PAX is over, you guys. But what a great weekend of gaming and nerddom… and I don’t think anyone got swine flu or stabbed in the eye: a major bonus!
The battle wages on between big game industry companies, independent game developers, and consumers who have become accustomed to stealing all games. The most innovative and exciting games come from indie developers, who are put on a special pedestal at events like PAX. The big developers had an impressive show, however: two in particular that blew my mind.
Turn-based strategy games Civilization V and Shogun 2: Total War
have taken the effects of their predecessors and made them look stunning.
Shogun 2‘s real-time battles, when shown on a big screen, look like an epic movie. 50,000 soldiers (samurai, ninjas, archers, cavalry) can be rendered on the screen at once. The jury’s still out on game play—and people say you will never be zoomed in enough to watch the individually motion-captured sword duals that play out on the field. But it looks epic. Totally epic.
- Shogun 2: Total War
Civilization V has improved on the popular series by adding full-screen 3D leaders (of Rome, Russia, etc) who speak their native languages! The battles also play out on a grid of hexagons instead of squares, making combat more intuitive and moving better. In actual interesting news, it looks awesome, and the best unit in the game is called the “Giant Death Robot.”
- Civilization V
In less epic but more political news, one of the most interesting panels I went to this weekend was put on by the guys who created the Humble Indie Bundle: a set of six videogames sold online in a name-your-own-price sort of way to support independent game developers and charities. When the bundle was sold in May this year, it garnered media attention for its unique method of sales and the principles it stood for: supporting independent developers; making games for Linux and Mac instead of just supporting PC; and eliminating DRM. The project earned $1.3 million, including over $300,000 for charity.
More about the Bundle, and some hot nerdy pictures, after the jump.
Jeffrey Rosen and John Graham of Wolfire games (creators of Lugaru and the Humble Indie Bundle idea) presented data at PAX that showed some interesting, if not useful, trends among people who bought the bundle. People could spend as little as one cent on the set of five games, and many did pay the minimum. 10,000 of the nearly 140,000 people who purchased the game spent less than $0.30. Someone donated over $3,000, and the average was around $9. So was it profitable to sell games to consumers allowed to name their own price? Probably. And the Wolfire team has hinted at plans to do a bundle deal again.
More fun data came from the process—Linux and Mac users paid a higher price (as did people who used Gmail!), and Linux users gave the least to charity. The most disappointing number: 25 percent of downloads of the game were from pirates: people who couldn’t make themselves spend even a cent… for charity. This is better than piracy rates reported by other indie developers, which can reach 90 to 95 percent.
The Humble Indie Bundle was particularly easy to pirate because of its lack of DRM, meaning it can be freely shared and downloaded an unlimited number of times. The developers didn’t use DRM because they oppose it, in fact: “Nobody likes DRM. It’s a universally hated thing,” said Rosen.
So pirates were “beating the system [the developers] had intentionally not created.”
- ANGELA WEBBER
- PAX’s PC free play room
- ANGELA WEBBER
- It’s lil’ Mario!
If you would like to see more photos of the weekend, check out my Flickr.
I find your thoughts on the ongoing Intellectual Property debate to be nuanced, thought provoking, well researched and original. I look forward to reading future pieces from you.