Depressingly, sexual harassment in a development studio is once again the lead news item this week, and from a studio most gamers would never think it could happen. That, and major seismic shifting in the power structure of the digital storefront landscape.
The news includes:
Let us know what you think.
This week’s gaming podcast has all three personalities doing their thing. We’re finishing up our historic look back at Sega while answering a couple comments and hammering out the news. No flashback this week, we just ran out of time. This weeks news includes:
This weeks question of the week revolves around a bit of journalistic integrity and who do you trust when reading game news articles on the Internet? Folks like the Wall Street Journal or more focused gaming blogs like Kotaku, 1up, Gamespot and others?
Believe this, Nintendo and their Wii console takes another month as top seller. The only product that moves more hardware than the Wii is the DS. As a gamer, it’s hard to understand how the Wii product continues to sell like this with the least supported game library on the planet.
The DS is completely understandable as it has a huge library of games, is more cost effective, comes in pretty colors and can save you tons of arguments and fighting from your kids on a long trip. In many ways the DS is synonymous with peace and quiet. What does the Wii offer us? Wii Sports and a new control scheme along with a few hit titles from Nintendo but little else for now.
I’ll be the first to admit, I thought this would be Nintendo’s chance to turn it all around and get the third parties involved. They have everything going for them in terms of sales, third party developers should be pushing out games each month considering the craze factor of the hardware. This just isn’t true.
Microsoft has announced they’ll be giving Xbox Live silver accounts access to play some multi-player cross-platform games for free until the fall update. Recently, Microsoft announced free online play with Games for Windows titles, effectively giving PC gamers “gold accounts” to play online.
Most people agree the move to give gold subscriptions to PC gamers was done because PC gamers don’t care to play Games for Windows games online if they have to pay for it. The culture of PC gaming is much different than console gaming on XBL, gamers expect the online experience at no cost; they’re already paying an ISP for network access, paying for a match-making system with a yearly subscription is not desired.
Console gamers don’t have a choice, buying the 360 experience arrives with simple to play games (no drivers, no installs) but limited online choices: pay or go away. Now, silver members will get a little taste of network play, along side PC gamers in the cross-platform Games for Windows titles.
“Supported cross-platform titles include Universe at War, Shadowrun, and Lost Planet: Colonies Edition.” (gamespot)
We question the intention here… is this as a good faith move or are they wetting people’s appitite for XBL so they’ll want to upgrade to gold in the fall? Or, maybe there are some logistical reasons to doing this in the Xbox Live infrastructure to prepare for upgrades where making it free solves a few of their internal upgrade paths and, as a side effect, gives gamers some games to play.
Of course, we’ve seen few people playing Shadowrun or Lost Planet lately. Maybe this will re-popularize a few older titles as well.
