Professional douchebag Bobby Kotick, hot on the heels of Activision announcing Tony Hawk will cost £100, as well as them posting crazy profits and market share increase when other publishers are losing their shirts, responds in an interview that if he was in charge of game prices... he would raise them.

With retail and consumers alike still getting to grips with the prospect of shelling out £54.99 for November's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has admitted that he would like to push prices even higher.MCV

Linky. I really have to wonder how far publishers will milk this "oh no games are so expensive" BS before the entire industry backlashes and stops buying altogether. The COD price increase was hilarious enough, considering the PC version of the exact same game costs 20 pounds less. I also laugh at the people who think this is the kind of thing digital distribution will solve when it will allow publishers even more control over game prices and eliminate used game sales. In fact, Activision are being such douchebags of late, particularly when Kotick says stupid crap like this right after having the balls to blast the PS3 for costs, I may reverse my self-imposed EA ban and move it to Activision instead. Activision is being more of the "evil publisher" than EA ever was anyways. This whole mess is honestly nearly as bad as Nintendo raising the price on their-made-a-profit-from-the-beginning Wii in the U.K. under the silly pretext of exchange rate deficiency (even ignoring the hedge that the Wii's absurd U.K. price already created), then saying flat out the next month that the Wii costs half as much to make as it did when it first came out. I feel sorry for you Brits.

Once again we have Epic Games going to a scapegoat (people are buying used games/renting) rather than trying to solve a problem within the industry (games are too expensive).

Epic boss Mike Capps has told GI that secondhand game sales are a "huge" issue in the US, and he believes the American development industry will start making moves to combat it.
 "I think DLC will be increasing in scope just because in the US we really need to make strides against the second-hand market," he said.
 Capps said that models involving restricting content to those who bought the retail product new are being mooted.
 "The secondary market is a huge issue in the United States. Our primary retailer makes the majority of its money off of secondary sales, and so you're starting to see games taking proactive steps toward that by… if you buy the retail version you get the unlock code," he said.
 "I've talked to some developers who are saying 'If you want to fight the final boss you go online and pay USD 20, but if you bought the retail version you got it for free'. We don't make any money when someone rents it, and we don't make any money when someone buys it used - way more than twice as many people played Gears than bought it."
 More through there.videogaming247

Linky.

This could be the final straw that blows up the entire console gaming industry if they are seriously stupid enough to push for it. Capps has said some narrow-minded, completely-out-of-touch-with-reality statements in the past, but this one takes the cake. Its as if he doesn't understand the concept of supply and demand.

I find it funny that critics say that the series is more and more flawed, broken and lazy with each passing year, most likely because the series IS more flawed, broken and lazy every year. Yet every single time the next installment is about to launch, they give it massive, Halo-like launch coverage and hype, which is essentially like providing free advertisement for punishment. This combined with the crap that EA pulled with Battlefield: Bad Company makes me yearn for when Trip Hawkins ran the company.

That being said, I think a blue PSP would rock my socks.

Well, Crytek and Epic Games weighed in why they think Crysis and UTIII aren't the best selling games ever, and instead of saying anything constructive, they use the old piracy scapegoat.

Said Yerli, "We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that's the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy, to the degree [that PC gamers who] 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 anymore."

This statement confirms the attitude a lot of game developers discussed earlier this year at the 2008 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA. We spoke with Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games, and learned that the Unreal Tournament 3 servers received over 40 million attempts at illegitimate access using pirate keys. That number is huge, and the real magnitude comes when you calculate the retail price of $49.99 (59.99 for Collector's Edition).

If those 40 million players actually paid the full price, it would have been nearly $2 billion more in Epic's pocket book. That is more than the quarterly sales results from Nvidia or AMD. To add another perspective, the government lost out as well, because no sales tax is earned on pirated copies.

When you take into account that Crytek saw similar levels of pirated copies, it is easy to see how big of a deal gaming piracy is. Between two games there were billions of dollars of lost sales. The natural instinct is of course to hit the platform(s) where they can actually earn money, which is looking less and less favorable for PC gaming.TG Daily

Crytek's problem is that they have built a game that has so much hype surrounding the amazing graphics struggling to pull 60 FPS on top of the line graphics cards that it has lead 90% of the PC gaming public to essentially say "why bother when I can't play it?" Whether that is Crytek's fault or not is up in the air, but they certainly took no measures to prevent such thoughts.

Epic, on the other hand, simply needs to STFU. They have made the exact same game for the past 4 years now, with each one being more reliant on graphics than gameplay as the years past, that people aren't bothering with UT anymore. You wanna know why Epic is facing financial problems with each passing game? Probably because their entire company is run by complete d-bags. They make Gears of War, it goes on to sell millions until people begin to realize how little it achieved, so Epic somehow think that they are able to be able to make relevant comments about the industry; completely ignoring the fact that most everything they have made in the past 5 years was shallow crap in a really nice wrapper and that they represent everything that is wrong with the industry all by themselves. Furthermore, there is no way to even prove anything related to such a number in sales revenue lost, because it implies that that many illegitimate server connection attempts are all separate people; which is nowhere near the truth.

PC gaming is dead (and console gaming is beginning to be), but it isn't because of piracy. Its because of crappy, unfinished releases; companies like Epic; and strong arm bull like this.
Besides, here is the alternative.

The entire industry is in dire need of a major, 1983-like crash simply because thoughts of companies like Epic that are so widespread and narrow-minded. The domination of the "Graphics first" mantra has made the whole industry a rotting corpse of itself, a blame which I place squarely on the heads of Sony. Sooner or later, PC gamers are going to realize that most of the next big amazing graphical showcases are just 10 year old gameplay with really pretty paint (Doom 3, for example), and they will stop bothering. PC games won't take that much of a hit as graphics card producers will. However, it will then destroy the console market.

While I have sworn myself off of EA games since 2003 for essentially everything I mentioned above, I have to say that it seems the entire industry is following the company down the same path. Sad to say, but it seems like the current generation may be the last I bother with.

So, Edge magazine has put together a list of the so-called "Hundred Best Games of All Time" as voted by apparently a bunch of morons who have never touched anything older than a Playstation (unless of course it was an SNES).

Lets do a little overview:

Crackdown, which is essentially a GTA clone, managed to make it on that list; while the far, far better Mafia did not. Pac Man Vs., which was essentially a mean spirited ploy to sell Game Boy Advances, is on that list, but neither the original Pac-Man nor Ms. Pac-Man are. Halo is in the top ten. Super Mario 64 is ahead of Super Mario World. Gunstar Heroes is not on that list. As much as I loathe Final Fantasy VII, XII has no right to be in front of it. Half Life is not on that list. Gran Turismo 4 is on that list, yet GT1 and GT3 are not. Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire are on that list, but the far superior Gold/Silver are not. Manhunt is on that list (probably the biggest piece of crap). Burnout 2 is on that list, but the better EA developed titles (well, Burnout 3 at least) are not. Phantasy Star Online is on that list, but the pioneering and incredible actual Phantasy Star titles from the 16-bit era are not. Super Mario Bros. 3 is not on that list. There is a Ridge Racer on that list that is not R4. THPS2 is on that list but the sheer perfection that was THPS3 is not. No Tetris Attack? Also, no Need For Speeds at all = comical. Out-Run 2006 is a great game for quick fun, but every 16-bit installment of the series (not to mention the original arcade versions of Outrun and OutRunners) wrecks it, and none of them belong on a "100 Best" list either.

To sum up? As the only games older than the PS1 are Nintendo or arcade games, I think it is safe to say that this is a list put together by the same morons who simply say games now are the best ever because they have never touched a controller without shoulder buttons and don;t know any better. And NiGHTS? Please. I'm sure that only an eighth of the people who shower it with praises have actually played it. Good though it is, it made it on that list because people have heard that it is good rather than played it. That whole list is trash for the same reason stuff like G-Phoria is trash: games that sell well or are constantly showed as great by whatever random celebrity that loves them are voted as great by the voters regardless of if they were played or unknown gems buried beneath. As such, more niche genres containing some truly incredible games (Myst, for example) are glossed over. And I find it funny that there is a total of two strategy games (maybe another one that I might have missed) on that entire list. And as is always the cases with such lists, many times when in citing a specific game they blindly vote for the newest one under the assumption that it must be better (GT4, Ruby/Sapphire, Silent Hill 2). Leave it to people who actually have played a wide variety of games, people.

Now, maybe it is a language barrier between America and the U.K., but in America Manhunt was essentially just a bad use of the GTA engine, so putting it on that list at all is pretty laughable. Especially since San Andreas wasn't on the list. And they apparently gave GT4 a perfect score too, which raises the question: Are they on the take?

On a completely unrelated note, am I the only one who thinks that the new system for rating games is dumb? The slide thing would have made for better control, but then they go and change it so it only allows .5 increments. If I think, for example, that Tokyo Xtreme Racer Zero deserves an 8.7 instead of an 8.5, I think I should still be allowed to express such.

One would assume that Sonic Team would treat their one true crown jewel (unless you count the various Phantasy Star games before Online) with a silk glove, but the general attitude that seems to be coming from them (notably again working on multiple projects at once) makes me feel more like the final product will be treated more with gauntlets. Sonic V. Mario? What the crap is that? Doesn't Sega realise that Mario and Sonic will not mask that Olympic games always suck?

On a somewhat related note, the Sonic RPG intrigues me, especially because it is being done by a different developer, thus keeping it from Sonic Team and keeping Sonic Team away from anything that isn't NiGHTS.

Further proving that Sonic Team is usually incapable of anything involving quality these days, a couple of months after the downright atrocious Sonic: Genesis (which involved Sonic Team ruining a game from a system that an outside, nobody team paid by Sega have already proved that it is possible to port games from competently), Sonic The Hedgehog: Megamix has finally been released. It is pure awesomeness, as well.