Merus

The thing that's blowing my mind is that there's an A/NZ special edition that contains a piece of content called the Dedsec pack, and a Dedsec edition also available only in A/NZ that does not contain the Dedsec pack.

Don't you dare tell me what my argument is, and don't you dare tell me that I have the same argument in this thread as everyone else. You don't get to speak for me.

It's so weird that Bastion was the breakout hit for both of those gentlemen.

Or done something interesting with their second screen thing.

Yeah, for an indie game you want the push to be day of release so that people see the trailer, then go, 'I'll buy that' and you've already got it ready for them to buy. You don't want to do much pre-release marketing because you don't have to get people to plan to go to the store, and you can't afford people to forget about your game before you can sell it to them.

I think what people forget is that Sega completely fucked up the Genesis era - they took their lead and squandered it by manufacturing and releasing three separate add-ons to it, draining their money and the goodwill of developers. The Saturn was a poorly engineered monster and made the situation bad enough that if the Dreamcast wasn't a smash hit, they'd have to fold. The Dreamcast was only a modest hit. Nintendo has not blown a bunch a bunch of money on pointless add-ons that won't sell - they usually try a few, but they've had hits. Customers still care about Nintendo, and the 3DS is a solid revenue source at this point. So Nintendo aren't going to follow Sega into the dark. As for leaving the hardware business, I think it's more likely that Nintendo will leave the software business, honestly. They've got great game designers, but their firmware is pretty terrible, whereas their hardware is basically always pretty solid. They came into games via hardware, and if they leave games (for instance, if they start making devices for the fitness market) that's how they'll leave.

Ron Gilbert's told the same story. In his version, he goes on to explain how irritating it got to be Spielburg's personal hintline and how they started passing it around to the new guys who were still excited to be talking to the real Stephen Spielburg.

How long has Sony had, though? Nintendo has a product that sells well and sizable assets. They've announced a strategy of diversification to bank some of that sweet, sweet China money. If they have to start having a firesale, they'll probably start with the baseball team. I mean, this Chicken Littling is fun so long as you recognise that it actually is Chicken Littling. This isn't serious analysis or based on anything particularly real, and until someone turns up who has actually read Nintendo's annual reports then silly speculation is where it'll stay.

I also remember the DS being seen as the last gasp of relevance for a Nintendo desperate to stave off Sony's inevitable takeover of their market. Not so much confusion over the Wii, though, people remembered the last time Nintendo did something that seemed odd and didn't immediately assume it was Nintendo that didn't get it. Like, I can't see Nintendo being an ascendant force in the premium console market any time soon, but I'm not going to rule out their moving into developing markets because it's all about the execution, not the strategy.

I'm guessing it's because it's a chocolate spread that doesn't taste like coffee or ice-cream topping. But surely America has chocolate spreads.

I'm not overly skeptical about UE4 pivoting hard towards indies - it feels like exactly the kind of thing you do if you're priced to extract money from large developers, then that market starts to collapse just as a competitor that's offering their product for free starts to grab mindshare. There's a long history of this in computing, of formerly expensive software being forced into a price drop because their competitors have made their star product a commodity. tl;dr capitalism at work

I enjoy how nuts Americans go for Nutella. I can just go to a shop and buy it, guys. It's okay.

Project Titan is/was Blizzard's next MMO project, which has been rebooted at least once, probably twice - once because Blizzard, and once because the market shifted very quickly in the MMOs, with Dark Souls, Minecraft, GW2, DayZ and EQNext pushing the standard of what an MMO is out of Blizzard's comfort zone. I think Superannuation is probably on the money here - Blizzard appears to have been broken by the enormous efforts to make Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2, and MMOs don't have to be big MMORPG behemoths any more to be compelling.

Christian Nutt has a good piece on this. What's notable to me is that marriage, like basically everything else that goes on in Tomodachi Life, is involuntary. http://gamasutra.com/blogs/ChristianNutt/20140508/217351/Understanding_Nintendos_Tomodachi_Life_problem.php

It reminds me of the joke of the economist who predicted eight of the last three recessions.

Anyway, that's an awful lot of assumptions for someone who doesn't actually live in a developing country.

Yeah, DVD players aren't expensive. You have room.

I wore shorts for the past six months. They're comfy and easy to wear.

Da fuq Look, Nintendo's problem is that they constantly use underpowered equipment to cut costs, and because the hardware's less exciting and the tools are poor quality, it's not desirable for developers. Their engineering culture is actually perfectly aligned for this kind of thing. As for making a 'luxury product', the Mega Drive continued selling in Brazil for like 20 years, because it was cheap enough to be affordable. $20 buys you more than a Playstation used to have these days. What Nintendo need to do is to suck it up and sell their games for a price developing nations can afford. Valve worked out there's a massive market for games in Russia, so long as you keep the massive wealth inequality in mind when you price, and China, India, Brazil and the African continent are in the same boat; looks like Nintendo's come to the same conclusion, which is encouraging.

I think the market's changed; there definitely seems to be more of an acknowledgement that you can't make a game that's just like WoW and be successful.

I bought Ruby and never got around to playing to playing it. God my backlog is just the worst.

It sounds like some of the EU characters are turning up, and I think they'd be insane not to at least have a Mara Jade-like character. It might not be canon, but people really seem to like her specifically so she probably works for what Star Wars is.

You know, it's kind of weird that we don't rent mowers, or at least have a mower shared amongst several people. You generally only need a mower once a week, at most.

They're incredibly expensive and incredibly hard; most people who know how to do them don't have the appetite for more than one, and few people who do have the appetite have any business making more than one, McQuaid. I think that's what's so incredible about what's currently called EverQuest Next (but deserves a better name): most of the people who know how to manage/develop an MMO decided that instead they'd just focus on one little system, and SOE basically bought the rights to all these little projects. I'm expecting it to be a glorious mess on release, because they are trying so much that's new that they basically have to fuck up some of them, but a glorious mess is way better than whatever Elder Scrolls Online is. The MMO field is incestuous enough that anything they get right will end up being something that everyone else at least pays lip service to.