Chris Plante, Polygon:

The trailer is misleading. I know when Assassin’s Creed Unity is released, this isn’t the game I’ll get. It will be about movement and daring escapes and history and spectacular set pieces and drama. That’s the game I want to play.

But marketing plays a role in game development, especially at the level of multi-million dollar AAA games. And if the studio gets the sense that non-stop-bloodshed is what the audience wants, they will ensure that’s what it receives. Only if we speak up, will the studio look at its audience differently. Until then, they will act off the rapturous applause they receive at E3 when a someone’s head explodes like a watermelon thrown off a 7-story building.

If you’d like an example of a trailer that conveys a different marketing method, look no further than the history-focused vignette Ubisoft ran yesterday in Europe. It hints at fictional conspiracy theory near the end, but overall it’s a fine primer on the history of the French Revolution. Maybe Ubisoft has divided their marketing, targeting different audiences with different trailers. Maybe this is them having their cake and eating it, too. Marie Antoinette would be proud, even if she never said anything about cake and that idiom is English.

Fantastic piece by Plante.

The two trailers mentioned, in respective order:

Revolution Gameplay Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBNfenWTCXg

Inside The Revoltion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W0sijMCEEI

Richard Lemarchand, as quoted by Polygon:

Capy Games, makers of Sword and Sworcery EP and their recent new arrival Super Time Force, and of the forthcoming Below. No two Capy Games are alike — they boldly experiment with the form and content of their games — but their fans follow them for their identity of stylishness, experimentation and playability.

They say that one of the best business plans you can have is to identify a product or a service that you passionately want, but that does not yet exist. The chances are that millions of people around the world will want it too, and your passion for whatever it is that you’re creating will ensure that you make something of high quality.

So it’s my firm belief that as game developers, we should trust our instincts, and cultivate our tastes. Whatever it is that you care about passionately, devote yourself to seeking out the best of it in the world, figure out what makes it good, and bring your discoveries to the games that you make.

This is the same reason I become incredibly excited at the mention of new Portugal. The Man or Cursive albums. These bands are shapeshifters, built on the idea of changing rather than defined sounds.

On the other hand, I will continue to purchase Minus The Bear records on trust of the consistency of their sound. The times they stray away are the times they lose me. There’s something to be said about the complimentary nature of variance and consistency, order and chaos, and our need for both.

Ex-Valve contractor Fabian Giesen’s exit letter:

Part of this has to do with the direction of the project. With AR, there’s a variety of information display/visualization applications, all of which are at the very least interesting and could turn out to be tremendously empowering in various ways. The endpoint of VR, on the other hand - all engineering practicalities of first aiming for a seemingly easier goal aside - seems to be fundamentally anti-social, completing the sad trajectory of entertainment moving further and further away from shared social experiences. (As I have mentioned multiple times, I find the limited, formalized, abstracted and ultimately alienated social interactions in most forms of online gaming to be immensely off-putting).

Later, offering context:

And having an immersive virtual environment - hey, MMORPGs even without VR get people to sink lots of time into them, and if anything that’s probably gonna be more pronounced in the VR version - that is set up to, ultimately, generate

ad revenue (and hence prioritize the needs of the advertisers over the desires of its users) is just an inherently gross concept to me.

All these trends have been there for a long time. I used to be hypothetically antsy about a major ad-run operation going long in VR. Now that Facebook has bought Oculus, that’s not a hypothetical anymore.

Now, I’m writing this just as the kerfuffle about Facebook running psychological experiments on their users is ebbing. This is not surprising; if you’re trying to maximize engagement (and thus ultimately ad revenue), these are the kinds of

trials you run, because you want to know what to show to people.

I still find it fascinating that three major companies are investing heavily in a novelty space.

Regarding social network involvement: Within the past few months, the increased rate of social networking notifications and ads has become more apparent. I don’t need to know if a friend just posted a status update, I don’t need to know that two games journalists I follow are discussing the WWE, and I don’t need to be asked if I know somebody with a random notification.

Don’t get me wrong. There will certainly be stellar avenues for VR in the forms of education, sports, and accessibility. Relinking my thoughts on VR piggybacked on Andrew House’s comments about Sony’s plans for the space.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Ready Player One. I am not ready to live it.

Andrew House on Crash Bandicoot and Spyro, as quoted by Telegraph:

In concept, it is something we’ve been thinking about and discussing, and this is a shift for us. We’ve started to say that maybe there isn’t anything wrong with going back and looking at characters that people still talk about, that were a big part of their childhood or their youth. I definitely wouldn’t close the door on that.

I’ve mentioned before that Microsoft needs to invest in aged Rare IP such as Banjo-Kazooie, Jet Force Gemini, and Conker (now coming to Project Spark). Blinded by their “success,” I however neglected Sony’s need to do the same.

It goes without saying that Nintendo is on the upswing. The value of their family friendly franchises are at the heart of why you can never count them out of the console race.

Mascots are identity. At the very least, Microsoft can lean on Master Chief but that only scores them a slice of the audience. (Granted a very big slice.) Sony has… Nathan Drake? Kratos? Sackboy and Sly Cooper are nice and all but hardly recognizable outside of Sony diehards. This all became very apparent with the release of Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale.

Nintendo’s franchises, like Disney’s, are approaching timelessness. As the HD Twins continue to struggle in setting themselves apart, Nintendo is only going to gain foothold with releases that focus on familiar faces. Microsoft and Sony need to adopt color and a little family franchise flair.

I’m sad to hear that working with Crash Bandicoot and Spyro would be “a shift” for Sony, but good on House for acknowledging this question. Great on Telegraph for asking.

Update: Prior to the launch of Sonic The Hedgehog 2 ,circa 1992, as excerpted from “Console Wars” by Blake J, Harris:

According to a recent national survey, Sonic was now a more recognizable American icon than Mario, MC Hammer, and even Mickey Mouse.

Relive the biggest plays from the 2014 World Cup with Matheus Toscano’s 8bit Football blog.

Toscano, as quoted by The Verge:

People want to see how their favorite players and teams would look like in 8-bit style. Whenever they can recognize someone, even if it is only represented by only a few pixels, that usually makes them laugh.

Most people who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s could experience playing football video games with such graphics. Whenever we see something similar, it brings back memories from childhood.

Worth relinking to my previous post on pixel art.