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Dead Island's lifeblood was co-op, 4 million units shipped
Dead Island's success was all due to that stunning trailer, right? Well, according to Guido Eickmeyer, development director and executive producer of games at publisher Deep Silver, the resort-vacation zombie simulator sold 4 million units because of its cooperative gameplay."This is why we got all the good reviews from users. This is why we got high user ratings, because it is the most exciting co-op experience that is on the market," Eickmeyer said.Despite investing less than $25 million dollars in the project – low for a major triple-A video game – Dead Island has been played for 56,907,547 hours in co-op, which is approximately 6,500 years total.After the success of the trailer, there were talks of forming the game around that, but there simply weren't the resources. Dead Island showed strong potential in its co-op, so the focus shifted to that and that game was a huge hit. Dead Island: Riptide is another "huge co-op experience" being revealed this week at Gamescom.
GDC Europe 2012: F2P developers should expect 70 percent initial user drop
Batting .300 is the gold standard for free-to-play games, according to former Empire: Total War designer Jan van der Crabben. He told listeners at a GDC Europe keynote that free-to-play developers should expect to lose 70 percent of their initial registered users. He said that player retention is the key issue facing the new business model, and despite the fact that most players leave F2P titles shortly after registering, those who stick around for a few days will usually keep playing. Van der Crabben, who is currently designing browser-based F2P games at Travian, pointed to World of Warcraft as a model, noting its mechanical effectiveness at retaining users by presenting them with cyclical gameplay. This amounts to "kill[ing] stuff to get better to get more abilities to kill more stuff," he said.
Majority of profit from Dragon Age: Origins DLC was from launch DLC
"Having something post-ship is absolutely essential," BioWare director of online development Fernando Melo told an audience at GDC Europe today, during his discussion of day-one DLC, online passes and long-term monetization. Shipping DLC on the day of launch is essential from a business standpoint – Dragon Age: Origins, for example, saw 53 percent of all of its paid DLC transactions solely from sales of its day-one DLC packs, The Stone Prisoner and Warden's Keep.This figure accounts for those who bought Stone Prisoner for $15 in a used copy of Origins, and those who purchased Warden's Keep for $7 outside of its inclusion in the Digital Deluxe Edition. Since these two DLC packs, Dragon Age: Origins has had seven additional iterations of downloadable content, which account for less than half of the total DLC revenue from Origins.Melo stressed the importance of day-one DLC from a business standpoint for any developer. Launch day sees the highest number of players and offers the widest possibility for catching long-term, continuously paying players, he said.
GDC Online announces John Smedley for keynote
John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, has been named for the Game Developers' Conference Online's business and marketing track keynote. In light of SOE's recent paradigm shift to focus on the free-to-play model, Smedley will be talking about how F2P is the future of online gaming. He'll run through how SOE managed to transition its games, how that transition has led to record highs in numbers of players and revenue growth, and what's in store for the future of F2P design. Other track's keynote speakers have yet to be announced, but details of other talks are slowly but surely being filled in. More details, including a schedule builder and an up-to-date list of speakers, are available on the GDC Online website.
Getting the best of both worlds in Fractured Soul
Fractured Soul's release status may be in question, with Endgame Studios tentatively planning to put it on the 3DS eShop in two parts, but it's worth hoping the game finds its way to players. The side-scroller takes one clever DS-friendly mechanic -- parallel worlds, one on each screen, that the player can jump between at any time -- and then cranks that to every possible extreme, to challenge and/or punish the player.The main gimmick is easy enough to understand, and the first few levels ease you into it nicely. Two side-scrolling environments exist in parallel, one on each screen, but they're slightly different from one another. There might be a bridge on the top screen where there's a gap on the bottom screen, or a wall in place on one screen that isn't on the other.%Gallery-152022%
Spinning a web from The Amazing Spider-Man's point of view
In an effort make you feel like you're Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man, Beenox has designed Web Rush mode, a first-person mechanic that lets Spidey move to a particular section of the environment in a cinematic parkour sequence.Think of that initial first-person bit seen in the movie's teaser trailer, which moves the camera inside Parker's head and lets you see skyscrapers of Manhattan through the eyes of Spider-Man.%Gallery-150652%
GDC 2012: Watch Funcom's full The Secret World presentation
If you found your appetite whetted for The Secret World after reading Jef's writeup from GDC, then make room in your life for 35 minutes of Funcom's full presentation from the conference! Senior Producer Ragnar Tørnquist, Lead Designer Martin Bruusgaard, and Lead Content Designer Joel Bylos take turns showing off in-game footage and discussing the game mechanics at play. Topics covered in the presentation include character creation, the creepy/sexy Dragon starter experience, how achievements work, story, crafting, and the lands of Transylvania. While the video isn't 100% pristine -- Funcom apologized for the less-than-perfect lighting during the presentation -- it's so chock-full of information and footage that you won't even notice. Give it a whirl after the jump!
Warren Spector (note: not 'War Inspector') GDC Lifetime Achievement award video loosed
During GDC this year, Warren Spector was honored with the Lifetime Achievement award for ... uh ... his life, and Mega64 was there with an amazing video to celebrate as much. Starring Epic Games' Cliff Bleszinski, you'll find out that Spector's name isn't just a guise for his secret job as a "War Inspector." Finally! The truth!
Long Mario never lived: Super Mario 3D Land director was totally joking
Koichi Hayashida opened his hilarious, energetic GDC speech with a look at some content that was considered for inclusion in Super Mario 3D Land, but didn't make it into the final game -- ideas like "Huge Mario," "Long Mario" (who is "sort of scary!") and a shell-riding "Pro Skater Mario."But were these ideas that really almost made it into the game? "No, not at all," Hayashida told me with a laugh during a subsequent interview. Hayashida then went on to explain his use of weird jokes and general high-energy style."Just for this presentation," he said (quietly), "I decided to turn my hilarity meter up to maximum for an American audience. If I was addressing a Japanese audience, of course, I would be much more subdued." In fact, "I think if I tried to give that same presentation for a Japanese audience, they might not even be able to follow it." Hayashida expressed surprise that the GDC crowd offered spontaneous applause for the corny, out-of-place "D. Mario" option that appeared in every multiple-choice question he offered on stage. "I was really surprised, because that's the sort of thing that Japanese audiences might have just sat there not clapping for."
Hayashida: Super Mario 3D Land is a gateway game
Super Mario 3D Land has a curious structure: it's very easy throughout the first eight worlds, and then it surprises the player with a "special" set of eight additional worlds, which test players with insane time limits, ever-pursuing "Shadow Marios" and every other trick EAD Tokyo could think of. So why backload the challenge?"We thought of setting the difficulty level about as low as we could go realistically for this game because we saw this as an entry point to the Mario games for a lot of people," director Koichi Hayashida told me during GDC. "So the way we see it is someone would pick up Super Mario 3D Land and play that, and then maybe they would move onto Super Mario Galaxy or Super Mario Sunshine or Super Mario 64 after that."There's an even more personal motivation. "Speaking as a Mario game fan personally, I should admit that I had trouble trying to clear the first two Super Mario Bros. games," Hayashida said. "So for me, I wanted to create a game that I could at the very least clear. Even if it meant using Assist Blocks, I was able to clear this one, of course."Hayashida and his team designed a game that allowed "lots of people" to see an ending, which plays at the end of world 8 before the Special Worlds appear. "Even though there's still a little bit of good challenge in worlds 7 and 8, people have at least the option to adjust the difficulty for what feels appropriate to them. If that means they need to challenge themselves to find all the star medals in a certain levels, they can do that. But we're not forcing people to do something at a very high level of difficulty all the way through." At least, not until the Special Worlds.
Exploring an open-world Gotham in Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes
Lego bricks inspire creativity, but that sense of discovery and creation is all but lost in the video games from developer Travelers Tales. The experiences are largely linear affairs, with not much in the way of making your own fun.Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes has a different design philosophy. Rather than give players a list of levels they can select, TT Games has removed the barriers around Batman's hometown. While the vision of an open world is welcome, a short demo of the game during GDC showed there's still a lot that tethers The Dark Knight to Gotham.%Gallery-150793%
Move's cryptic Datura captured on video
At GDC, Sony officially unveiled Plastic Studios' Datura, a Move-based adventure game that puts you in control of a spooky floating hand in a richly detailed forest. I had the opportunity to move through the forest, touch trees, and crack ice, but you need this video from PlayStation Blog to help understand the oddity of Datura.Datura seems to trade adventure game logic for dream logic, and gives you bizarre choices that result in unexpected effects. For example, picking up an icepick (in a hollowed out statue) transports you instantly to an ice field, where you must decide whether to get a trophy -- or a frantic person -- out of the ice. Seemed like an easy choice for me, but apparently not everybody does the same thing. Your actions result in alterations to the main forest environment, which may include ... different insects? Told you it was odd.
GDC 2012: The Secret World's crafting, combat (and cutscenes) revealed
Funcom's hush-hush demo at last week's Game Developer's Conference was quite a bit of fun, even if the opening few minutes treaded perilously close to wince-inducing. The Secret World creative director Ragnar Tornquist kicked things off with a brief introduction, which was followed by a look at the game's character creation as experienced by a female Dragon-faction avatar. Once that was complete, we got an eyeful of some opening cinematics, and I do mean an eyeful. If you've never watched a lesbian makeout scene alongside a half dozen sweaty male game journos (and a couple of pretty PR girls), well, let's just say that it's hilarious to think about now and fairly awkward to actually experience.
Play Sketch Nation Studio, publish title you created in-game, profit
Making games is hard. Making games that make money is exponentially more difficult, but even that doomed opportunity isn't possible without first overcoming the initial problem -- making games is hard.We've tracked the emotional and economic expense of making a game without a publisher, devoted backers or rich family members, and the personal sacrifice involved in devoting oneself to a passion of game creation is now in the glaring public light. Engineous Games wants to take some of the pain out of programming with its new app, Sketch Nation Studio, set to debut at the end of March for iOS devices, Engineous founder Nitzan Wilnai told Joystiq at GDC.Studio is the follow-up to Sketch Nation Shooter, an app released in 2011 that allows users to draw their own creations and put them into a game instantly. Shooter sold 800,000 copies at $0.99 a pop, saw 100,000 games created and 10,000 available for sharing across the network. Studio takes the premise of Shooter one step further, and allows users to have their games published through Engineous on the App Store with a tap of a button.Engineous will publish each applicable title for $0.99, and after Apple takes its standard 30 percent, Engineous and the Studio developer will split profits 50-50, each seeing $0.35 of every sale. Sell 1,000 copies and get $350; sell 10,000 and get $3,500. That's not a bad reward for simply playing a game, but it gets better -- Sketch Nation Studio is free.
The best mobile games of GDC 2012
We've picked out five of the most interesting new mobile titles seen at the Game Developers Conference this year. One of them is available now, and the others are coming soon, all from studios and developers of varying talents and reputations. Read on to see the cream of the crop from the mobile side of this year's GDC.
Final thoughts from GDC: How JRPGS can dance to Reisuke Ishida's beat
This is a column by Kat Bailey dedicated to the analysis of the once beloved Japanese RPG sub-genre. Tune in every Wednesday for thoughts on white-haired villains, giant robots, Infinity+1 swords, and everything else the wonderful world of JRPGs has to offer. For all the discussion about the dire straits the Japanese game industry finds itself in, my lasting image of GDC 2012 will be of a Japanese developer who got so excited about his projects that he literally started dancing at his podium.That developer was Taito's Reisuke Ishida (Space Invaders Infinity Gene), and he was in town to host a talk titled simply, 'Five Techniques for Making an Unforgettable Game.' No self-flagellation about the declining quality of Japanese gaming here; just Ishida running between the two screens on either side of his podium as he danced to the trailer of Groove Coaster. I find Reisuke Ishida's enthusiasm for the craft infectious, to say the least.
My first dance with Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien
Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien is easier than Bit.Trip Runner.I'm saying this up front because I'm guessing the difficulty in Runner turned some would-be fans away, and I want those people to keep reading. If you liked the simple rhythm-platforming gameplay of Runner but hit a metaphorical wall after hitting so many literal walls, this will be more your speed. I think I got through about 8 stages in a row of fast-moving, autoscrolling, jumping, sliding, kicking gameplay without dying.In fact, a lot of the game is designed to welcome lapsed or new players. The retro look has been replaced by a polygonal style that co-director Alex Neuse describes as "whimsical," with a rounded, cartoony CommanderVideo and cute creatures bouncing happily to the music. Cutscenes in a Saul Bass art style act as both exemplars of a popular style and, as co-director Mike Roush explained, a "stepping stone between the old style and the new style." bridges between the 2D Bit.Trip look and Runner2's in-game presentation. As an XBLA/PSN title, it's also available to people who couldn't play the WiiWare-based Runner. "So this is like, hey everyone, this is our fun little gameplay thing, rhythm music platformer, and we can all play it," Neuse said.Even if you're a bad enough dude to enjoy the insane difficulty of Runner 1, there's plenty in the sequel to capture your interest. Like choices.
Shadow Government tries to combine real-world policy with casual gameplay
Shadow Government was probably the most fascinating game I saw at GDC. I should probably clarify that: I didn't see much of the game in action, but what I did see showed off an excellently designed UI and some good looking (if a little complicated) Farmville-style game mechanics. The most fascinating thing about Shadow Government isn't what it does, but what its developers hope to do. Nicholas Fortugno is the game's main designer, and though he's still fairly young, he has a number of solid iOS and award-winning game credits to his name. He's also a teacher of game design, and with Shadow Government, he says he's aiming to not only bring up the level of these Farmville-like social freemium games, but also help players to take a long, hard look at the effects of real-life issues. That may sound a little nuts -- it certainly does to me. But Shadow Government isn't just driven by Fortugno's freemium engine. It's also driven by a number of simulations from a real-life group called The Millennium Institute, a think tank that does hardcore policy analysis for a number of corporations and countries around the world, setting up models as accurately as possible that will predict the given effects for any number of real life decisions. What if the price of oil goes up, or agriculture is de-funded, or minimum wages in a certain company go down? The Millennium Institute models situations exactly like that, and Fortugno has been given access to all of those simulations in order to model this game. On the surface of Shadow Government, you're placed in control of the future of the real-life United States and given a set of freemium tools to make decisions for the country. Do you build up industry by building a factory, or grow education by building a school? Underneath that relatively simple interface, the Millennium Institute's simulations are running. If you want to, you'll be able to dive into the background of the app and really see the effects all of your decisions have. Fortugno hopes that the game will actually teach people how certain policies work by dealing with real-world issues in this very social, casual way. The policies and analyses that Fortugno talks about and that the Millennium Institute researches are extremely complicated affairs, some that I'm sure would require multiple degrees of study to really research and understand fully. But Fortugno is convinced that even given the relatively simple interface of a freemium game, he can at least get people interested in making these decisions. Seeing the effects of those decisions might push people to educate themselves further. Shadow Government's not necessarily an educational game. As Fortugno told me, it wouldn't help to market the game that way, and it's not necessarily meant to be an experience built around numbers and simulations. But Fortugno says it is meant to be a title "for people who don't play games in contexts that they don't play games about." In other words, Fortugno's trying to take Farmville and actually use it to make people think about and even understand the real world around them a little further. Shadow Government is currently being worked out in a closed beta, and it's set to come out later this year. Fortugno certainly has the chops for a project like this, and as I watched him animatedly talk at GDC, it became apparent very quickly that he wants to make it work. The game's idea and ideals are both quite fascinating, so I hope Shadow Government pulls it off.
The Repopulation releases second pre-alpha trailer
Tantalized by the little tidbits about The Repopulation that came from last week's GDC? Find yourself hungering for more? If so, today's your lucky day! Above and Beyond Technologies is offering something more to whet your appetite: a second pre-alpha trailer. Coming in at just under two minutes, the video gives players a peek at a number of the features discussed in our interview plus much more. In accelerated time-lapse format, it displays a bit of the landscape, shows off some nation building, demonstrates a few combat moves (everyone loves a good roundhouse kick, right?), reveals player swimming, and showcases character customization. Sadly for fans eager to really sink their teeth into The Repolulation, the video ends all too soon. In the immortal words of Oliver Twist, "Please, sir, I want some more." [Source: ABT press release]
The Witness cares about you more than you know
Soon after launching his debut hit, Braid, on Xbox Live Arcade in 2008, creator Jonathan Blow issued a cheeky walkthrough tip on his personal site. In so many words, it said "suck it up and don't use a walkthrough" – a statement which many saw as reflective of a perceived "my way" attitude to game design.Others saw it more expectantly, knowing Blow to be a perfectionist and not one to offer hints on his games. He hates games that hold your hand. "Treating the player like a baby all the time, I don't like that," he told me during an interview last week at GDC.That's why he's designed his latest game, The Witness, to hold your hand just long enough to find the path. "What I do is I work really hard to not condescend the player and to not treat the player like they're stupid, but at the same time to follow good game design practices. This game has to be learnable, and there has to be tutorialization in it, but it's not patronizing tutorialization."Unlike Braid's more linear pacing, The Witness is designed as an open world – albeit a very small open world – so that difficult puzzles can either be skipped (not all must be solved to reach the end) or passed by for later on. Blow said this was intentionally designed to respect the time of players. "It's more about crafting a small, heavily interconnected jewel that gives people the highest density experience, respecting their time that way. There's not gonna be a lot of walking around through empty lands in this game."Though the game is looking more complete than ever, The Witness has no set platforms or launch window beyond PC and iOS, and "some time in 2012."
