The Aaron Barr story is quite entertaining.

Right now there are major revenues to be made in modern warfare FPS games, and as a result everyone is rushing to get one out.

How much money do the other generic military shooters actually make? The Battlefield series is well established and presumably profitable, but Magicka is currently outselling it on Steam and Amazon. It's outselling CoD too. The Sims is outselling all shooters on Amazon, but I don't see anyone rushing to make a clone. The big publishers would be better served by innovation rather than endlessly rehashing other games, which usually results in failure (every wowclone ever).

I couldn't bring myself to buy the first one, despite the many $5 sales on Steam, since I knew I'd never finish it. Platformers almost always frustrate me.

Everything I do over the phone or online now asks for the zip code. I assumed it was another security question since it isn't listed on the card itself.

Their business model is predicated on releasing new (paid) content every 6-8 months in lieu of a subscription fee. It has been over 40 months since the last release which they announced as the final one since GW2 was already underway. Something has gone wrong with their planning. I hope they aren't having funding issues.

As for the other stuff, Guild Wars is basically a card game designed around tactical PVP - picking your 8 card deck and coordinating it with your teammates is all that matters. The PVE is focused on tactics also. It's not meant to be Diablo. 'Macros', item farming, crafting, and mindless leveling are intentionally non existent. No leveling also means no ghost towns which along with the one server and no subscription makes it unique for fantasy themed online games.

It was supposed to enter beta in late 2009! They haven't released anything for GW in over 3 years which is clearly not ideal.

I didn't know that Steam told developers "No", so it's surprising they'd reject an inoffensive (bland) niche game when they already carry all sorts of trash. That said the game is listed on his site for $19.95 when I doubt it'll sell for more than $5 on Steam so maybe the rejection has more to do with economics than content?

On a semi-related note, Steam is telling me I already own "Gratuitous Space Battles: Galactic Conquest" even though I most certainly do not since it just got released.

I relive all my EQ memories by watching "Has anyone here seen my corpse?"

Korea remains the biggest territory for NCsoft, generating 416.6bn Won in sales, followed by Japan (79.2bn Won) and North America (48.6bn Won). Europe came in fourth, with sales of 34.3bn Won.

Yeah, no one outside of Asia seems to like Lineage and Aion got a lot of press here but fizzled out too. That's why I was curious about Guild Wars. I logged in during Canthan New Year and there was still over 150+ English instances in Shing Jea Monastery which is pretty impressive for a 5+ year old game. I really hope Guild Wars 2 continues to find the sweet spot between WoW and Korea.

I was curious how many units Guild Wars still sells, but the article didn't mention it.

I remember playing one of these at a party in the 90's, but I can't remember if it was any fun.

They probably do even though it's bad for Stardock. Their products being available at more venues would lead to more sales.

Even if they're still trying to pretend that Impulse is relevant, there's no excuse for it not being available for download at Amazon.

I forgot this existed! I'd like to buy the complete version, but it needs to be on Steam or Amazon downloads for that to happen.

GW had pretty good writing. The main stories weren't great, but they weren't offensively bad cliches (Bioware) and the continuity was occasionally excellent. They really take their "lore" seriously.

This needs to be released well before Diablo 3.

The first one was marketed as a Diablo Killer even though it didn't have any skills or randomization! It was still fun to play through once. The second one was heinous, and this sounds like more of the same.

The game was poor to mediocre in every aspect, but it was the utterly insane decision to charge $15(?) per month for non-existent content that made it widely hated and doomed.

The only competitor for Steam is Amazon. They had some excellent deals in their download section over the holidays but the super prices haven't returned and the selection is still very limited compared to Steam. That's a problem for all of the 'competition', but Amazon has the clout to fix this and they're clearly not going out of business anytime soon.

I played Warcraft in 2005 and it had enormous amounts of content compared to what EQ and Anarchy Online had in their first year. I've tried a few of the clones and they offered less than WoW (Lotro had no "Horde") but still copied all the bad ideas - simplified game mechanics and pointless leveling that eventually turns most of the areas into ghost towns.

First game was a nice shooter with some good ideas and occasionally excellent level design, but the expansion made it clear that we'd already seen their best work.