A quick note: Most of my posts are not this inflammatory! If you’ve found this piece by way of Penny Arcade or a link by somebody who found it by way of Penny Arcade, welcome! Glad you stopped by. Consider checking out the rest of my blog, where I make plenty of other posts that aren’t so polemical.

No, not everyone who pirates a game would have bought it. But when you can go to any torrent site at any given moment and see thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people downloading a game, even weeks after it came out, how can any reasonable person not accept that there were lost sales?

Sure, we don’t know what percentage of those pirated copies are lost sales, but just because we don’t have that figure, does anyone truly believe that means the potential sales are negligible?

We know from firsthand statements that Ritual, just as one example, saw considerably more technical support requests from pirates than from legitimate customers on Sin Episodes. Does it matter if you thought that game wasn’t good? No. Those pirates must have thought it was good enough to try to get it to work properly.

And that is clearly not an isolated example. Because every time anyone brings this up—be they a top-shelf developer, or a less prominent one—people think of a million reasons why that particular game or that particular developer just don’t deserve the support of the discerning PC gamers. It happens every time, with the excuses tuned for each game. At that point, they stop being isolated examples, and they become part of a very clear trend. (more…)

[Update: This piece was published on Gamasutra on July 9.]

A number of observers have hypothesized that the recent, vaguely-announced contract renegotiation between increasingly huge publisher Activision and star developer Infinity Ward may have been catalyzed by last year’s surprise regained independence on the part of Bungie Studios.

The move was revealed by Infinity Ward community manager Robert Bowling, who stated that the studio has renegotiated its deal with owner Activision, and will have “complete control” over its next project, a new intellectual property. (In an email, Bowling told me the company isn’t ready to go into any further detail just yet.)

The Bungie connection

The Bungie-related speculation is sensible, and almost certainly at least partially accurate, particularly from Infinity Ward’s perspective. Like Bungie, Infinity Ward was founded as an independent studio, and was acquired by its publishing partner; both studios retain key leadership; and both reached their incredible retail success after they were acquired.

Both also left their major properties–Halo and Call of Duty–in the hands of their publishers after years of unbroken franchise development, freeing up the studios to get back to what put them on the map in the first place: developing new titles.

Seeing the kind of leverage Bungie leadership was able to wield when negotiating its amiable departure from Microsoft ownership surely inspired Infinity Ward’s Grant Collier et al to knock on the doors of Activision brass, revenue sheets in hand.

Breaking the never-ending dev cycle

But inspiration may also have come from somewhere a little closer to home: Blizzard Entertainment, the fully-owned-but-nigh-untouchable rockstar developer of WarCraft, StarCraft, and Diablo, a subsidiary of soon-to-be Activision partner Vivendi. (more…)

I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed that BioShock–one of the most aggressively original games that has shipped recently–is so quickly becoming a full-on Franchise, with an 18-month (or so) sequel and a Hollywood sequel. It is inevitable, really–but that’s the most telling part.

Now, I have met a number of people working on BioShock 2, and honestly I think it would be difficult to find a group that is more talented and more suited to the material, so I don’t want to give the impression that I am ragging on that studio or its project, because I’m not. I can’t wait to see what they’re thinking up.

Similarly, director Gore Verbinski gave an interview that puts his enthusiasm for and knowledge of BioShock in an encouraging light. He and screenwriter John Logan have definitely skewed towards the more box office Hollywood blockbuster side of the cinematic experience, which wouldn’t be my first pick, but I can see the justification and necessity there.

Logan did write one of my favorite films of the last several years, Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, so that’s a plus–and I can see some parallels between the eccentric billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes and consummate captain of industry Andrew Ryan, both larger-than-life figures consumed by larger-than-life principles. Ken Levine is said to be involved; it isn’t clear to what extent.

So it isn’t that I don’t have faith in these projects. It’s just that I find it unfortunate that the video game industry is still so relentlessly hit-driven, in a way that hit-driven Hollywood isn’t even close to being, to the point that once somebody does find a hit you can pretty much draft up a map of commodification, effective immediately, with your eyes closed.

Despite the games industry’s relative youth compared to other entertainment industries, it seems to have grown commodified and financially conservative pretty quickly. This is just the Way Things Are, I guess, but I came across and interesting press release that went out the other day, describing an unusual publishing venture.

OneBigGame is a non-profit publisher (hm?) that, once it has established net revenue, plans to donate all its proceeds to charities benefiting children around the world (what?), establishing itself as a charitable organization by proxy. This week the company announced its board of directors, which consists of a number of big names to those who cover the industry.

The whole thing is founded and chaired by Martin de Ronde, the founder of what is now Guerrilla Games (the Killzone people). Its board includes Kuju (Battallion Wars, Crush) CEO Ian Baverstock and Game Developers Conference director Jamil Moledina, and its advisors include Shiny (MDK, Earthworm Jim) founder Dave Perry and gaming pioneer Mark Cerny (Marble Madness, etc.).

It’s certainly hard enough getting any new publisher up and running these days, let alone one that doesn’t intend to make its executives rich. (more…)