Everyone has a fighting chance
The Windwalkers Kickstarter page has been updated with a pair of features designed to familiarize fans with the game based on the French post-apocalyptic novel "The Horde of the Counterwind" by Alain Damasio. The first is a video showing the team creating the game. In addition, the first chapter of "The Horde of the Counterwind" has been translated to English for the first time and is available for interested readers to check out.
Nvidia has announced the "Shield" console during this week’s Game Developer’s Conference. Shield will feature a "super computer" streaming cloud system called "Grid" that will constantly be updated with the latest games and PC quality gaming in the living room.
Blizzard has released a teaser picture for what seems to be a forthcoming opinion piece about Overwatch. The article is titled "The New Peacekeepers: Vigilante justice–is it vital in a post-Overwatch world?" Check it out and let us know what you think!
The massive 1.6.5 update has been applied to the Elder Scrolls Online servers and the game is back up and running. The patch brings several updated features and systems online as well as lays the groundwork for the March 17th update that will bring Tamriel Unlimited, the buy-to-play version of ESO, online. Tamriel Unlimited is slated for a March 17th deployment.
Lead Writer of the Dragon Age series, David Gaider, has announced via Twitter that he is leaving the DA team and moving to the as-yet-unnamed Bioware project. Patrick Weekes, author of The Masked Empire and also a DAI team member, will take over the lead on the series from now on.
A Tweet from the Storybricks team just cropped up on Twitter that indicates that the company is closing its doors. This comes quickly after last week’s announcement by Daybreak Game Studio that it had severed ties with Storybricks for EverQuest Next.
The MMOG category is large and diverse enough to be a consistent source of interesting news and food for thought. Last month, as usual, there was no shortage of news about individual MMOGs. February was also rather interesting for those among us, myself included, who track what’s going on in the industry and the market. During the past few weeks, we had the chance to learn at least a couple of notable lessons… if we didn’t know them already.
Normally I just find a way to blame players for the problems in the market, wait for the accusations of being "a dev kiss-ass" or "biased" (if that word is ever used correctly, I wouldn’t know) or "a troll" and then move on to the next piece. The freelancer is just a handyman with words; we have to keep moving on to the next one and the next one so a little hate doesn’t hurt us. This process is nothing new.
The traditional "pay wall" (pay a single price and play forever) or subscription (pay an up-front cost plus a monthly maintenance fee) models are every bit as valid and stable as free-to-play, but there are plusses and minuses to each of the models. To compare them, let’s outline the pros and cons for free-to-play and discuss the others as we go.
Those proclaiming the death of the PC may want to consider a new report that shows steady and dominating growth in PC gaming over the next three years. Open Gaming Alliance has released a detailed graph showing the growth of PC gaming from its current $26B to $35B by 2018. The growth is attributed heavily to the eSports movement popularized by games like League of Legends and Hearthstone, among many others.