Since we brought you Friday’s article on Thursday we thought we would balance things out by bringing you Saturday’s article on Sunday (OK – we will admit it, we where all busy yesterday). Welcome to the “SAY WHAT?” issue…
They said what?
(say what?)
O.K. We admit it. Captain Pike was a star trek captain before captain kirk.
“We didn’t want to have interiors at launch,” said “Star Trek Online” executive producer Craig Zinkievich. “We thought it was just a little bit too much. We really wanted to make sure we delivered a really deep experience, but your bridge not being in the game, it really felt like a hole in the game, and it was just something that we had to put in.” – Craig Zinkievich, Executive Producer, Star Trek Online
Once the game goes live (or if you are amongst the lucky few in the beta – which we dearly wish we were) we will all get to choose from among 20 bridge designs. Mr. Zinkievich said they are to function as social hubs but that’s alright with us. We happen to know Trekkies from all over the world and we have ALOT of socializing to do!
SAY WHAT!!!
If you are like us, you love down loadable content (DLC) for your stand alone pc games. Games like Fall Out 3 come immediately to mind. If you are also like us, you get so tired of having to jump through hoops, open multiple accounts (which invariably generate spam) all just to buy said DLC. We also get just a bit tired of having to buy content for ”points” which never seem to come in the same increments in which the content is sold (here is looking at YOU Microsoft). Always, of course, necessitating buying more “Points” than is necessary to purchase the game.
Wait!
Gamestop to the rescue!!
According to a report in Arstechnica (who gets their information from Variety Magazine) “ the retailer will start selling digital content in its stores starting next year, and it already has backing from Sony and Microsoft. The new service will allow customers to pay for the content in store and then download it when they return home.” You can read the article here.
SAY WHAT?
Remember how, just before the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) was released, Activision/Blizzard head honcho Bobby Kotick caused a bit of a stir by saying he would “raise the price [of MW2] even further if [he] could?” Now that many players are up in arms (or not up in arms if they didn’t buy MW2) we all know why Mr. Kotick wanted that price raised. Here is an excerpt from article (below) over at Gamesindustry.biz (available here):
“Activision CEO Robert Kotick has exercised options on just over 1.93 million shares this week, allowing him to buy them at a price of USD 1.03 and sell them at between USD 11.43-11.54 each.” – Phil Elliott, Gamesindustry.biz
And a quick note, that puts the stock mentioned above worth around $20 million.
SAY…IT ISN’T SO…
Say it isn’t so…the endless trial (and tribulations) of Warhammer Online. We had such high hopes! Paul Barnett was on our show several times! As we have said before, Paul Barnett could sell ice to polar bears in the dead of winter. We are wondering if even he can sell the general gaming public on this:
Endless? We hope!
Warhammer Online is one of the subjects we discuss with JMO and TIPPA on Show 48 (due out soon…we promise). Even though we are always ones to say “don’t nail the coffin lid shut just yet” on any game, this confirmation of the “endless trial subscription” coupled with the news of the 80 layoffs over at Mythic (we hoped that news wasn’t true either) doesn’t bode well for the future of the game. While any discussion on the WarhammerOnline and what happened between the glory days of launch and now could fill a book (or at least several articles) the general feeling at the end of show 48 was that Mythic tried too hard to please World of Warcraft customers and not enough to please fans of the table top game.
In the end, what we here at No Prisoners, No Mercy hope is that Mythic (or what ever EA calls them these days) will take a hint from Turbine and go the way of DDO (Dungeons and Dragons Online) and be free to play with some sort of micro-transaction business model. The big question here is, of course, how do you keep them down on the virtual warhammer online farm after they have seen the latest MMOs. THAT, my friends, is always an enormous task.
See you online,
The No Prisoners, No Mercy team.
Actually.. Gamestop offering DLCs for physical money might be quite convenient for kids and teens who don’t have their own credit cards and thus can’t directly buy DLCs online. Sure, they can buy point cards now, but that’s simply an extra hurdle that could be avoided.
If it works out as well as promised by Gamestop, even though I have a credit card and whatnot, I will be buying my dlc that way just for the sake of simplicity…one stop shopping and no fiddly bits with points.
Julie
I don’t want to sound like i advocate violence, but Mr. Kotick needs to be hit…
By a 60 ton tank, Repeatedly, Until his head finally is about as thick as his brains are, and then ten times more for good measure, then finally being lit on fire, and have the ashes stored somewhere out in west Texas with the rest of the toxic and radioactive waste. If anyone is going to be the death of Activision-Blizzard it is him and the board of directors. That company used to care a lot more about the games and the developers than profit margins. Heck, they split from Atari just so that the developers would be better off and could make great games without being dictated to by a white-collar warlord.
I wish he was the one who sent you the comment about lighting hair on fire and extinguishing it with an ice pick.
Also, I don’t know if you have anything planned to discuss this, but you might have heard about the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Terrorism bit, and I am curious what your opinions are on it if you have seen it.
@McDonough: “…by a 60 ton tank…”
Wow…but how do you REALLY feel? I am not sure what has you so miffed about stock options (perhaps you should enlighten us) but it hardly seems like the one human being will be the death of Activision/Blizzard – especially one who is so button down, all business, profit line orientated. After all it was he who, not that long ago, announced that he was proud of the fact that the heads of studios were now coming in to his office to discuss budgets.
“…about lighting hair on fire…”
I am not sure why you wish it was Mr. Kotick making this comment, unless of course, you feel he has some aversion to burning hair (we here at NPNM know we do…it stinks)
And no…we had no plans for the discussion of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in a future show, with the possible exception of mentioning it in passing.
And no…we (that the NPNM Team we) hadn’t heard anything about “terrorism”.
How I really feel is that there should be an SEC investigation into insider trading that wont reveal anything but would at least hit him with “obstruction of justice” because he made unpopular comments scorning gamers and simultaneously earning eighteen million dollars in instant profit.
As far as the CoD:MW2 bit, they included a mission where you join a group of terrorists in massacring thousands of civilians in an airport. It plays a key part of the story, but many people are up at arms about it. Some people are starting to wonder if it was added in its current form merely for shock value and ratings, which plays into Mr. Kotick’s recent “acquisition.”
I forgot to address the corporation destroying bit. I doubt a CEO could destroy a company single handedly either, but the general direction of valuing profits over quality(games, developers, and community relations included) helped lead to Atari’s and Midway’s forced buyouts in my opinion. I also thing that it will severely hurt Nintendo if/when the Wii loses its “oooooooooooh shiny new toy/fad” appeal.
As far as the CoD:MW2 bit, they included a mission where you join a group of terrorists in massacring thousands of civilians in an airport.
In all fairness, the sequence does have significant plot relevance, you don’t need to shoot any civilians yourself (but you need to shoot the cops) and you’re given ample warning and offered a chance to skip the sequence beforehand.
In essence, the airport scene serves the same function as the nuclear explosion scene in the first Modern Warfare: To establish the antagonists’ credibility as villains. In the scene, you’re playing an undercover CIA operative, who doesn’t know that the Russian terrorist cell he had infiltrated was planning this. The terrorists attack the airport, and the protagonist tags along to avoid blowing his cover. At the end of the sequence, the leader explains that he knew who the protagonist was all along, kills him and leaves his body behind as evidence, implying that the CIA (and by extension, the USA) was behind the attack. The Russian general population is understandably furious, which kickstarts the main conflict of the plot: A Russian invasion of the USA.