Sunday, February 12, 2006
14:59 by FoxTwo Ok this is getting scary. I just came across this piece of news called Half-Life 2 Goes Episodic - PC News at GameSpot.
What's scary about it?
Simple.
If it takes off, more game companies will want to follow suit. When that happens I can forsee 2 things.
The thing with number (1) is that, it makes a lot of business sense. You have sunk x amount of dollars into research and development of this game, invented a new graphics engine that blows the socks off everything else on the market, and you made one game with it. Why waste all that money? Make use of the engine again and make more games - release them as "episodes" and milk the damn market dry!
Game level designers will have something they are already used to, since they have used it before. They just have to thing up of new ways to lay out that "level", and tell the scripters to write some scripts to trigger some new monsters or something.
So, in effect, the 2nd, 3rd and subsequent time around when you re-use (think OOP programming paradigm) the game engine to make new "episodes", you are spending very little money. No longer do you need to fund R&D into making a new graphics engine. No longer do you need to pay artists to create new monsters. No longer do you need to pay sound engineers to create new sounds. Well okay, maybe "minimal amounts" for them, if the new episodes require new mobs and new sounds due to new weapons or some such.
Now, if they are going to sell these episodes at full retail prices, then it's gonna be all hell breaking loose. The article refers to them as "expansion packs". Most times, expansion packs are sold just under retail prices of the original game (like Hordes Of The Underdark and Shadows Of The Undrentide for Neverwinter Nights). However, by calling them "episodes", it gives gamers an impression of them being just "mods", or just "some new stuff but using the same engine" thing. In our minds, that doesn't command "full retail pricing".
Then of course, there is the universal love-hate relationship gamers have about Steam and any kind of "Internet Delivery and Activation Anti-Piracy Protection System". Oh yeah, when Steam was launched, it was touted as unbreakable.
What it actually did was to inconvenience legitimate customers, people like me, who actually pays money to buy the games. What do hackers (and consequently, the pirates) do? They just hack it. They can play it without even needing to download the activation key file.
Oh yes, don't be surprised. Do a search on your favourite P2P file sharing network. You will see whole lists of "Half Life 2 - no-Steam crack" and similar files. Oh yeah, Steam was unbreakable for only like a week or 2. Didn't take hackers that long to bypass all the protection measures taken in the game.
Me? I personally swore off ever buying or playing anything from Valve Software again, no matter how good the game might be (see this blog entry). I hate their business practices, and I hate being inconvenienced especially when I am a legitimate customer and have never ever pirated nor purchased pirated versions of their games.
14:59 by FoxTwo Ok this is getting scary. I just came across this piece of news called Half-Life 2 Goes Episodic - PC News at GameSpot.
What's scary about it?
Simple.
If it takes off, more game companies will want to follow suit. When that happens I can forsee 2 things.
- Less "new" games will be coming out, because, programmers are inherently lazy. If they can "inherit" work that has already been done and then just add more content to it, they will.
- Other gaming companies might like the new "Steam" idea from Valve and want to implement something similar. In the future, all your games that you buy from the shop will need to download a huge "activation key file" in order to play it. No thanks, if I wanted that I would just stick to playing MMORPGs.
The thing with number (1) is that, it makes a lot of business sense. You have sunk x amount of dollars into research and development of this game, invented a new graphics engine that blows the socks off everything else on the market, and you made one game with it. Why waste all that money? Make use of the engine again and make more games - release them as "episodes" and milk the damn market dry!
Game level designers will have something they are already used to, since they have used it before. They just have to thing up of new ways to lay out that "level", and tell the scripters to write some scripts to trigger some new monsters or something.
So, in effect, the 2nd, 3rd and subsequent time around when you re-use (think OOP programming paradigm) the game engine to make new "episodes", you are spending very little money. No longer do you need to fund R&D into making a new graphics engine. No longer do you need to pay artists to create new monsters. No longer do you need to pay sound engineers to create new sounds. Well okay, maybe "minimal amounts" for them, if the new episodes require new mobs and new sounds due to new weapons or some such.
Now, if they are going to sell these episodes at full retail prices, then it's gonna be all hell breaking loose. The article refers to them as "expansion packs". Most times, expansion packs are sold just under retail prices of the original game (like Hordes Of The Underdark and Shadows Of The Undrentide for Neverwinter Nights). However, by calling them "episodes", it gives gamers an impression of them being just "mods", or just "some new stuff but using the same engine" thing. In our minds, that doesn't command "full retail pricing".
Then of course, there is the universal love-hate relationship gamers have about Steam and any kind of "Internet Delivery and Activation Anti-Piracy Protection System". Oh yeah, when Steam was launched, it was touted as unbreakable.
What it actually did was to inconvenience legitimate customers, people like me, who actually pays money to buy the games. What do hackers (and consequently, the pirates) do? They just hack it. They can play it without even needing to download the activation key file.
Oh yes, don't be surprised. Do a search on your favourite P2P file sharing network. You will see whole lists of "Half Life 2 - no-Steam crack" and similar files. Oh yeah, Steam was unbreakable for only like a week or 2. Didn't take hackers that long to bypass all the protection measures taken in the game.
Me? I personally swore off ever buying or playing anything from Valve Software again, no matter how good the game might be (see this blog entry). I hate their business practices, and I hate being inconvenienced especially when I am a legitimate customer and have never ever pirated nor purchased pirated versions of their games.
