Sometimes math can really sum up a situation well.

.Today brings both interesting news and bad news out of Electric Arts. It was announced that EA has sank $300 million into purchasing Playfish, a casual game studio that’s made a splash on Facebook. While casual web games are certainly no new thing for EA, there is no doubt in my mind that they’ll be pulling in some good revenue with this purchase. Which makes the other news announced about them today all the more surprising:

Even though they just spent $300 million on that purchase, EA has also laid off a significant portion of their employees, and sources are saying that includes 40% of Mythic. According to EA, the total number of people being laid off totaled to somewhere around 1500 – no small amount – and was done because it was necessary to transform their company. Gamasutra has a ton of information in those links on this if you are looking to find out more exact details.

This was surprising for me to hear, and definitely pretty depressing. To all of you who lost your jobs, I wish you the best of luck. To EA… Probably not the best idea to announce a major studio purchase when you’re laying off a bunch of people, related or not.

According to 3D Realms, the $12 million that Take-Two is suing the company for is baseless. They claim that while Take-Two may have paid that much to get the rights to publish the game, 3D realms never saw any funding from them until July of 2008, which totaled a much smaller $2.5 million. That is compared to the $20 million 3D Realms claims to have put into the project.

Duke Nukem Forever, indeed.

You think you're gunna get money from me?

Frankly, I’m surprised that Take-Two stuck with the project for so long. Apparently they even renewed the contract in 2007 – which, given that was already a decade in development, should have been a clear sign that it just wasn’t happening. Given that Duke Nukem Forever has been the butt of jokes for years, I’m more surprised that they didn’t seek legal measures before, not that they’re suing now. So, while Duke Nukem Forever may potentially never be released, I’m getting the distinct feeling that we haven’t heard the last of it just yet.

Just goes to prove that you can’t bring down The Duke. …You just can’t push him out in game-form these days, is all.

As I have stated before, these are terms that do not exist in Star Wars.

Thread closed.

That, as you can imagine, caused more debate and complaints. Generally speaking, whenever you bring up a hot button issue like that, people are going to be downright irritated. There is absolutely no avoiding it, regardless of your stance. In this case, the complaining spilled out of the official forums and onto blogs and news sites around the Internet. In fact, so much as bringing it up – even without presenting any opinion one way or the other, has been enough to incite heated debate amongst forum goers and commentators on the broader issue of homosexuality- which isn’t surprising, many people have strong opinions one way or the other (heck, I’m opinionated too). As I said though, you probably already know about that – or at the very least, there’s plenty of places to read about what happened.

Instead, what I found interesting was something on Scott Jenning’s blog, even if it wasn’t the focus of his post. Should MMOs have forums long before they’re released? Before any game actually exists for players to, well, play?

I find myself pretty torn on this one, to be honest. I like online communities and I like hanging around early development forums (even if I mostly just lurk these days). It can be fun to watch games slowly develop as new information comes out, to meet other people who look forward to the game, and to start building the foundations of a community. This period can be nice for really bringing to gether your strong core audience – well, in theory. A large part of me wants to say that MMOs should have forums early in this development stage. Of course, I’m also bias.

When I really think about it, you can make some good arguments for not having a forum until release/beta (where you really should have one). It is quite true that until you reach that state, there is very little game to actually talk about. There’s speculation – but that can often lead to heated and often circular arguments. There’s discussion on possible game systems, but there’s often litle basis for them, and the discussions are often rehashed. A lot. In fact, not just rehashed from discussions on other forums, but rehashed over and over again on the official forums. Then you generally have a lot of the random off-topic threads, which basically exist on every forum.

Besides that, fansites are going to pop up as long as you have made the announcement and pump out news on a semi-regular basis. Those fansites will have forums. The type of people who get on your forum during early development are going to be the same people that would go to a fansite to chat if you didn’t have a forum. It is when the game releases/gets much further into development, that you’re going to start getting a significant number of people who won’t go to some fansite to chat, but will go to your forums. (No, no citations for this, but I’m betting it is largely true.)

As I said though, I have a hard time making a call on that one. I’m actually rather curious on what other people have to say on this topic. As a note though, if these words were censored, even post-release, this issue would have arisen anyway. However, that isn’t the point!

BioWare

I’ll be up front on this one: I’m a BioWare fan. I’ve played everything they’ve released – heck, I even had a copy of Mass Effect for the Xbox 360 within the week it came out, and I don’t even own a 360 (I just lived with someone who did). NeverWinter Nights has long been one of my favorite games as well, largely because of the Auroura Toolset modding tools that it came with. I was also hoping to get that same magic with the release of NeverWinter Nights 2 from Obsidian, only to find one major problem: few people really made any modules. The tools were too complex for many of the people who turned out modules in the original game.

I actually have that fear with Dragon Age as well. While I expect to pick up a solid, polished game that’ll give me many hours of entertainment, I also am worried about the amount of modules people will actually make with it. I do know that BioWare is spending time with users of the original Aurora Toolset, so hopefully these fears will be unfounded. There is even a Beta Application up right now for people to help test out, quite specifically, the modding tools.

If nothing else, BioWare has stated that they plan on releasing a full scale title, and will be releasing further downloadable content to expand on the Dragon Age Universe.

It sounds like this whole OnLive thing might actually be real. Of course, they also might have a heck of an awesome connection there and a server in much closer proximity than we will see when it launches.

Update: A video of the OnLive presentation is up here.

OnLive is an interesting concept. Basically, they will host games, including major AAA titles, use their computers to process everything going on, including the graphics, and then send that information to your machine-of-choice, which will display what is going on in the game. Likewise, you will input commands into the game like you would with any other, which will then send toOnLive’s servers to be processed in the game. In other words, it’ll be like playing a game on a computer a thousand miles or so away. The biggest problem with an idea like this is lag. However ,OnLive claims that they’ve spent a lot of time developing technology to combat just that, and have even worked with ISPs to get past this problem. The end result, they claim, is that you can play a game through OnLive with as little latency as you would notice on a LAN or less. Frankly, if that is true, that is extremely impressive. If it is true.

The benefits of something like this is the same as any digital distribution channel like Steam, but you also won’t need a powerful computer to play the best titles. The computer doesn’t need to do any of the processing, so if you’re sitting on a machine from five years ago, without a dedicated GPU, you can still play games like Crysis . This is also huge for Mac users, as anyone with an Intel-based Mac will be able to take advantage of games their platform would never see. Heck, Mac gaming could become a normal thing! It also makes me curious if Linux will get such connectivity at all, letting us band together in some creepy (but awesome)coombiyah-singing heaven of gaming, where platform doesn’t matter.

Again, that is if this actually works. I’m skeptical that they can actually do what they claim, but I would welcome such a system all the same. There are problems with it, even if it does work though. A number ofISPS (*cough*Comcast*cough*) have instituted bandwidth caps that could be quickly reached with such a system. If you use services like Netflix on top of this, you could be hitting that cap pretty quickly, I have no doubt. On top of that, you also won’t own any physical copy of the content. That means if the service ever goes down, so does your access to the game. While I certainly am a supporter of digital distribution, I still do realize that the lack of actual ownership is a very real problem. It may also get pricey as well. I would expect, at least, a monthly subscription for access to this, most likely on top of the cost of games. So, instead of paying for a few games a year, you’re paying for a few games and the ability to access them. While that price might well be cheaper than keeping a top-of-the-line computer, it might be a pain if you keep at least a decent one regardless.

As is, they apparently have nine third-party publishers interested in them, including big names like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Atari, Take Two, and Warner Brothers. That is a pretty big sign that they might be able to pull something off, but time will tell on this one.