An article on
Jeux PC that's since
been removed reveals plans for
Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth
that can still be found
in Google's cache of the French gaming site. A
translation shows this to be filled with details about the project, saying
that while it's not a direct sequel to Alpha Centauri, though parts of it will
draw on the classic space strategy game. The amount of detail in the article
(including a screenshots and box art) and the fact that it was removed suggest
an official announcement about this will probably roll out soon enough. Thanks
Indie Retro News.
Ars Technica recaps a PAX East panel where Tom Petersen, Chris Roberts, and
Matt Higby discuss PC gaming, with Ars' takeaway being that the platform isn't
just surviving, but is in fact dominant. Here's a bit:
Robert expanded on
Higby's point: the PC has always been the biggest and best platform for
developers and for gamers—it just hasn't always grabbed the biggest headlines.
The "PC as a platform"—a phrase echoed by Petersen—is an absolutely massive
market, but it's not always realized as such because it's fragmented between
different OEMs and home-built rigs without a singular marketing effort.
Higby also spoke extremely candidly about game piracy, saying things I've heard
echoed on forums before but never out of the mouth of a developer. Piracy, he
said, is an availability and distribution problem. The more games are
crowdfunded and digitally delivered and the less a "store" figures into buying
games, the less of a problem piracy becomes. Roberts was quick to agree, and he
noted that the shift to digital distribution also helps the developers make more
money—they ostensibly don't have everyone along the way from retailers to
publishers to distributors taking their cut from the sale.
Oculus' Palmer Lucky agreed that piracy is a problem that can be solved not
through more restrictions, but through fewer—the way to kill piracy is to make
it more convenient to simply download a game legitimately than to go through the
rigamarole of pirating it. Higby chimed in to agree—it's more annoying to
download a pirated version of a game than to download via a trusted digital
delivery service.
Petersen said that the total yearly industry-wide revenue for PC games (not
video games in general, but PC games specifically) is $24 billion—a number that
includes initial sales, in-game transactions, free-to-play microtransactions,
digital downloads, and everything else. That's a huge amount of revenue to
chase, and the panel members all agreed that the money will go to the developers
and publishers and makers who produce what PC gamers want, as long as they let
players buy games however they want to buy them.
Last night I noticed an alarming commotion happening outside not too far from
the BlueTower, which included what sounded like it must have been wildlife...
When I tried to mimic this odd chattering, MrsBlue semi-jokingly said it sounded
like
What Does The Fox Say.
This actually made as much sense as anything, and after finding a slightly more
authentic clip of
fox
calls on YouTube, I am pretty convinced this was indeed foxes doing what's
called "gekkering." There are woods near enough, but we are in the suburbs, so
this is pretty surprising, as it must have been coming from someone's backyard.
R.I.P.:
Sue
Townsend, author of Adrian Mole books, dies aged 68. Thanks Laurence.
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