Bail Out

I did not think I'd be updating this unread, long discarded corner of the web again, but there have been some interesting developments lately. By "interesting," I mean "really awful." It is hard to imagine that my favorite hobby - next to watching the Patriots - has gone so downhill in the past year and a half after hitting a terrific peak in the autumn of 2004.

Over the next month or so, I'll be making random, less-than-coherent posts detailing just how retarded the industry - and the hobby - has become. Some events and trends I'll pontificate on:

E3 Shitcanned - This is actually the right move for the industry, and its collapse is more of a result of the sad state of affairs in general gaming public, rather than the companies who wanted to pull the plug on it.

Non-games - Perhaps the best reason to bail out of the hobby now. How much longer are companies going to focus on investing in quality products when they can just slap together a crossword puzzle game and rake in the cash? Sad, sad, sad, and somewhat ironic that Nintendo - the company to pull the industry out of Atari's ashes - is probably leading the march towards obsolescence. Oh I'm well aware of the unit sales in Japan, the quarterly profits, and how much lower the development budgets may be. But guess what? I play games on the weekend, not stock tickers. Again, the saddest part of this are the ones cheering it on who don't even profit from it.

Microtransactions - Can they maybe just press the game onto the disc and be done with? Why do I want to give a company more money for content that should have been there to begin with? I'm not talking about episodic content like HL2 where it is obvious that a great deal of effort and capital has been put it into creating an entertaining game. But horse armor? Oregon Ducks away jerseys? A rearrangement of assests already on the disc to sell you a new car? The next generation has started off with paying a lot more to get a hell of a lot less, and if it continues, well, gamers get what gamers deserve.

Cross-purposes - Can Sony please decide who they want to compete with? After the success they've had in the past twelve years, they could say "we are only competing with ourselves" and it would not be bullplop. Unfortunately, that is not the case. I'm not going to fault them for putting Blu-Ray in PS3. The goal here is to crush HD-DVD, but it has direct, tangible benefits for gamers. Higher quality audio and video, multiple region versions on one disc, the potential for some killer compilation packages, and last but not least, not having to swap discs like an idiot every couple of hours on longer games. PlayStation helped bring the CD format to gaming after Sega couldn't manage to do it, and it made a world of difference. Putting DVD in PS2 helped the system age better than it would have had Sony stuck with CD's or used some odd DC/GC-esque proprietary format. Using Blu-Ray is a smart choice. But throwing in hard drives that push the console price past $399, a retarded motion sensing feature in the controller... online "entitlements" and SingStar products... make a decision fellas. Are you competing with Toshiba, Microsoft, Nintendo, or Apple? I'll strike Apple from the list right away - they're staunchly behind Blu-Ray and see the format's potential. There is also news today that Sony is working to get PlayStation titles working on Intel and PowerPC hardware - guess who that benefits. But Sony has really got to pin down who their target is, or they're going to nail a lot of people in the crossfire: gamers, third party publishers, and even their own stable of first party developers. Folks like Insomniac, Rainbow Studios, and the Santa Monica Studios deserve a lot more focus from Sony than they are getting right now.

The above list is only the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully over the next month I can touch upon even half of what is going wrong these days before heading into the sunset (again) - and hopefully staying there this time.