It’s Thanksgiving, and all three podcasters are in for turkey and videogames.
This week’s meaty news includes:
Let us know what you think.
Despite being recorded on April Fool’s Day, the podcast has no pranks, just a long political discussion and has Paul demanding no one say anything about BioShock Infinite. Speaking of that game, the crew announces the winner of the BioShock Infinite contest. This week has a Gaming History about the development of XCOM: UFO Defense.
This week’s news includes:
There is a ton of feedback, plus a new contest to win a copy of Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm. The rule is the same as BioShock Infinite: listen to the podcast and comment on what is discussed.
The podcast is back, albeit on a Saturday instead of the usual Friday. No Gaming Flashback or Gaming History, but a good chunk of news, though some of it only tenuously connected to videogaming.
The news this week includes:
This week’s Question of the Week is based on the Minecraft convention scam from last week, which the podcast discusses, “Have you even attended a convention devoted to a game?”
Yoichi Wada of Square Enix has let the cat out of the bag. The cat is Final Fantasy XIII for the Xbox 360 and it will be simultaneously released with the PlayStation 3 version. This may be an end to an exclusive era for Sony as all their big brands jump to non-exclusion.
This is probably a result of gamers slow adoption of the PlayStation 3 hardware for various issues, one being cost. Personally I think Sony’s move to say “no price cut” in our near future is a grand mistake. It is well understood that they want profitability over quantity but you’re losing your exclusives to a broader audience.
Each generation of consoles brings new industry trends and, for now, exclusive games from third party developers is too risky when you look at overall cost to produce a block buster title like Final Fantasy XIII. Consider the sales of GTA IV, although they were in the millions, imagine how low it would have been if they only released on the PS3. They’d might have actually lost money on the game.
Square Enix can see the writing on the wall, that writing says “ship on as many mediums as possible.” Gamers are split between consoles with a huge segment on Wii and Xbox 360, if you can at least ship on one of those consoles along with the PS3 you’ll do better financially.
(Thanks, Kotaku)
