villain!”) or what he terms ‘copious handwaving’ (’”See, this pink pulsating blob represents ‘Feelings’”, explains the designer to the confused player.’). His solutions? Taking a look at several different methods (most with a long history of other applications), their uses and limitations, and how technology can help. Some general thoughts?: Here is a thought. When trying to create emotion in your players, tone down with the fixation on Hollywood, camera techniques and in-game narrative. It isn’t our unique strength as a medium. Instead, explore what would happen if we, as designers, actively attempted to create and manipulate the social, psychological and physical environments of our players in order to induce artificial emotions. Toss the storyboards and scripts. Game design becomes an exercise not so dissimilar from the movie The Truman Show. You provide the carefully balanced system that sets up the appropriate physiological states and cognitive labels. The players react with predictable, measurable human drama. OK, I’m not sure we really need to toss the storyboards in all cases, but experimentation with new ways of making the medium more powerful is never a bad thing. It’s a really, really interesting piece and well worth sitting down to peruse. Constructing Artificial Emotions: A Design Experiment [Gamasutra] More »
“Shaping the Community” – Games Need To Be More Like Film?
4:30AM Maggie Greene | Gamasutra has a piece up by Andy Robertson on what the game industry can learn from the film industry – at least in terms of fostering a sense of community. Game companies, you see, are apparently falling down on the job of giving their fans some “ownership” in the final product. It’s transparency of the design/production process that makes the hit! Who knew? Lord of the Rings wouldn’t have been as successful a film without the rabid community surrounding the films (hasn’t Tolkein always enjoyed a mass following of dedicated fans)? Halo 3 is a hit because of relative transparency between company and fans? The Playstation blog is turning around years of crappy PR for Sony? Maybe it’s just the fact that I’m on my last nerve after a week of fires, declining air quality, and more fires in San Diego, but my gut reaction is ‘You’ve got to be kidding me’: As the games industry takes innovative steps to communicate with and involve the wider public in their process, there is a lot that can be learnt from the films industry. It is clear that, just as with films, it is essential that it enables its audiences to feel a sense of ownership of the media they purchase. We can achieve this with transparent and honest communication — be it a blog, podcast or video. It’s nice that people like Joss Wheedon and the actors involved in Firefly were all about ‘going to the people,’ but writing a book – or making a movie – or designing a game are creative processes that belong to someone else. ‘Lack of ownership’ has never bothered me when it comes to the media I consume – just because I like it a lot doesn’t mean I have any role in it than ponying up cash (and I’m OK with that). Lack of transparent process hasn’t stopped a frighteningly rabid fan base from springing up around Square Enix or a million other examples that are probably more representative than Firefly. So, dear Kotaku readers, what do you think? Does transparency in process make any difference to you? Or were those of you who were combing Bungie forums for Halo 3 news going to buy the damn game anyways? Shaping Your Community: What Films Did, Games Must Do More »
