This podcast has a little storminess to it, as it was recorded during a thunderstorm. There’s also tons of interesting news.
This week’s items include:
Let us know what you think.
This week’s episode covers a wide variety of topics, with no set news list save talking about Nintendo Direct’s oddly uninspiring conference. There’s no news list, so feel free to discuss what you found interesting or frustrating about Nintendo’s stream or anything else mentioned in the podcast.
Now that Activision has merged up with Blizzard all under Vivendi it’s time to consider what to do with all the additional overhead, management, internal studios and sheer amount of people working on projects within their organization. In other words, it’s time to trim the fat and get leaned out for the long haul.
This isn’t unexpected news, the only way to grow more effective as a large company is to remove some of the access baggage that can slow you down and let your competitors take control. This is a sad job which nobody takes pride in (most normal people anyway) but it could mean the difference between rising to the top and sinking like a brick.
“We are focused on improving efficiency across the combined organization and are concentrating on businesses where we have leadership positions that are aligned with Activision Publishing’s long-term corporate objectives,” Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith said in a statement. (gamespot)
It’s important to be aggressive as a large company, just like you would be as a startup company. There is a reason startup companies grow into powerful competitors that win, grow and eventually become (or be purcahsed by) larger companies.
As part of this move some staff will be migrated to new projects, persumably reporposed into other divisions or allowed to find new jobs somewhere else. This is called “realignment” by those in the management organization, and currently those up for realignment are:
These realignments along with other organizational changes will effect a few working game titles:
At this point we’re not sure which, if any, will continue to be developed under Activision and which will be sold off to other companies or retired. Surely, those money making titles will be sold off if Activision has no plans to finish them.
Again, it’s hard to consider this a bad decision. This is a decision of growth over having too many “Cooks in the kitchen” making soup. It’s better to have rock solid titles of epic proportions than a large pool of mediocre titles with minimal sales and bad reputations, and that’s why they spend a lot of time in the office working on this and having a type of office chair for long hours on a computer is really helpful in this area.
It’s not that the titles they’re questioning are necessarily bad, but are not the leading titles in their space and are should be either given a stronger team to work on them or retire them entirely. To build a stronger team with passion and direction it might be best to sell the franchise(s) to other organizations so they can do it right with time and attention to detail.
(Thanks, gamespot)
I like using keyboards for racing games that have simplified acceleration, braking, reversing, and turning such as TrackMania (four keys for all), but fighters and etc. are difficult for me via keyboards.
Mice allow for more angular granularity than controllers because of the area of movement across the mousepad/surface when using an adequate sensitivity, and mice can be polled around 1KHz or more versus controllers being polled around 250Hz, as far as I know.
If mouse sensitivity is set too high above 800 CPI or so, noise becomes an issue (quantization occurs at too low of CPI), so I recommend mice equipped with the 3360/3366 sensor as the older mice with 30×30 or less pixel/photo-diode arrays might have more trouble with noise because correlation imaging sensors will always be imperfect.
Here’s a thread regarding mice with said sensors from a reputable forum:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1602282/lets-compile-all-3360-3366-and-their-release-dates-for-everyone/0_100
The reason of 800 CPI or so being the sweet spot for current mice is, each pixel on the tracking surface or “matrix” is approximately 30 microns in diameter because of the lens magnification and sensor height from the tracking surface, so 25.4mm to convert an inch / 0.030mm = roughly 846.666 of these pixels are able to fit in an inch on the tracking surface, and the aforementioned sensors should be the same.
Each pixel is divided to achieve a higher resolution, so noise becomes an inevitable issue making a larger photo-diode array more ideal.
http://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-mouse-myths-busted/#page-1