industry-personalities
Latest
Brad McQuaid delays Kickstarter until January
Would you like to give Brad McQuaid a whole lot of money to make another game after Vanguard? Well, you'll just have to wait a bit longer. In a recent Twitter update, McQuaid stated that the Kickstarter for his next project will be delayed until January due to the challenge of raising funds during the holiday season. He also promised followers that the delay will mean showing off more of the game when the project goes live. No one knows what the project will look like at this point, although McQuaid's previous statements have indicated that it's meant as a throwback to the days of the original EverQuest and the first iterations of Vanguard. If that sounds like exactly what you'd like to play... well, as we said, you'll have to wait a little while to fund it. But it's coming.
Flameseeker Chronicles: When good Guild Wars 2 commentary goes bad
I'm aware that not everybody who reads this column loves Guild Wars 2, and I'm cool with that. Occasionally I'm baffled by a comment or two left by people who apparently just swung by to give a brief, negative review of the game, completely independent of the topic of the article they left it on, but that's mostly harmless. I appreciate the vast majority of thoughtful comments, whether positive or negative; I like to think that most of you love MMOs as much as I do, and I believe that a person doesn't necessarily have to like a game in order to have something insightful to say about it and its role in influencing the industry. I mention all of this because I want to make it clear that when I talk about toxic GW2 commentary, I don't mean people leaving negative criticism in general, or saying that they don't like the game. In fact, the majority of what I'd like to discuss comes from people who apparently play the game regularly and who are deeply invested in it. Some of them say that they love it. And because they love it, it's easy to see why they might feel protective of it and take perceived threats to it personally.
Documentary on Richard Garriott to premiere in 2012
He's the man credited with Tabula Rasa and Ultima Online. He blames other companies for ignoring the social gaming space. He runs his own company via robot, and he likes to remind everyone that he is a key element of the ultimate RPG. Oh, and he's been to space, and that's what the upcoming documentary about Richard Garriott is going to focus on. The documentary, Man on a Mission, will be chiefly focusing Garriott's efforts to be the first son of an astronaut to go into space. As the documentary explains, due to Garriott's nearsightedness, a career in NASA was always out of the question, but he never stopped wanting to follow in his father's footsteps. The documentary will premiere on January 13th nationwide, tracing his path to fortune through video games followed by his trip aboard the Soyuz spacecraft. If you're interested in seeing what you can expect from the documentary, you can check out the trailer just past the cut.
John Smedley talks free-to-play across the industry
If you've somehow missed the news from earlier today, John Smedley had a chat with us about the impending switch to a free-to-play model for DC Universe Online. So it might not come as a big surprise that he's penned a recent editorial on GamesIndustry.biz regarding the current state of MMO business models and where the industry is heading. It also probably won't surprise most people to see that he envisions the free model overtaking subscriptions, but his reasoning might. As Smedley sees it, free-to-play has a number of advantages, but one of the big ones is that it levels the playing field between big developers and smaller outfits when the games can both be played up-front without an initial investment. It's also more commonly accepted as a worldwide model, which matters in an industry that increasingly looks to other markets aside from the US. Sony Online Entertainment is slowly moving into the free-to-play realm itself, and only time will tell if the model will be a success for DCUO, but it's interesting to see the thought process behind the model expanding on a regular basis. Look for our own interview with Smed regarding his thoughts on the growing free-to-play trend, coming soon.
Sean Dahlberg moves on to Faxion Online development
For some of our readers, the idea of managing the community for Star Wars: The Old Republic would be a dream job. (How well this lines up with understanding what community managers actually have to do is debatable.) Sean Dahlberg, however, has apparently decided that he's had quite enough of that scene, so he's packed up and moved on to UTV True Games and Faxion Online. It's a bit of an odd move, and Dahlberg has put up a short entry on his personal blog explaining why he's moved on and what he's moving on to do. Faxion Online is a free-to-play game focused on the war between Heaven and Hell, with what Dahlberg describes as a sense of humor resembling that of the inimitable Dungeon Keeper franchise. He explains that while he enjoyed working with communities, he wanted to get back into designing fun systems for an actual game, and he felt that he could make a larger contribution by shifting focus to his current occupation of Senior Game Systems Designer for Faxion. For more details and a few more tidbits about what's planned for the free-to-play title, take a look at his full entry.
