The gang discusses the just-released Captain America: Civil War as well as mention the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse film, but they also do get into this week’s news, which is heavy on the Nintendo side.
The news includes:
This week’s Question of the Week is “What era war would you like to see in a shooter?”
Electronic Arts may be considering the Spore system as an “Engine” for licensing to other developers to build RPG’s, action games, web-based games and many other options. Much like ID Software and Epic Games have done, this could be a build system for new creative additions to the industry.
Considering the amount of crazy Spore mini-games that have hit the street in the last few months, it seems possible EA’s already using this technique in-house to build hype and extension to the Spore product line. Usually such engines are licensed by smaller developers (smaller compared to Electronic Arts anyway) and not a big publisher such as EA.
Frank Gibeau, president of Electronic Arts’ Games Label says, “What’s so beautiful about Spore is that it’s extremely malleable, you could add RPG or action, you could take it to different platforms, like (Web-page) flash games, the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360, Nintendo’s Wii” (kotaku)
While EA did use the word “you could” they may be referencing the fact that “one could do it, if they worked at EA.” Electronic Arts wants to win the battle of the publishers, no doubt, and they continue to grow in size; would they let loose the Spore engine on outside developers? Or, would they keep it as an in-house engine for their own groups to leverage in future projects?
The patience of PlayStation 3 owners is wearing thin as retailers are reporting a 200% increase in PlayStation 3 trade-ins, usually for Xbox 360 consoles, as well as sales slumps for PSN points cards and fewer multiplatform game sales for PS3.
“In the first week of downtime we did not really see any major change in sales or trades,” says one source, a store manager at a major UK retailer speaking on condition of anonymity. “However from the second week onwards we have seen an increase of over 200 per cent on PS3 consoles being traded in, split almost 50/50 between those trading for cash and those taking a 360 instead.”
Another UK source has reported that the independent retailer had seen a “massive increase” in the volume of PS3s traded in in recent weeks, and has pegged the biggest trade-in demographic as “the hardcore online shooter crowd”, who are logically the group most likely to defect when their online gaming is wiped.
This week sees the return of Paul Nowak from his holiday vacation. There’s plenty of news items and some reader feedback, but also the return of Gaming History as the crew checks out the failed portable console, the Game.com.
The news for this week includes:
Finally, the Question of the Week is simple: “What did you do on your holiday break?”
