What Would Matt Do

(Yes, I did make a new word there, thanks for noticing!)

Scrap #1: Odd company gives interesting results plus a correction

I say odd company because it sounds like an interesting idea…if your game is based purely on numbers publishers come up with:

As for "FutureNot’s" potential success, Zatkin analyzed it and says it’s "a surprisingly decent game" that could sell 216,000 copies in six months. He notes that most developers won’t make a blockbuster like "Halo 3," which has sold more than 3 million copies so far.

See, EEDAR is a company that can guesstimate how much money a particular feature in a game will make you. Want to add coop multiplayer? They predict a 12k in sales in the hypothetical game that Forbes cooked up. They do this by breaking down features in 6000 previous games, comparing sales, and coming up with numbers.

Except that it might be a pretty big load of shite. I get what they are trying to do, but it’s the exact same thing I’d hate to have to deal with as a designer or developer. Managers all over the world want a tool like this, but I just can’t see it working. How can they look at a game like Bioshock and tell me a multiplayer mode would have added such and such sales? It’s all guesstimate work and it can’t work across genres and types of games. Not to mention, it’s VERY guesstimate work when it comes to games that are full of bugs or missing promised features, but are used to figure out how such and such feature affected sales. For instance, say a game crashes a lot. That it’s buggy will get around and sales will be less, but how is that going to affect the results EEDAR’s data? There are so MANY different ways to look at a data and factors that should be taken into account I just can’t see this being of actual value.

But I can see it being used by many past the developer/designer level. Publishers all over already use this kind of maybe-it-works data. They can guesstimate, pretty well, how much adding features will cost. Maybe. But they don’t really know how much that will add in sales. With the data from EEDAR in hand, they will be much happier, even if the data has real potential flaws in it (see comments above). To be fair to publishers, I’m sure they already have made up numbers and charts for this kind of data. They love numbers that justify their decisions…

In the original article, they say only 4% of games make a profit, but that number wasn’t quite true and they released a correction.

Scrap #2: This is exactly what I thought Left 4 Dead would be like

I didn’t buy L4D. I’m one of the minority in my gaming group because of that choice. Most everyone I have friended to play TF2 with on Steam is playing L4D. I didn’t buy it because I played the demo and while I really liked it, I just can’t see it holding up longer term or being diverse enough to keep my interest. From bluh.org:

The game is good at mixing things up.  Things rarely happen exactly the same, and you can’t really prepare too much for what will happen, or expect things to go the same way twice.  Which is really great when you are playing on a high difficulty, as it keeps the game fresh. 

Which is sorely needed, because it is a very limited and very repetitive game.  Not to say it’s not still fun… but after you’ve played for a half hour, you’ve seen everything.  There’s the odd new event, and the scenery changes, but really, after a half hour, you can safely say you’ve experienced the game.  I’ve put five hours in it, and seen two of the campaigns through to the end, and I feel like if I stopped playing today, I wouldn’t miss much more.

I can’t really speak to more of the game than to say I agree with pretty much everything Charles said in that write up compared to the demo. For an asshole, he has decent game opinions. I especially like the ideas of getting rid outlines and seeing flashlight beams for reals. Needs a lot more options for hosting the game like that.

As for the demo… Did Valve really turn off the demo after the release? Really really? That seems pretty low to me…

Scrap #3: Are you low on X-men knowledge?

I know a lot about the X-Men and I even learned a few things from this bad boy. Good read.

What Would Matt Do: In order, I’d stay as far away from EEDAR as I could. I’d play Left 4 Dead if it was $20-$30 instead of $50. And I still wish Marvel wasn’t fucking everything up so reading comics could be good again…