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Bizarre dev reveals why racer flopped.
Bizarre Creations’ ambitious racer Blur failed to find an audience because the basic ‘cars with weapons’ concept scared off gamers, so says former design manager Gareth Wilson.
Speaking at the annual Develop conference in Brighton, as reported by Edge, Wilson explained that it is part of a developer’s job to “reduce people’s fear of buying your product” a job that Bizarre apparently failed to do.
According to Wilson, consumers have three different reactions to a product: comfort, stretch and panic.
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Comic-Con 2011: 320GB Xbox 360 package with game, white Kinect sensor, astromech-inspired console, and metallic C-3PO controller hits this fall for $449.
Star Wars Kinect was always intended to be a new take on gaming in the sci-fi franchise, but now it’s going to bring with it a new take on the Xbox 360 hardware. At a Star Wars Kinect panel at Comic-Con today, Microsoft and LucasArts revealed a new Kinect Star Wars-themed Xbox 360 console set for release this fall.
The bundle will include a 320GB Xbox 360 console with an R2-D2 theme, a metallic C-3PO controller, a white Kinect sensor, and a copy of the game for $450. For comparison, the current 250GB Xbox 360 Kinect bundle with Kinect Adventures sells for $400.
Originally announced at E3 2010, Kinect Star Wars is set primarily during the time of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, with overlapping bits of the other prequel trilogy films and nods to the original Star Wars trilogy as well. Players will take orders from Yoda, cleave their way through armies of battle droids, and use Kinect-enabled Force powers to battle the Dark Side.
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“Star Wars Kinect gets R2-D2 console bundle” was posted by Brendan Sinclair, Eddie Makuch on Thu, 21 Jul 2011 11:05:25 -0700 -
Online game to arrive in Collector’s Edition, Digital Deluxe Edition, and Standard Edition packages with preorders receiving early access, in-game items; all downloadable versions exclusive to EA’s Origin store.
As Star Wars: The Old Republic nears its long-awaited release, the massively multiplayer online game is starting to hit some familiar prelaunch milestones. Today, that milestone is the rolling out of a preorder campaign and announcement of premium release bundles.
The Old Republic will be available in standard and premium editions for both retail and downloadable stores. While the boxed copies of the game can be purchased from numerous retailers, both digital versions of The Old Republic will be exclusive to Electronic Arts’ own Origin downloadable storefront.
The beefiest of the bundles will be the $150 retail Collector’s Edition. That box will pack in a Gentle Giant-produced Darth Malgus statue, galaxy map, music CD, a “custom security authentication key,” and a journal adding to the game’s fiction, as well as eight in-game items. The premium downloadable version of the game is the $80 Digital Deluxe Edition, which includes six of the eight in-game items in the Collector’s Edition.
Those who preorder the $60 standard edition of the game (available as a download or boxed copy) won’t be walking away entirely empty handed. All preorders will receive early access to the game, 30 days of game time, and an in-game color stone that will let players change the hue of their lightsabers and/or blaster bolts.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is set to be released later this year. For more on the game, check out GameSpot’s previous coverage.
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“Star Wars: The Old Republic gets a trilogy of releases” was posted by Brendan Sinclair on Thu, 21 Jul 2011 10:31:19 -0700 -
In danger of being “iPhone devs” only.
The UK games industry is in danger of becoming an iPhone dev-only scene, according to a top Codemasters developer.
Andy Wilson, who’s directing forthcoming FPS Bodycount at the UK publisher’s Guildford studio, told Gamerzines that the lack of tax breaks for developers is sending projects overseas, causing developers here to shut up shop.
“The UK is primarily tough, in my opinion, because the bright, shining hope of tax breaks for the games industry got torpedoed,” he explained.
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“We’re competing with sex with your gf.”
The game industry often forgets how important £40 is to gamers, the developer behind racing game series Project Gotham Racing and Blur has said.
Ex-Bizarre Creations design manager Gareth Wilson, who is now chief games designer at Sheffield based Outrun Online Arcade developer Sumo Digital, said at the Develop conference this afternoon that one of the reasons launching new games in the current market is incredibly tough is because developers compete not just with games, but with non-gaming activities, such as playing football in the park and having sex.
“As we’re in the industry and games are our life, we sometimes forget how important £40 is to someone,” he said.
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New consoles will bring new business model.
Phil Harrison, former head of Sony Worldwide Studios, has offered his thoughts on the next generation of consoles – and foresees a business model that breaks away from the one that’s served the industry for the past 30 years.
Speaking at this week’s Develop in Brighton, Harrison saw consoles moving towards a service-based model over the retail one that’s previously defined the industry.
“I think the era of the console where hardware companies spend $3-4 billion to build a chipset and then it’s supported on a tax on the software – that’s the business model of the last 25-30 years – that’s over,” said Harrison.
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Develop 2011: Former Bizarre developer Gareth Wilson, now at Sumo Digital, shares what he learned from the racer’s commercial failure.
Who was there: Gareth Wilson was the design lead on Bizarre Creations’ arcade racer Blur. The game earned unanimous praise in prerelease focus testing, scored well with reviewers, and had a large marketing spend, but it failed to sell enough copies to break even. Publisher Activision shut the studio down earlier this year, and Wilson has now moved on to work at Sumo Digital.
What they said: As the developer of Metropolis Street Racer and Project Gotham Racing, Bizarre Creations had extensive experience in the racing genre. It had also created launch titles for Sega and Microsoft consoles. However, when it was bought by megapublisher Activision, it released two commercial flops in the form of Blur and James Bond 007: Blood Stone, and the studio was closed shortly after.
Gareth Wilson, who was a designer on Blur, studied economics and business and used his learnings to reflect not just on the failure of Blur, but on game sales in general. New intellectual properties are having a tough time in the market, with Wilson citing Bulletstorm, Singularity, Alan Wake, Enslaved, and Vanquish as recent examples of good games that have struggled to gain traction at retail.
Wilson’s first piece of advice to game makers was to reduce the competition. New intellectual properties could find audiences more easily by being a launch title for the Wii U or a release on smaller, cheaper platforms (mobile), or by going out via new distribution methods (OnLive). Wilson cited MotorStorm as a good example; the PlayStation 3 launch title gained immediate sales thanks to a limited number of options at launch, and the resulting profile helped it sell more copies over a prolonged time–much more than either of its two sequels, Wilson said.
His next recommendation was to think about an economic principle that he called “Consumer Theory 101,” or reducing people’s fear. Customers exist in three states–comfort, stretch, and panic–and during the purchase process, they make split-second decisions that push them between the three.
Wilson used three examples to illustrate his point. Cornflakes are a familiar, comfortable experience for most people. Chocolate cornflakes would be unique and would possibly stretch them into new ground. However, bacon cornflakes would be completely unique and would push consumers into an unfamiliar place that could yield panic.
The sweet spot for game makers is in the chocolate cornflakes area–where consumers are still in familiar territory, but where there are fewer competitors. Two examples he used were Batman: Arkham Asylum and Zumba Fitness. The former game would be considered niche, with the latter being mass-market, but both take familiar concepts and recognised brands and do something new with them.
A more personal example for Wilson was Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing With Banjo-Kazooie, developed by his new employer, Sumo Digital. It was released earlier this year but was a lot more successful than Blur. Wilson said this was because it was familiar (kart racing), combined many different licenses (Sonic, Banjo-Kazooie), and had mass appeal (Sega characters resonate with core gamers and children alike). Blur, meanwhile, was an arcade racer with realistic cars, neon power-ups, and sci-fi weapons: a “confusing” prospect for potential buyers, he admitted.
Game developers who want to experiment should do so on lower-budget platforms, he advised. He explained how Limbo would never have gotten investment as a boxed product, but was the third biggest game on Xbox Live Arcade last year and made over £7 million ($11.3 million), coming from a team of around eight people. In other words, it was an immensely profitable game–and it hasn’t even been released on the PlayStation 3 and PC yet. “If Playdead wants to make a triple-A game now, Microsoft will say, ‘Sure!'” he claimed. He also praised Valve’s approach to bundling the original Portal with familiar titles such as Half-Life 2. “If they did [Portal] as a $40 game, [consumers would] have been like, ‘What is this?£”
Wilson said developers should aim to distill a game into a single statement and make sure all its design principles adhere to this statement. For Project Gotham Racing 3, the concept was “Being Cool in Cars.” From that, the elevator pitch evolved into “Deliver the drama, exhilaration, and sex appeal of the world’s most stylish vehicles and locations on the world’s most powerful console.” Following that were design pillars, such as “Life begins at 150mph.” “If it doesn’t fit in your pillars, you’re damaging your game,” he opined, claiming that PGR3 was the most tightly focused game Bizarre ever made.
Wilson’s final option for developers was to build a reputation for excellence. Rockstar, Valve, and Crytek have all done this, and Wilson believes that games such as Red Dead Redemption, Left 4 Dead, and Crysis all managed to thrive in busy genres off the back of their developers’ reputations. However, it takes money to do this and is a risky proposition, as developers are often considered only as good as their last game.
Quotes: “We’re competing with everything. We’re competing with having sex with your girlfriend. [Your game] has got to be better than going to the pub for two nights.”–Wilson on the true extent of competition in the marketplace.
“If I released a sim racing game and an arcade racing game, the sim would score higher because that’s what reviewers like.”–Wilson, bemoaning the reviews process.
Takeaway: Making games is tougher than ever. “To be triple-A, you need to be [scoring] 9 out of 10,” Wilson argued. He was clearly burned by his experience on Blur, unable to see why his game sold so poorly following such a positive reaction and a big marketing spend. However, on reflection, and by using economic principles to understand the market, he can now understand why other games thrived while his faltered.
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“Blur was ‘confusing’ for consumers, says design lead” was posted by Guy Cocker on Thu, 21 Jul 2011 08:36:52 -0700 -
2K Sports rolls out three new cover stars for latest hoops effort; Michael Jordan returns to round out the trifecta of NBA legends.
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“Johnson and Bird get their own NBA 2K12 covers” was posted by Marko Djordjevic on Thu, 21 Jul 2011 08:00:00 -0700 -
2K Sports rolls out three new cover stars for latest hoops effort; Michael Jordan returns to round out the trifecta of NBA legends.
2K Sports is not afraid to repeat its cover athletes, and this year’s cover for NBA 2K12 is no different, except for a slight modification. Today, it revealed the cover art for the upcoming release, and while Michael Jordan returns to grace the game’s cover, he is joined by two other great players. This year’s game will feature not only his Airness but also the Celtics’ Larry Bird and the Lakers’ Magic Johnson on separate covers.
The move is not region specific. When the three covers were revealed to me a few days ago, the first question I had was this: Are these covers going to be specific to certain parts of the country? I was assured that equal versions of all three covers will be available throughout all of North America. This means that people on the East Coast might be stuck with a copy of the game featuring Magic Johnson, while b-ball fans in California may only find copies of Larry Bird available on store shelves.
While initial runs of the game will feature an equal balance among the three former superstars, Michael Jordan’s cover is the de facto version; additional shipments will only feature his cover. If reprinting is necessary, it could make the Magic and Bird covers potential collector’s items.Read and Post Comments | Get the full article at GameSpot
“Johnson and Bird get their own NBA 2K12 covers” was posted by Marko Djordjevic on Thu, 21 Jul 2011 08:00:00 -0700 -
2K Sports rolls out three new cover stars for latest hoops effort; Michael Jordan returns to round out the trifecta of NBA legends.
Get the full article at GameSpot
“Johnson and Bird get their own NBA 2K12 covers” was posted by Marko Djordjevic on Thu, 21 Jul 2011 08:00:00 -0700
