A tiny green creature once said, "Size matters not." An anonymous thinker also said, "It's not the size that matters, it's how you use it." And a starving News Blips writer just said, "Why is my extra-large pizza taking so damn long to arrive?"
News Blips:
The video game industry is too big. That's according to Dinofarm Games' Keith Burgun, lead designer of 100 Rogues for the iPhone and iPad. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Burgun believed the industry will "eventually" revert to a smaller, quality-oriented state as opposed to over-relying on franchises and licensing. "I think that video games have achieved, in the last 20 years, this bizarre rock star status in our culture," he said. "Because of that, our industry has become way bigger than it ought to be." Burgun also drew an analogy of his ideal perception of the industry with the board-game community, saying, "If you look at board games, it's an industry that's doing pretty well, but there's a lot of quality. It's mostly people who are really into games who are into it, it doesn't have the same status as video games, where everybody is supposed to be super into it. I think that the way that the board game industry looks is something like the way we can imagine a future video games industry looking." And yes, that is the only photo of Burgun I was able to scrounge up.
Apple unleashes its lawyers upon Amazon over its use of the term "App Store." Bloomberg reports that Apple is waggling its legal finger at Amazon for trademark infringement and unfair competition. In its official complaint, Apple said that Amazon "has begun improperly using Apple’s App Store mark in connection with Amazon’s mobile-software developer program." Kristin Huguet, a representative of Apple, said the lawsuit went ahead because Amazon's App Store "will confuse and mislead customers." This only galvanizes me to trademark the word "the." If Apple can register widely used colloquialisms, then I have a fair shot, right?
Prepare to empty your wallet whenever you want to buy a new 3DS game. Hideki Konno, project lead behind Nintendo's impending handheld, told Gamasutra that the company would rather focus on quality than release its games at budget prices. "So now in terms of one dollar games, or free games, or whatever that is out there in the market, I mean, really, we're not going to be competing with that," Konno said. "We're not going to try to match that; we're just going to continually strive to not just maintain, but increase, the quality of the entertainment that we're providing, and let it sort itself out. Again, we're not worried about competing at a price point level." Konno also surmised that if a normally priced game were to appear at a lower cost, its content and quality would suffer. "If somebody said to me, 'Hey, we've got Call of Duty on your portable device and it's only going to cost you 100 yen [$1],' yeah, I'd be super stoked, really excited about that," he said. "And I'd be really excited to see a great game at a really cheap price, but I just don't think that you could make a game that's immersive and as big as, let's say Call of Duty, or any other large title, and sell it at that price point; it's just not possible." I'd buy COD for 100 yen. More importantly, does anyone have 100 yen I could borrow?
Plopping down $60 for a new game isn't fair, according to Easy Studios (Battlefield Play4Free, Lord of Ultima) General Manager Ben Cousins. "I can't think of anything more exploitative than gating all of your content behind having to pay someone $60," Cousins said to Rock, Paper, Shotgun in an interview. "That's a really harsh business model if you think about it objectively." Cousins subsequently touted Easy Studios' adoption of the free-to-play model, explaining, "What we do is enable everyone to play the game and figure out if they like it. If they don't like it, they can walk away and they don't lose anything. How many times have we all bought crappy games for $60, right? And the majority of people in our game spend less than that — the cost of a full-priced game. So what we're selling is a cheaper than full price game that you can try before you buy. If you choose to buy at all." I'll admit that paying $60 for a game is atrocious, but the alternative isn't that appealing either: My fingers have curled into shrunken digits after sinking all those hours into the free Dragon Age: Legends.
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