Topic: Games Industry Death Watch 2010-present

[tendoboy1984]

If they reworked it as a rental service a la GameFly where you paid a certain amount and could play whatever you wanted it would be a lot more attractive. It wouldn't matter anymore that you lose the ability to play when the company goes away if it were just subscription-based. I'm not sure the publishers would let that happen, though.

So you mean kind of like Netflix, where you pay a subscription and get unlimited streaming?

[broodwars]

Cloud gaming will never be "big", it will have its niche but will never become the main way of gaming because the negatives outweigh the positives. OnLive's only real positive is being able to play games your PC normally couldn't handle. Maybe have it be a back-up option you get when you buy a retail game (like how many DVD/Blu-ray Discs now come with a free digital copy).

And people thought the same of television, computers, the internet, film, etc. when they were all first introduced.  I'm not a fan of Cloud gaming, but I do think at some point in the next 20 or so years it will be the status quo.  The technology is just too early right now (broadband penetration is not where it needs to be), and people like us who place importance on physical media still have too great a presence in the marketplace.

[TJ Spyke]

brood, it's not the same. You can still use TV, film, computers, etc. if the Internet is down or the company that makes them shuts down. If you spend $2,000 on "buying" games on OnLive and the service shuts down, you lose all those games forever. Maybe cloud gaming might become supplemental, but I don't see it ever becoming the primary method of content delivery.

[NWR_insanolord]

See, I don't care about physical media, I'd gladly buy every game digitally if I had the ability, and even I don't like the idea of cloud gaming right now. I want a local copy, whether it be physical or digital.

[Chozo Ghost]

Gamestop should buy OnLive because in a few years Gamestop is going to be obsolete, and OnLive is already in the direction Gamestop will need to go in order to survive, so they might as well just buy it now while its struggling because they can get it for a good price.

[NWR_insanolord]

As much as people may hate it, GameStop's not going to be hurting that much from digital distribution anytime soon. They'll be fine for at least a decade, assuming something else doesn't do them in.

[shingi_70]

Gamestop already has their own streaming service in the works. In other words onlive is fucked. There is no one left who could be a viable buyer.

 http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/8/16/3248074/gamestop-to-launch-cloud-gaming-service-spawn-labs-summer-2013

[Louieturkey]

Gamestop's cloud gaming service is closer to a competitor with Steam and Origin, not OnLive.

[shingi_70]

http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/20/3254779/htc-loss-onlive-investment

HTC lost $40 million from their investment in onlive. They've been having tons of bad luck lately.

[BranDonk Kong]

I used to love HTC, but they are all over the place. They make some pretty solid phones (especially the One Series, EVO Series and DROID Incredible series), but they've made some stupid mistakes like purchasing half of Beats and investing in Onlive.

[shingi_70]

I wouldn't call them stupid purchases. Buying them made sense ara time where tootle was pushing its own ecosystem hard and seriously pushing the nexus device. They wanted something to make them different.

And while bad purchases didn't help it also is a by product of its hard to sell a phone in the current market if your not Apple or Sanding. Or have a major partnership with a carrier like verisimilitude and Motorola or att/tmobilr like nokia.

Must sick less than two years ago they were on top of the world with phones like the evo and G2. But theyvdid what sanding is doing now and flooding the market with a to. Of waly phones alongside your big boys.

[BranDonk Kong]

Your autocorrect is killing your posts...or you're drunk. They were stupid purchases though, and they're already selling Beats back (or most of what they bought) for less than they paid. It's odd that HTC's market share is so low in the US, since their share of Sprint phones (at least before the GS2, GS3, and iPhone came out on Sprint) had to be quite high (they sold quite a few EVO 4G and EVO 3Ds), though I suppose Sprint isn't exactly the biggest carrier in the US.

[shingi_70]

Yeah sprint is the third biggest carrier now due to stupid purchases as well. I. Between the Evo and htc one series there was a lull where hitch was releasing a whole lot of nothing that lost them a lot of consumer confidence. That and they haven't been able to make a good tablet. Both of their android tabs failed and its rumpred they were banned from working on windows tablets.

Sucks as I love my G2.

[BranDonk Kong]

You don't have to be banned from making Windows tablets, Microsoft basically fucked all the OEMs with their surface tablet, so many have just dropped the idea.

[shingi_70]

This was before the surface was announced. And a lot. Of oems are working on windows 8 tablets. Some like hp and thoshiba are making intel based windows 8 tablet and laptops.

And in addtion to intel tablets there are a few oems working on arm tablets as well.

 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/08/13/collaborating-to-deliver-windows-rt-pcs.aspx


The only oems who have been complaining have been acer. All the other oems have pretty much said bring and we will do better.

[TJ Spyke]

Buying 51% of Beats was not a bad idea, it was pretty good. They still own about 25% of the company (which is doing pretty well), they have just done done as much to integrate music into their services as they should have. Investing in OnLive though, I don't see that as a good move at all.

[Louieturkey]

Some still see cloud gaming as the future.  OnLive still has a shot at figuring this out.  It may end up being though that they were the pioneers in the field but ultimately, it's another company that makes it mainstream, like how tablets were made before but weren't popular and mainstream until the iPad was released.

[shingi_70]

Eh onlive still wouldn't get it any mainstream attention as sony and microsoft have their own cloud solutions and nintendo isn't intrested.

[shingi_70]

So Sony shut down its Liverpool studio the one behind wipeout today. A few of the guys are confriming on twitter.

And a few weeks back there were alot or layoffs at Microsoft's new Vancouver studio. The guys who were working in the free to play and kinect section of the studio were let go so the studio could focus on the new hatdcore IP it had been working on. Didn't help that MS Vancouver is right next to MS Bigpark which works on casuel/kinect games and Microsoft recently opened up MS London just for free to play games.

[Chozo Ghost]

Would it be appropriate to discuss the demise of Nintendo Power in this thread? Its not a company per se, but it is sorta part of the industry.

[shingi_70]

Would it be appropriate to discuss the demise of Nintendo Power in this thread? Its not a company per se, but it is sorta part of the industry.

I guess but there's already a thread and a dev being shut down is more topical. That and all of the NP people are just being transferred.

[broodwars]

So Sony shut down its Liverpool studio the one behind wipeout today. A few of the guys are confriming on twitter.

Well, that's a shame. I've never been the biggest fan of Wipeout (the controls just seem very iffy for me considering how fast you're going down the track, & the AI seems almost as rubber-bandy as Mario Kart), but the games have seemed pretty high quality and they've been generally well-received.  I wonder if this is just part of a larger cost-cutting move by Sony, rather than the result of some larger dissatisfaction by Sony in that team's work.

[Do_What]

Gosh. I liked wipeout, in that "There hasn't been an F-Zero game in 5 years and this is seriously as close as we're ever going to get so I'll take it" kind of way. It does feel like a pure cost cutting measure. Which is a shame, because they seem to be one of Sony's best studios at producing quality portable titles.

[oohhboy]

While I never cared for the wipeout series of which they milked to death, I will always remember Psygnosis for it's Colony Wars series on the PSX.

List of way too much Wipeout:

Games developed as SCE Studio Liverpool
Formula One 2001    2001    PlayStation 2
Wipeout Fusion      2002    PlayStation 2
Formula One 2002    2002    PlayStation 2
Formula One 2003    2003    PlayStation 2
F1 04              2004    PlayStation 2
Wipeout Pure        2005    PlayStation Portable
F1 05                    2005    PlayStation 2
F1 06                    2006    PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable
Wipeout Pulse            2007    PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 2
Formula One Championship Edition    2007    PlayStation 3
Wipeout HD            2008    PlayStation 3
Wipeout HD Fury    2009    PlayStation 3
Wipeout 2048         2012    PlayStation Vita

In more related death based news, another Zynga executive jumps ship.

[shingi_70]

So as we all know last week Onlive fired all its employees died, and then restructured with a new back about to rehire as many people as it can looks like this mistake will end up being a gain for Microsoft.

 http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-holding-hiring-mixer-for-former-onlive-employees

Now it looks like at least some of the laid off OnLive employees could find themselves working for a new boss: Microsoft. The company has set up an web page that specifically invites "individuals and teams affected by the OnLive transition" to a hiring mixer on Monday at Microsoft's offices in Mountain View, California. The location is near OnLive's own headquarters in Palo Alto.

Microsoft says in its invite that it is hiring in both Mountain View and its main headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The invite doesn't say anything specifically about Microsoft developing its own cloud-based streaming game service, saying only that it has "big projects in the pipeline for the rest of 2012 and beyond."

Microsoft at one point considered OnLive to be a threat to its Xbox division, according to recently leaked two year old internal documents, and apparently considered acquiring it. It now looks like Microsoft is more interested in the people behind OnLive rather than the company itself.

People were expecting Microsoft to buy onlive after the Sony/gaikai deal. But why buy the studio when you can just grab the talent and intergrate them into putting M$ exisiting cloud stuff towards gaming.