This is the third attempt in as many weeks at making an episode.
There’s no real news items this Thanksgiving as the podcast is giving away free Swimsanity codes and talk about the games they’ve been playing that month.
Let us know what you think and win a Swimsanity code.
This week we’re covering a few stories fresh in 2011 or at least our reactions are fresh! We’re hitting up some community comments, as the usual, and doing a flash back of River City Ransom, last covered in episode 4–don’t go find the old one, listen to the new one (we only had 3 listeners back then!). The stories of the week:
This weeks question of the week: What game did or do you love that no one else seems to have ever heard of?
This week we’re flashing back to Star Wars, an arcade classic from 1983. We’re looking back at the history and forward progress of ArenaNet, co-founded by some Blizzard folks. In the news, we’re looking at:
John Riccitiello, EA’s CEO says the recession is a blessingWe also learned that Don’s got some issues with not sucking at Mass Effect.
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)
