Everyone has a fighting chance
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.
MMORPG.com has partnered with My.com to give away five of their recently announced Skyforge Founder’s Packs. These aren’t the entry level packs, either! We’ve got five of the Wrath of the Gods Ultimate Edition packs today. Read on to learn how to enter for your chance to snag one!
The Crowfall KickStarter page has been updated with an FAQ that goes into some detail about the two main types of storage to which players will have access.
A trend that seems to be gaining a lot of ground in games development these days comes in the way that information is released to the public. In days past, new information about an upcoming title was teased out in a series of big announcements over time. Such a way of releasing news about anticipated games was both frustrating and exciting. Frustration set in when we wanted to know more, more, more. Excitement set in after a big revelation that gave us tons to discuss and analyze.
Cliffhanger Productions has announced that Shadowrun Online will now be known as Shadowrun Chronicles. The team has been considering a name change for awhile and took community input in order to come up with the new name.
Despite a few new additions to the schedule this year, PAX East still represents the official kickoff of the video games show season for me. Things have been relatively quiet after the holidays, but now it’s time for developers to show what they’ve been working on over the last few months. This week, we’ve rounded up a couple of games were most excited to see at the show.