The Videogame Roundtable has been around since 2009 and it’s hit its 400th episode, separate from TD Gaming Podcast! Former co-host Dan Quick offers his congrats, and the guys discuss electronic music.
This week’s news includes:
Be sure to listen to the outtakes after the end of the podcast!
If you thought you’d be getting a release of Starcraft 2 for the holiday of 2008 you’ll be upset at the news. The heavily awaited RTS title Starcraft 2 will be arriving sometime in 2009. The original title arrived in 1998 but we’re not going to see the first sequel until sometime next year, amazing people even remember the game after eleven years, right?
Activision Blizzard hardly makes a game we’d forget. The reason we all have fond memories of Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo is due to the craftsmanship that goes into the game titles (and a bit of the marketing). The developers take their time to hand craft and test a solid product, which is reason alone to see a release next year rather than in this one.
“Next year’s offerings from Activision Blizzard should include highly anticipated PC strategy title StarCraft II, the sequel to one of the world’s most enduringly popular games.” (starcraftwire.com)
It won’t make the 2008 holiday schedule, making us wonder if it’s a 2009 holiday schedule. Although Activision Blizzard doesn’t need to time their games for the biggest sales seasons it doesn’t hurt to push the title out when gamers are actively looking for new blockbusters.
Personally, we’d love to see a Spring/Summer release time frame to give us something to fill the void, but we’re sure Activision’s marketing team has plans revolving around money than a few gamers personal preferences. Regardless to the launch time we’re at least privvy to the knowledge that it’s coming next year.
The game industry is doing “okay” in this bad economic time compared to other industries. Primarily, Nintendo is rocking the house with their games, hand-held’s and consoles while mobile developers are showing some great successes in the industry. Many success stories in our industry are based on small titles, downloadable games of the more “casual” style while a few larger titles are experiencing slower than expected sales trends.
We’ve mentioned this in the past, but the tough economy gives many smaller developers great opportunities for success. While big publishers struggle to look good in the eyes of the investor, tiny developers can produce quality titles for minimal cash investment and time to market. Ten years ago, smaller developers tried to compete with the big boys making larger titles, cloning successful titles or simply asking investors to put it on the line for their game. Today, developers can create a small iphone app, a cute WiiWare title or exploit the XNA efforts of Microsoft for Xbox Live Arcade and actually have a chance.
There are still challenges with these smaller developers when working in the WiiWare and XBLA publishing channels, your game marketing and promotion becomes highly reliant on Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony for PSN. Tom Prata, senior director of Nintendo of America talked to Gamespot about this issue:
“Finally, there’s the problem of promotion. It’s not enough to make a great game if nobody notices it. Prata specifically said Nintendo will be devoting more resources to support the promotion and development of WiiWare games in the future.” (gamespot)
Of course, in the world of smaller game titles and downloadable casual games, you’re going to be at risk of finding a lot of “shovelware” — products that are only released to make a quick dime, often based on some license or popular theme/character. The great game titles will, hopefully, rise to the top and show themselves off amongst all the wanna-be money makers.
Those smaller developers putting a huge passion into their titles actually have a chance in this new industry trend. Game makers, internationally, now have a chance to grasp a small piece of the industry and make their dreams come true. The core audience may see this as a trend of noisly low quality titles, but I believe the industry needs this change to grow a new generation of developers based on niche interests.
While many can wait for their next release of Madden the rest of us will continue to spend a little money to see what the future innovators are going to be bringing to the table.
Another late podcast, as Summer is in sight, and E3 looms ahead. Some minor audio issues with the podcast, but still the same podcast-y goodness we can expect from Paul and Jonah.
The news includes:
All that and Listener Feedback.
