While the shift has been great for consumers, who are enjoying an unprecedented, and largely free, game experience, it has been devastating for publishers and shareholders, who are seeing sales and profits decline.

Let’s dissect this, first he talks about a ‘shift’ in the multiplayer experience (from what I gather anyway, the source doesn’t explicitly quote what this shift is). Multiplayer gaming hasn’t changed at all since it’s humble beginnings with Quake and UT. You buy the game, and can then play however much multiplayer you want. Next let’s talk about his quote on the cost to the consumer of multiplayer gaming, of which he says is ‘largely free’, which is bollox considering Activision have raised the price of CoD:MW2 to beyond £40 at launch, almost twice what most other multiplayer games charge. Not to mention that the new DLC costs £10 for 3 new maps (and 2 ported ones from CoD4). Finally, lets talk about how he thinks publishers have been devastated by the fall in sales and profits. Come again? That’s rich when you come to Modern Warfare 2 which broke all records of day 1 sales (including records set by movies and other multimedia), and has broken the billion dollar sales mark. Kotick himself has stated that “We’ve heard that 60 percent of [Microsoft’s] subscribers are principally on Live because of Call Of Duty”.

Obviously this guy is an idiot, but never-the-less what he recommends Activision to do is likely going to come true in one way or another.

It is too early to tell whether that will be a monthly subscription, tournament entry fees, micro-transaction fees, or a combination of all three, but we expect to see the company take some action by year-end, when Call of Duty: Black Ops launches.

Kotick even said that he would implement a subscription service tomorrow if Microsoft and Sony would allow it. A CoD MMO has been on the planning tables for a while now, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see where this could lead for the series. Essentially Activision can brand Call Of Duty an MMO by slightly revamping the statistic and leveling system, labeling it an MMO, and charging an extortionate fee or microtransactions for people to play it.

It is likely that Activision will ease the pain of consumers, and will continue to offer some form of free multiplayer, at least for a while, but we believe it is imperative that the company begin to capture some value from the huge number of hours spent – 1.75 billion hours on Xbox Live alone through mid-April and we estimate that this figure is approaching four billion hours combined through today on Xbox Live and PSN

We are quick to point out that the average single player game has an expected play time of under 30 hours, suggesting that a staggering 133 million units of equivalent game play have been spent (so far) playing Call Of Duty online, with Activision only seeing revenues from the original 20m units sold, plus an estimated eight million map packs sold.

Source

This is also very very worth a read, a short history of Activision Blizzard. Basically how Activision are destroying Blizzard from the inside out.

I’ll try to keep this as brief and civilised as possible. Now, Bioshock 2 as you may have known is the sequel to Bioshock, a game which caused many controversies over it’s use of DRM, more specifically SecuROM. Complaints from gamers persuaded 2K Games (the publishers) to drop the install limit from five to two, and then remove SecuROM from the game altogether.

Bioshock 2′s system requirements have recently been released however, showing the decision to start using SecuROM again, along with a myriad of other measures which I can only assume are to help prevent piracy, or they would be if they worked. SecuROM is being used as a disk check, that’s all it’s there for. It gets installed on your system to prevent something which can be cracked in a matter of minutes using readily available user made patches. Using disk checks to prevent piracy may have been viable ten years ago but it’s 2010, the age of digital distribution, aren’t disk checks a thing of the past?

On top of that, 2K games are knowingly installing software onto user’s computers which they know will cause problems for certain systems, as they had many complaints from the first game which used the exact same software! The icing on the cake is that SecuROM includes a tool to uninstall it’s software from any computer, safely and legally from their website, in case your system isn’t compatible, which begs the question why bother in the first place.

Also required to play the game is Games For Windows Live (GFWL), Microsoft’s Xbox Live’s bastard offspring, giving you 15 activations before you have to phone up Microsoft and ask for more. Not to mention the requirement to be online to save your game and earn achievements.

It’s time publishers start to realise that these sorts of DRM systems only affect the honest paying consumer, while pirates are free to download un-restricted versions without SecuROM disk checks or GFWL activation limits. Systems like Steam are the way forward whether the industry likes it or not.

Bioshock 2 system requirements
2K replies

Apologies for not keeping up with daily posts on the blog recently, Christmas must have made me lazy or something. To make it up to you, I’ll show you what I’ve been working on for the last 3 days almost solidly. This is a 3D model of a German Tiger Tank made in 3D Studio Max for my modeling course at Portsmouth Uni. I think it turned out quite well considering it’s my first model with the software.

One thing I’ve noticed is that modeling takes A LONG TIME. Seriously. The turret and barrel took me about 5 hours and it’s not even that complex. The details on the back must have taken at least 8-10 hours because of how many times I redid parts after figuring out what I did before was horribly messy (it still is messy by professional standards). I’m sure once I get a handle on the UI things will speed up however, half the time I spend on trying to find the button that does what I want to do. Anyway, here are some high-res renders (click them!).

It’s also apparently been snowing a lot in the rest of England, reportedly up to eight inches (!) back at my house in Witney, unfortunately only a pitiful two down in Pompey. Why couldn’t it have snowed OVER CHRISTMAS, you know… like it’s meant to. Anyway, walking down to the cinema last night was fun, considering the pavements are like ice rinks. I also saw a car wheel spin for about 10 seconds at a crossroad, by the time he got moving the lights had gone back to red and the car behind had to wait again, which was amusing to say the least.

Oh yeah, and Happy New Year.

Thanks for Lunarwolf for finding these pretty astounding figures on this year’s most pirated games. Initially unsurprising is Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) topping the PC games list with 4.1 million, over four times the Xbox version of the game. This is nothing special when you think of how notorious the PC platform is for pirates, however, when you think that MW2 was only released on November 10th while it’s nearest competition was released in June, the popularity of this game becomes apparent. Even more strange is the fact that the game was released with Steam protection, which is regarded as the best protection a game can have, yet it still tops the list (note that no other games on the list require Steam).

We’re caught in a vicious spiral, major developers are spending less money on developing for the PC platform and treat it more like a console, for example in MW2 we saw the lack of dedicated servers and the requirement of playing through IWNet (Infinity Ward’s Peer 2 Peer system) so they can sell us add-on packs like consoles. This in turn means PC gamers are more inclined to pirate the game which makes developers consider the PC platform even less viable and so the spiral continues. Charging £35 for a PC game didn’t help Activision either.

PC games via BitTorrent in 2009:

• 1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (4.100.000)
• 2. The Sims 3 (3.200.000)
• 3. Prototype (2.350.000)
• 4. Need For Speed Shift (2.100.000)
• 5. Street Fighter IV (1.850.000)

360 games via BitTorrent in 2009:

• 1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (970.000)
• 2. Street Fighter IV (840.000)
• 3. Prototype (810.000)
• 4. Dirt 2 (790.000)
• 5. UFC 2009 Undisputed (720.000)

Wii games via BitTorrent in 2009:

• 1. New Super Mario Bros. (1.150.000)
• 2. Punch-Out!! (950.000)
• 3. Wii Sports Resort (920.000)
• 4. The House of the Dead: Overkill (860.000)
• 5. Mario Power Tennis (830.000)

Source

Christmas has apparently come early for a lot of us in the form of a massive Steam Sale that will be going on for the best part of a week. Notable games include Grand Theft Auto (£4.99), Stalker (£1.39), and Mirror’s Edge (£3.24), along with hundreds of others. However, it reminded me of a letter I wrote to PCGamer a while ago on how these sales could be damaging the PC gaming industry.

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Could digital downloads be a bad thing for consumers and developers? I’m starting to think so, and we’re already seeing the early stages of it.

For anybody who regularly checks out the Steam store (as I do), you’ll have noticed that The Orange Box has recently been on sale for less than £5. You may also have seen the 40% off Left 4 Dead sale shortly afterwards. I read an article in your 200th issue about how much sales increase when Steam does a sale, and it got me thinking.

Imagine if this massive influx of sales was not because of people who thought the game was too expensive beforehand, and then buying it in the sale, but because all the potential customers were waiting for the inevitable sale so they can get the game at a frankly ridiculous price. I recently purchased World Of Goo for £20, yet the following weekend it went on sale for £5. I didn’t feel ripped off because the game was worth the price I paid for it, but there was a slight feeling of regret.

I’m not suggesting gamers are going to wait half a year before purchasing the latest games, but 75% off sales are much more prevalent now than they were a year ago. If the benefits of putting games on sale are as pronounced as your article suggests, I see developers putting their games on sale closer and closer to the game’s release, while gamers are holding out longer on the purchase to try and buy the game when it’s on sale. Eventually games won’t sell at all initially and the developers will be forced to release their games at lower prices.

We’re already seeing the exact same thing with Apple’s App Store. For anyone who doesn’t know about the App Store, it’s a digital distribution service for iPhone and iPod Touch applications and games. Apple takes 30% of the revenue plus a small fee to publish a game, but in essence anybody can make and publish a game. It started last year with games selling for a maximum of £6, which seems fair for a game on an iPod. However, since then the prices have dropped dramatically with any app over £1.19 ($2) being criticized as too expensive unless it’s a console quality game. Guess what? It all started with apps having 2-3 day sales for 59p (99c). The consequences aren’t as large for iPhone developers, with games being cheaper to make. However, when you think of PC games which can cost millions to develop, the possible outcome is devastating.

The quality of games will drop and developers will start releasing games in quantity rather than quality to stay in business. Retail shops will be completely pushed out of the market.”

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Obviously I could be totally wrong, it’s just something to think about. In the meantime, we can all enjoy playing GTA4 for the price of two pints. Click here to see a fantastic spreadsheet of all the games on offer. If the spreadsheet doesn’t work for you, SavyGamer has a great list here.

Update: I’ve been getting some highly negative replies to this letter, I just wanted to say this is not something I believe will happen, just something I wrote a year ago to try and get into a magazine. By all means tell me why my theory (that’s all it is) is not correct, but please don’t hate me or say I’m an idiot for writing it.