Interview 1
First, the audio interview with reader and game enthusiast "chiefvsmario":Interview with chiefvsmario (Click to listen!)
Interview 2
Secondly, a text interview with another gaming enthusiast, "Fenril":Forte: Tell us a bit about your history involving video games.
Fenril: As a very young child, I often played my older cousins' video games, under the hawk-like watch of my mother. When I was six years old I recieved my first console; an N64 for my birthday, along with Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I remember my mother telling me I wasn't allowed to play Zelda at first because of something she'd read about it having blood in it, but (luckily) there was a video game room for the "big" kids at my day-care, and without motherly supervision I was able to experience absolutely delightful games, such as Mischief Makers, Star Fox64, Super Mario RPG, Bomberman 64, Pokemon Snap, Kirby 64, Yoshi's Story, Mystical Ninja, and so on. Later, my mother actually started to like video games herself, and we purchased most of the afore mentioned games to play together at home. And by together, I mean she watched and told me to watchout for NPCs and things in the background of the stage...
Forte: Do you think video games have gotten better, worse, or stayed the same over time?
Fenril: I don't think games have gotten worse or that there are more bad games as much as bad games now-a-days have better marketing teams. Except for Megaman. Those games got worse.
Forte: Looking at the infographic on the Costly Creation blog, does the empty space on games surprise you?
Fenril: Yes it does! Although, it makes me feel sort of dissatisfied, like every time I ran into one of those "why can't I do this?" or "why can't I ever go there?" or "why was what that NPC said just flavor text and not a little easter-egg?" it could have actually been something they added into the game. Not like they didn't have space, right? On the other hand, I feel excited to know that there's ample space to work with when making games. It feels like the possibilities are so much more grand than before, and they were already amazing to begin with!
Forte: How do you feel about microtransactions, and do you think those are a good business model in comparison with traditional DLC?
Fenril: Well, since I'm a fan of certain MMOs, I really don't mind microtransactions, as long as they don't unbalance or break the fairness of the game. As for DLC... on-disk DLC is absolutely unacceptable. It's just rude for any amount of the production time going towards a game's launch to include working on DLC. That pretty much means a consumer is going to have to wait longer for their game, and then have to pay again to unlock content already on the disk of the game they just bought.
Forte: What do you think the industry should do to increase sales and decrease loss?
Fenril: I don't know what the industry in general can do, but Nintendo already did what they could. Allowing 3rd-party companies to port to Nintendo's consoles stole a vast majority of the reason to buy either Sony or Microsoft's consoles. All Nintendo needs to do now is start making house-hold appliances.
Ian Owen's Guest Blog: Development Salaries
In the past year the video game industry has had it’s ups and downs, a slight decline in overall value of the industry occurred due to the over-saturation of mobile gaming and new innovations in mobile devices. But, it is expected to resume it’s upwards trend in the following year with the rumored release of the Xbox 720 around the holiday season of 2013, as stated on bloomberg[1]. Now, I know there has been talk about all the profits and how much the game industry has been making, so lets turn the page and look at what the actual employees are making.References:
[1] Dina Bass & Ian King, November 30, 2012: Microsoft Said to Plan Next Xbox for 2013 Holiday Season
No comments:
Post a Comment