Powerup PR

gamefreaksnz: (via HIPSTERS - Ash Ketchum by ~autis on...

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 21:57:35 -0500

(via HIPSTERS - Ash Ketchum by ~autis on deviantART)

Colin Moriarty of IGN and his response to ME3 critics

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:53:05 -0400

Colin Moriarty of IGN and his response to ME3 critics:

Mass Effect 3 has had a tumultuous time winning over fans. The big reason: the ending. People hate it. While I won’t get into spoilers, I can completely understand where fans are coming from. It felt cheap, especially considering the 100+ hours people put into the game.

Mass Effect 3 Ending

This has adversely affected Bioware and EA from a PR standpoint. What makes this even more interesting is that many game journalists have taken to defending the developers for the ending (as well as the issue of day-one DLC, which is an entirely different issue). One particularly vocal journalist, Colin Moriarty of IGN, believes these developers are being “bullied”. The following link is my interaction with Moriarty via Twitter.

Follow Colin on Twitter: @notaxation

I’d always appreciate the follow as well :) @JTSweeney90

STOP SOPA AND PIPA

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:14:23 -0500

STOP SOPA AND PIPA:

SOPA and PIPA are bills that will be voted on in the House of Representatives and the Senate. I encourage you all to contact your nearest representatives and tell them you will not stand for censorship that deprives small businesses of their rights. Not only would Wikipedia be torn down, but countless other websites and online communities would be destroyed as well. Please do what you can to make your voice heard.

PR Nightmare

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:26:44 -0500

PR Nightmare

The Arab Market: A New Opportunity for Game Develepors?

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:05:06 -0500

The Arab Market: A New Opportunity for Game Develepors?:

Mashable’s Mahmoud Khasawneh takes a look at the Arab gaming market and sees the opportunity for growth as well as the challenges developers face in marketing to the region.

CatsPajamas: Life as an eSports Broadcaster (p.3)

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 02:29:00 -0500

This is the third and final part of my interview with Kevin “CatsPajamas” Knocke, an eSports broadcaster who currently casts games for the IGN Pro League in San Francisco.

Cats talks about his thoughts on the future of eSports and how it can continue to grow in America.

Me: MLG just recently released its viewership numbers, and they were extremely impressive. IPL3’s viewership was extremely high (if you know its peak viewership numbers, please send them to me!). Barcraft was covered in the Wall Street Journal and that has aided SC2 and E-Sports’ popularity as well. Do you believe E-Sports has “arrived” as a successful business? If so, why?

Cats: At IPL3, for our first live tournament ever, we had a peak of 127,000 concurrent viewers with over 12 million views over the entirety of the event. We’re extremely happy the community responded in such numbers to our first event of that size. I do believe that eSports has a sustainable business model. People have shown that they are willing to come out in strong numbers to support a variety of games. It’s largely up to organizations to identify which games are sustainable eSports and not invest tons of money into irrelevant games and productions. We’ve seen organizations in the past that have tried too hard to push themselves into broadcast media not designed for eSports, or investing in the wrong games, or spent money on pet projects that turned into money pits. Hopefully now people will learn to scale their organization while concentrating on the core of what makes eSports awesome: The games themselves.

Me: Whip out your crystal ball!— What do you see in the future of E-Sports? Do you believe it will remain an internet-exclusive medium, or do you think it can have success on cable television as well? Or is there another way to innovate the sport and broaden its appeal?

Cats: Truthfully, I hope that eSports never goes to TV unless TV will accept games in their raw form (e.g. no commercial breaks in the middle of a Starcraft match, no altering the length of games in an attempt to make it TV friendly, etc.). I think that the internet is the perfect medium for eSports as internet video viewing is far outpacing TV in growth. A great argument can be made that TV is already ubiquitous, and thus that’s the reason for internet outpacing TV growth, but I think that the point remains that a new generation of media consumers are adopting the internet as their primary viewing vehicle. This is perfect for eSports. We have not yet come close to tapping all of the viewer potential of the internet. Let’s hope eSports organizations stay there.

gamefreaksnz: BioShock 2 coming to Mac in January Feral...

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 01:49:48 -0500

gamefreaksnz:

BioShock 2 coming to Mac in January

Feral Interactive, the same team that brought Batman: Arkham City and Deus Ex: Human Revolution to Mac, have announced a January 2012 release for BioShock 2 on Mac.

Photo

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 14:58:40 -0500

CatsPajamas: Life as an eSports Broadcaster (p.2)

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 10:00:00 -0500

This is the third and final part of my interview with Kevin “CatsPajamas” Knocke, an eSports broadcaster who currently casts games for the IGN Pro League(aka IPL) in San Francisco.

In the second part of our interview, Cats talks about his work at IPL as both a broadcaster and a talent manager at IGN’s eSports division.

Me: As a full-time broadcaster on both YouTube and at the IGN Pro League, what’s been the most rewarding part of the job?

Cats: To me, the most awesome part of being an eSports broadcaster is conveying my sense of enthusiasm for a game effectively to a viewer. I love Starcraft. When I’m not talking about Starcraft at work, I’m planning new SC2 tournaments, reading Team Liquid and /r/Starcraft on Reddit, watching streams, and learning about the game. So when I see an amazing game that fills me with adrenaline and I can see that my presenting the game has directly influenced others’ enjoyment of the game, it’s a big thrill for me. I also count myself as extremely fortunate that I have a full time job in an industry I love. I wouldn’t trade what I do for anything in the world, and will work as hard as possible to make sure I’m always in this industry.

Me: In contrast, what are the challenges that come with the position? Is there anything that took you by surprise that you didn’t consider when you began working with for IPL?

Cats: What a lot of people don’t realize is that I’m not just a caster here at the IPL. I’m part of the management team, so I directly oversee anything related to talent (i.e. all casters for all of our games, any on screen hosts, and allocation of talent time for whatever programs are running/shooting). I cast for about 10-15 hours a week here, but I work about 40 hours a week on everything else related to my division here at IGN eSports. In some ways it’s a challenge because the community assumes that you have no other responsibilities other than presenting a cast, but I think it’s actually rewarding to be tasked with so many different responsibilities. It’s also a pleasure to be able to influence the direction the IPL is taking, as I really feel that I personally am helping to shape the growth of eSports here in the U.S.

Me: What do you think makes Starcraft 2 such a great competitive game? Why is it so universally attractive to so many people around the world?

Cats: Starcraft 2, to me, is the perfect blend of quick thinking and fast reflexes. Unlike chess, it’s a game of imperfect knowledge of your opponent, so it’s extremely dynamic in the way different players approach the game. On top of that (and what really makes it exciting to me) is that the game is not yet figured out, so players individual approaches really reflect their personality. It builds a great public face that fans can grab on to.

CatsPajamas: Life as an eSports Broadcaster (p.1)

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 03:50:00 -0500

eSports broadcaster Kevin “CatsPajamas” Knocke was kind enough to take some time out his day working at the IGN Pro League in San Francisco to answer a few questions I had about his career path, eSports, broadcasting, and, of course, Starcraft 2:

Me: How did you get started as a Starcraft 2 broadcaster? Did you have a background in broadcasting in college or was it an interest/hobby that grew into something you wanted to do professionally?

Cats: Right around launch, I purchased the game with the intention to play it casually and spend a lot of time in the UMS game scene. I make no apologies for the fact that I came to the game casually, and it captured my interest immediately. I started laddering several hours a day, pushing me to diamond pre-masters release. Quickly thereafter, I started watching streams, anything from players to tournaments.

What I quickly realized was that there were a lot of great and knowledgeable Starcraft people commentating, but not a lot of people that approached casting from a professional sports-style play by play perspective. I had previously spent about 3 years on the radio in college, but nothing too serious and certainly no professional training. But, even with that, I decided to fire up a stream and start broadcasting whatever I could get my hands on. Before I was picked up to do bigger tournaments, I was broadcasting 30-40 hours a week to a stream with (for the first few months) 10-20 viewers at a time and later 300-900.

Add on top of that I was updating my social media channels (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. in addition to video editing) about 20 hours a week, working a 20 hour a week job, and was a full time graduate student (oh, and I’m married :D ), and I didn’t have a lot of time for anything else. Before I was picked up for big tournaments, I seriously considered dropping everything to grow my Justin.tv channel into a full time job, estimating that I could make ends meet if I kept streaming for about 10 hours a day.

Well, needless to say, that would have been a risky future, but I knew that broadcasting was something I loved and wanted to pursue for a job.
Lucky for me, I paid my way to MLG Dallas to do a little networking. I ended up in the front row of the audience next to David Ting, our VP of R&D and General Manager of eSports here at IGN. Unfortunately, there was no commentary in the crowd as the players could hear the MLG commentators. However, that ended up being very fortunate for me as I basically ended up personally commentating Kiwikaki vs Idra to David. He liked it enough he gave me a job a few days later. :D

(Part 2 of the 3-part interview will be made available within the next few days)

Twitter: @CatasPajamasSC2

Facebook: facebook.com/CatsPajamasSC2

Starcraft 2 and the rise of eSports in America

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 02:40:00 -0500

As I sat up at 10:30 on a Tuesday night, my brother Sean came over to to me, wondering what all the commotion was bout. I had been furiously typing at my desk while listening to some “weird noises” from my computer. He asked me what I was doing and who I was talking to. I told him it was a couple guys from Sweden and the Phillippines. He gave me a peculiar look.

“No Sean, they’re not sexual predators. We’re talking about Starcraft 2!”

I had played a couple of RTS(Real-Time Strategy) games before Starcraft 2. Age of Empires 2 and Warcraft 3 were my first real forays into the game genre. They were both creative, fun and extremely well-designed games that brought a lot to the table. However, like many other games, you sit down, play it until you get bored and then move on to whatever is cool to play with your friends at the time.

This is what separates Starcraft 2 from other RTS games. While I was explaining to Sean how I was talking to people from all over the world, I realized: I was talking to people from all over the world because of Starcraft 2.

Global Appeal

Starcraft 2, released a little less than a year and a half ago, sold 4.5 million units within 6 months of its release. Impressive numbers to be certain, but nowhere near the stratosphere of CoD: Modern Warfare 3 or the market penetration of Angry Birds(over 100 million downloads worldwide). So what makes Starcraft 2 so special? Its community.

The SC community is global. While many point to Starcraft’s popularity in Korea, few recognize its notoriety throughout Europe and China. The world’s top players are not only from Korea, but come from around the world. Starcraft has spread its popularity while connecting these countries. Players are not recognized by their real names or country, but by their unique player aliases.

Chris “Huk” Loranger, winner of multiple international tournaments is from Canada, while his teammate and fellow champion Greg “IdrA” Fields is from New Jersey. Aleksey Krupny, aka White-Ra, is from Ukraine. Johann “NaNiwa” Lucchesi, considered one of the top players in the game right now, is from Sweden.

Competitions have taken place in Germany, Sweden, the United States, Canada, the Philippines, South Korea, the United Kingdom and countless other places around the world. What’s bringing it all together is the internet. Players and tournaments can live stream all of their events online for viewers at home to enjoy. Within minutes, tens and even hundreds of thousands of SC2 fans can watch their favorite players go head-to-head with the best.

A fan of IdrA’s can watch him play at the ASUS ROG Stars Invite in Finland and go up against a Swede, a Ukrainian and a Korean. While multiple translators must be in attendance to care for the foreign players, everyone has a mutual understanding and passion for all things Starcraft.

Potential of eSports Mainstream in America

What made Starcraft so successful in South Korea was a number of things, first and foremost, was timing. During the late 1990’s Korea was going through a period of massive technological growth. It had begun developing one of the most sophisticated networking systems in the world, giving its population extremely fast internet and online capabilities. At the same time, Blizzard had built its upcoming game, Starcraft, on the ability to play any match online against someone practically anyone online. Blizzard’s game was not only a critically-acclaimed hit, but it swept South Korea by storm.

It appears Starcraft 2 in America may have hit a similar “timing push.”

The numbers above me are taken from this past season of Major League Gaming, the number one E-Sports organization in America. The IPL (IGN Pro League) also held a tournament this past fall, where the tournament reached over 127,000 concurrent viewers at one point and over 12 million total views throughout the event.

Starcraft has also recently received publicity from Forbes Magazine, CNN and even the Wall Street Journal for its active Barcraft community.

From a business perspective, practically any consumer product company targeted at young males should be foaming at the mouth at that opportunity to sponsor, promote and advertise to that key “male 16-24 audience.” When big sponsors and advertisers begin dishing out the money that it should to advertise to this audience, the E-Sports community will grow exponentially. And with numbers like MLG and IPL’s, it appears we are on the verge of seeing E-Sports flourish in America.

Online Passes creating rift between gamers, developers and retailers

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 23:28:00 -0500

With the announcement of the PSN Pass, the cold war between game developers and game retailers have put consumers in the line of fire. The PSN Pass, which according to IGN, is a one-use code similar to EA’s Online Pass, which “grants the account holder redeeming the code full online access for that title,” a spokesperson said. Those who do not have a pass(i.e. whoever bought the game used or is renting it) have to pay for a code via the Playstation Store, which costs 10 dollars.

So what does this mean for gamers?

For years, retailers like GameStop/EB Games have made the buying and re-selling of pre-owned games a major portion of their revenue. It’s a lucrative premise. Allow a gamer to buy a new game at your store, wait until he/she sells it back to you, then re-sell it for a significantly higher price. It’s a winning formula, for retailers at least.

Developers, however, have been left out in the cold. Developers receive absolutely no income from the sale of these pre-owned games, leaving many studios with middling first-month sales to close up shop in the months following their game’s successful release. In order to get a.) encourage consumers to buy games new and b.) get a piece of the pre-owned gaming pie, Sony has decided to force the consumer to make a choice. Either he/she must buy their game new for 60 bucks, or play only the single-player portion of the game(a part of video games that has become increasingly ignored by gamers and developers alike).

As a college student living on a part-time hourly salary and commuting from home, this is an economic gut-punch. What if I wanted to borrow Resistance 3 from my buddy and test the multiplayer out? Tough luck. What if I was planning on renting Uncharted 3 from Redbox for a night? I guess it’s just me and Drake jumping out of exploding planes on our own.

While this news is troubling to the regular gamer, it may be even more disturbing to game retailers. Companies like Gamefly and Family Video, who depend on rentals of multiplayer games may potentially lose millions in business because of this change.

While it is understandable that game developers want their piece of the pie, this is not the best way to go about it. Not only does the PSN Pass(and other developers’ versions that will surely follow) alienate consumers, it put extra strain on the developers themselves to create an outstanding product, because it if isn’t a 9.0 or higher on IGN, Gamespot, Gameinformer or any other game review then it won’t be worth a purchase. Even if it is critically-acclaimed, games like Resistance 3 have shown just how harmful the effects of this program can be. Many gamers were turned away from renting the game(and then buying it) because the online portion was restricted for only the people who bought the game new.

Developers are playing a dangerous game of pushing consumers to buy new, and in the next few years they will find out if gamers are willing to push back.

Growing Pains: The Treacherous Path of the Game-Movie Crossover

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 23:17:00 -0500

Clue.

That was the first and last movie based on a game that amounted to anything resembling a truly successful move from the game industry to the movie industry. And it was a board game I played with my grandma.

Lara Croft, Max Payne, Doom, Resident Evil, Bloodrayne, Alone in the Dark, House of the Dead, Dead or Alive, Prince of Persia, Hitman, Streetfighter, Super Marios Bros., and Double Dragon are all casualties of one of the newest phases in feature films these days: take a gaming franchise and suck the life(and more importantly, cash) from its fans by putting out a nice plate of hot garbage during typical slow seasons for moviegoers(February-May, September).

It appears as though Hollywood’s incessant desire to ruin great shows from generations ago(the honeymooners, king kong) has bled into the gaming industry.

“Man,” I cried, “how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!”

Always the red-headed stepchild of American media, the gaming industry, all the way from the developer studios to the Prima Guide-reading Final Fantasy freak, has felt invalidated. The need to prove itself as a legitimate medium blinds developers from realizing the facts of the matter: some games were never meant to be movies.

What makes Prince of Persia such a fun game? You can run around walls and stop time. You are controlling the way the game is played out, manipulating the way your player moves and learning from past mistakes. That isn’t a quality that can be duplicated by a stuntman, creative camerawork, and CGI. And since when has any Resident Evil character been able to move around as easily and ridiculously as Milla Jovovich? The Resident Evil movies looked like the work of a film major given too big a budget and too much time with a dvd of The Matrix. Hell, the only scene in Doom that people seem to care to remember is when it went in FIRST-PERSON. I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but any FPS has done this camera angle before and ON TOP of that, you can, dare I say it, control the character and move the camera any which way you want.

I have heard the old excuse that videogame movies only suck because the people behind them are incompetent. Videogame movies suffer from the Uwe Bollitis. I’m not buying it.

For as much disdain as I have for guys like Jerry Bruckheimer(the Donald Trump of moviemakers, and I mean that in the most negative light), I have to admit that he is capable of putting almost anything out there and finding a way to attract an audience to see it. Not even he, using Jake Gylenhall as a main character, could draw a lot of people to see Prince of Persia. Instead the film got middling reviews and an even more mediocre box office performance when it landed behind Sex and the City 2 and Shrek Forever After. It couldn’t beat a chickflick and major contender for a Razzie candidate and another crappy Shrek movie.

Hope on the Horizon?

There has been extensive talk about a Halo movie in development. However, like many other game-to-movie attempts, it doesn’t look promising. Peter Jackson, Spielberg and other have been associated with the project, but nothing concrete has been brought forth, and a full-featured Halo movie appears to be nowhere in the near future.

There are also rumors that Rovio, creators of Angry Birds, have spoken with Hollywood execs about an Angry Birds television show and movie. While Angry Birds plush dolls, clothes, and other accessories are doing great business for them(It’s actually the most copied brand in China), it doesn’t really have a plot that rivals The Godfather. However, there is precedence for this ambitious idea. Consider that Pokemon was originally a video game on the GameBoy before it made boatloads in movies and TV shows.

Final Considerations

At least 80 percent of great videogames made are excellent forms of entertainment because the experience players have with the game are unique to them. We are able to create our own story and create emotional attachments to characters, places, or even items in the game. When games are made into movies, that spirit of the game is lost, and in turn, both hardcore gamers and casual moviegoers leave the theaters unsatisfied.

Especially when done by any man whose name starts with Uwe. Ewww.

ROBOTS OR DINOSAURS?

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:01:00 -0500

Robots. They’re obviously the more evolved beings…and they probably were the ones who would destroy the human race before this epic battle would take place