Psychonauts sold very poorly, and was responsible for a projected 18 million profit revised into an 18 million dollar loss (don't ask me how that makes sense). The CEO responsible for Psychonauts then resigned.

So it's not the same company anymore.

This comment was edited on Sep 17, 2009, 01:10.

Face it, most of the people that buy Total War games wouldn't know bad AI if it bit them in the ass. TW's AI is good enough to consistently sell a huge number of copies, and any kind of nerd rage or supposed boycotts won't put a dent in the sales.

Besides, you know as well as I that you'll be seduced by the pretty graphics and the previews and the hypes up feature lists, and then Napoleon will receive glowing reviews and everyone on all the forums will be splurging over it the first few days, and you just won't be able to bear it anymore and you'll buy it anyway.

This is the best online Asperger's self-test I've seen. Your severity is the number of paragraphs you'll be able to swallow.

The author could probably make centerfold of Asperger Monthly. Good contender for Aspie of the Year.

So, let me get this straight. They had an agreement in 2000 for 12 million dollars. And Scott Miller is claiming they didn't see a penny of that money? Must have been some agreement. Even though the money was probably segmented into parts tied to development milestones, I find it very hard to believe that an agreement could possibly exist without an initial advance.

Even if we didn't have all the other history, based on only this I would say there's a 99.9% chance Scott Miller is not being truthful.

Although the other option, that they signed an agreement 9 years ago, agreed to no advance, and never collected a penny, would mean that Scott Miller is a complete failure at business management... Which, you know...

What I'm more interested in is some insight into the development environment. I mean, it's pretty obvious where things went wrong, but I'm really hoping some disgruntled ex-employee will anonymously post some stories or something.

I'd love to learn more details on Broussard's management style, hopefully with juicy anecdotes.

The 1998 footage looks more finished than the liquidmesh demo. I know that's supposed to be an artist portfolio, but the game it seems to showcase is at least a year away from release.

Also, canned / not canned, based on the duke4.net writeup, it looks to me like good ole George was given a chance to finish the game in exchange for the IP and a whole lot of money, and he chose to close doors and sit on the IP instead. There's no way in hell he'll find anyone else willing to fund further development with Broussard at the helm. Which means he's hoping to sell the IP for more money than Take Two offered him. He chose to have his team out on the street for the prospect of making a few more million out of the IP.

He should have sold the IP 12 years ago. Probably would have gotten better offers back then, and we'd have had a few released Duke games by now.

Based on the gamasutra article, there is definitely some merit there.

Though, I can just see the NCSoft management sitting there looking at the stinker Garriott delivered them, looking at Tabula Rasa's sales and plummeting player base, while that guy is in Russia getting blasted off to space.

Don't blame them for firing him at all. But then it's their own fault for hiring him in the first place.

It's such a fun addictive game with great visuals and deep strategic core. Too bad it regularly crashes to desktop with the same error. It's even more upsetting that the patch did nothing to address the issue.

I'll keep it on my HD until the next patch. Hopefully it'll be playable then.

I have to say, as funny and cool this all sounds the game does look quite awful when you get down to it.

Yes, I have a feeling that's the impression that ninety out of their hundred thousand YouTube views got out of viewing the trailer.

"Holy Moly, Stalin AND Martians? I gotta check that out!"

*click*

"Oh"

Joypad button press to server: 25ms
Server processing time (physics/sound/AI): (insignificant)
Best case delay to encode frame: 1ms
Best case delay until frame sent: 15.7ms (16.7ms per frame, -1 for encoding)
Server to client TV: 25ms

Your total round trip best case would be 25+1+15.7+25 = 66.75ms, which is 14.98fps.

Aren't you also forgetting a couple more things?

First, there's the transfer time for the frame itself. Sending a keypress to server is negligible, but receiving a frame back gives you a more sizable chunk of data. A 10 Mbit connection is capable of receiving 15,600 bits per millisecond, which is 1,920 bytes / ms. Which means that even if you magically compressed your 720p frame to only 10 kb (81 920 bits), transferring that 81K bits at 15K bits / ms would take roughly 5 ms. Right? So that's something else on top of that, and that number is highly variable based on what's going on on screen. Some busier frames could take 10, 15, 25 ms to transfer.

This actually gives an interesting calculation. 60 fps on a 10 Mbit connection would mean 15,360,000 b/s divided by 60, that is 256,000 bits or 31 Kb per frame. That means that each of their 720p frames must be compressed to 31 Kb on average. Plus subtract a few Kbs for sound and other stuff, since there's more being transferred than just graphics. That kind of compressed frame size might be a real stretch with racing games or other fast games with lots going on on screen.

I still can't figure out it if these people are outright crooks, or just ignorant tools.

They must just be swindling investors. They gotta be. That server cost calculation really sounds like something a knowledgeable person would invent to fool someone who understands nothing about computers. On the other hand, it could be a legitimate attempt at a business plan by someone who doesn't know what the hell they're doing.

In any case, it won't work. That much was clear from the start. The only question is, are they legitimately trying or is this a scheme.

You don't own songs just because you bought a CD or the sheet music to them - you can't just release them and make profit out of them because that breaches copyright. You can't just buy a book, scan it in and start producing thousands of copies. Copyright is simply the best way that society has found to compensate artists, which in turn benefits society - otherwise nobody would invest in producing content.

That's not even apples and oranges, that's apples and digital cameras.

When you buy a music CD, sure you can resell that CD. When you buy a book, sure you can resell it on ebay or on amazon or at a used bookstore.

Nobody here is talking about taking a used game, copying it, and selling a thousand copies. That would be criminal copyright infringement, a federal crime investigated by the FBI.

What is in question here is a regular Joe buying a game, playing it, and reselling his one used copy. As a matter of fact, this is a case of a regular Joe buying product XYZ, using it, and reselling it for less than he originally paid for it. In no circumstances should this ever involve the original manufacturer, unless of course that manufacturer directly deals with the used sale (such as with used cars etc).

As long as the manufacturer deals in new products, he gets paid for the product only once, and that's during the initial sale. That's it. Copyright and intellectual property have nothing to do with reselling individual items, otherwise Boeing can sue airlines for reselling old airplanes since so much work went into designing them; Louis Vuitton can sue the wife of an out-of-work mortgage broker for selling a used handbag on ebay claiming copyright on the LV logo, etc etc etc. It's just so retarded it makes no sense whatsoever.

I believe that publishers and developers SHOULD get a cut of used games sales. Therefore I obviously find the proposal put forward here to be acceptable, as it puts the gamers in control of the amount given. We shouldn't be supporting intermediaries that seek to take money away from the people producing games - they're profiting from the hard work and financial risk of others. It also means that if a game becomes popular in the second hand market then the publishers can see that it's financially viable produce another game of that type.

Think about it. If even 10% of the $2.4bn used games market went to publishers and developers that would amount to $240m, money that wouldn't be going to shitty middlemen.

The only possible solution here is for publishers to offer a game buy-back program and then to resell these used copies.

Otherwise they have absolutely no right to expect profits from a product they already sold once. The very concept goes against the way the entire world is set up. A used product is the property of the current owner, not the original manufacturer. Video games are no different than any other commodity, they depreciate over time just like cars and clothes and furniture.

Also,

Most games ARE NOT worth $50-60

Uh huh. How do you figure that exactly?

Games routinely sell for 50-60 bucks all over the world, which means that's exactly what they're worth. The current market price is factored into all the development budgets. Developers and publishers know that a game ABC can sell X number of copies at Y dollars per unit, and so its budget can be no more than X * Y. If games did not sell for $50-60, video game budgets would be adjusted accordingly, and you'd get less of a game for less money. You do get what you pay for either way.

I wonder if Funcom's top management is kicking themselves very hard right now for not letting the game stay in development longer and get later-game content and PVP ironed out before release. Probably not. I'm sure they're finding someone else to blame.

Hear hear. I'm amazed that the franchise lasted all these years. Goes to show that if you put a chick with big boobs and round hips in front of a certain demographic, that's all it needs.

Note to self, if this is the end of the franchise, I should make my own big-boobs-round-ass pseudo game ASAP. The niche can't remain empty for long.

Wow, and I thought I was lucky to get this one today, but I guess a lot of stores are selling them everywhere?

Anyway, yeah, there's about 4-5 hours of gameplay there. The visual customization is amazing, absolutely incredible. I can't even imagine the development effort that went into making the creature, building and vehicle design. However, it's quickly becomes very clear that that's where all of the development effort went. There's barely anything at all in this game beyond the model editor.

The spore stage actually offers the most varied gameplay, because there your choices in the editor actually matter. Once you get out of the water, all the customizations become useless - you get 4 combat and 4 charm powers, and that's it. Gameplay is dumb as hell - walk up to the creature, and press keys 1 through 4 as needed. Repeat 1,000 times.

The RTS portion is even worse. You'll find more depth in any bargain bin RTS from 1997. Camera controls are wonky, and the customization there seems to be purely cosmetic with no effect on gameplay.

I mean, I first played once as a carnivore, got to space in a couple of hours, and got bored. Restarted as a herbivore, got almost to space just now, and the game basically played exactly the same. There's no gameplay variety behind your choices at all. The basic mechanic is exactly the same, except maybe the animations are different.

How incredibly disappointing. Instead of making a glorified 3D model editor, they should have provided fewer customization choices with more meat, and put all the effort into doing something new with actual gameplay. Otherwise, if you got the Spore Creature Creator for 10 bucks, you've pretty much already played everything there is to play.

The reason they have had bugs is due to a shitty publisher, PB is clearly very very talented as a group of about 16 turn out these incredibly complex and innovative RPGs.

You couldn't be more wrong.

Making games is a collaboration between developers and publishers. Publishers don't go around forcing developers to start projects they cannot complete. On the contrary, developers start on projects, and then usually run around and shop for publishers, proposing features, timelines and budgets. More often than not, developers propose extremely optimistic budgets and timeframes, hoping to get a publishing contract, and then they end up incapable of making a quality game under those conditions.

Cases are extremely rare when a publisher rushes in and releases the game before the contracted release date, not giving the developers enough time to finish. What usually happens is the opposite: the developer promises the earth and the sky, but then when the release date comes, it turns out they were only able to do half, and even that is a buggy mess.

So the reason Gothic games are buggy is because the developers bite more than they can chew. They cram features in there that they cannot get to work in time for release. It's hard to fault the publisher for not saying "oh hell, you promised to deliver this game tomorrow but you couldn't and it's an unstable buggy mess, well, fine, here, take another couple of mil, go on vacation, finish the game next year!"

Buggy games are caused by poor planning by the developers. Sometimes they promise too much because they're dishonest and just want to screw the publishers, and sometimes they promise too much because they're eager and optimistic and don't know what they're getting into. In Gothic's case it's clearly the latter, but with a bit of a former too, because honestly, after all these games, they should learn to plan ahead already and be able to figure out which features they're capable of delivering in time for release.

Flight sims aren't dead because they're too complex to play, they're dead because they're too complex to develop. Back in the good old days you could develop a flight sim with the graphics, physics and features considered cutting edge for the time with a team and at a budget comparable to a game of any other genre. Not any more.

In this day and age, on a budget needed to build a realistic flight sim you could build three RTS's or five racing games. And building a realistic flight sim requires more real-world expertise than any other type of game. There's exactly two developers out there worldwide that possess people with the skillset, and if you wanted to start a third, you could spend a year running classified ads, looking for a lead programmer with degree in aerodynamics and three shipped games on his resume. It's near impossible to even find a 3D modeler capable of reading aviation blueprints, and 3D modelers are a dime a dozen.

So there are so few realistic flight sims out there in this day and age not because there's no audience, but because there are no developers capable of building them, and no publishers willing to finance them. And it's only going to get worse and PCs get even more powerful.

No one puts their main on a test server and the SoE rules are VERY clear, NO one can transfer a toon from test to LIVE. This rule has always been in place and never changed.

WAAAAAAAAAAH WAAAAAAAH

Sony make game. Sony make rules. Sony change rules. You suck it up.

Then have a bunch of rednecks whom don't clue wtf going on

Whom alert

This comment was edited on Dec 21, 12:39.

Oh no how dare the developers do something to their own game? How dare they have friends? Go cry me a river, geez. I never played EQ2 and I'm not really into MMOs, but God damn is this retarded.

Some guys helped the devs beta test something, became friends, and got rewarded for it. How does this hurt anything other than a bunch of egos? I'm surprised the devs are even backing down.

Yet another proof that all MMOs are nothing but a cesspool of idiocy.