Tag: games

Epic Beats Google

I’m not even remotely surprised that Epic won its case against Google over the Play Store. If we’ve learned anything, it’s that the game developers are smarter than the Big Tech guys and all their Silicon Valley lawyers:

A federal appeals court has upheld a jury verdict condemning Google’s Android app store as an illegal monopoly, clearing the way for a federal judge to enforce a potentially disruptive shakeup that’s designed to give consumers more choices.

The unanimous ruling issued Thursday by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals delivers a double-barreled legal blow for Google, which has been waylaid in three separate antitrust trials that resulted in different pillars of its internet empire being declared as domineering scofflaws monopolies since late 2023.

The unsuccessful appeal represents a major victory for video game maker Epic Games, which launched a legal crusade targeting Google’s Play Store for Android apps and Apple’s iPhone app store nearly five years ago in an attempt to bypass exclusive payment processing systems that charged 15% to 30% commissions on in-app transactions.

This is good news. It should make it a lot easier to get apps on the platforms that people prefer to utilize on their phones.

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RIP Julian LeFay

Legendary Elder Scrolls creator Julian LeFay passes away at 59. Julian LeFay, the designer largely credited with helping shape the vision of fan favorite Elder Scrolls franchise, has passed away at the age of 59.

This is a hard one to hear. I was friends with Bennie for years, and it will probably surprise a lot of people to learn that we even worked together for 18 months on what was supposed to be a launch title for the Sega Dreamcast.

He left Bethesda to come work for Fenris Wolf after we signed a $1.5 million deal with Sega to provide its first RPG for its new Katana system after our original producer at GT moved to Sega of America and made signing us one of his first orders of business. I’d licensed the rights to Traveller from Marc Miller, and Julian was not only tired of working at Bethesda after his friend Vijay had left for Microsoft, but was very excited to take his innovative design concepts into a science fiction space for the first time.

And, of course, he liked the idea of working with me and my partner, as we’d hung out together at various CGDCs and E3s for four or five years by that point. He, Vijay, Bobby Prince from id, and Carter from Spectrum Holobyte were the people I spent the most time with at the Westin and the various other locations outside of the CGW crew.

Unfortunately, Sega of Japan eliminated Sega of America and cancelled all ten launch titles that SOA had in development, including ours, about one year prior to the launch of the Dreamcast, in favor of spending the $100 million that had been budgeted for those games on putting the Dreamcast logo on the front of the Arsenal FC jerseys. This was, of course, a terrible decision that was much-mocked in the industry, and helped contribute to the failure of the Dreamcast to compete with the original Sony PlayStation despite its technical superiorities.

I still remember Julian, Kurt (from SOA) and I laughing about the fake headline in a parody newsletter given out at CGDC that read: “SEGA REFUSES TO REVEAL PLANS FOR SELF-IMMOLATION” or something to that effect. It wasn’t quite so funny when I got the phone call from Kurt telling me that a) he had been let go, b) SOA was being shut down by SOJ, and c) Traveller was canceled. In retrospect, that was the beginning of the end for my time in the game industry, as GT’s collapse followed Sega of America’s by about 18 months.

So Julian and I never finished our game. We talked once or twice about possibly working together, and I think he ended up getting back together with Vijay toward the end, but things never managed to quite work out. It’s truly a pity, because I think that what we could have – what we WOULD have – achieved would have been truly epic, in fact, more epic than Epic.

It is truly the end of an era. Julian LeFay is gone, but he should never be forgotten by the gaming community. He never received the plaudits of Richard Garriott, John Romero, or Sid Meier, but he was genuinely one of the great designers of the era. He always imagined things on a larger scope than most of us were able to conceptualize. He set the standard for complex randomized environments and laid some of the conceptual foundations for both the MMO and all modern games that incorporate random elements as part of their design.

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The End of the Middleman

The Internet has reduced the need for retailers and various rising costs have rendered their cut unviable, and increasingly, their businesses too, as Fandom Pulse chronicles the shutdown of Boardlandia:

It’s been a strange space in board gaming for the past several years as companies have turned to direct crowdfunding more and more, abandoning brick-and-mortar shops. While some online retailers have thrived by offering discounts, the industry received an artificial boost due to COVID-19, and a lot of gamers buying board games because they were stuck at home.

That boost faded, and now retailers have been in a precarious situation where most of the big sellers have all transitioned to direct crowdfunding, leaving little room for such retailers to exist. Enter the new tariffs, which have created a panic among board game companies who get their product from China. 

This is why, despite the various difficulties we’ve battled over the last few years, I’m confident that the direct infrastructure we’re still building is going to be the right way to go over the next decade or two.

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No One Ever Learns

The Dragon Awards, Game Dev Edition:

I’ve been informed that an indiedev community I’ve supported for years, since Soulash was in its infancy, has canceled me from participating in their events.

At this rate, I can’t say if any indiedev spaces wouldn’t de-platform developers for voicing “right-wing” opinions outside their communities, so I plan to start organizing one after releasing my next big update.

The goal will be to create a bank of knowledge and offer guidance related to indiedev that doesn’t require overthrowing the government and creating a communist utopia to build games sustainably.

And, maybe more importantly, to help bridge the divide between developers and gamers so that they are no longer split into separate bubbles with gatekeepers holding access to communities and funneling them to left-wing activism.

The only type of community that makes sense in gaming is player-centric – any other starts to have conflicting interests or abuse. It’s in everyone’s best interests to deliver what players want, except for government and corporate shills. A clear focus on gathering like-minded people around our shared passion for hobbies will help us all return to fun.

Let’s organize, build, and push for a meaningful change together.

Of course, he’s not going to gatekeep his new space, because that would be bad, right? So the infiltrators and subverters who kicked him out of the original space are going to invade and end up kicking him out of the space he created.

One would think that a game developer would be able to play this strategy out ahead of time. Perhaps he’s just not a very good designer.

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Kingdom Come: Degenerate II

Fandom Pulse correctly called out Daniel Vavra for his deranged and degenerate promotion of pedophilia in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II:

Yesterday, the tides turned on the discussion for Kingdom Come: Deliverance II as video game influencers learned that Daniel Vavra inserted underage gay sex into the game. Melonie Mac eviscerated the developer with comments on X, leading the charge against evil LGBTQ+ grooming.

It’s been uncovered that the graphic scene depicting sodomy in the game actually shows a child (Hans Capon) engaging in it.

It was revealed by IGN that the scene in question featured Hans Capon with the outlet writing on X, “The medieval world of 1403 Bohemia can be a lonely and dangerous place, so why not make it just that bit more special by romancing everyone’s favourite Lord, Sir Hans Capon.”

Based on a codex from the first game, Hans is a teenager when this vile act takes place.

An entry from the Codex for Hans Capon states that he was likely born around 1388 and died in 1419. It also makes it clear he is “underage.”

It states, “The underage son of Jan Jesek Ptacek and Hedvika of Dauba.”

This response raised questions from various gamers who didn’t appreciate the defense of graphic pedophilia scenes in the name of historical accuracy, especially when Vavra took liberties with historical accuracy by adding a black person to the court in Bohemia in another strange move to add “diversity” to the series.

It will be fascinating to see if all the moronic YouTubers who defended the game on the grounds of Optional Gay Sex will continue to defend it on the grounds of Historically Accurate Optional Gay Pedophilia.

This is precisely why hard, firm, and bright lines have to be drawn and policed hard. Give them an inch, and they’ll immediately start molesting children and sacrificing them to Satan.

Every. Single. Fucking. Time.

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GamerGate’s Pyrrhic Victory

Games Journalism is like fewer than 40 people now. Magazines are basically gone and websites are close behind them. None of this is a surprise to me, but it’s incredibly sad. We had something awesome for a while there. Younger generations have no idea what they missed out on.

As a longtime fan of Computer Gaming World, which I would argue was one of the greatest magazines ever published, I could not agree more. In absolutely related news, we’re informed of the game industry’s darkest hour since the Video Game Crash of 1983:

The movers and shakers of the video game industry will gather Thursday in Los Angeles to celebrate the annual Game Awards, the sector’s equivalent of the Oscars. But no amount of glitz and glamour can put a sheen on what has been one of the worst years in the industry’s history, marked by waves of layoffs and studio closures.

“Game industry continues to be just incredibly bleak behind the scenes,” Mike Bithell, who heads a small British studio, posted on the Bluesky social network this month. “Ecosystem is in free fall. Doubt there’ll be an easy solution, or a quick one. This darkest hour has dragged out to a darkest couple of years.”

At least 14,500 people in the sector were laid off worldwide in 2024, up from 10,500 in 2023, according to the Game Industry Layoffs website. Many studios have also closed their doors. In recent months, French giant Ubisoft announced it would close its branches in San Francisco and Osaka. Sony-owned U.S. studio Firewalk — behind this year’s spectacular flop “Concord” — met a similar fate in October.

The fact that the financialization of the industry led to its complete failure, and that its convergence led to its inability to perform its core function, is not even remotely surprising. The suits were bad enough in the late 1990s; I remember GT Interactive’s vice-president – and eventual Atari president – once calling me tell me that he didn’t like the color of the laser bolts in an early demo of Rebel Moon Revolution.

“Harry,” I said. “You’re a lawyer. First, we’re working on the 3D engine now, so we made the lasers bright pink and bright green so it’s easy to see where they go. Second, you’re a freaking lawyer! Leave the game development to the game developers.”

But the invasion of women and other status-seekers, who were chasing the cachet of being in the entertainment industry as well as the high-paying jobs available in game dev, really sunk the ship. They were more concerned with story and characterizations than gameplay, and once the social justice movement got started, representation and inclusivity and diversity and every form of sexual insanity. I flat-out quit playing new games; I haven’t paid any attention to a mainstream game in years and I’m very, very far from alone.

The good news is that the independent game industry is alive, well, and thriving. It’s actually rather reminiscent of the late ’80s and early ’90s when it was possible to develop a successful game with a small team of 2-to-10 serious and motivated gamers. #GamerGate won, in the end, but it has been a costly victory indeed.

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The End of Bioware

Mark Kern reports on an interview with a tester that appears to spell doom for Dragon Age Veilguard, and possibly, Bioware itself:

@nuhre_ gets the scoop in her interview with a game tester who reveals all. Alleged rumors from testing in 2023 build highlights:

  • Game is super woke. Pronouns in your face.
  • Qunari companion literally introduces themselves with immersion breaking modern language “I identify myself as non-binary.”
  • Romances were, and still may be gender locked UNLESS you choose a pronoun other than he/him, you MUST be pansexual or you were/are restricted to TWO romance options (Neve and Harding) while other choices may romance anyone. (this might have changed due to BG3 success and influence).
  • Solas is SIDELINED HARD. Made into a minor character with little importance or development until suddenly important at end of game, and that ending is “Baffling” and not in a good way, (but no spoilers revealed.)
  • The story is “disappointment after disappointment.”
  • Facial animation is “Andromeda all over again” and “plastic” which I assume is a lot of “my face is tired” quality.
  • Inquisitor and Inquisition is corrupt and may not be of any help even if you didn’t disband it. Choices don’t matter “It’s Mass Effect 3 again.”
  • Rook SIDELINED, backstory wasted. Just a guy in a bar, very much diminished.
  • Tester feedback IGNORED. Boss said “It’s very good feedback, but I can’t send it to them (the devs). It’s very good but …” Basically you can’t talk about how the woke stuff is making the game worse. It’s not something you can talk about, even if it is ruining the game.
  • Grey Warden Davrin, a newcomer who never finished his training, gets to influence and make important decisions for the Grey Wardens solely because he is a PoC. “Gets to decide everything.”
  • The segment of gameplay in The Fade is a boring “walking simulator” with just some fetch quests. Completely wasted opportunity.
  • Other major characters like Varric, turned into mere “advisors” and pushed to the back of the story.
  • “It’s so far removed from Origins, that it’s crazy that it’s in the same universe.”

“THIS IS THE END OF BIOWARE” the interview concludes. Final nail in the coffin of a once great studio and franchise.

I liked Baldur’s Gate, and the investment company for which I worked helped fund Neverwinter Nights, but I generally considered their games to be overrated and more than a little derivative. The fact that they went full SJW and embraced the Diversity Initiative didn’t surprise me in the slightest. If the failure of DAV causes the studio to go down, I wouldn’t care at all. It’s not like losing Origin Systems to the graveyard of developers.

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Pixel Artists Wanted

A very small team and I have been working on a game project. We’re at the point where we need some art, so if there are any pixel artists interested in volunteering – this is a labor of love, not a business project – please get in touch. It’s a very cool game; imagine being able to play MMO-style battlegrounds without the MMO.

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Adieu, Old Friends

This one stabs the heart a little bit. Paul was my best friend’s younger brother’s best friend, so I’d known him since I was around 13 or so. Andy, I met through Paul not long after GI got rolling. We played games with them many times, both in the Digital Ghetto and at their offices; I saw Andy’s band play his fantastic THREE-CHORD SONG at the Fine Line, and they both came to our epic Christmas parties back in the day.

Paul’s been gone for a long time and now his legacy is at an end too. Then again, at 33 years it was the longest-running game publication and it lasted a lot longer than our game company did, so I guess you’d have to say the Pro Player won one last game.

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The Anonymity of the Innovator

One of the early innovators in the knife-training world contemplates some of his business mistakes, and expresses his exasperation with the youngsters in the field who have no idea that they are standing on his shoulders.

My review/remark caused a lot of guffaws and a few smart ass remarks, among the 20 and 30 year old readers, most of whom were so submerged in modern “dynasty jargon,” up to their fad-beards in mystique, and lost in the web world. They’d never even heard of us older guys from the 1990s and 2000s. I mean, who am I to comment like this on their latest fad-boy genius?

I can identify. While I don’t fault my fellow GamerGaters who still don’t know, and have no reason to know, about my connection to the initial launch of GamerGate, it was a little astonishing to hear die-hard gamers claiming, with a straight face, that I had no connection to gaming or game development at all. But that doesn’t bother me, just as the litany of my various failures by the usual anklebiters doesn’t

That’s not to say that none of my failures bother me. The failure in particular that haunts me the most wasn’t even my fault, perhaps in part because I keep being reminded of it on a regular basis. And virtually no one who wasn’t in a very small and elite circle even remembers anything about it. As a result, no one wants to believe it, or would believe it if it weren’t a matter of historical and public record.

The Latest News From The Gaming World: Sim Fans—Welcome To The Next Level
ARTIST Graphics’ 3GA Chip Feeds The Need For 3D Speed

ARTIST Graphics, a Minneapolis-based hardware manufacturer, has announced a new graphics chip that may transform your work-a-day PC into a high-performance graphics workstation.

Consider the current state of the art: IndyCar Racing. Papyrus’s hot new game creates a very intense environment for simulated racing action. To do so, it pushes current technology to produce 12,000 flat shaded or 2,000 texture-mapped polygons per second. Bur imagine how much richer, how much more intense, a simulation could be if it could process 12 million flat-shaded, or 30,000 texture-mapped polygons per second at a higher screen resolution than standard VGA. While this might sound as far off as Gibsonian cyberspace, ARTIST Graphics and their 36/1 video processing chips may well make such simulations a very real possibility in ‘94.

ARTIST Graphics has been a manufacturer of graphics hardware used primarily for Computer Aided Design since 1982. Their chips and video boards are used widely by CAD professionals for applications that need heavy graphics horsepower. Adapting ARTIST Graphics’ latest high-end graphics technology to the PC games market is largely the result of a conversation that took place in 1992 between Chris Taylor, senior software engineer at Electronic Arts, and Theodore Beale, “trans-dimensional evangelist” at ARTIST Graphics.

“Chris had called to find out about VESA support on some of our cards,” said Beale. “We got to talking games, and I swapped him a graphics board in return for a couple of EA games. After playing with it for a few weeks, he suggested that we add a few features to our next-generation chip that would make it a really killer device for 3D simulators and action games. I went back to our engineers and asked them about adding the features, and Io and behold, the 3GA.”

According to ARTIST, the chip is capable of displaying up to 12 million flat-shadowed, two hundred thousand Gouraud-shaded, or thirty-thousand texture-mapped polygons per second in a game. These numbers approach RISC-based graphic workstation performance. Simulated benchmark tests have yielded 90 million WinMarks on the WinBench 3.11 test at 1280 x 1024 x 8 resolution on a 486/66 PCI bus machine (an average local-bus VGA video card at 640×480 yields 6 million WinMarks). Games could be written to run with the 3GA from within Windows, with the game’s code written to effectively bypass the Windows’ graphics routines. This would allow 3D intensive games to run under Windows without degradation of performance.

The 3GA chip’s 64-bit wide local memory bus supports up to 4 megabytes of VRAM and up to 8 megabytes of DRAM. The memory allows a game to load a huge portion of a game’s graphic data directly onto the card, thereby relieving the computer of a huge burden. Additionally, the 3GA chip has an on-chip VGA architecture which supports standard VGA text and graphics modes, and VESA SVGA modes up to 1024 x 768 resolution at 8 bits per pixel.

“With this kind of technology,” says Fred Savage, director at Origin Systems, “the limitations of the VGA architecture are removed. Anything that allows us to reduce the load on the CPU is going to let us have a much larger scope for our PC-based games.”

ARTIST’ Graphics is currently working on an OEM deal with a major video card manufacturer. For more information, contact ARTIST’ Graphics at (612) 631-7800.

Computer Gaming World, February 2024

One of these days I’ll go into more detail on the panoply of mistakes that were made, by me and others, that opened the door for Nvidea, and also answer some intriguing anomalies, such as why Artist Graphics held the original trademark for the 3D Blaster and how my biggest, most massive mistake until 30 years after the fact.

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