Or just the sound of gamespot.com imploding?
The dust is finally settled on Jeff Gerstmann and his cohorts who abandoned Gamespot after his departure. Their new endeavor appears to be GiantBomb.com which will yet another Game News and Reviews site.
I’m really happy to see Gerstmann and crew back and can’t wait to see their new site evolve.
Recently, I had a chance to play with an OLPC, the new “One Laptop Per Child” laptop and I was
thoroughly impressed with the hardware. Along with the Asus Eee PC, the Intel Classmate PC, and
rumors of a Acer product along these lines, the market of low cost linux-based laptops is really heating up.
Will this be the catalyst to make Linux a viable platform for gaming?
Linux has always been a solid platform for emulators, but not so hot for original games. With cheap, durable
laptops in the hands of many younger gamers, it seems like a good market for games. While the OLPC is targeted
in developing nations, some of them will end up in the hands of kids with deep pockets, and the Eee PC seem like
the perfect product for K-12 and college age students with it’s portability.
The downside for me as a parent is that there isn’t any educational titles available, so while I’m in the market for a durable laptop for my two younger kids, it’s hard to consider the current generation of linux laptops. My kids love to play games like Dora The Explorer on our current old laptop, so it’s a hard sell to get them to make the switch until publishers take notice and start releasing Linux titles.
A big question for publishers is piracy; can you create a Linux title that people will pay for as opposed to torrent? I personally think so, but I think it’s a challenge that many publishers won’t pursue.
Here’s my own predictions for 2008 in gaming:
This is all complete speculation on my part and very likely dead wrong. It’s fun to speculate though!
N’Gai Croal is always a must-read for me, but this article, which gives context to the Gerstmann firing, is one of his best.
It will be interesting to see how the industry evolves as we move forward. Review scores, in my view, can make me interested in a game, but it never has been a replacement for reading the reviews of people I trust. As podcasts have become more prevalent, I find my own buying decisions influenced more and more through online personalities I trust as opposed to publications and websites, and I wonder if we’ll see more super-reviewers that pop up in the future that have their own brand as opposed to the company they work for.
I’m old enough to remember when Siskel and Ebert started their movie review show on PBS and the impact it had on how I decided what movies to watch. Before then, I’d look at the advertisements in the local paper and see what reviewers quoted in the ad copy, but as I became more acquainted with their show and they became more personal to me, I started using the “two thumbs up” as a gold seal of approval for a show. It didn’t matter that Ebert worked for a Chicago paper; I could care less about his day job.
If anything, I think the Gerstmann firing became a bigger deal by the fact that there were so many video reviews he had done, as well as regular podcasts in which he took part. The rich media of audio and video made him more of a recognizable personality and so got the axe, a lot of gamers reacted very personally to it.
It will be interesting to see how things shake out. At the end of the day, there is no mistaking a bad game as a good one and games cost a lot of money to the average person, so no matter how much the system is gamed, people will find a new system to replace the old one if it doesn’t work out.
Gamespot.com used to be one of favorite sites to get gaming information, but over the last few days, they’ve seemed to self-destruct. 10 years ago, no one would have noticed the inner workings of a trade publication having internal problems, but with the advent of the Internet, a company shake up can greatly affect a company. Given the uproar on gaming forums all over the Internet, I think Gamespot has lost a lot of credibility in the last few days, regardless of the truth.
The first something seemed amiss was on Tuesday evening when I listened to Gamespot’s HotSpot Podcast which is always on my weekly rotation of podcasts. What seemed odd was the missing voice of Jeff Gerstmann who is a regular voice on the show, and with no one mentioning his absense, it seemed like something was up. A few days later, the Internet was buzzing with rumors of Jeff being fired and walked out of the office over his review of Kane and Lynch, a mediocre first person shooter that got a 6.0 from Gerstmann (NOTE: I have not played the game). His video review was removed from the site (see the youtube version here). Since then, hell has broken.
It’s hard to determine rumor from fact but there are a few things about which I feel strongly.
It will be interesting to see how it all works out over the coming months. If I were a competing site, I’d be hiring Gerstmann in a heartbeat.
As a followup on my last post on why I think backwards compatibility is important, here’s a direction I would consider for Sony:
Re-Position the PS2 as a competitor to Wii
Given the business Wii has generated in the casual game market with a technology platform comparable to the PS2, I think a great move for Sony would be to build out a competing product to the Wii using the PS2, which also would work on the PS3. The idea would be to improve upon the motion controls of the SixAxis controller and build a controller similiar to the Wii’s. Internally create a Wii Sports competitor for it and build it with a PS2 for $179-$199, or as a controller and game only package for PS2/PS3 at $59-$99.
Here’s why it makes sense:
Of course with no backwards compatibility, it doesn’t make much sense since there is no upgrade path to the PS3. With the way the Playstation business has gone off the tracks over the last year or two, they need to do something to get back on the rail and I’m not sure Playstation Home is going to sell systems.
Recently, Sony announced a new PS3 model sporting a 40GB hard drive at a reduced price of $399, which should be good news for gamers looking to purchase a PS3. Along with other cost cutting measures, they’ve had to remove all PS2 Backward compatibility to the unit. Will this hurt Sony? I think it will.
Quoting analysts at GameDaily.com:
It’s not an ideal solution, but something had to be done. “It’s about cost reduction, but also getting people to focus on PS3 games. End of the day, they need to do something, and this was probably a compromise between costs and price cuts,” UBS analyst Ben Schachter said.
I can understand the sentiment, but it’s going to be a cold winter this Christmas for Sony. Here’s why:
I do agree that price is the most important consideration for getting someone to purchase a PS3, but at $399, it’s a hard sell over an XBox 360 with it’s larger library of games.