Kalypso Media announces that
The Big Cheese DLC for
Tropico 5 will
be a free gift for those who buy the North American retail version of the island
dictator sequel, which is expected in stores tomorrow. They say this is a thank
you to show appreciation for buying the disc-based version, and that The Big
Cheese will automatically unlock for no additional cheddar when it is released
this summer.
We missed word last week that
Line Of Defense
is headed to Early Access, and that the upcoming MMOG from 3000AD is the latest
game to go the premium route for this, as it will cost $99.00. An
update on TwitLonger
(more than 140 characters!!) by Derek Smart explains the reasoning for the high
price (thanks
PC Gamer) and shoots a laser across the bows of a competitor. Here's a bit:
The
$99 EA price tag - which has a LOT of perks - ensures that only serious people
who can provide meaningful feedback through their commitment, need apply. And
for that they get a lot more than they would if they waited for the final game
release.
We're simply not interested in letting freeloaders gain early access to the
game, not provide meaningful - if any - feedback, while we foot the bill for the
backend services, servers, bandwidth etc
We're a SMALL independent game dev making a MASSIVE game in a genre dominated
and monopolized by SOE and their popular @planetside2 series. In contrast, from
start to finish, LOD was developed by less than ten people. Including
third-party contractors. Yeah.
And unlike those other guys, we don't take your money, then plonk you in useless
assets (how do you like that hanger now?), a largely unfinished product or a
product that may not even see the light of day. I don't even need to defend
against that premise; go look at my game releases. While they may not be
everyone's cup of tea, we still keep making them because we have and know our
audience.
Here's
a video
showing off over three minutes of gameplay footage from
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
that was on display at E3. The clip shows Geralt playing charades and follow the
leader with a silent little friend, with some combat thrown in along the way
for good measure.
Continue here to read the full story.
Tomáš Duda's Twitter feed has posts
showing that the SCS Software (
Euro Truck Simulator) developer had his
Steam Community, Steamworks Partner, and Steam OpenID access revoked by Valve
for a year after using a
Steam scripting tags vulnerability to make a
community announcement do the Harlem Shake, saying this is something he'd
previously reported to Valve. There's a post about this from Tomáš in
this reddit thread: "Short version of what happened: <script> tags were
allowed in community announcements. We were talking about weird Steam's HTML
parsers in the #steamdb channel, and then Harlem Shake happened. Blame xPaw,
Marlamin and Gran PC, of course." Thanks Joao.
A
thread from last week on the Ubisoft forums discusses stuttering problems
some owners of the PC edition of
Watch Dogs are experiencing running the
open-world action game (thanks
DSOGaming). This prompted the following reply from a U.K. Community Manager:
"We have identified the factors that are creating this particular issue and are
currently working on a fix. We’ll keep you updated when we know more on when
we’ll be able to release it." Those looking into the game's visuals and
performance, may also be interested in
a thread from last
week on the Guru3D.com Forums (thanks
CVG) which offers tips on how to enable bloom effects and other visual
effects shown during the E3 2012 demo of the game, though these may come at the
expense of performance and stability.
Wolfenstein: The New Order is number one on the
GFK Chart-Track sales chart for full-priced PC games for last week in the
U.K. after swapping places with last week's number one,
WildStar. New
entries are
Enemy Front and
Spintires, while
Call of Duty:
Ghosts reenters the chart at number 20. Watch Dogs is still top dog on the
all platforms/all prices chart, while Enemy Front enters at number 19.
Without further ado,
here's the write-up:
‘Watch Dogs’ (-47%) comfortably holds on to No1
for a third consecutive week
It's a quiet time for the industry with gamers distracted by the World Cup, now
underway in Brazil. It is therefore not surprising that EA’s ‘2014 FIFA World
Cup Brazil’ (+16%) is the Top 10’s highest climber, up from No6 to No2, ahead of
‘Wolfenstein: The New Order’ (-21%) which sneaks up one place to No3. ‘Mario
Kart 8’ (-33%) is only a hundred sales behind as it slips from No2 to No4. ‘FIFA
14’ (-26%) doesn’t get the same boost as its World Cup stable mate, but still
manages to hold on to No5, while EA’s non-footballing title ‘Titanfall’ (+1%)
does well to jump 3 places to No6, perhaps strengthened by reports of it getting
a big update this month.
Both Minecrafts are non-movers with the Playstation 3 Edition (-16%) still at
No7 and the Xbox 360 Edition (-8%) still teetering at No10. ‘Call of Duty:
Ghosts’ remains a strong Top 10 performer, holding on to No8 with sales only
dipping by 11%. In its second week, sales of Square’s ‘Murdered: Soul Suspect’
fall by 52% positioning it at No9. Despite it being a quiet week, there is still
room for a new entry with CI Games (formerly City Interactive) debuting at No19
with World War II themed FPS ‘Enemy Front’.
Markus
"Notch" Persson - Literally worse than EA. Thanks
Eurogamer.net.
Someone saw that the EULA says you can’t charge for these things, and
asked one of the people working at Mojang about it. That person said that
yes, it is indeed against the rules, and then everything exploded. A lot of
people got the impression that we’re changing the EULA somehow to only now
disallow these things, but they were never allowed. A lot of people voiced
their concerns. A few people got nasty. Someone said we’re literally worse
than EA.
We had discussions about it internally, and eventually had a big meeting
where we said that yes, people running servers are a huge part of what makes
Minecraft so special, and that they need to be able to pay for the servers.
So we came up with all sorts of ways this could be done without ruining the
“you don’t pay for gameplay” aspect of Minecraft we all find so important.
These rules we’re posted in non-legal speak here:
mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-monetisation (our lawyers are probably
having a lot of fun trying to turn that into legal text). There are new
rules. These are new exceptions to the EULA. All of these make the rules
more liberal than things were before.
People are still asking me to change back to the old EULA. That makes me
sad.
Here's to my better half, as it's MrsBlue's birthday today. That better-half
estimate is probably an underestimate if you want to check my math, though
invoking math on the occasion of a woman's birthday is rarely the right move, so
I'll just leave the calculator where it is.
Also, congrats to the Spurs for winning the NBA championship.
R.I.P.:
Pittsburgh Steelers Chuck Noll was more than football coach.
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