This week’s episode was delayed due to serious Windows issues this past week. The episode was saved, however, and is 90 minutes full of discussion. The podcast deals with a lot of console hardware rumors.
The news items include:
All this and Listener Feedback.
Once upon a time, Activision Blizzards CEO Bobby Kotick kicked a few franchises to the curb: Riddick and Ghostbusters. No doubt, this was a result of the Activision and Blizzard merger requiring some resources to the merged together while others were cut from the lineup. Phil Harrison, the new big suit at Atari/Infogrames has raised these little birds from the ashes with a dream to build them into 100-million dollar franchises.
While Bobby Kotick said the titles, “don’t have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million dollar franchises,” Phil Harrision sees it as a personal challenge to prove him wrong.
“What Bobby, perhaps unhelpfully said, was that those games were franchises which wouldn’t make $100m of revenue and generate sequels. If that’s his benchmark, then fine — and we’d love to aspire to the same benchmarks. But you know what? I would love to turn Ghostbusters into a $100m franchise, just to prove him wrong.” (1up)
In many ways, this is the difference in attitudes from a large firm compared to a smaller firm with strong goals and a vision for success. Activision Blizzard is big now, perhaps the biggest publisher in the industry, they can’t be bothered with minuscule 80-million dollar franchises. Others, like Atari, strive to take a title from nothing to something of greatness. Granted, Atari’s failed in a lot of franchises, but with their new ex-Sony executive behind the helm things could turn around and this might be the first step.
Most of the best game franchises in existance today started from nothing but a dream. Big publishers don’t have time to dream, they’re too busy making money off the fanboys of their current franchises.
The publication of this episode is a little late thanks to uncontrollable circumstances, but while Paul discusses the ending of Slicing Fractions, this week’s episode includes both a Gaming Flashback, Scramble, and a Gaming History which focuses on the Zelda series.
This week’s news includes:
This week’s Gaming History discusses rumors that raged about Zelda games – Paul is not amused.
This month seems to be full of conferences, as Nintendo Direct was streamed the previous week, BlizzCon 2021 aired this week, and Sony’s State of Play is due next week. The announcement of Diablo II Remastered was only the highlight of the BlizzCon show.
The news this week includes:
All this plus Listener Feedback. Let us know what you think at the Facebook page.
I liked the auction house in Diablo 3 because it allowed for more gear homogenization; if my character got an item that did not help that specific class as much as another item, I could possibly auction that loot and buy a better suited one.
The 6 TFLOPS available on Scorpio make it comparable to an overclocked RX 480, so it might be capable of running Doom without dynamic resolution scaling, and consoles use low-level APIs similar to Vulkan, but we don’t know the CPU specifications.
Thank you for mentioning me!