For those not in the know, the image to the left is of the original Warcraft. While I didn’t really play the first entry with anyone else it certainly prepped me for Warcraft 2, which I played the hell out of on many a LAN. My teenage years were full of hefting around beastly computers just so we could string piles of wires along the floor to play games like Warcraft 2, Quake, and Counterstrike. I’ve been playing socially since the early-to-mid 90s. Guess what? I never stopped playing single-player games.

I’ve spent a great deal of time since then playing lone wolf in games like Mass Effect and Final Fantasy. In fact, Final Fantasy XII has taken up most of my game time for the last several months. I’m a sucker for good story and I enjoy taking the time to flesh out and explore worlds like those found in Elder Scrolls.

That being said, I also consider myself to have sound business acumen. From the Kotaku article:

While successful, the addition of multiplayer to the multi-million unit selling BioShock may be illustrative of the changing expectations of consumers. If there’s little to do but replay a narrative-driven campaign, many gamers appear quite happy to resell their discs and move onto the next game.

What they’re saying is that BioShock 2 is pushing multiplayer something fierce. We won’t know if the single-player campaign is adversely affected until the game ships, but I prefer to put my faith in Bethesda. They made an awesome game in BioShock and I expect nothing less from the sequel.

However, I do understand the point-of-view of the publisher:

“The best way to combat people trading in your game is to simply make it better in whatever way works for you,” argues Todd Howard. “People trade in cars with poor value. Our DLC is a good way to add to the value of the base game and give folks yet another reason to keep playing.”

If your customer trades in that disc, then there’s one more used disc in circulation for someone else to purchase without having to purchase a shiny, new copy from the distributor – thus less revenue for the developer. Further, if the developer offers enough compelling content after the initial release then the more likely I am to purchase shiny, new downloadable content. Again, driving revenue for the developer.

In recapitulation, I don’t think single-player games are going anywhere. Nor do I fault developers for trying to blend cooperative modes with franchises or genres which are traditionally single player. So long as Sqeenix keeps making stand-alone Final Fantasy games, I’m all set.

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Google: Wave, an early version of a collaboration and communication tool, was recently announced and released to developers. It consolidates email, instant messaging, blogging, wikis, multimedia, and document sharing, into one interactive application. By presenting Google: Wave to the community now, Google has committed the project to open-source development in hopes of inspiring IT professionals everywhere to find revolutionary new ways to apply their own applications to Wave, before the product’s launch later this year.

“We’re banking on Wave having a very large impact, but a lot of it depends on our ability to explain this to users. That’s part of the reason why we’re putting this out early to developers,” said Lars Rasmussen, Wave project co-founder. “Now is a good time for developers to start picking up the APIs, building cool applications and extensions, so when we do launch later this year our users and their users can enjoy all these things together.”

In their eighty minute presentation at Google’s annual I/O conference co-founders Lars and Jens Rasmussen, of Google: Maps acclaim, demonstrated a number of of already functional applications. This included multiple Wave Clients, Photo Sharing, multi-user live-interaction, contextual spell check, live language-translation, and API’s interacting with applications outside the demonstration hall.  With just minimal interaction, Wave easily co-opted its operation with data mining, Google: Maps, an unspecified blog client, and Twitter.

Wave is built on Google Web Toolkit using HTML 5, and is designed to let developers extend its functionality and integrate it with other Web services. By design, Wave lets people create a document using a client no more advanced than a Web-Browser, where multiple users can add and edit rich text, multimedia, gadget applications and feeds concurrently.

See for yourself at:

http://wave.google.com/

On January 16th 2009, electronics superstore Circuit City issued a press release gavelling another nail in the coffin of the current economy.  Beginning Saturday January 17th, the company will begin liquidating its assets in order to pay its creditors and pass quietly into the footnotes of business history.  The announcement does not come as any great suprise, However, it potentially signifies what may be the official beginning (and the first overt casualty) of the U.S. recession on a blue-collar level,  a downturn that has been flagging the economy since early 2008.

Circuit City had hoped to use the Christmas Season, and Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, to reorganize itself sufficiently to stay in business, a feat that pudits hoped would buoy concerns about a consumer level recession.  While Circuit City will not have been the first company affected, or even bankrupted, by the recession, its closing foreshadows the future of Economics and expectancy for 2009 and perhaps the next 3-7 years.

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Dear Fellow Nimrods:

If you peer closely enough at the image above, you’ll see that our site traffic is up 27,600%. Frankly, that’s awesome. Keep up the good work.

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Just before the new year Sony decided it high time to roll out a “public beta” version of their long-in-wait service, Playstation Home. Having not played with Home for any extensive amount of time I’m hardly qualified to speak of its virtues, much less its purpose. However, Rastafunk Abe and I caught an article on arstechnica recently detailing just how popular “add-on” items are despite limited assortment and bugs common with any beta software.

Sony is driving the micro-transaction to new levels and their program (game?) hasn’t even officially started. Take for instance the creation of “groups”… I can best liken this to a clanship of sorts, though limited to 31 users. In beta form, groups cost $5.00. In their final stage (I was warned upon trying to create a group…) they will incur monthly service fees to maintain. I dared to believe that anyone would pay for a half-hearted “Friend’s List” so I ran a search. All groups… I can’t tell you how many popped up, but it was at least several hundred.

Another pricing matter which took me by surprise was the total disparity between the various goods for sale. Fancy, designer coffee tables selling for $1 while a t-shirt sells for $2.50. I can only surmise the reason being that a coffee table is there for one’s personal enjoyment while a t-shirt is a walking advertisement visible to the masses.

The last thing that caught my attention was a comment posted in regards to the original ars story. One commenter asked the question “Who cares? What does it matter if people buy into this? Let them waste their money…” Which brings me to this post. I care because Sony is taking the lead in setting a precedent that’s quite dangerous to the consumer. I perceive the problem to be larger than a company simply charging real-world cash for petty online crap; rather, I believe that Sony, and other game studios, will dumb down their initial offerings without lowering the price of entry.

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