Well the cat is out of the bag. Anno Online is upon us.
Anno Online will be a browser based version of the popular business simulator.
Yes unfortunately instead of working on the next major Anno title, Bluebyte Studios has instead decided to release a browser based title based on the world of Anno they have been creating over the last two decades.
Bluebyte Studios has upped the bar on every single Anno game they have ever released with each sequel getting better and better.
Whether or not this latest browser based game will be able to up the wildly popular Anno 2070 is hard to tell at this juncture. But I guarantee that Troublmaker will be playing it.
For the second year in a row The Consumerist has rated Electronic Arts (via public voting) the worst company in America.
This of course was done via popular vote and Electronic Arts is the most popular worst company in America.
I think that if anything is what they actually are, the most popular bad company in America. Not the worst by any means. There are obviously some voting problems here. If polls were setup outside of Walmarts showing all of the various propaganda about the bad stuff Walmart does, Walmart might be the worst.
This article acts as a defense of Electronic Arts, not because they are great guys, but because there are far worse villains in the world than the guys who make video games for a living.
Why Electronic Arts?
If you ask the President of Electronic Arts why he feels EA got this award he would say it’s because they’re the top, or more oddly… that people targeted them because of their pr-LGBT stance.
This last point was very odd. Bioware (the RPG branch of EA) make games that feature characters who you can make into lesbians and homosexuals. Mass Effect 3 most notoriously features a gay black love affair that you can craft if you want it. SWTOR came under heavy fire when they said they would add in LGBT relationships and even more when they actually did it.
So I decided to go to the White Supremicist web site that has been around for a little over 20 years. I first found Stormfront when I became intellectually interested (as a child) on whether or not racists actually still exist… they most certainly do. Stormfront like any other white supremicist league has a fervent and powerful gaming community. So some quotes from their forum on Mass Effect 3:
“Im disappointed in the open faggotry in this game, in one scene a male negro talks about losing his husband back on earth…
So pointless and disgusting to have stuff like that in a game, shame on you Bioware.”
“The first 31 hours of gameplay… I really liked. Tense action, good sense, atmosphere, music, story (slightly less dialogue options than in ME2 though) but… What really, really bugged me was the ending/s. The Stargazer cut-scene was a nice reflection though, but the initial choices are a bit too similar in a depressing way, imo.”
“ME3 was a great game until the ending. I here most fans hated the ending so much that they’ve either subscribed to “Indoctrination theory”; in which Shepard is hallucinating the end scene, or are complaining to Bioware to write a new one in DLC form.”
“I agree. It’s pointless and annyoing to have political correct and multicultural marxist agenda in games. It’s everywhere.
I couldn’t believe it when that pilot Cortez started crying to my Shepard about the loss of his husband. And it gets worse, you can overhear conversation on the Citadel in which a woman is searching for her wife. Then there is the black guy Anderson romantically involved with Kahlee Sanders, one of the few remaining blond haired, blue eyed humans (apparently in Mass effect universe genuine blond hair and blue eyes are almost nonexistent ). And of course, except the Reapers, we have the other bad guys, Cerberus , “human supremacist” group. Etc. Yuck! I’m sorry now that I bought ME3. I finished it but it left a sour taste in my mouth.
It’s sad that gaming industry joined in pushing a certain agenda.”
Yes as it seems even the white supremicists are split on homosexuality in Mass Effect 3. From a simple sampling of 100 responses I found a little under 50% did not care about the gay relationships while another 50% were actively boycotting Electronic Arts.
Although it is possible that there were church groups and hate groups working against EA to try and make them the top, it might only represent a smaller portion of society.
So what is the real reason EA was voted the worst company in America?
There are two distinct reasons that are both true and when combined make for a surefire winner.
The first is that gamers are the most connected players in the world. They watch more Youtube videos than any other crowd, they spend more hours on Reddit than any other sub-reddit, and take in more news than the average person. Gamers in their heightened intellectual state are also prone to protest.
The mass protest of gamers in 2011 was enough to cause legislatures to consider the Stop Online Piracy Act.
A year later the protest of gamers was enough to stop any real legislation in regards to violent video games.
Video gamers are a giant and powerful untapped voting electorate that no politician has ever sought to capture. On top of this they are also one of the most international crowds. Electronic Arts ships its games off to over 300 countries world wide. There is no other company on the list that even matches this.
When I voted (as a Canadian) in this poll it never once asked me what country I was from. It just allowed me to vote. To this extent this massive international block could swing in and send a note to the gaming industry, hey, you guys suck!
But with that in mind had it been ANY games publishing company on that list, they would have been worst as well. Activision could have easily won this award simply for being the only games publishing company on the list.
If there were two on the list, neither might have won. One of the problems with this is you have four major retailers, four major banks, four cable networks, two postal delivery services, seven Internet providers, three airlines, four credit services, and a cruise line… that’s a lot of split voting.
In a political situation it would be like if half of the Democrats left the Democratic Party and created The New Liberal Party of America. This would split the Liberal vote in half and cause the Republicans to win every election. This is basically what is happening in this poll.
So that’s a long winded way of saying #1.
The second reason has to do with their business practices, although as I will show later, their’s are not nearly as bad as others. Electronic Arts releases SimCity and on the first day you can purchase three DLC packs. Each of these cost $10 and add a lot to the game in terms of functionality. That makes the actual price of the game to be $90 when games like Cities in Motion 2 are running around selling their game for $20.
This kind of business practice of splitting up games and nickle and diming consumers is enough to anger people. It gets worse with SWTOR’s free to play model making you purchase toolbars and character slots (and expansions).
When you have a company that sells 50 million games a year and in each one of those they try and nickle and dime people a little bit…. it’s going to have a lot more breadth than some of these other guys.
Actual Worst: The Banks – Bank of America, Chase, Capital One, and Wells Fargo
It’s funny that America’s economy can be entirely blamed on a collection of banks conspiring to cheat consumers and in term cheat the country… and yet people are so willing to jump on a video game publisher.
It’s like if Satan was marching his army across the world conquering as he went and a gypsy was stealing quarters at a market, people would be more willing to tell off the gypsy woman than Satan.
But that’s exactly how it is.
10 years ago the banks of America were caught using poor business practices, that they still use today.
The worst of these is giving people mortgages, that they know people would be unable to pay back. They allow people to take bets through differential investment insurance on whether these people will fail at paying their mortgage and when they can’t pay their mortgages these guys take their homes and in turn profits go to the guys betting against them.
This happened all across America and still happens. Bank of America is clearly the worst of the worst. With a four way split vote on banks it’s amazing that Bank of America was even able to get into the finals
But I ask this.
What is worse from a company.
A company that will liquidate the total assets and home of 1000 families functionally making them homeless and destitute. Or a guy who charges you an extra $5 for a character slot?
Because the effects of Bank of America are not as every day visual as EA’s it might be hard to see how bad this collection of banks are exactly.
Interesting fact about… interest. Interest was first established by Jewish bankers in the 11th century. The idea was Jews would store your money in a bank, they would take your money and invest it in something and you would collect interest. The interest rate would be competitive with other bankers and so bankers would be forced to give larger and larger cuts of their international profit.
Every day nickle and dime include the transaction fee which was first introduced by Bank of America. This practice became so big that banks started offering people to trade their interest gains for transaction fee removal. Yes the banks convinced us that they were doing us a favour… as opposed to us having done them a favour by letting them hold our money.
Unfortunately the victims of this bank are so destitute and broke they don’t have a voice to speak out against these guys.
#2 Worst: Walmart
I can understand there might be a little resentment towards Sears, JCPenny, and BestBuy. But honestly, none of that resentment is even remotely close to that of Walmart.
Walmart is such a clear second worst company in America. However instead of being rated second it gets to be tied with AT&T for third because of how the voting brackets worked out.
Walmart is everywhere. It is the largest distributor of goods in the world. They purchase and sell more stuff than anyone would have ever thought possible.
However simply being large is not a problem.
Walmart has two major problems that make them second worst.
The first, and most critical is they do not treat their employees well. Here in Canada Walmart has most recently been caught in a foreign workers fraud. Basically in Canada if you cannot hire from the local population you can hire foreign workers to temporarily work in the country and reduced rates. Walmart fired a large portion of their staff and replaced them with foreign workers. Other countries have this and I have no doubt Walmart does this world wide.
Another major labour problem involves unions.
Walmart hates unions.
In Quebec a Walmart staff voted to become unionized. They signed on with he Canadian Autoworkers Union (the CAW creates and supports small unions for such places similar to how the Teamsters work in America). Less than a week later the Walmart announced it was closing down. All staff was laid off and everyone lost their job. Walmart did not want the idea of a unionized Walmart to spread to other Walmarts.
A second major problem with Walmart involves their foreign workers. All those cheap goods we buy come at a cost. Walmart operates thousands of sweat shops in China using mostly prison labour but also some child labour. Under these conditions people make all of the goods we find at Walmart.
The goods are sent to your local Walmart where Walmart sells them so cheaply that local made non-sweat shop goods cannot survive. Other retailers are fighting to survive against the Walmart Juggernaut.
Third Worst: Carnival Cruise Lines
I’m sure there are tones of reasons to hate AT&T, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft… I really do. But I don’t think Google changing the layout of Youtube or Facebook adding Timeline really cut it against real hard hitting problems of some of these companies.
Most recently the US Senate indicated the Carnival Cruise Lines costs the US Navy $4.2M in rescues with over 90 serious incidents.
As a response Carnival Cruise Lines indicated that it is maritime tradition to help anyone who is in need and referenced that they sent one of their cruises to aid Florida.
And this is where it gets kind of weird. First it means that the people on that cruise were sent off to Florida instead of their normal regular destination. And second it means that Carnival Cruises have way more problems than you will often hear about. With over 90 serious incidents there is more going on in Carnival Cruise Lines than you might think.
I don’t even know why it is called an American company. Carnival Cruise Lines is based out of some small island in the Bahamas and simply using American services for their cruise. Yes, they don’t pay taxes.
Most cruise lines will cancel their cruise if the weather is too bad. As compensation they will often offer various packages around the same time on ships that are sailing that won’t encourage weather problems.
Not Carnival Cruise, this discount carrier will go no matter what. More often than not passengers will get dropped off on random countries that are not on the list. Some of these areas do not have access to an international airport meaning once you get on this cruise, you cannot get off no matter what.
And you really get the idea that it is discount.
People often report unclean conditions, shortages of food, bad smells everywhere, understaffing, theft, and nickle and diming.
I can’t see how Electronic Arts who charge you $10 for DLC can even be compared to these charltons who are seemingly so incompetent.
EA Isn’t the Worst
EA gets a lot of flak because they are the kings of an industry that is full of despicable business practices and games being pushed forward before they are done. Electronic Arts is a symbol of all of the problems almost every single gaming company out there has, not the exception.
I didn’t mention it until now, but it is worth mentioning. Recently Electronic Arts laid off a large portion of it’s staff at a Montreal based studio that worked on mobile apps.
This is not a shitty EA specific decision, this is something every single gaming company out there does all the time. The problem is that because Electronic Arts is so freaking huge
When I worked for Bioware (pre-EA) and Ubisoft prior I was hired on for a contract in which my contract expired on the release date. If they pushed back development I would get a contract extension. The work I did was not needed beyond the development of those games.
This is the uncertain world that video game developers live in. Everything they do is very specialized and because of this once a game is done, they’re not needed anymore. Looking at Bioware’s hiring I found this:
It’s very obvious from this job posting that one of these two positions is a temporary one.
This is how it is for people who make games everywhere. They want to get that position on the left, but they have to start off with a bunch of those positions on the right.
In a game development cycle it starts off with artists who are working out the conceptual stuff. Artists include both graphical and authors who are working out the story. After six months they might hire on some people to work very specifically with character models and another to work on just backgrounds. Staff shifts from one job to another and on launch day there is a giant set of lay offs. The only people kept on are usually those who have the skills to work on effective DLC who generally get contract extensions.
These people who are held on might get transferred to another project as the DLC runs out. They then hire on another wave of people to work on another project.
Every single company does this. The fact that EA might hire on a thousand people to make a game means that they’ll probably lay off a thousand people once the game is made.
If this still disgusts you remember every single game developer does it and the only way to stop it would be to boycott all games… which you will never do.
Not sure if it was because the game wasn’t selling as many as they hoped or the pre-order bonus was too good.
SEGA has decided to change the pre-order bonus.
The original pre-order bonus setup by THQ was tiered so that first tier was two Team Fortress 2 hats, second tier was Warhammer 40K Cawn of War 2 Retribution, and tier three was a General’s cache filled with skins, generals, and Steam dollars to purchase future DLC with.
So the new offer still includes the Team Fortress 2 hats, the only thing that was unlocked from the tiers. There is now a free piece of DLC called Theatre of War which includes a new mini-campaign from another part of the flank. There are two skins for tanks. The final piece, and most controversial is the four generals.
The four generals are a little controversial because obviously they will be selling these generals as DLC. This means people who pre-order will have a tactical advantage on those who do not.
Generals in Company of Heroes 2 will operate like selecting your Air,Ground,Tanks path did in Company of Heroes. The difference is that different generals can be slotted in and out to give various powers and advantages.
Had you asked me a year ago if Wrath of Heroes would have closed today…. I might have believed you.
The game was doomed to fail. In this article you will find out how.
Origins
It all began with a studio called Mythic. Mythic successfully created a game called Dark Ages of Camelot. DAOC was successful in attracting 1M gamers to its ranks and was one of the few early MMOs actually able to compete with Everquest and Lineage. It was a masterpiece. The game was so great (for it’s time) that people would be talking about it as the prime example of great PvP for a full decade of development.
For years people would release MMOs talking about how they have former developers of Dark Age of Camelot. Even today, Elder Scrolls Online, declares that it has developers from this monumental game.
So when DAOC studio Mythic was purchased by Electronic Arts people started throwing doubts into the future of this former independent studio. Warhammer Online was announced as the first post-EA title. The game was hyped up to no end. A large part of the success of the hype was how into the game developers were. When asked to describe MMO players the lead developer stated “people want games that are addictive, in which you beat your chest run at your opponent and kill or be killed.”
It was this sort of attitude that saw the game get 1M on launch sales… but that’s all.
Warhammer Online fell apart relatively quickly and was never really able to develop as a game. Support for the game was dropped very quickly and some or all of the staff was re-assigned to a new MMO studio “Bioware Austin.” To this day Warhammer Online still runs with the infinite trial which unlike most games which have this… it’s had no positive improvements on entry into the game. SWTOR went free to play, Warhammer Online still remains a subscription based game.
The Warhammer franchise was still felt to be worth exploiting. THQ was still having relative success with their Warhammer 40K series and it was felt they just needed to make the right Warhammer game for the giant Warhammer tabletop community.
The end result was they created a multi-online battle arena (MOBA) based around Warhammer Online’s end game multiplayer.
Fail #1: Market Mis-Conception
At the time of Wrath of Heroes there were really only two types of MOBA games available, your typical shooter types and your League of Legends types.
The shooter types were more popular as their gross sum of players was by and large the largest percentage of the market. Although League of Legends had a large player base, other games of its type (and there were many) had no chance of success.
So it was openly presumed that League of Legends was a bit of a fluke and copying it’s format was a bad idea.
League of Legends had a lot of problems with its game. The first was that it wasn’t all that welcoming to new players. The amount of stuff you would have to learn was tremendous considering HOW many unit and unit types there were exactly. One top of that it wasn’t all that obvious what items you ought to buy, the values of different things for different classes, and the end game for this game.
The League of Legends format was seemingly not worth copying because it fit into a large niche similar to that of World of Warcraft. In the past Mythic (now Bioware-Mythic) tried to snake users away from Activision-Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and failed. So obviously taking on the industry giant was not going to be their goal.
Then they looked to the other genre, shooters. Shooters are open to anyone to join. They actually have no learning curve whatsoever. Anyone can jump in and play instantly. Shooters didn’t revolve around an existing evolving game like LoL and didn’t have complicated in-game decisions to be made. Shooters were games you could jump into and jump out of, no long commitments and no long term investment, other than the initial purchase.
Call of Duty’s model in particular was of great interest. It allowed people to make open customizations in between games to weapon types in between matches based on how much you leveled that particular weapon. It was felt this could be adopted to heroes and as you would level your heroes you could create advantages or traits.
This ended up being a fairly large mis-interpretation of the existing market place. As it turned out the reason why people were so accepting of Call of Duty style play was because it was really the only popular option. Tribes Ascend was able to show with it’s hyper popular space shooter that you can have complicated progressive play in a MOBA and be very successful.
The end result was a product that felt very bland and didn’t seem to go anywhere.
They very significantly missed the marker on their market. The thing that people liked about Call of Duty games was that your kills rewarded you with a “in a row” based system in which you could deploy some sort of trick against the enemy. Had the Call of Duty franchise been expanded into larger roles it’d probably do even better.
There was no evolutionary system in WoH. It was simply a game in which three teams spammed their abilities against each other in hopes of landing final blows until the time was up.
Fail #2: Tri-Faction
One of the crowning ideas from Dark Age of Camelot was the idea that it was easier to balance a game around three factions than one. The idea worked like this. If two teams are fighting each other the two teams had to be identical otherwise they would have advantages over each other. With a third faction added in it meant in three way battles there needed to be far more co-ordination to team up with the other team and take down the person who was in the lead… and then backstab your former friend who is now in the lead.
If this doesn’t make sense to you… you’re not alone.
But you can’t convince fans of the original franchise of the inherent wrongitudeness of this argument.
Let’s say for example you are one such person who accepts this argument.
The fault in the argument is that there is some sort of balance in a constant 2v1 type of scenario, in which the king of the mountain is always the one.
As a matter of fact the levels of tactics in this gets minimized from removing key players or isolation type strategies simply to two teams zerging whomever happens to be the top. Of course you can’t zerg only the guy who is on the top because you want to also crush the person on the bottom from time to time so that when you get to the top they have further to grow.
The end result is that whomever is in third place will always almost be in third place forever… and it goes back to be a 1v1 with an extra non-important party involved.
This failed tri-faction format has plagued MMOs for quite some time, when introduced into a MOBA it just showed very little hope.
By adding in third third faction it meant that you could not plot traps because any second you are not engaged in combat you are missing an opportunity to score some of those deadly kills.
If you are losing in a MOBA like DOTA2 your best bet is to play defensive and spring traps on lesser numbers of opponents. If you are losing in a MOBA like Wrath of Heroes you run out and do the exact same failing tactic you were doing before.
The problem ends up being killing blows. In a simple 1v1 scenario it’s very easy to track who earns a kill. But in 1v1v1 if I was to do 80% of the damage but you were to get the final 20%…. you got the kill. That just doesn’t seem right… and that fact just didn’t set well with the community as a whole. The fact that the game favored classes that had high nuking power over all others proved to be a massive downfall in this 1v1v1 format. People were choosing heroes specifically so that could run in and steal killing blows in team battles.
The tri-faction also limited what sort of game modes they could release. Of course there is elimination. Then there is elimination. There’s a hold a point mode. There was a somewhat of a capture the flag game. The capture the flag game ended up just being another elimination mode. The hold a point mode simply ended up being a run in circles mode. The tri-faction modes simply could not be fun.
Had they simply removed the tri-faction mode they could have created game modes that were strategic and fun. Instead it just always ended up being the largest spam possible.
Unfortunately though they could not remove it, all because of the third point.
Fail #3: Games Workshop
An intellectual property contains the right to an idea. So Games Workshop owns the rights to all content regarding the licensing of Warhammer and Warhammer 40K. So at the end of the day all final say will go to Games Workshop on all things.
When you’re dealing with some IPs they’re very flexible. There are nearly 100 different incarnations of Superman and Batman with extremes being allowed by artists. When you look at Batman games in fact you find very few common elements as everyone seems to have their own unique take on Batman.
Having a very flexible intellectual property is important because gameplay elements have to be fun and the story has to be great second.
A MOBA has a very simple design. But when designed within a very stringent world it becomes difficult to create something worthwhile.
One of my friends was a former employee of THQ and he spoke of how hard it was working with Games Workshop. It would seem that as they had great ideas for Warhammer 40K titles they kept getting shot down because it was outside of the character and lore of the people they were portraying. In fact there was a book called Space Marine which Game’s Workshop sued because they felt they owned the term “space marine.”
The same basically happened for this game. The developers might have had all sorts of great ideas for the game… and they all got shot down by Game’s Workshop. All characters, abilities, game modes, and settings had to be run by Game’s Workshop before they could make it live. It kind of hurts when your hands get tied by intellectual property owners.
Fail #4: No Hooks
At the end of the day Wrath of Heroes did not have any “hooks” for consumers. A strong MOBA developer will offer a carrot to a gamer. Then the MOBA developer will slowly string that carrot away until the player is so far deep into the game that he gets upset about there being no carrot… and then he finally gets the carrot… and another trap is presented to the player.
This is the profit making gameplay of nearly every MOBA and every single MMO. The goal is to reward your players as little as possible but make it seem like they are making possible.
World of Tanks does this by rewarding two currencies that can be invested in different ways strategically.
Call of Duty does this by making it so your weapons level on every single use so that as you are leveling to unlock new weapons and perks you are also leveling to unlock new gadgets.
DOTA2 does this by offering you randomized rewards and set rewards.
A good hook for one of these games is one in which you are following that carrot for your reward and some intermittent reinforcement is presented so that you continue playing.
DOTA2′s model was lottery based, and there was no intermittent reinforcement.
Basically after achieving certain objectives in a match you would receive a lottery spin based on each win you get. You gained gold based on what combinations of things you can get.
There was no second tier keeping you there. If all of your gambling rolls were bad you were less interested in grinding. If all of them were good you would just think this is normal and still not care.
The gambling mechanic itself doesn’t represent a good hook.
A good gambling mechanic involves risking something to gain something. This mechanic has no risk, it’s just a randomized reward. If your reward happens to suck you feel cheated and unrewarded. If it’s amazing you feel lucky… and still unrewarded.
Instead the game ought to have scaled rewards in such a way that you gain large rewards for great success but you can risk it for even greater rewards… and then choose what your risk level is.
Without an effective hook however Wrath of Heroes was unable to keep people playing. Instead people would play for a while, make no progress and then just quit. The brain responds best to almost getting something and feeling like they could have had that. Without scaling rewards you cannot create an effective hook.
In the end the design team at Mythic-Bioware were trying to create a game that was fun to play instead of a game that was addictive. Games that are fun people will have people play it once and be done with it. Think of any single player game out there that you enjoyed… but uninstalled after you played it once. That’s what Wrath of Heroes was, an online game without an addictive hook.
I remember thinking that Microsoft Instant Messenger would last forever.
It goes back even further than that I suppose. When IRC was out I just didn’t see how anything could compete with this mass chatroom format, then messenger wiped them out.
Microsoft’s Live Messenger became so dominant that it wiped out all of the messenger competition.
But as it ended up Facebook wiped out Live Messenger. It was a year ago I logged on and noticed no one was around. I deleted Messenger that day. The day after I received an email from Microsoft telling me that they merged my account with Skype and would discontinue their messenger service.
Facebook was successful in connecting the whole of the internet together and it was also successful in linking up all games, tablets, cell phones, and even televisions. It was a successful platform that dominated social media. Of course, Facebook could be wiped out eventually too.
Which got me to thinking, how long will it be before Steam stops being relevant?
Steam was the first digital distribution service for video games. It initially became popular for two main reasons.
The first is that Valve makes really great games and they forced you to install the Steam DRM in order to purchase Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Gary’s Mod and other of their DRM loaded super popular games.
The second reason is that because of Valve’s reputation for making outstanding games people have become very loyal to Valve and have stuck with Steam.
But signs that Steam is not alone have really shown their signs.
The first and most obvious is Electronic Arts’ Origin platform. A lot of people compare this to an indie developer and a big giant corporate evil developer.
But let’s think about it a different way.
Electronic Arts is a huge publisher that puts out tones of great titles every year. Last year we saw Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3 launch as an Origin exclusive (on PC). Those are two massive games. To compete Valve produced… nothing.
This year Origin exclusives include Sim City and Crysis 3. Crysis is one of the best selling game series of all time. Sim City will be the highest selling game of 2013.
Whether you love or hate Electronic Arts the fact is they are putting out huge AAA titles that are actually good and that people actually play. They are games that require the Origin platform to play and as I’m writing this Origin hit its peak of traffic with over 1,000,000 users online.
Steam at its peak was 2,000,000 users. Origin clearly has a long way but they have taken a huge bite out of Steam and might continue to.
Valve simply put, does not make games. All Valve does these days is publish mods as stand alone games.
There last few titles include Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, DOTA2.
Counter Strike: Global Offensive as far as I can see is just a graphical update on the original game.
Left 4 Dead 2 is a sequel to Left 4 Dead, which was a popular mod of Half Life.
Portal 2 is the sequel to Portal. This is actually a game a Valve employee made in his spare time and was released as a 1 hour game. It is the only real game they’ve released in a long time.
DOTA 2 of course was “ripped off” from Warcraft 3 and it’s still in court the exact legal status of this game. Surely it will go live, but to say Valve made it and has exclusive rights to it is laughable. As we speak League of Legends is launching a mega campaign to crush this title.
Other than Portal, Valve has not released a meaningful title in years. On top of this the only publishers they are getting to sign up for Steam only DRM are very small publishers like Focus Home Interactive and Paradox Studios.
To be fair Bethesda does all their work through Valve. They are a major publisher and they do release a game once every 2-3 years that shatters records every time.
That’s being fair.
But the fact that all of the Bethesda’s of the world are doing without Steam is becoming kind of bothersome.
Steam, like Facebook, is trying new things to try and stay meaningful and stay ahead of the game. The goal of their current developments is to offer enough tools to publishers that they will accept the Steam only DRM and not go to other digital distributors.
The Steam Workshop is one of the big grabs for developers. By hooking their game up to Steam and only Steam they can rent the Steam Workshop and inspire a modding community relatively cheaply. For some games this makes a lot of sense and leads to sales. ARMA 2 and Skyrim are the biggest benefactors of this to date. But for other games, like Torchlight 2, largely get ignored.
There is also Steam Leaderboards which is relatively new. This feature allows for smaller games to create global ratings based on performance.
The Market, which is still in beta, will eventually allow players to buy and sell things on a virtual market and make money. Steam picks up a commission on every sale. In the future it will probably be possible that other developers will be able to put their games on there and pick up the commissions.
The Greenlight Project is another attempt at staying relevant. One of the big guiding forces that is stealing gamers away from traditional platforms is the massive Kickstarter indie market. Basically a developer throws his game up on Kickstarter and asks for X number of dollars. But he’s not really looking for X number of dollars, he’s actually looking for X number of players. In truth most of the really great games on there could be funded through a legitimate publisher.
But that’s not how this profit model works.
They want to have people contribute to the game and work with them developing the game. The game will spread through word of mouth and increase the total number of contributors. In the end these small team projects have great room for success and can operate completely separate of any platform. Most of these games are hosted on their own websites and allow you to download the game from their own servers.
By dipping their fingers into this pocket Valve is not actually looking to increase the quality of games that are available on Steam, but instead grab this unique user developer market that is emerging.
Greenlight if anything will keep Steam relevant in the future.
But for how long?
It has been 9 years since the release of Half Life 2. No doubt if or when a Half Life 3 (or Half Life Episode 3) was to release it would peak interest in gamers. But by comparison Electronic Arts is throwing out 2-3 AAA releases every single year as Origin exclusives and Ubisoft is creating 2-3 AAA releases every single year with UPlay.
It won’t be long before other people figure out they can do without Steam.
For those who think that the Steambox will save PC gaming and save Steam… think again. The Steambox is just a platform that supports any client, a person can load Origin and Steam on it. It is no different than how Facebook can appear on your cell phone…. however if Facebook were to venture into the hardware market it would be a nightmare.
EA is Not the Worst Company in America
Posted in Blog Entry, Commentary with tags bank of america, consumerist, ea, electronic arts, walmart on April 15, 2013 by troublmakerFor the second year in a row The Consumerist has rated Electronic Arts (via public voting) the worst company in America.
This of course was done via popular vote and Electronic Arts is the most popular worst company in America.
I think that if anything is what they actually are, the most popular bad company in America. Not the worst by any means. There are obviously some voting problems here. If polls were setup outside of Walmarts showing all of the various propaganda about the bad stuff Walmart does, Walmart might be the worst.
This article acts as a defense of Electronic Arts, not because they are great guys, but because there are far worse villains in the world than the guys who make video games for a living.
Why Electronic Arts?
If you ask the President of Electronic Arts why he feels EA got this award he would say it’s because they’re the top, or more oddly… that people targeted them because of their pr-LGBT stance.
This last point was very odd. Bioware (the RPG branch of EA) make games that feature characters who you can make into lesbians and homosexuals. Mass Effect 3 most notoriously features a gay black love affair that you can craft if you want it. SWTOR came under heavy fire when they said they would add in LGBT relationships and even more when they actually did it.
So I decided to go to the White Supremicist web site that has been around for a little over 20 years. I first found Stormfront when I became intellectually interested (as a child) on whether or not racists actually still exist… they most certainly do. Stormfront like any other white supremicist league has a fervent and powerful gaming community. So some quotes from their forum on Mass Effect 3:
“Im disappointed in the open faggotry in this game, in one scene a male negro talks about losing his husband back on earth…
So pointless and disgusting to have stuff like that in a game, shame on you Bioware.”
“The first 31 hours of gameplay… I really liked. Tense action, good sense, atmosphere, music, story (slightly less dialogue options than in ME2 though) but… What really, really bugged me was the ending/s. The Stargazer cut-scene was a nice reflection though, but the initial choices are a bit too similar in a depressing way, imo.”
“ME3 was a great game until the ending. I here most fans hated the ending so much that they’ve either subscribed to “Indoctrination theory”; in which Shepard is hallucinating the end scene, or are complaining to Bioware to write a new one in DLC form.”
“I agree. It’s pointless and annyoing to have political correct and multicultural marxist agenda in games. It’s everywhere.
I couldn’t believe it when that pilot Cortez started crying to my Shepard about the loss of his husband. And it gets worse, you can overhear conversation on the Citadel in which a woman is searching for her wife.
Then there is the black guy Anderson romantically involved with Kahlee Sanders, one of the few remaining blond haired, blue eyed humans (apparently in Mass effect universe genuine blond hair and blue eyes are almost nonexistent 
). And of course, except the Reapers, we have the other bad guys, Cerberus , “human supremacist” group. Etc. Yuck! I’m sorry now that I bought ME3. I finished it but it left a sour taste in my mouth.
It’s sad that gaming industry joined in pushing a certain agenda.”
Yes as it seems even the white supremicists are split on homosexuality in Mass Effect 3. From a simple sampling of 100 responses I found a little under 50% did not care about the gay relationships while another 50% were actively boycotting Electronic Arts.
Although it is possible that there were church groups and hate groups working against EA to try and make them the top, it might only represent a smaller portion of society.
So what is the real reason EA was voted the worst company in America?
There are two distinct reasons that are both true and when combined make for a surefire winner.
The first is that gamers are the most connected players in the world. They watch more Youtube videos than any other crowd, they spend more hours on Reddit than any other sub-reddit, and take in more news than the average person. Gamers in their heightened intellectual state are also prone to protest.
The mass protest of gamers in 2011 was enough to cause legislatures to consider the Stop Online Piracy Act.
A year later the protest of gamers was enough to stop any real legislation in regards to violent video games.
Video gamers are a giant and powerful untapped voting electorate that no politician has ever sought to capture. On top of this they are also one of the most international crowds. Electronic Arts ships its games off to over 300 countries world wide. There is no other company on the list that even matches this.
When I voted (as a Canadian) in this poll it never once asked me what country I was from. It just allowed me to vote. To this extent this massive international block could swing in and send a note to the gaming industry, hey, you guys suck!
But with that in mind had it been ANY games publishing company on that list, they would have been worst as well. Activision could have easily won this award simply for being the only games publishing company on the list.
If there were two on the list, neither might have won. One of the problems with this is you have four major retailers, four major banks, four cable networks, two postal delivery services, seven Internet providers, three airlines, four credit services, and a cruise line… that’s a lot of split voting.
In a political situation it would be like if half of the Democrats left the Democratic Party and created The New Liberal Party of America. This would split the Liberal vote in half and cause the Republicans to win every election. This is basically what is happening in this poll.
So that’s a long winded way of saying #1.
The second reason has to do with their business practices, although as I will show later, their’s are not nearly as bad as others. Electronic Arts releases SimCity and on the first day you can purchase three DLC packs. Each of these cost $10 and add a lot to the game in terms of functionality. That makes the actual price of the game to be $90 when games like Cities in Motion 2 are running around selling their game for $20.
This kind of business practice of splitting up games and nickle and diming consumers is enough to anger people. It gets worse with SWTOR’s free to play model making you purchase toolbars and character slots (and expansions).
When you have a company that sells 50 million games a year and in each one of those they try and nickle and dime people a little bit…. it’s going to have a lot more breadth than some of these other guys.
Actual Worst: The Banks – Bank of America, Chase, Capital One, and Wells Fargo
It’s funny that America’s economy can be entirely blamed on a collection of banks conspiring to cheat consumers and in term cheat the country… and yet people are so willing to jump on a video game publisher.
It’s like if Satan was marching his army across the world conquering as he went and a gypsy was stealing quarters at a market, people would be more willing to tell off the gypsy woman than Satan.
But that’s exactly how it is.
10 years ago the banks of America were caught using poor business practices, that they still use today.
The worst of these is giving people mortgages, that they know people would be unable to pay back. They allow people to take bets through differential investment insurance on whether these people will fail at paying their mortgage and when they can’t pay their mortgages these guys take their homes and in turn profits go to the guys betting against them.
This happened all across America and still happens. Bank of America is clearly the worst of the worst. With a four way split vote on banks it’s amazing that Bank of America was even able to get into the finals
But I ask this.
What is worse from a company.
A company that will liquidate the total assets and home of 1000 families functionally making them homeless and destitute. Or a guy who charges you an extra $5 for a character slot?
Because the effects of Bank of America are not as every day visual as EA’s it might be hard to see how bad this collection of banks are exactly.
Interesting fact about… interest. Interest was first established by Jewish bankers in the 11th century. The idea was Jews would store your money in a bank, they would take your money and invest it in something and you would collect interest. The interest rate would be competitive with other bankers and so bankers would be forced to give larger and larger cuts of their international profit.
Every day nickle and dime include the transaction fee which was first introduced by Bank of America. This practice became so big that banks started offering people to trade their interest gains for transaction fee removal. Yes the banks convinced us that they were doing us a favour… as opposed to us having done them a favour by letting them hold our money.
Unfortunately the victims of this bank are so destitute and broke they don’t have a voice to speak out against these guys.
#2 Worst: Walmart
I can understand there might be a little resentment towards Sears, JCPenny, and BestBuy. But honestly, none of that resentment is even remotely close to that of Walmart.
Walmart is such a clear second worst company in America. However instead of being rated second it gets to be tied with AT&T for third because of how the voting brackets worked out.
Walmart is everywhere. It is the largest distributor of goods in the world. They purchase and sell more stuff than anyone would have ever thought possible.
However simply being large is not a problem.
Walmart has two major problems that make them second worst.
The first, and most critical is they do not treat their employees well. Here in Canada Walmart has most recently been caught in a foreign workers fraud. Basically in Canada if you cannot hire from the local population you can hire foreign workers to temporarily work in the country and reduced rates. Walmart fired a large portion of their staff and replaced them with foreign workers. Other countries have this and I have no doubt Walmart does this world wide.
Another major labour problem involves unions.
Walmart hates unions.
In Quebec a Walmart staff voted to become unionized. They signed on with he Canadian Autoworkers Union (the CAW creates and supports small unions for such places similar to how the Teamsters work in America). Less than a week later the Walmart announced it was closing down. All staff was laid off and everyone lost their job. Walmart did not want the idea of a unionized Walmart to spread to other Walmarts.
A second major problem with Walmart involves their foreign workers. All those cheap goods we buy come at a cost. Walmart operates thousands of sweat shops in China using mostly prison labour but also some child labour. Under these conditions people make all of the goods we find at Walmart.
The goods are sent to your local Walmart where Walmart sells them so cheaply that local made non-sweat shop goods cannot survive. Other retailers are fighting to survive against the Walmart Juggernaut.
Third Worst: Carnival Cruise Lines
I’m sure there are tones of reasons to hate AT&T, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft… I really do. But I don’t think Google changing the layout of Youtube or Facebook adding Timeline really cut it against real hard hitting problems of some of these companies.
Most recently the US Senate indicated the Carnival Cruise Lines costs the US Navy $4.2M in rescues with over 90 serious incidents.
As a response Carnival Cruise Lines indicated that it is maritime tradition to help anyone who is in need and referenced that they sent one of their cruises to aid Florida.
And this is where it gets kind of weird. First it means that the people on that cruise were sent off to Florida instead of their normal regular destination. And second it means that Carnival Cruises have way more problems than you will often hear about. With over 90 serious incidents there is more going on in Carnival Cruise Lines than you might think.
I don’t even know why it is called an American company. Carnival Cruise Lines is based out of some small island in the Bahamas and simply using American services for their cruise. Yes, they don’t pay taxes.
Most cruise lines will cancel their cruise if the weather is too bad. As compensation they will often offer various packages around the same time on ships that are sailing that won’t encourage weather problems.
Not Carnival Cruise, this discount carrier will go no matter what. More often than not passengers will get dropped off on random countries that are not on the list. Some of these areas do not have access to an international airport meaning once you get on this cruise, you cannot get off no matter what.
And you really get the idea that it is discount.
People often report unclean conditions, shortages of food, bad smells everywhere, understaffing, theft, and nickle and diming.
I can’t see how Electronic Arts who charge you $10 for DLC can even be compared to these charltons who are seemingly so incompetent.
EA Isn’t the Worst
EA gets a lot of flak because they are the kings of an industry that is full of despicable business practices and games being pushed forward before they are done. Electronic Arts is a symbol of all of the problems almost every single gaming company out there has, not the exception.
I didn’t mention it until now, but it is worth mentioning. Recently Electronic Arts laid off a large portion of it’s staff at a Montreal based studio that worked on mobile apps.
This is not a shitty EA specific decision, this is something every single gaming company out there does all the time. The problem is that because Electronic Arts is so freaking huge
When I worked for Bioware (pre-EA) and Ubisoft prior I was hired on for a contract in which my contract expired on the release date. If they pushed back development I would get a contract extension. The work I did was not needed beyond the development of those games.
This is the uncertain world that video game developers live in. Everything they do is very specialized and because of this once a game is done, they’re not needed anymore. Looking at Bioware’s hiring I found this:
It’s very obvious from this job posting that one of these two positions is a temporary one.
This is how it is for people who make games everywhere. They want to get that position on the left, but they have to start off with a bunch of those positions on the right.
In a game development cycle it starts off with artists who are working out the conceptual stuff. Artists include both graphical and authors who are working out the story. After six months they might hire on some people to work very specifically with character models and another to work on just backgrounds. Staff shifts from one job to another and on launch day there is a giant set of lay offs. The only people kept on are usually those who have the skills to work on effective DLC who generally get contract extensions.
These people who are held on might get transferred to another project as the DLC runs out. They then hire on another wave of people to work on another project.
Every single company does this. The fact that EA might hire on a thousand people to make a game means that they’ll probably lay off a thousand people once the game is made.
If this still disgusts you remember every single game developer does it and the only way to stop it would be to boycott all games… which you will never do.
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