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Enter At Your Own Rift: The big takeaways from GDC
After dining on enough beef brisket to feed an army of hungry cowboys, I returned from Austin's GDC Online to chip away at the Ashes of History world event quests. RIFT had a nice showing at the GDC Online Awards ceremony, walking away with awards for Best Online Technology and Best New Online Game. In addition, Trion CCO and RIFT Executive Producer Scott Hartsman gave a talk about RIFT's pre-launch preparations and post-launch plans. GDC was dominated by a handful of common topics, like free-to-play, metrics, monetization, and technology. In this week's Enter at Your Own Rift, we'll take a look at a few of these to see how they apply to RIFT, and then we'll look at the big takeaways from GDC overall.
Ubisoft buys free-to-play game developer Owlient
Paris-based free-to-play game developer Owlient has created a number of successful online properties. The most popular of those is Howrse, a game that lets you train and race ponies until they get old and die, at which point you send them to Heaven. It is this kind of unprecedented vision that made the studio a prime target for megapublisher Ubisoft, which acquired Owlient earlier today. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot explained in a press release, "This acquisition is the next step in the acceleration of Ubisoft's free-to-play strategy following last year's launch of Settlers Online, CSI Crime City and Heroes Kingdoms, as well as the recent beta launch of our ambitious title Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Online." Those all sound just fine -- we just hope Owlient doesn't lose sight of its Heaven-Pony roots under its new management.
