Headline RePLAY – 7.17.12

Today on Headline RePLAY: Gearbox Software maintains that Duke Nukem Forever is like Half-Life, a new Earthworm Jim is coming and Steam doesn’t “cheapen” IPs.


Despite the armada of negative press on Duke Nukem Forever, Gearbox Software boss Randy Pitchford insists that the game is comparable to Valve’s Half-Life.

“I still stand by that,” he told Eurogamer. “When I played what 3D Realms had been working on I was really surprised by it. Like everyone, I thought who knows what the hell those guys were doing? And here there was a lot of stuff… And when you realize what the actual gameplay is, the actual gameplay is very much like Half-Life. “

“It’s basically a linear, narrative experience, but the puzzles are derived from the environment,” he continued. “It’s not just ‘shoot the guy’. Some of it’s about, ‘how do I navigate through this? What do I manipulate in the environment to make my path?’”

“It’s almost identical, beat for beat in terms of its gameplay pacing, to Half-Life.”

|Source: Eurogamer


A new Earthworm Jim is not a matter if, but a matter of when, says Shiny Entertainment founder David Perry.

“Our problem is that the team is all doing well in whatever they’re doing right now,” Perry told Eurogamer at the Develop conference last week. “It’s just a bunch of guys who all have their own thing. Everyone has their own company. So, to get them to stop what they’re doing and work on a game is very difficult, but it’s something they all want to do.”

Perry says the group constantly talks about making the game. “We have our own little discussion group on Facebook. We’ve been having this discussion: when will this happen? When could we do it? What would make sense?”

“It’s one of those things that, no one’s got the time right now,” he said. “I’m sure it’s going to happen, I just can’t tell you exactly when.”

|Source: Eurogamer


There’s no doubt that Steam sales are a boon to consumers with their almost-too-good-to-be-true prices. Publishers are not so enthused, EA claiming that it “cheapens” intellectual property. Valve’s director of business management disagrees.  

“If that’s what we thought was happening, or that’s what we saw happening, we wouldn’t do it,” Valve’s director of business management Jason Holtman told PC Gamer at last week’s Develop conference. “Actually, all the data is contrary to that. A promotion is not a policy; a promotion is just a feature to give people more value.”

“It’s not as if a 75 percent offer or a 50 percent off sale at some point in time cannibalizes a sale that would have happened earlier, it’s just not true,” he claimed. “We’re actually seeing both of them growing. We don’t see one cannibalizing the other. If we did, we wouldn’t do it.

“People aren’t making a decision thinking ‘I’m always going to wait for perfect pricing,’” said Holtman. “There are time elements to it, there are fan elements to it, there are value elements to it. People sometimes like paying the full amount on the first day because they want to play it now and they want to be a fan.”

|Source: PC Gamer

No comments:

Post a Comment