This episode was delayed a few days thanks to some acting work for Jonah Falcon. The podcast moving forward will be recorded on Wednesdays, partly because videogame releases are on Tuesdays. The guys also discuss the disaster No Man’s Sky has been.
This week’s news includes:
All this and Listener Feedback, too.
Jonah’s heading off to cover PAX Unplugged on Thursday morning, so this week’s podcast has been a quick, sub-40 minute show, even with a Gaming Flashback of Infamous 2, a game that former co-host Jordan Lund is probably far more familiar with.
This week’s news includes:
Let us know what you think.
There is room to grow in the world of massive multiplayer online gaming. A large online community should not have to subscribe to a monthly charge to play great MMORPG’s because there are other known models that work, including the micro-transaction based MMO.
At first, this sounds like a dirty word, micro-transaction. Often we relate it with being “nickle and dimed” through a video game by means of dirty marketing which feeds our enthusiastic gamer addiction. Put this thought aside for a minute and keep an open mind.
Imagine a game with worlds the size of World of Warcraft and stories as in-depth as Guild Wars (which is not monthly itself) but free from monthly payments (or “playments” a new term that needs to be coined). The reason behind the monthly charge covers service fees, technical support staff, bandwidth, servers and sheer volume of Activision Blizzards user base.
The micro-transaction concept could still help pay for all the overhead of running an online gaming business because gamers tend to be over-enthusiastic about their great addictive games. If you build a game with excellent content, replay value and strive for a community atmosphere a micro-transaction title can work just as well as a subscription based game.
One beautiful aspect to micro-transaction models is paying for content when you’re willing to pay. This includes cosmetic character alterations, basic needs items (health potions) and other products to enhance the playability of the game without requiring the gamer to do so. There will be some gamers that use this as a “free ride” and never buy anything while other gamers spend way too much because they have expendable income which helps balance out costs.
Since the podcast recording last Wednesday had audio issues and the news was, frankly, boring, the crew decided to record a new 464th episode on Easter Sunday, after some more interesting stuff was announced near the end of the week. That, and Scott expresses his enthusiasm for Thimbleweed Park, the spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle, using a SCUMM-like interface.
This week’s news items include:
All that and some Listener Feedback.
I read that Civ 6 will use DX12, so it might help low tier PCs as the low-level API reduces overhead, and it could be coded for async compute to accommodate AMD GCN and Nvidia Pascal GPUs via concurrency to gain more performance:
https://www.techpowerup.com/224112/amd-partners-with-firaxis-on-civilization-vi-development