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The 'Titanfall' mobile game will die on the vine
If you managed to get access to the Titanfall: Frontline beta, congratulations: You're playing a mobile game marked for death. "We've learned an incredible amount in the beta test of Titanfall: Frontline, but in the end felt the experience wasn't ready to deliver the intense action-packed gameplay synonymous with Titanfall," a post on the game's website says.
Does the world need another first-person, team-based shooter?
"I'm not the only asshole who had this idea a few years ago," Cliff Bleszinski says in between sips of a sugar-free Red Bull. He's perched in the lounge area of his studio's E3 meeting space, on the other side of a thin wall where a dozen journalists and internet influencers are playing his latest game, a team-based shooter called LawBreakers. Every now and then, the players beyond the wall suddenly wail and clap as a game comes to a dramatic close. Bleszinski is talking about the market for online, first-person, team-based shooters -- a niche genre that, in mid 2016, is on the verge of oversaturation. Overwatch just came out, and it's been a monstrous hit for Activision Blizzard. It dominates the front page of Twitch, and there are already plans to transform it into a truly competitive, esports-focused title. Other similar games, such as Gearbox's Battleborn or Epic Games' Paragon, are also on the market, but they can't compare in terms of player numbers or hype.
'Gears of War' creator's 'LawBreakers' is a timed Steam exclusive
It turns out Cliff "CliffyB" Bleszinski hasn't abandoned PC gamers after years of making Gears of War games for the Xbox 360. His new shooter LawBreakers will be a Steam exclusive "at launch." What's more, the game where humanity destroyed The Moon isn't free-to-play any longer -- but it won't cost $60, either. Why the change of heart? "As the game continued to take shape, we realized free-to-play wasn't the right fit for what we're building," Bleszinski says in a canned press release quote.
Free to Play: The value of zero
Recently I read about Min Kim, VP of Nexon America, commenting that he thinks that their new set of games might actually be looked over because of the lack of a subscription. Essentially, it is the same quandary that an artist gets into when he or she wonders how much to sell their art for. I used to be scolded by my fellow artists all the time for not charging enough for works of art, the argument being that something handed out for too low of a price is often seen as gimmicky or cheap. As Kim put it, if "someone were to pass you a gift card worth $100, and they say, 'Hey take this, it's free.' Initially you would clam up and go, 'Wait, what's the catch?'" He pointed out that many subscription based developers might have to start giving more bang for a player's buck in order to keep up with the new, higher quality games that are coming from the FTP market. It will be interesting to see if this happens or not. But I can totally see what he means about pricing, or the lack of. My artist friends and I used to have those discussions about pricing for hours. I used to practically give the stuff away not because I thought it was bad, but because I just saw it as something I wanted people to enjoy. One of my friends told me he set his prices sort of high, and that this created a "value" for the item, something that the collector could claim that the piece was worth. If you look at the millions of dollars that some art brings, you have to wonder: is it only worth that amount because someone paid for it?
Austin GDC: Live at the Minho Kim keynote
If you haven't heard of Minho Kim, I'll forgive you -- I hadn't heard of him either until the name showed up in the list of keynote presentations at the Austin Game Developers Conference. Kim is Nexon America's director of game operations, and while Nexon hasn't made a big impact in North American markets, their free-to-play, micro-transaction driven online games (the best known of which is probably MapleStory) are a hit in Asia and Europe. Kim's keynote launches the final day of the conference with a discussion of micro-transactions. Joystiq is on-site waiting for festivities to begin, so keep reading for a play-by-play.
