@yoda101280 That totally depends on his contract. If it has a "non-compete" clause in it, then he's in the wrong. And I have to imagine that there is such a clause...otherwise we'd have spokespeople selling their services to the highest bidding competitor as soon as they finished a commercial.
Halo Wars wasn't the ruination of the Halo franchise, so Bungie should be over this by now. Besides, Bungie's new goal should be to show everyone whether they can achieve that level of success again with a brand new franchise.
It must be tremendous pressure on the dev team to know that they have this tiny month-long window to target for their game's release, and if they miss it, their work gets scrapped and pushed back to next year.I guess this is good news for 2K Sports...again.
Having the Steam client on Linux is a good first step, but it is still just a first step. Giving top-tier developers the tools they need to easily port their games to Linux is the bigger hurdle. I wonder if Valve is actively creating any libraries that will assist with the porting effort.
Another hurdle is with the graphics card makers (e.g. nVidia and AMD) who refuse to put their Linux drivers on par with their Windows equivalents. That's another reason to keep tweakers who try to squeeze every last frame per second out of their rigs on Windows.
Still, having Steam on Linux sends a strong signal to the rest of the industry that Linux is considered a viable gaming platform, both technically and commercially.
When I bought the first Tomb Raider game back in 1996, I was with my girlfriend. She made a snide comment along the lines of "Yeah, I know why you want to play that game..." She continued to believe that until she watched me play for a while. And she kept watching until I (we) completed the whole game.
When you first see the DoA games, the jiggling boobs is one of the first things that jumps out at you. When you actually play the game, however, it's the thing you're paying the least attention to -- well, if you actually want to win, that is. The DoA fighting franchise succeeds because it's a good fighting game. As others have mentioned before, the boobs are just icing on the cake or something to draw you in at best.
Now as for those DoA beach volleyball games, don't get me started...
I think there are two factors that contribute to the continued success of the LEGO game franchises:(1) Not all players are interested in all franchises. While my kid might be more interested in the Harry Potter games, I'm probably more interested in the Star Wars or Batman games, because our "franchise interests" are different. So we play the games that we like and kinda ignore the rest without feeling that we're missing anything.
(2) The games straddle a very difficult-to-hit line between casual and core gaming. They require some degree of skill, but they're not punishing. They stay loyal to the universes they depict without being violent or gory. Too many games are way on one side or the other. The LEGO games truly are fit for the whole family--not too difficult for younger kids, not too trivial for older kids and adults, and with content that I don't have to pre-screen before I buy it for my children. I can't say that about many other grames out there.
I do hope they'll continue to innovate, but the success of the LEGO games has been one of the pleasant gaming surprises over the past decade. And this is from someone who admittedly said "LEGO?!?" the first time I read about one of these games coming out. :-)
No doubt Sony is looking to cost optimizations (read: a cheaper, slimmer PS3) to drive these profits, but they often leave money on the table by not taking advantage of other opportunities to create a good ecosystem of games, music, and video. Sony has a major presence in all of these areas, and yet they price older properties too high (e.g. $10 for Tomb Raider?!?) and make it difficult to purchase content and use it across systems thanks to lots of DRM and activation requirements.
It's probably too late for them to catch Apple in the music / video market now, but if Sony had taken these steps back in 2004, we might be seeing a line around the block to buy the PS Vita rather than the iPhone 5.
Given that the PSOne and PS2 had ten year runs and the PS3 eclipsed them both in terms of R&D budgets, of course the PS3 will be around until 2015. I would bet that it will be sold through 2016 easily and even beyond that if major developers continue to make games for it.
Until EA stop making a PS3 version of Madden, the platform will never truly die.
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