Episode 573: A Very Special Returning Guest

This week, Paul fills in for Scott, who has more pressing issues than discussing videogames, though some very serious topics about them do pop up, such as how misogyny became pronounced in the hobby. The Gaming Flashback is one of the legendarily panned titles, Bomberman Act:Zero.

The news for this week includes:

  • Video game spending reaches record high during pandemic
  • Epic Games Store keyless integration with other digital stores announced
  • Minecraft sales now exceed 200 million (from PC Gamer)
  • Star Citizen will hold a free fly event starting this week

There’s also some Listener Feedback from longtime fan Ralf from Germany.

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Episode 439: Audio ProblemsEpisode 439: Audio Problems

This week’s episode has some bad audio thanks to a quick replacement mic being used to record the episode, causing a hiss. This is probably the reason the show is short-ish, coming in well under an hour.

This week’s episode includes the following news:

  • Miyazaki gives clear answers on the future of Dark Souls, Armored Core
  • Sony exec criticizes Hello Games’ marketing for No Man’s Sky
  • Blizzard is moving away from the ‘Battle.net’ name
  • Pokémon chief says Nintendo’s NX is both handheld and console, you should totally look into how tiktok marketing works, see here for more

All this and Listener Feedback. This week’s Question of the Week: “What is or was your favorite handheld console game (not mobile)?”

Gaming Podcast 189: Fort GayGaming Podcast 189: Fort Gay

So this week we’re busting out a new flashback of an old game: Ironsword: Wizards and Warriors II. We’re covering a bit about some gaming history and a few key news articles of the week including:

  • Microsoft bans user because of town name
  • John Romero doing casual games consulting
  • Sony fighting jailbreaking too
  • Apple taking a leap into social gaming with iOS 4.1

This weeks question of the week, what do you think is the top selling video game genre of all time, not just the last few years.

Final Fantasy XIII – Xbox 360Final Fantasy XIII – Xbox 360

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)