Not unlike the situation Nintendo was faced with in the months after the launch of the 3DS, there has been talk of doom and gloom regarding the Vita. Sales of the new handheld have not been particularly mind-blowing in Japan since launch, and Sony has not attempted to portray its launch as anything it is not. More importantly, it has not yet begun to panic -- and nor should it. After 325,000 units were sold in its opening week, Vita sales in Japan have declined week-over-week more often than not. 3DS, PlayStation 3, and even the PlayStation Portable have routinely outsold it, although this finally changed last week when the Vita sold almost 3,000 units more than the PSP. Still, that's nothing to write home about, which is perhaps why Sony CFO Masaru Kato didn't go as far as it seemed he was going to when describing Vita's sales.
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Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning has a lot of content. This much we know. Releasing next week isn't the most perfect time as far as I'm concerned with the Vita's launch on the horizon and both Twisted Metal and Resident Evil: Revelations competing for my time, but it's also a much more comfortable spot than any point in the last quarter of 2011 would have been. One of its developers recently pondered if the amount of content crammed into the game was overdone, and I can't help but think it just might be. "We recently had a content completion play through about two months ago... so, QA guys, they've been playing the game for years, they know all there is to know about it, its ins and outs, etc... their goal is to play everything," lead designer Ian Frazier told Strategy Informer. "Do every quest, every dungeon, everything possible, but as fast as possible. That means easy difficulty, skip all cut scenes and dialogue, sprint everywhere that's sprintable, fast travel everywhere you can, don't do any combat you don't need to do... that all took around 200 hours, and that was a speed run."
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While everyone on the internet is busy running Madden simulations to predict the Super Bowl we thought we'd take a different approach. In order to determine the winner between the Patriots and the Giants, we're taking Skyrim's home-grown patriots, the Stormcloaks, and pitting them against the country's giants. *
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Downloading the upcoming February 14 Mass Effect 3 demo will upgrade the subscriptions of Xbox Live Silver members to Gold so that all players can sample the game's multiplayer before its release on March 6. The temporary upgrade system that the demo takes advantage of indicates that Xbox Live as we know it is so outdated that it can't cope with offering users a single demo. The current XBL Gold/Silver division needs to change. After five years of Microsoft's biggest competitor offering multiplayer for free the console maker maintains what amounts to a $60 annual surcharge to play online. Online gaming is not new or novel -- it gained popularity nearly 20 years ago. Even consoles began supporting the function in the Dreamcast era. Multiplayer gaming should come standard with any system in 2012.
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Reflecting the fact that last year's Supreme Court decision, which reaffirmed videogames qualify for First Amendment protection in the United States, wasn't quite clear enough for everyone, Oklahoma state representative William Fourkiller has introduced a new piece of legislation sure to draw the ire of gamers. HB #2696, as reported by Gamasutra, would see an excise tax of one percent levied against the sale of any and all violent videogames in the state of Oklahoma. That immediately raises the question of what constitutes a violent videogame -- Call of Duty is undeniably violent, but would a game where bears can punch each other count as violence? Fortunately the proposed bill provides specific criteria: a violent videogame is considered to be any game to have received a Teen, Mature, or Adult Only rating from the ESRB.
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I love Half-Life, but somewhere around E3 2010 I resigned myself to the fact that Half-Life 3 won't see the light of day anytime soon. Steam, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Dota 2, Counter-Strike, as well as some projects we've probably never heard of seem to keep Valve busy (and rich) enough for the time being. Not all fans are so patient. A Steam group named, A Call for Communication (CFC), is hosting an event called "A Red Letter Day" and asking players around the world to play Half-Life 2 this weekend at 2:00 P.M. Eastern, 11 P.M. Pacific, with the hope that Valve will take notice and begin to share more information about the future of the series. Years of listening to forum-posters demand things of game makers with a remarkable sense of entitlement and lack of shame has led me to expect little constructive work to come fans, but CFC's positive tone and earnest message managed to shake me of my cynical world view (if only for a few moments). The group even goes out of their way to encourage positive interaction between Valve and fans on their official site: "The lack of communication between Valve and the Half-Life community has been a frustrating experience. While continued support for current and future products is greatly appreciated, fans of the Half-Life series have waited years for a word on when the franchise will return. So, Instead of focusing efforts in a negative and disrespectful way, we have decided to gain Valve's attention by delivering a basic message:
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Since being released for 3DS just over a month ago, 10 million notes have already been exchanged through Swapnote. Considering the size of the 3DS install base is still relatively small, it's an impressive achievement. Swapnote is, however, hardly perfect, and a lot of that has to do with the limitations of the 3DS itself as Jeremy outlined last month. Namely, it's impossible to share notes with strangers or anyone beyond the 100 people you're limited to being friends with on 3DS. There were ways Nintendo could have worked around this, but the situation was almost far worse. As discussed at length in the latest edition of the roundtable Iwata Asks discussion series, Swapnote was originally developed for the DSi and was nearly ready for release at the end of 2009. Even before the idea of a picture diary for DSi came up in late 2008 (as a response to the lack of downloadable software for the system), Daiji Imai of Nintendo's Network Business Department had been interested in creating a maternity health record book. The idea was to keep a record of a child's development that could then be shared with him or her once they were older. This morphed into an idea of a picture diary that was iterated on numerous times. One of the keys was that notes would not be typed; handwriting was deemed to be a warmer, more capable way of expressing one's feelings. And while it can be hard to read people's scribbled notes at times, that decision was without a doubt for the best.
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This week was not kind to video game publishers. THQ announced plans for 240 lay-offs amidst the board of directors and CEO giving themselves a 50% paycut. Meanwhile, Disney bought a controlling stake in India-based UTV Ignition -- a publisher which went through its own set of lay-offs and restructuring last year -- for an undisclosed sum after the Indian government approved the deal which had reportedly been in the works since at least last summer. Disney plans to use the firm to expand their own presence in the Asian market. Neither company revealed how the changes would impact Ignition's gaming division. It's entirely possible that it will have little or no effect, but that seems unlikely given the troubles the company endured last year. THQ ran into financial trouble after relying on licensed properties and kids and family titles, specifically uDraw, whereas Ignition announced they would shift their focus to downloadable titles last year after a series of poorly performing games. These two publishers are hardly the only ones publicly struggling. Various factors, including high-cost HD development, have led to a shakeout amongst small and medium sized publishers like Eidos, Gamecock, Midway, and others while Activision rakes in massive profits. Of course, this is normal, companies that fail to adapt die. However, THQ's and Ignitions's recent troubles stem from a disturbing trend in game consumers, not from development or publishing difficulties. It seems that players are spending more time playing games, but paradoxically spending that extra time with fewer titles. Game makers have never in the forty-year history of the medium had such a massive consumer base to sell to, but players have never been so unwilling to try new experiences.
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