Posts Tagged activision

Activision wants your money!

Posted by Sam in Development, Gaming on 19 July 2010

So called ‘industry analyst’ Michael Pachter has said that progress in the market, publishers need to start charging for the multiplayer experience in games, as currently multiplayer is a nearly free experience.

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.

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Blizzard RealID: Welcome to WoWbook

Posted by Sam in Gaming, MMO on 8 July 2010

Battle.Book

A few days ago, Blizzard made an announcement that shocked the whole World Of Warcraft community, people who used to play but have quit, and even people who have never played the game before. Everyone seems to have an opinion on this, and almost all of those opinions are massively negative towards the idea.

The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID — that is, their real-life first and last name — with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it. These changes will go into effect on all StarCraft II forums with the launch of the new community site prior to the July 27 release of the game, with the World of Warcraft site and forums following suit near the launch of Cataclysm. Certain classic forums, including the classic Battle.net forums, will remain unchanged.

The official forums have always been a great place to discuss the latest info on our games, offer ideas and suggestions, and share experiences with other players — however, the forums have also earned a reputation as a place where flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild. Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before. With this change, you’ll see blue posters (i.e. Blizzard employees) posting by their real first and last names on our forums as well.

They are trying to justify the move by saying it will make the forums a better place with less trolling and spam, but it’s not hard to see that there is a lot, lot more behind this move than what’s on the surface. If their sole reasoning was to remove trolling, they could have made you post with your account, and not a specific character (at the moment, you can make a level 1 character and post completely anonymously), if your whole account was being shown, you would be more careful with what you post. Instead, Blizzard look to be moving into Facebook territory. A move to Facebook integration with Battle.net could make a lot of money for both parties. As everyone knows, Farmville has a lot more players even than World Of Warcraft, and if Blizzard were able to tap into that market they could make a lot of money. It’s not long before we see updates on Facebook saying, “John Smith needs one more Primordial Saronite for his Uber Epix chestplate, can anyone help him?”, or, “Kate Bloggs has completed 75% of the achievement ‘Collect 200 top hats for the homeless’, that’s amazing!”.

However, in doing so, they are risking the security and privacy of all the people who post on the forum. In a community of millions of players, the chances are that some people are going to disagree with you and in very rare (but still possible) cases, want to take it further than just replying on the forum. Giving away your full name makes it incredibly easy to find out where you live, what your email address is, where you work, basically everything and anything about you. If the forums didn’t show this information, it would be incredibly hard if not impossible to find out anything, unless you explicitly told the person your email/name. It’s almost guaranteed that woman are not going to post on the forums anymore, as many hide behind male avatars so they don’t get harassed and stalked online by lonely men. Employers will search for your name when considering you for a job and will find posts by you explaining why this DPS rotation is better than that one, and like it or not they might reject you for it. A fine demonstration of this going wrong was when Blizzard employee Bashiok, the poor fool, posted his real name on the official forums, and an hour later everybody knew his phone number, house, family, and lots more.

The choice is, post on the forum and give away your identity to ANYONE who wants it, or don’t post on the forums at all. This will obviously drive away a huge number of the best posters on the official forums, making them a worse place than before, even without the spam. What happens when you get redirected to a technical forum to ask a question? I know I’ve had messages from GMs that say, ‘please post on the suggestion forum’, or error messages that say ‘please post on the technical support forum’, what will I do then? If I don’t want to give away my identity I have no choice but to let my thought go unheard.

As such, I don’t see how anyone can agree with this. This goes a LOT LOT deeper than simply stopping spam and trolling on the forums, and in my opinion this could be the start of the fall of WoW if Activision-Blizzard decide to stay on this route.

Alec Meer, Rock Paper Shotgun
Ciderhelm, Tankspot
Long forum post by Natti

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Most pirated games 2009

Posted by Sam in Development, Gaming on 30 December 2009

The Pirate Bay

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:

360 games via BitTorrent in 2009:

Wii games via BitTorrent in 2009:

Source

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