Many popular PC games are huge nowadays. I mean literally over a gigabyte. The million dollar question (literally) is how much is too big? What what point is the file size such a barrier to entry that it becomes economically unfeasible? In the recent World of Warcraft beta, the download size was in excess of a gig and there are thousands and thousands of people happily participating in that. I am a big believer that people (like me) want the convenience of pressing a button ...
Drengin.net is going to be expanding hugely soon. We've been signing deals (announcements coming soon) with various major publishers to put their games on Drengin.net. The idea isn't to necessarily put their latest/greatest titles on there but instead focus instead on games that are on their way out from retail. The example I love to use is Total Annihilation. It's discontinued now (I'm sure you can find it somewhere) but it's a game that was just awesome in its time and graphically it still ...
Well, today GalCiv2.com got both slashdotted, Digged, and Neowin'ed at the same time. Why? It started earlier today. Someone over at Digg.com made an article that implied that Stardock wanted people to pirate our game, Galactic Civilizations II. Which is definitely not true. We need every sale we can get. But the argument was essentially that because our retail game has no copy protection that we essentially invite piracy. And since sales of the game have been so good, t...
Greetings guys. We're in the current issue of Computer Games Magazine. But I saw that we got raided and lost some members which is a bit of a bummer. Comment here on what you would like to see and what's happening.
The problem people have been hearing about in the game industry isn't new. But it's good that it's coming out. Here's a blog I wrote in 2002 about the game industry's dark side: https://www.joeuser.com/Articles/TheDarksideofthegameindus.html
I'm going on a trip tomorrow and where I go, so goes my laptop. The laptop is a pretty good game machine. Unfortunately, I can't play very many games on it when I travel. That's because most games now use rather obnoxious CD-ROM copy protection. Copy protection on PC games is, in my opinion, not just ineffective, but stupid. I say that as a software developer and publisher of 10 years. And as time has gone one, I've become increasingly convinced that any copy protection that inconvenien...
The April 2008 edition of PC Gamer has a very thorough review of Sins of a Solar Empire. 91% and Editor's Choice!
After years of being told that PC gamers are really just console gamers but with different game controllers (mouse and keyboard) and that in-depth strategy was dying, we now have some conclusive evidence that no, that serious strategy games are alive and kicking. Behold: #1 at Gamespot: #1 at IGN: #1 at 1Up: And what about sales? #2 at Amazon.com, #3 at EBGames.com / Gamestop (And it sold out, they've replenished) Why is this significant?
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After more than a couple of years of work, Sins of a Solar Empire has gone gold. What an incredible journey it's been. For the past year, Stardock, the developers of Galactic Civilizations and Ironclad, a new company made up of developers who worked on Homeworld: Cataclysm have been working together to try to create a 4X RTS. Stardock and Ironclad pushed the release date back a few times to ensure that there was plenty of time to incorporate the features they wanted in as well a...
This morning I visited G4 and taped an episode of X-Play while I demoed Sins of a Solar Empire. The people there are totally awesome. Morgan Webb is totally awesome. It's nice to get away from a debugger and get to actually visit and hang out with fellow gamers. Here's a link to the show. They're rebroadcasting it again later tonight. http://www.g4tv.com/xplay/features/19985/Hands_On_Sins_of_a_Solar_Empire.html
GameSpy has awarded Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar with its coveted expansion pack of the yeard award and rated it as the 4th top overall PC game of 2007 (just behind BioShock). Go here to read more about it.
I know I'm very happy with how well Sins of a Solar Empire has done. For its pre-release marketing, we d did a lot more with it in terms of screenshots. The game is really really pretty. I wonder how much of its success is due to the fact it just looks so darn cool?