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17 Dec 04

Well, it's the last weekend of Christmas shopping. Hmm, if I needed to get a bunch of last minute shopping for my gaming friends done, what would I do? I'm sure you strategists can figure it out. Also don't forget the Child's Play toy drive is winding down. If you were planning on contributing, time's a wasting.

It looks like unic is wrapping up the Massive Assault AAR in the forum. It's quite a good read. If you haven't tried the game, it will give you some good insight into how the game plays and the ebb and flow of battle.

Just a quick EA update. Evil Avatar found this story from Newsday. It points out that gaming analysts are pointing out the pitfalls of the deal for the NFL. It adds that EA is "taking a beating in Internet newsgroups and the video-game press." I wonder if I qualify as the press? Probably not. It also notes that Madden only sold 600k more copies than ESPN this year. I can see why they needed to take action. You can't ignore losing almost 2 million in unit sales at $50 a pop. I guess I look pretty naive predicting the "realistic" pricing of annual sports games.

I did see another interesting strategic move in the game industry lately. It seems Take 2 is delaying to release of Midnight Club 3: DUB edition to the second quarter. The official reason is to polish the game. I think the reasoning behind it is a little deeper. First a similar game was just released by EA, NFS: Underground 2. If there's not a reason to directly compete, let gamers wallets recover. Also, there were some pretty specific complaints made about EA's game. I'm sure Rockstar and Take 2 didn't want to be raked over the coals for the same problems. Finally, this also give them some time to analyze exactly how high NFS:U2 set the bar. That way they can be sure they can surpass it. We'll see how it all plays out.

Jason
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16 Dec 04

It's close to holiday break time. I'll probably get tomorrow up, but then we'll see how things go throughout the rest of the holiday. My parents are here to visit their grandson, plus it is Christmas time. Besides a lot of the gaming news is dying down until January. However, if anyone wants to write something to put up here, let me know. We should be able to work something out.

A quick note on the biggest game wars. It was just announced that GTA: SA will be ported to the Xbox and the PC for release in early June next year. Since the PS2 version is still ahead of Halo 2, I'm guessing GTA is going to win overall. I'm sure it doesn't matter beyond fanboys and PR people.

I've been reading some reviews on Ghost Recon 2. Unless I'm misunderstanding, this game doesn't seem to bear much resemblance to the game originally released on the PC a few years back. I don't like the term consolized since it seems to indicate PC's are always superior which we know isn't true (would that it were). I will say it sounds like the game has been "sexed up" to borrow from the BBC. While that can be a good thing, I'm not sure that's the game I want to play.

Jason
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15 Dec 04

People are really upset about this EA deal with the NFL. Right now there's a petition to the NFL to back out of this deal. They're up over 8,600 signatures. Even if you throw out the "Ima S. Whole" brand of joke signatures, there's probably over 7,500 fans angry over this deal. I can't imagine this plays well at the NFL head offices. Of course, they can comfort themselves by taking a bath in their cash.

Some people have pointed out that this is a case of executives not understanding the current market (and the future of the market). For instance, they would never sign an exclusivity deal for TV regardless of the money. They need the competition to keep the value of contracts up. That does bring the amusing thought that the NFL could sell the AFC game rights to one company and the NFC to another. Would gamers buy the best game or the one that had their favorite team?

Let's see, EA now owns exclusive licenses for the NFL, PGA, FIFA and NASCAR. Yet none of those offer exclusive broadcast rights for their sport. Analysts keep calling gaming the sleeping giant. It's a multi billion dollar industry with worldwide reach. You'd think the amount of money EA is throwing around would give them a clue, but no. To grow any industry need to gain more new customers than they lose. That's simple. These games are representations of their sport to their current fans and potential new fans. Without competition and improving games, you're not putting your best foot forward. Worse, you might not even be paying attention to the very people you're trying to attract.

I mean if over 2 million people bought ESPN NFL this year, can the NFL really afford to lose even half of them as fans? Were there more than 2 million complaints about the Janet Jackson incident at the Super Bowl? Yet action was taken and apologies made.

Speaking of trying to find your audience, the Spike TV video game awards were last night. If you're interested in the results you might as well grab them from Gamespot since they won favorite gaming site. Man, I wasn't even nominated. Well, there's always next year. Anyway the reason I bring it up is in the on going battle between GTA: SA and Halo 2, GTA won another round.

Jason
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14 Dec 04

I mentioned being asleep on the job, but that's no excuse for missing yesterday's big news. Yes, EA has bought the exclusive license to make NFL football games using the real teams, players and stadiums. Perhaps I dropped the ball on this one. I heard the rumors that this might happen, but I seriously didn't think that either the league was that stupid or that EA was willing to spend enough money on it.

Reports have EA spending something around $300 million to get exclusive rights for five years. Bill Harris has calculated that that will result in at least a $10 mark up in prices for those five years. Both point out that the NFL has hurt themselves in the future by destroying the market today. The start up costs of bringing a new football franchise online in five years will be huge so there's a risk there will be no competition for EA when the license is renewed. If no one competes, EA is the market and sets their own price.

My guess is that the league will figure that out before renegotiations begin and go back to open licensing. The question is who will take the risk then? Clearly competition has made the sports market better. If nothing else the new ideas generated by having different teams working separately, inspires the competition. It's painfully obvious that without competition, there's little incentive for Madden to innovate. I'm not saying they won't work hard to improve the product and everyone is expecting a huge visual jump on the next generation of consoles, but will we see radical new passing or kicking techniques? How about improved playbooks, defensive motion or realistic interceptions? The fact is that EA will get to that sort of thing if there's time.

So what's the competition to do? I guess they have a few options. One is to go pure college football. Even though the market's smaller, it keeps you with an improving football engine through the drought. Another would be to go the "generic" football route. You create a pro game that plays like the NFL, but doesn't have any of the players or teams or stadiums. On the plus side, you could give LA a team. On the down side, I'm pretty sure you'd have to stick with budget pricing on that one.

What else? Well, you could make a themed football game. Perhaps you'd have an international game where teams plays and strategies reflect their culture. You could move the game in the direction of something like Chaos League with a fantasy setting. How about a remake of Grave Yardage? What about a near future sci fi game? You could choose to have fantastic players or keep it realistic, but have varying house rules. There are some interesting options. I don't know if any of them are economically viable.

Of course, you always wonder if the answer is no if Sega/Visual Concepts punts and releases the source code to the public. Sure EA might steal some ideas, but can you imagine a quality, free, open source football game? It would be pretty cool.

Jason
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13 Dec 04

It's Monday again and Christmas is closing in. I'll say nothing more than to remind you the advertising links are available and that GoGamer in particular is having an impressive Christmas sale. Thank you for your support. And if you're not interested in supporting the site, once again I'll encourage you to check out Child's Play. I have a link on the front page through the holiday.

You know it's weird being tired all the time. You think you know what to expect, but fatigue changes everything. It's kind of like the combat exercises we used to run in the military. Toward the end you're so exhausted that even simple tasks seem hard. Then you get to try to do simple task in chem gear. Of course, exercises always had an end point you could look forward to. Parenting is for life. Still one little gas burp causes him to smile and it's all worth it. Just don't expect too much coherence.

I haven't been too up on the latest news, but I try not to fall too far behind. It's interesting to see how the sales battle is shaping up. You probably can't count on leaked sales data, but that's all I've got. So far it looks like Halo 2 has sold about 3.3 million units in North America through the first of December. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has sold about 3.6 million units. Both are expecting a strong holiday, so it looks like a good year for gaming.

There's a rumor floating around that Halo 2 got chopped in half at least on the single player side. The first half was released and the second half is being upgraded to be a Xbox 2 launch title. While I could see a backlash if that's true, I can also see the motivation behind such a move. Of course, it's harder to sell 3.3 million units at $350 a pop, assuming launch prices hold at previous levels. I guess we'll know if Halo 3 is announced as a launch title.

This week's game is from some guys getting some bad press lately. With the new Lord of the Rings game out, Battle for Middle Earth, there's been a lot of comparisons to the War of the Ring. The short of it is that most review have commented that even though BfME is flawed it's still better than WotR. That's kind of harsh since Liquid was forced to rush the WotR out to catch the wave of the last movie. I enjoyed their first title, Battle Realms. It had flaws, but I thought it added a lot to the genre. They created an interesting world that I had fun exploring and battling in.

Anyway Liquid's next effort is coming soon. It's Dragonshard (official site) from Liquid Entertainment. It's set in the new Dungeons and Dragons world of Eberron. It's a world of magic and magical technology. It's a RTS with some RPG elements. I happen to like the three sides: Humans of the Silver Flame, the evil power-hungry Umbragen and (get this) the primal beings of unstoppable rage. I'm guessing there's a war brewing there. Look for the multilevel combat next year.

Jason
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