This week’s episode is unremarkable. Don’t expect any surprise guests or news, just a lot of chatting about comics and wandering way off the topic of video games.
The news items for the week are:
Let us know what you think.
There’s a ton of discussions, such as Xbox Cloud Gaming will reportedly let players stream any game in their library from November, Russia straight-up bans Discord for enabling ‘terrorist and extremist purposes’, Killing Floor 3‘s dynamic tech makes zed heads ‘flower’ when you shoot them, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will get a Nuketown map, Brazil lifts ban on X following Elon Musk’s compliance with Supreme Court orders, the DOJ may break up Google, Terrifier 3 (the indie horror film that managed to make 10x its budget while Joker: Folie à Deux flails in the water) is getting a videogame, the current head of Xbox Game Studios, Alan Hartman, is to retire at the end of November, with Rare studio boss Craig Duncan taking over and the official Nintendo Museum appears to be emulating SNES games on a Windows PC, which is slightly embarrassing.
The news:
Let us know what you think.
The post Episode 735: Long Discussions first appeared on Gaming Podcast.
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If you’re wondering where the podcast has been, it’s been in technical hell. Twice the podcast was recorded each week, and both times there were serious technical issues. This time, we’ve got it right, and even have Paul dropping by to discuss his new book, “Gaymers: the Difference a ‘Y’ Makes: How (and Why) to Make Video Games LGBT Players Care About“. Actually, it’s mostly dominated by a discussion of an episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
Otherwise, the news items include:
The Question of the Week: “Who is your favorite superhero?”
Gigaom had a great writeup about how Grand Theft Auto IV marks the end of “next generation” as we know it, stating, in more words or less, the game is a failure. GTA: San Andreas sold 21.5 million copies during its time on the shelf while GTA IV has sold roughly 9 million copies as of June 7th.
Granted, the game is still on the shelves and will still get sales, but the mass of “hardcore gamers” have had their fill and either purchased it or will not. The end result? A huge tapering of sales numbers for the graphically impressive game. Take-Two spent USD $100 million to develop the game which had great opening sales records but has gone down drastically since.
Imagine the title gains them USD $30.00 per sale in profit (considering distributors get the game for roughly USD $45 to $48.00 USD), taking into account shipping of the product, marketing and all the materials that go into producing a copy, they’d have to sell a large quanity of game titles to break even, which I think they have done.
Nobody is in this industry to break even. A block buster title should make block buster profits, right? Else, why bother to spend the 100-million when a Wii title can double or triple the profits with six months of development?
