What Would Matt Do

This is pretty funny shit. Matt Damon is big fat jerk:

So here’s the bottom line: nowhere in this train wreck of a telephone game does Matt Damon ever say he’s not OK with game violence! Furthermore, he doesn’t even say he’s okay with movie violence. You’ll note that Jason Bourne kills relatively few people, and he certainly doesn’t shoot them. In fact, he takes pains to disarm his opponents and throw away their guns.

What Would Matt Do: Laugh and laugh and laugh.

I know, it’s a simple concept. When you develop games, you like it when people buy those games, because then you get money. Maybe you’ll use that money to fund your crazy sex addiction or to move to some mystical far away land like New Zealand or heck maybe you’ll even use it to make more games. What ever you do with it, you’d like some of it.

Up until this point though, Crytek, the makers of that decidely average but beautiful Crysis game, have finally decided to make console games too. What are their reasons…?

“We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin. I believe that’s the core problem of PC gaming: PC gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won’t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive any more.”

Ah yes, the ever present pirates and their dastardly ways. It probably has nothing to do with the game being dependant on the hardcore PC game market, a market that is very much pro stealing. It probably has nothing to do with them requiring PCs that only the special ops guys have to run it with the effects full on. It definitely has nothing to do with the afore mentioned hardcore PC game market being a pretty damn small market. Damn pirates.

But they are coming around on the market size issue. It’s daft for a company to release a FPS as a PC exclusive these days. Utterly daft. I’m glad Crytek finally realized it, but they must be smacking themselves on the forehead could of had a v8 style.

What Would Matt Do: Were I Crytek, I’d quit blaming pirates and starting putting the blame square on my shoulders, right where it belongs. Then I’d quit playing the blame game and make a damn fine console FPS. Maybe.

Yeah, it probably shouldn’t be news when when one large conglomerate calls another empty and says:

"It’s almost the opposite of Electronic Arts, which has commoditized development. It did a very good job of taking the soul out of a lot of the studios it acquired."

It’d be liking Wendy’s saying, at least we don’t treat our employees like McDonald’s does. Which kind of ignores the real point, they both treat their employees like shit.

Yeah, EA is notorious for literally stealing the soul of the development houses they buy, but I don’t remember saying Activision was particularly good at preserving the autonomous of the guys they buy either. As a matter of fact, the only guys I’ve heard are good at that is Microsoft and then only with Bungie (i.e. - REALLY successful dev houses).

Except…EA is so bad at it they actually admit it themselves:

Bullfrog, Origin Systems, and Westwood Studios rank as some of the best development houses of all time. They also happen to represent three of EA’s most spectacular failures. "We at EA blew it," said EA CEO John Riccitiello at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas this morning, "To a degree, I was involved in those things, so I blew it."

To be fair to them, they claimed that in the context of we’re trying to fix things, but still.

You know what I’d love to see? Development houses that didn’t have to be bought up to exist. Development houses that could find good publishers that weren’t always looking to buy them out instead of work them. Baring that though, I’d love to see publisher slash developer houses (EA, Activision, Ubi, etc) that care about the development teams they have working under them and give them a bit of freedom.

Not to over use the statement or anything, but I’d also like a moon pony.

What Would Matt Do: Were I made of money, I’d start a publishing house and run it the right way. Of course, I’d first have to go to business school and learn what the right way was beyond respecting your employees. Though respecting my employees would put me a huge leg up on competition.

Yeah, Kotaku is on the Internet, but until recently they apparently didn’t know it. Today they have realized that the internet is full of fuck tards:

It’s disheartening to think that it has come to this, that unless we’re talking about the relatively safe topics of consoles and their direct by-products there can’t be intelligent discourse on Kotaku.

Really… people have no self control on the internet? I’m stunned. Sure, I’m making light of what they think is a very important issue, but this isn’t the first place on the internet to have to deal with asshats. As matter of fact, it’s not the 999999th place either. I get that they want comments on the posts and that they probably don’t have a huge amount of time to give to moderation… But they just expect people to behave and act intelligently because they asked them to? They have obviously been on a different internet up to this point. One I would love to be on.

What Would Matt Do: Expect the worst from internet users. What self control or good sense you might wish they would have, they definitely won’t.

I admit, I don’t read a lot of Game Set Watch. This kind of thing convinces me I should be.

Recently, Danny started getting suspicious that certain other websites were ‘borrowing’ his release list without crediting. So he decided to include a game that, uhh, might not actually exist, into the ‘Release This!’ column last week, to see what would happen.

I love it, though I probably would have been a bit more blatant about it. Something like, “You’re a Cheater: Yes, I’m talking to you GamePro”, just to see what you could get away with before they noticed.

Either way, cute little read and shame on you, IDG.

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What Would Matt Do: Being that I love it when lazy, cheating bastards get theirs, I’ll drink a brew for GSW and make with the laughing at IDG when I meet them. Which will be any day now of course.