Today on Headline RePLAY: The future of gaming in
the words of EA’s COO, resumable replays coming to a StarCraft II near you and the father of Mario voices his concern on video game violence.
Free-to-play and microtransactions may be the
future of video games in order to avoid the music industry’s fate, says
Electronic Art’s Chief Operating Officer.
“We’re going through, as an industry, just an
unbelievably difficult transformation,” said EA COO Peter Moore in an extensive
interview with Kotaku, “that is not from one business model to another but from
one business model to a myriad of different business models.”
Despite Moore’s belief that the industry is transitioning
to a variety of business models, he predicts the F2P/microtransactions model
will be in every game.
“I think, ultimately, those microtransactions will
be in every game, but the game itself or the access to the game will be free…,”
he said. “The great majority will never pay us a penny which is perfectly fine
with us, but they add to the eco-system and the people who do pay money—the
whales as they are affectionately referred to—to use a Las Vegas term, love it
because to be number one of a game that like 55 million people playing is a big
deal.”
Ultimately, Moore believes that the F2P model is
inevitable within the next five to 10 years, and compares it to walking into a
store.
“I think there’s an inevitability that happens five
years from now, 10 years from now, that, let’s call it the client, to use the
term, [is free],” said Moore. “It is no different than… it’s free [for] me to
walk into The Gap in my local shopping mall. They don’t charge me to walk in
there. I can walk into The Gap, enjoy the music, look at the jeans and what
have you, but if I want to buy something I have to pay for it.”
Moore asserts that the transition is necessary, to
avoid becoming like the music industry.
“Music used to make money selling music,” he notes.
“Music is now all about going on tour and concerts, go do corporate
appearances, sell your merchandise, build your online website, find ways to do
it that way, because they don’t make much money after Apple takes its cut, and
that’s where most of us get our music.
“We don’t even see ourselves as a traditional
publisher anymore. We’re a digital entertainment company.”
After the infamous internet drop during the Global StarCraft II League finals in Las Vegas:
why is LAN still not available for StarCraft
II? In Kotaku’s continuing interview series with StarCraft II lead designer Dustin Browder answers that very
question:
“We got to a point in development where we were
trying to deal with creating an online, connected experience for our fans,” Browder
explained. “We really wanted everyone to always be hooked up to their buddies
all the time. We felt like that would be a way better user experience than just
having everybody sort of separated out all the time, hiding out in offline
mode.”
Browder says it was a “difficult decision”
discussed for years. “We made the decision that since everybody’s connected these
days anyway, that it wouldn’t really be too much of an issue.”
Except there was an issue, like the spectacular
internet drop in the middle of a major eSports match during the Global StarCraft II League finals that compelled
spectators to chant: “We want LAN! We want LAN!” with Browder in attendance.
“We have seen in a couple of places, we’ve had some
venues who are doing eSport play unable to maintain their Internet connection,”
he conceded. “Which was a bit of a surprise for us, but again, it’s not that
unreasonable. We’re like, ‘Really you can’t—okay.’”
This prompted Blizzard to implement a “restart from
replay” feature, which allows internet dropped players to load up a game file
and start exactly where they left off. Resumable replays and other new features
are set for release sometime close to StarCraft
II: Heart of the Swarm’s launch in a free patch that is free and
independent from the expansion.
“So if their network gets down… if there’s a
brown-out, if somebody’s mouse explodes, you’ll soon have a way to jump right
back in and keep playing.”
Joining the man behind Epic Mickey and Deus Ex,
Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto voiced his own concern about the violence that
permeates today’s video games.
“Sometimes I get worried about the continued
reliance on making games that are so centered around guns, and that there are
so many of these games,” Miyamoto told IGN. “I have a hard time
imagining—particularly for young generations of gamers—how they sit down and
play and interact with that.”
