Naughty and Nice ’12 #2: Gaming occurrences

1. “It is so frustrating to come so close, but clearly there simply isn’t that much interest in building the kind of game I envisioned.”
— When Kickstarter doesn’t work
Obviously, not everything posted to Kickstarter manages to succeed. It doesn’t matter if you’re $400,000 short like Class of Heroes II or a heart-breaking $28 short like Alpha Colony. If your project doesn’t reach the goal, it doesn’t get funded. According to a Kotaku report taking figures from Kickstarter itself, only 25% of gaming Kickstarters actually succeed. It just goes to show, if you have an idea for what you think is going to be the greatest game ever, you’d better hope you’re not the only one who thinks that way if you post about it on Kickstarter…

“It should have been our most successful game, but it was cancelled
for financial reasons.” — The cancellation of Star Wars Battlefront III
Say what you will about the Star Wars expanded universe. Some of it is great and some of it isn’t. Sure, none of it is canon, but it’s fun to explore the what-ifs.
Or it would’ve been if not for the cancellation of what would’ve been the latest Star Wars game to enter the market. What makes this notable is that the game was reported to have been 99% completed (unless you listen to an unnamed source who claims that it wasn’t more than 75% completed and that it wasn’t a good game) and that the only thing left to do was test it for bugs. Sure, it’s always upsetting to learn that a game you spent so long developing has been cancelled, but there’s nothing worse than to cancel a more-the-less completed game.
I suppose this doesn’t mean much to me, personally, since I was never planning on playing the game in the first place. But for those who were, this had to have come as a punch to the gut and is just the latest high profile game cancellation in the industry in recent years. Mega Man Legends 3, anyone?

3. “I would argue, and I’ve said this before, that used games are
cannibalizing the industry.” — Epic fail for Silicon Knights
Denis Dyack has had a bad year. In March, he became the latest developer to claim poverty because of used games. Unfortunately for him, he was in the middle of a lawsuit against Epic Games at the time, and this was probably putting quite a drain on his company’s bank
account. Later that month, he claimed that he didn’t get the grant money promised to him from the Canadian government, and in May, the judge in his company’s lawsuit decided that if he were to win, he would get the equivalent of peanuts. It would’ve been a Pyrrhic victory indeed if he had won.
The opposite of “Pyrrhic” is probably “Epic”, because that’s who ultimately won. Epic Games was granted over $9 million dollars for winning the lawsuit, which is bad news for Silicon Knights. Worse is that now Silicon Knights has to recall and destroy all unsold copies of both Too Human and X-Men: Destiny (although a quick search on Amazon.ca has revealed that there are still brand new copies of X-Men: Destiny for sale as of this writing), and so this probably spells the end of the company. Interestingly enough, the same person who was very outspoken when it came to blaming others for his company’s financial woes has become very tight-lipped about losing the lawsuit. Sorry, Denis, but it isn’t used games that’s costing your company $9 million, now is it?

4. “We’d LOVE to be able to remove the protection completely, but we
know that vast numbers would simply copy it if it was that easy.” — DRM still doesn’t work, news at 11
We’ve seen news stories for years about how DRM doesn’t work. Granted, bad news travels a lot faster than good news, especially if it confirms your own beliefs. Still, you never hear a single story about how DRM saved the day and made things better for the average gamer. That’s because DRM doesn’t make things better for the average gamer. Time and again, it has made things worse. Are you
experiencing Internet and/or server problems? Sorry, you can’t play Diablo III until the Internet’s fixed. Are you upgrading your system by swapping out parts? Sorry, you can’t play Anno 2070 anymore unless Ubisoft is feeling generous.
All snark aside, Ubisoft did finally decide to abandon their ridiculous DRM.
Enter Yoyo Games, whose DRM included with Game Maker Studios permanently vandalized many users’ projects when the software mistakenly thought it was pirated. The company is going to be changing its DRM, apparently, but those hapless developers who for some reason don’t keep frequent back-ups are screwed. If you ask me, whenever I get around to making a game, I’d rather not use software that randomly adds the skull and crossbones symbol to my project if it gets a bug up its ASCII.

5. “Miranda, I wanna know your bra size.” — A year of misogyny
Well, I touched upon it above, but now I’m diving into the deep end. Yep, this was definitely a bad year if you were a female and you liked video games. Notable events included a video game tournament in February where someone acted like a jerk to a female teammate and then tried to defend his actions immediately after. The asshole in question even tried to claim that it is ethically wrong to take sexual harassment out of the fighting game community. Apparently, it’s a prerequisite to treat women as objects if you want to properly play Street Fighter.
And far be it from me to not mention Anita Sarkeesian, the woman who dared to stand up and announce her intention to produce a series for YouTube about how women are portrayed in video games. How did gamers react? The quiet ones were the ones who agreed with her and funded her Kickstarter campaign. The loud ones were the ones who called her a “fucking ovendodger” and a “Dumb ass nazi cunt,” threatened her with
rape and created a game where you could punch her in the face.
I’ll probably be here forever if I continue but the bottom line is that if you look to the right, you’ll see examples of how gamers can be better than this. But the sad fact is that not all of them are. If I could hunt down all of the loud jerks who denigrate women and castrate them so that they won’t be able to breed, I would. But I can’t. The majority of them post from behind an anonymous username and thus feel that they are immune from consequences. I would probably have to break some laws if I were to try to track any of them down.
So here’s to 2013, a year where hopefully this behavior doesn’t continue… aw crap, Anita hasn’t released a single episode yet and I just know that when she does, it’s going to be flamed to Hell and back. Well, time to build that fallout shelter I’ve been meaning to.

1. “Fund and Follow Creativity” — A year of surprising Kickstarter successes
This year was definitely the year of big success for Kickstarter projects. Whether it was the otherwise untitled Double Fine Adventure, Obsidian Entertainment’s Project Eternity or the Ouya console, gamers threw their money towards a lot of different projects that looked like they would work, but that wouldn’t have had the support of AAA companies. With Kickstarter comes the notion that developers who are funded directly by gamers have the freedom to create the kind of product that they intend rather than having to compromise on certain aspects of the product in order to appease whoever funded them. Many of these projects have a release date of 2013, so hopefully by this time next year, Tim Schafer will still be over here on the right column rather than over there on the left, unless Drew tweaks the code again.

2. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt genuinely overwhelmed before until
last night, reading everyone’s messages.” — Journey gets nominated at the Grammy Awards
That’s probably not really all that notable, Journey is a pretty decent band and I’m sure they got nominated a lot in the past. But I’m not talking about the band, I’m talking about the game.
If you haven’t yet listened to the soundtrack for Journey, I would consider it the second best video game soundtrack of the year. The game itself is #2 on my list for the best downloadable games of the year and I wrote a review of the game that lauded its multiplayer aspect. I don’t play multiplayer games (or enable those functions in the games I do have), so that alone should say a lot about how great Journey is.
The Venn diagram of the kinds of people who watch the Grammys and the kinds of people who play video games might barely overlap (I could be wrong), but Journey’s nomination at an awards ceremony that doesn’t usually cater to the game’s target audience confirms just how transcendent the game really is. Entire websites are devoted to people talking about their experiences playing the game. You just don’t get that with Final Fantasy.

3. “No one bus should have all this power.” — Gaming charity events continue to go strong this year
When the dust settled on Desert Bus For Hope 6, they had raised more than $440,000 for the Child’s Play charity, but they’re not the only gamers who have raised money for worthy causes. For example, Mass Effect Marathon 3 raised over $26,670 for Child’s Play, Extra Life raised almost $2 million for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, and the Mario Marathon 5 raised over $112,000 for Child’s Play. Later this week, The Speed Gamers plan to hold their own Mario Marathon to benefit the Make A Wish Foundation, and they’d already raised nearly $60,000 earlier this year in their Pokémon Marathon. Yeah, it turns out that not all gamers are out to degrade women and train up to be serial killers.

4. “I’m not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don’t get to be the hero.” — The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker receives a gender-swap mod
In a year that unfortunately seemed to reaffirm the notion that gamers are a bunch of misogynistic assholes, a gamer by the name of Mike Hoye decided that his daughter should be the hero once in a while. The sad fact is that most games don’t offer that kind of experience as they’re written from the point of view of a guy and don’t allow the player to change this. Sure, some games do allow the option to choose your gender, but not all of them apply this option equally. Persona 3 Portable offers a gamer a much different experience if they choose the female protagonist instead of the male and this results in a rich experience no matter who you are, whereas White Knight Chronicles acknowledges the customized player character once at the beginning and then promptly ignores him/her for the rest of the game. Even as far back as Dragon Warrior 3, I swear the text didn’t change much for me if I chose to play as a female character. She still was addressed as if she were male most of the time.
Mr. Hoye put a lot of work into making sure the game would run properly as he had to do more than just a simple editing of the text. He had to make sure that each portion of dialogue was the exact same length as before, or else the code would break. But in the end he did it, Link’s gender change was complete, and now his daughter can play the game and feel more like a hero. (Or, well, Mike can play the game; his daughter is only three-and-a-half. Oh, by the way, Mike? You might want to take a look at Final Fantasy XIII sometime if you want another game where your daughter can feel like a hero.)

5. “Everything’s changed now.” — A video game movie that doesn’t suck? What’re the odds?
It turns out that Disney knows what it’s doing after all. Wreck-It
Ralph could’ve easily gone either way, considering how badly video games tend to be portrayed in anything outside of video game magazines and blogs. But this is Disney, the same company that produced movies like The Lion King and The Princess and the Frog. They’re the ones who purchased Marvel and then produced gems like Thor and The Avengers. They wouldn’t mess up something like Wreck-It Ralph, right?
I haven’t watched it, but of those who have, they’ve rated it 8.2 on IMDb, 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, 73% on Metacritic and 3.25/4 stars on Keyframe. I’d say that’s pretty good.
Wreck-It Ralph is basically a story about a game villain who decides one day that he wants to be a hero instead, so he runs away and joins an FPS. That’s what I’ve gathered from the trailer and although I know that trailers sometimes lie, I’m hoping this isn’t the case here because I’m pretending to be an Informed Journalist for a moment. Still, I think the bottom line is that this is a movie about video games that many gamers, especially those who almost literally grew up in the arcades, will enjoy. (This also bodes well for Star Wars, Episode VII. Just saying.)

1. The mass industry exodus
It has been one hell of a year for gaming and that’s not necessarily a positive thing. At one point being an executive or even a figurehead for a major gaming developer is something most can only dream of. After all, who doesn’t like the idea of fame and fortune all while being in an industry you love? Doctors and Bioware founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk might disagree after spending decades in the business. In September their sudden resignation shocked the industry. Not to be outdone by the Doctors, Epic Games designer Cliff Bleszinski left the company in early October. In May former baseball-pitcher Curl Shilling and his company, 38 Studios also left the scene. Unlike the Bioware Doctors and Cliffy B, 38 Studios was a dream-come-true-turned-nightmare as bankruptcy hit the newly formed studio shortly after releasing Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning. I suppose the dream of being top-dog in the video game industry doesn’t last forever.

2. A Cross Assault to remember
At this point video games are a multi-billion dollar industry. People are playing more games than ever thanks to the rise of mobile gaming and the continued popularity of consoles and handhelds. Even so, it still shocks some male gamers to learn woman are also gamers and want to be treated with respect. (Note: this isn’t the same as asking developers to only create games women would want to play at the expense of what’s being created now.) This year was spectacular at Capcom’s Cross Assault tournament when Aris Bakhtanians insisted sexual harassment was part of gamer culture after he was called out by other gamers. On the sixth day of the tournament Miranda Pakozdi had enough and exited Cross Assault by forfeiting her match. The buzz surrounding the scandal forced both Capcom and Bakhtanians to apologize. However, the damage was done, the internet raged for a while and any positive discussion addressing sexism turned into spitting matches between sexists gamers and gamers tired of the negative portayal of their hobby.

3. Left behind yet again
Last year we saw a number of highly anticipated niche titles being left in Japan. Those games were mostly for the DS and PSP—- two systems that are effectively dead in the West. With the arrival of the 3DS a variety of popular games were sure to make their way out of the Land of the Rising Sun. Unfortunately, it looks as if Square Enix may be leaving Bravely Default: Flying Fairy behind, despite it doing well in Japan and containing a style reminiscent of older Final Fantasy titles. Speaking of older titles, we thought for sure Atlus USA would bring over the PSP port of Persona 2: Eternal Punishment. After all, the Persona series is popular in North America, the PS1 game was released here more than a decade ago and many fans would support a late PSP release even if it was only available as a PSN download. Sadly, Atlus has been silent regarding Eternal Punishment, instead focusing on Persona 4: Golden for the Vita. The irony is quite bitter considering the situation with Persona 2: Innocent Sin on the PS1 more than ten years ago…

1. Kicking the funding over to the fans
This year hasn’t been a great time for video games and creativity. Between sluggish game sales, the lack of new consoles and major figureheads leaving studios it feels as big publishers will become more risk adverse than ever. Fortunately for gamers who wish to see projects other than first person shooters, big action games and major sports franchises there are alternatives. Kickstarter has proven that fans are willing to pay for a gaming project they care about from smaller developers. Double Fine and inXile Entertainment saw major successes and met their funding goals. FTL: Faster Than Light came to fruition earlier this year as it reached its funding goal in February and was successfully released in September. Additionally, fans have even supported the Ouya, an Android powered open source console. 2013 will be an interesting year when all of these Kickstarter projects are finally available to backers and the public at large.

2. #1ReasonWhy discussion is important
Last month a number of women in the gaming industry took to Twitter with the #1ReasonWhy hashtag. The purpose of the hashtag was to bring to light the sexism and sexual harassment they face as programmers, artists and writers in their respective field. Many women gave first and second hand accounts of why they felt uncomfortable and sometimes unwelcome in the gaming industry. The outpouring of support and solidarity among both women and men was amazing to see. At least before the trolls arrived. Nearly two weeks later the hashtag is still active and there is meaningful discussion to be found. The first step on the path to change is admitting there’s problem, even if that problem has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the light.

3. Xseed and NIS America get Steamy
Gamers who enjoy niche Japanese games might be bummed out at how many titles are no longer being localized—especially on handhelds. Fortunately, there might be a new and interesting alternative to games on the go. In March Xseed released a port of Ys: The Oath in Felghana on Steam. Later at the end of May, Ys Origin was also published on Steam. While the Ys games aren’t exactly top sellers they are enjoying a fair amount of exposure and Steam sales are certainly bound to find new gamers who wouldn’t have tried the series on the PSP. In August NIS America entered the fray with a port of ClaDun x2. The list is very small but hopefully Steam can become a viable platform for localizing niche RPG releases in the future. If not, we’re all going to have to brush up on our Japanese or hope other fans do the heavy lifting with their own translations.

1. Dedicated handhelds struggling in the West
This was something many of us didn’t want to admit, but it does seem like handhelds are seriously losing market share in western territories. This is happening due to a number of factors. Mobile phone gaming is gaining serious ground, but Nintendo and Sony haven’t dealt with the situation with the best decisions. It’s not too late to combat this in Nintendo’s case, though.

1½. In fact, Wii U might be struggling, too
This probably wasn’t a big surprise after this year’s tepid E3 showing, but the Wii U’s launch was cold worldwide. It’s far too early to write it off, and the first year for new hardware is typically rocky, but the distant future looks bleak right now. That, or they’re holding back some big announcements for the future that could drastically change its outlook.

2. AAA Ggames disappointing many
There were a lot of people disappointed with this year’s crop of big budget releases, due to not delivering on expectations. From Mass Effect 3 to Max Payne 3 to Diablo 3 to Resident Evil 6 (among others), some thought the games could have used more time in the oven; others thought they were simply flawed to the core. Fortunately, next year looks much better.

3. Game journalism drama
The second half of the year saw the ethics of many video game journalists called into question, especially in Europe. The Rob Florence fiasco, where Eurogamer edited his work to remove some parts due to inane libel threats, was by far the biggest. It looks bad, but hopefully forces the writers and publications to make some changes in the future.

4. The string of layoffs and studio closures continues
This is the negative part of budgets rising, a contrast to the #1 “Nice” entry. We’re still seeing an unbelievable amount of closures this late into the generation, with Eurocom being the latest victim. And it’s tough to see this getting any better for some studios in the near future. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, and not everyone will be strapped in securely.

1. The smell of Next Gen A new generation of consoles means new beginning for both developers and consumers. The latter group is more likely to buy new IPs on a new console, meaning developers will have the freedom to show us new possibilities and worlds with more advanced tech. There will be some setbacks, like bad corporate management getting in the way, but some will overcome that.

2. Excellent indie and digital games
This has been a great year for the indie and digital markets on PC and consoles. You know something’s going well there when games like The Walking Dead series from Telltale Games, Journey, and Mark of the Ninja have been nominated for Game of the Year awards, above the legion of “AAA” games released from bigger publishers. Hopefully this is the start of something bigger.

3. Namco Bandai
Namco Bandai had been reviled by fans for years due to leaving many good-looking games in Japan, especially those from the Tales series. But it seems they’ve had a slight change of heart recently. They’ve been localizing more (but not all) Tales games, and have also been publishing other Japanese games like Dark Souls. The sequel to that is coming soon, along with Ni no Kuni for PS3.

4. Zynga
This isn’t here to say it’s a good thing to see people out of work, but the numerous setbacks Zynga suffered were good because it shows how a company shouldn’t rely on blatant me-too copycats to prosper in the market. The worst of them, Dream Heights (a rip-off of Tiny Tower), may have happened last year, but the karma is setting in now.