The
Steam Community website has word that Valve is offering all
Main Competition finalists
in the Independent Games Festival Steam distribution deals:
Valve
would like to congratulate all 23
Main Competition finalists
announced this week by the Independent Games Festival (IGF). As part of this
year's event, Valve is offering all IGF Main Competition finalists a Steam
distribution agreement for games available on PC, Mac and Linux. Two of the
finalists,
Luxuria Superbia and
SoundSelf are already on Steam Greenlight and their nominations means they
go straight to the Greenlit category and into talks of distribution!
Two new trailers are now online to show off
Line of Defense Tactics, an
imminent squad-based tactics game from 3000AD set in the same universe as Line
of Defense, their upcoming MMORPG. There's a
Training
Session 01 trailer with a mission 01 play-through described as a "basic
video going over the movement, firing and command menu controls," and a
Training Session 02 trailer
with a look at character editing and mission 02 with the following description:
"A more advanced video showing more controls (weapon swapping, using items) and
strategies." There are more details on the desktop and mobile game on the
Line Of Defense Tactics website.
Continue here to read the full story.
SuperData Research offers their accounting of the worldwide top 10 grossing
free-to-play games for all of 2013 (thanks
GameSpot). Perhaps surprisingly, the top earner
on their list came pretty close to $1 billion in revenue. Here's what they
report:
- Crossfire, $957 million
- League of Legends, $624 million
- Dungeon Fighter Online $426 million
- World of Tanks, $372 million
- Maplestory, $326 million
- Lineage I, $257 million
- World of Warcraft, $213 million
- Star Wars: The Old Republic, $139 million
- Team Fortress 2, $139 million
- Counter-Strike Online, $121 million
GfK's weekly U.K. sales charts are now available for the week ending January
18th. The
full-priced PC games chart has the same top three as last week, with
Football Manager 2014 hanging onto number one, and the only reentry being
Diablo III at number 19. On the
all platforms/all prices chart the top four remains static with
FIFA 14
still at number one. Here's
their summary:
‘FIFA
14’ (-23%) comfortably holds on to No1 in the All Formats Chart, making it a
total of 8 weeks at the top.
It’s the largest number of weeks at No1 since ‘Zumba Fitness’ made it to 10
weeks back in W33 2011. Another quiet week means there is also no change at No’s
2, 3 and 4 with ‘Call of Duty: Ghosts’ (-39%), ‘Battlefield 4’ (-26%) and
‘Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag’ (-31%) all non-movers.
‘Lego Marvel Super Heroes’ (-12%) climbs one place to No5, ahead of ‘Killzone:
Shadow Fall’ (-6%) which jumps two places to No6. The rest of the Top 10
shuffles amongst itself with ‘Need for Speed: Rivals’ (-28%) stuck at No7,
‘Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition’ (-7%) up one place to No8, ‘Grand Theft Auto V’
(-56%) down four places to No9 and the extremely budget friendly ‘Aliens:
Colonial Marines’ (-10%) not budging from No10.
‘Mario Party: Island Tour’ on 3DS is the first Top 40 new entry of the year,
debuting at No18.
The
XeNTaX website has the results of
a research project they undertook to analyze the game review data hidden away on
the
Metacritic website. The results can
be viewed in
this Adobe Acrobat-format document, which sums things up with this conclusion:
The
data at Metacritic leaves much to be desired and seems to be heavily biased.
When critic scores do not comply with user scores in the majority of cases,
which has been shown in this paper, and the selection of critics is seemingly
under no formal control, the validity and accuracy of the data is low. Caution
is necessary when using Metacritic information to guide your own decision to buy
or not buy a game. Until there is more transparency on how this process takes
place at Metacritic, more transparency on the flow of funding from which sources
and the observed biases are removed, the database is of limited use for the
end-users.
The
Total War Wiki
announces the release of the first public version of the Assembly Kit for
Total War: ROME II on Steam, saying this is "essentially a collection of
tools and example data files that will help modders create bigger and better
mods" (thanks
PC Gamer). Here's word:
Following the successful launch of the Steam Workshop for ROME II, we are
pleased to release version one of the Assembly Kit for ROME II. The Assembly Kit
is currently in Beta, and its feature-set will expand over time. If you have any
questions or find any bugs to report, please visit the official forums here:
http://forums.totalwar.com/forumdisplay.php/181-Total-War-ROME-II-Game-Mods
Ars Technica - When it comes to video games, difficulty is the point—not the
problem.
You can talk, then, about a game's art, politics, script, music, sounds,
making, impact, legacy, sociological significance, and all the intricacies
of design and data that conjure these. But you should never forget the
fundamental contract every game seeks to forge with its players: accept this
world and these obstacles in the name of experience, and make of them what
you will. Difficulty is the point, not the problem. The play's the thing.
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The civil rights leader's birthday was
actually last week, but it's not really a holiday in the U.S. if it's not on a
Monday, so there you go.
The football games were pretty great yesterday, though the officiating was
pretty rough. I turned around my horrible regular season for
our playoff pool and am in first place at this point, with my pre-playoffs
pick matrix resulting in nine winners out of ten games so far. The points
escalate with each round in this one, however, so there's still the chance for
me to end up as low as tied for fourth out of ten (actually nine, as one player
made no picks) if I get the Super Bowl wrong, so I'll keep the champagne on ice
for now.
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