GamerGate
I’m going to get this one out of the way right now. I spoke at length on it earlier, and I’m not going to beat a dead horse, but this is probably the single biggest story of the year. I wish it wasn’t. Arguably, the shitstorm that is GamerGate is still ongoing, although it’s now down to a dull roar. A certain segment of the Internet is being incredibly shitty to a few particular women, and pretty much anybody of a certain degree of visibility who calls them out on it. I don’t agree with Anita Sarkissian’s work, I don’t agree with her positions, but I will defend her right to make them and distribute them. People are, likewise, free to disagree with her and not support her if they choose not to. But this shit has gone way too far for way too long.
PS4 and Xbox One Mark Their 1st Year
A year ago, the “next generation” of game consoles came out. By now, the PS4 seems to have taken a comfortable lead, though Microsoft came to their senses and got rid of the more objectionable and or customer-unfriendly features to help pick up their sales, finally outselling the PS4 for the month of December. Strangely, neither console seems to be big in Japan, though of the two, the Xbox One launch in Japan was just this side of pathetic. They’re probably going to be around for a while yet, so the battle for hearts and minds (and wallets) rages on.
A couple of years ago, there were some grumblings that the Assassin’s Creed series had jumped the shark with the third game, set during the American Revolution. This year, there’s some louder rumblings that it’s actually the French Revolution which has caused the series to reach its nadir. More specifically, the release of Assassin’s Creed Unity and the raft of bugs that it launched with. While some were annoying as piss (like the one where you couldn’t hop out of a hay wagon after you hopped in to hide), the defining bug of the game had to be the lack of faces on NPCs. Eyes, teeth, hair, those were there, and that’s all that was there. Sure, the bugs got patched, but it’s got fans upset and thinking maybe Ubisoft needs to stop trying to annualize the series.
Unless you have been holed up in a cave without Internet access or close to a Hot Topic store for the last several years, you have undoubtedly heard of Minecraft. After basically retiring from further development on the title, creator Markus “Notch” Persson came into a rather substantial windfall when Mojang was sold to Microsoft. Notch’s cut of the sale: $2.5 billion USD. So what does one do with that kind of bankroll? Apparently, one outbids Jay-Z and Beyonce on a Beverly Hills mansion, dropping $70 million USD on a fully furnished home high in the hills, complete with cases of Dom Perignon and a “candy room.” Gosh, whatever will he do with the remaining $2.493 billion?
Chris Roberts Is Still Making Stupid Money
To be fair, we’re not talking Notch-levels of stupid money, but still pretty damned substantial. As of the time of this writing, he is sitting on $68 million USD for his game Star Citizen. While it seems to be slowing down a little bit, the potential for sales surges cannot be discounted. A large part of this can be attributed to the release of new ships for sale, including variants of earlier ships and “limited edition” ships which have sold for what might be considered ridiculous sums of money, despite not having a playable release of the whole game or even a section of the game until very recently. Hopefully, the game will be fully released by this time next year, but who knows how much money will have been sunk in by that point?
Dave Braben and Dangerous Elitism
If there has been any lesson that has been systematically ignored by developers the last few years, it’s that when you tout a game for having a single player mode, people don’t like it when you force them to have an always-on connection just to play alone. Blizzard caught hell for it with Diablo III, EA caught hell for it with the most recent SimCity, and now Dave Braben is catching hell for it with Elite: Dangerous. What makes this particular instance so egregious is twofold. First, Dave Braben is not part of a big megalithic publisher/developer monstrosity. He’s heading up a small dev team that went the Kickstarter route, and he’s been in constant contact with the community for a good long while now. Secondly, he appears to be abusing (or at the very least, bending into a pretzel) the proviso that “features may change before the final release.” Up to this point, offline single player had been a feature that had been promised until it was unexpectedly and unceremoniously removed before the game’s “gamma” release. Players looking to get refunds have been told in no uncertain terms that they’re out of luck, and Braben himself is now stating that the game’s persistent universe can’t update without an always-on connection. Similar arguments were advanced with SimCity, and it did nothing to stem the tide of fury in that situation. One suspects this will lead to an increase in Star Citizen copies and ships being sold.The Last Guardian Is Still Missing
Dammit!
Ralph Baer held a lot of patents. He was involved in technical and scientific endeavors ranging from the earliest TV repairs (back when TV repair required an honest-to-God college education) to a small contribution to the Apollo program. For gamers, though, his legacy was the creation of the first game console ever. The Magnavox Odyssey predated Nolan Bushnell’s Atari 2600 by about a year, though being the first generation of anything, it had some problems and shortcomings. But it was the first instance of the TV being used to display objects which were under a person’s control. The Odyssey also shipped with the world’s first light gun (though no ducks or annoying dogs to shoot at). Baer would also create other electronic games such as Simon, and came out with the Odyssey 2, which improved significantly on both his original design and on the Atari 2600. He was 92 when he died.
Blizzard Back On Top
It’s perhaps inevitable, but with a new World of WarCraft expansion, there’s people who re-subscribe just to check out the new content. At one point, the subscriber base had slid below seven million players. Within a month of the release of Warlords of Draenor, the subscriptions were back up close to their high water level of twelve million plus. So far, opinion has been pretty positive and the new expansion seems to have blunted a lot of the ill will generated by Mists of Pandaria. Those players who had toons that were perhaps lagging behind (or who had skipped the Pandaria content) got one free boost to level 90 to start off right away in an alternate timeline where the orcs didn’t become bloodthirsty slaves to the Burning Legion, and instead became bloodthirsty stormtroopers to Grom Hellscream. When is Thrall going to admit his friend is a giant dick? Probably not even in the next expansion.
Here’s hoping for an even better year in 2015.
- Axel Cushing
