by Jeff Woleslagle on Sep 15, 2009
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As we discussed in yesterday's newsletter, MMOs aren't always
the most watchable games. That's beginning to change with more and more
action-oriented games, but in between some comments that would make
awesome chapter titles in Satan's leadership book, Activision CEO
Bernard Kotick stated that he wants to fuse the best parts of console
gaming with PC gaming. Are we seeing hints about the future of
Battle.net unfold before us? That, plus the latest round of troubles
for the developers of Stargate Worlds, is yours to discuss in today's
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MMOs typically aren't the most watchable games. If we locked you in a
room with 3 sets of people playing MarioKart, Call of Duty 4, and World
of Warcraft, chances are you'd gravitate away from WoW and towards
something with LAN or console appeal. Not only are the UI elements
small and the gameplay relatively slow-apace in the typical MMO, the
more dazzling side of the game is how people cooperate to complete
objectives, and that's hard to see from a single player's perspective.
But gamers are, by nature, watchers. Half the fun of any game is
talking about the thrilling moments afterward, and the best part of my
job is sharing with you, longsuffering reader, the best moments I
experience in the MMOs I play. MMOs are usually better in the telling
than in the watching, so it's no surprise that a game like EVE Online
has an exponentially bigger armchair audience than its active
playerbase. We like to watch, perhaps more than we like to play
sometimes, and TVs are typically staged much better for an audience
than even the biggest e-peen of a computer monitor.
I guess that's why this article on how
href="http://www.gamespot.com/news/6226758.html">Activision
plans to bypass consoles with "untethered Guitar Hero"
doesn't surprise me. Kotick argued for a streaming presentation of
video games that make use of a media hub rather than a licensed
console, which makes sense now that Guitar Hero and Rockband have
proven that you can (easily) sell hardware with software. That media
hubs will probably become licensed consoles in this
scenario seems to have escaped him.
What does surprise me is how open Bernard Kotick is on the subject of
streaming media (Kotick is President and CEO of Activision Blizzard,
whose subsidiaries, surprisingly enough, are Activision and Blizzard).
Kotick's sweeping statements go far beyond relaying the thought process
for Guitar Hero, but also (potentially) games like Call of Duty and
Blizzard's upcoming games. Could Diablo 3 and the ever-mysterious
"unannounced project" by piped directly into your Media PC? Is Blizzard
grooming Battle.net to take on this role after all?
Kotick went on to make more gruffly ass-hatted comments like "The goal
that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into
Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making
video games" and that's he's tried to instill into the company culture
"skepticism, pessimism, and fear." It's like games industry rewind to
15 years ago, it shows how impervious and godlike the executives of
these companies believe that they are, and it wholly explains why
Blizzard done more exploitation than innovation since the olden
days. You can't argue with the results in the short-term,
though, and the reality of the Blizzard situation is probably nowhere
as bleak as it sounds, as judging from our own interactions
with Blizzard developers.
I guess we'll all have to keep watching to find out what these comments
mean to Blizzard, but in the meantime, do your own bit of speculation
the Loading...
forum.
From our
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=6">Articles,
News & Events Discussion
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=46257">Major
Investor Sues Gary Whiting of CME
I'd
love to see the Stargate IP come to life as a MMOG; I really
would. But whenever I picture the hardworking folks at Cheyenne
Mountain Entertainment, developers of
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/73">Stargate
Worlds,
I see the company's founder, and alleged shady businessman, Gary
Whiting shooting down their dream of launching a game like a
player in some crazed game of
href="http://www.cyberiapc.com/flashgames/duckhunt.htm">Duck
Hunt.
I have no doubt that there are a lot of good people working on Stargate
Worlds, but I have to wonder how they're dealing with the oppression of
financial
woes, scandal,
and now lawsuits.
Will CME ever get a break? Do they deserve one? Would you like to see
them pull off Stargate Worlds?
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=46257">Share
your comments.
==============================
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==============================
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