I have hard time believing this. Warhammer Online is selling for the same price in Europe as in the States, once you do currency conversion. Amazon UK price is

MyWebTimes.com reports a 11-year old girl saved her family from a crashed car, motivated by knowing an upturned car can explode because it happens in Grand Theft Auto.

I’ll just say the parents should not have let the kid play GTA in the first place, but good think the family survived the crash. The Kotaku readers have much more interesting comments, such as this total classic from Nobuyuki: “The article fails to mention that after she saved her family, she jacked a car passing buy and ran over 3 cops.”

I’ve previously mentioned how WoW players are using the heavy leather ball to added fun – for example see this discussion on how someone comments spending two hours doing PvP in Warsong Gulch was fun because the group had the ball and couple play a game with the ball while slaughtering the poor Alliance members.

I was prompted to to write this after I saw some incredibly funny videos on YouTube about players doing very, very long jumps using the Rocket Boots Xtreme. For the uninitiated, this is a pair of boots that can be manufactured by players specialized in engineering, and for a for a very high price. I doubt the Bliz dudes really thought what they were doing when they implemented this feature – I’m immediately thinking how to abuse this for capture the flag PvP. Anyway, see the video below for a method of travel that probably wasn’t ever supposed to make it into the game.

Bruce has noticed the rise of digital distribution. This reminded me of commentary by Greg Costikyan – I recall he ranted in GDC a couple years back about how the next gen consoles will probably have no physical drives at all, as opposed to relying on Xbox Live and PS Network for all game sales. This in turn will mean that instead of having competing publishers who get to participate in decision making of which games get shelf space in stores, those marketing decisions will be 100% determined by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. If your game doesn’t sell, it’ll fly out from the front page of the store in a day.

Unfortunately I can’t find which talk this was in. I thought it was the infamous Game Developer Rant from GDC 2005 so I dug up the MP3 and listened if Crys had missed a piece but no, it’s not there. If anyone can point me to this, I’d love it.

The talk did have one classic line though from Greg, which wasn’t blogged (on Nintendo’s practice of relying on one aging designer over cheaply licensed devkits): “Iwata-san has the heart of a gamer, and my question is what poor bastard’s chest did he carve it from?”

Scott J points to some pretty harsh commentary directed to the Age of Conan team.

I have to say I’m familiar with the phenomena. When you have millions of people using your site, each of whom has a lot of time, you get a collective results of million hours worth of feedback every month. Now that’s fine and useful most of the time, except when it turns to silly things like defacing wikipedia pages about the product (there’s a bit over 5000 edits on english Wikipedia Habbo page alone), or scamming other users to “get even”. So, I feel the pain the AoC dev team must be experiencing.

It’s been interesting to read the commentary of AoC all over the web, given I’ve not played the game myself. The bit that I disagree with, is the notion that the company intentionally put out a bad product out because they thought they can just rely on the franchise. I don’t believe that for a second. What they were probably aiming for is a killer product, and they just didn’t have the skill to deliver. The biggest fail in in the project seems to have been overspending on the look and feel, compared to the resourcing in the programming and design of the actual game. That in turn indicates whomever made the calls on the resourcing failed, so most of the team really is not to blame.

(Incidentally, I apologize for yet another breakage for some readers. I had accidentally not converted the URL most people see to use the Feedburner version, so most readers were still getting the old crappy feed. I promise to stop fiddling this for now.)

Ben Zeigler wrote a continuation piece to his MMO economy musings where he mentions me (thank you!) and an interesting piece from Scott Jennings.

While I do agree to the

I read two blog posts this morning which talk about MMO revenue models but go on wildly different tangents. These were:

Why Subscription-Based MMOs Make Sense over at Double Buffered, where Ben Zeigler points out that there is no publicly known cases of wildly profitable MMOs that use the free to play, pay for stuff model, versus many games that make a lot of profit, which use subscriptions.

Bruce Everiss, on the other hand, argues that the western games industry is losing $1 billion in revenue due to only offering subscriptions, which I wholeheartedly agree with. As a WoW player with limited amount of time on my hands, I’m considering ending my subscription since I can’t compete in the game with teens who have endless supply of time. I’d have no trouble dropping down some cash to get gold if Blizzard offered the option, which would allow me to get on fair level with the players who have more time.

If I was to design a new product, I’d aim to implement both models. One way to do this could be:

• Allow people to play for free, but implement some artificial strict restriction like not earning XP past some early level, unless you subscribe. This is essentially the current try-before-you-buy system, except I wouldn’t enforce any 10 day limit and I’d let people keep they accounts in some dormant mode even after ending the subscription. I’m fully aware this can be argued to lose some revenue, but I believe enforcing subscription to keep data is akin to blackmail.
• Implement a dual-currency model, where one currency is earned, and one bought. It should be possible to play without ever using the bought currency, but for most fun one would spend both. Users would be able to trade the currency with no pre-defined rate. The bought currency would be used for primarily vanity items, which incidentally is exactly what Blizzard is doing with their collectible WoW cards.
• Allow users to pay the subscription either by paying, say, $10 a month for just the sub, or $20 a month for both the sub and $20 worth in the currency.
• Allow a user to also pay for the monthly sub by spending $10 worth of the paid currency.

Doing something like this might enable getting the subscription revenues, as well as be close enough to “free play” that you’d get the large player base. The reason for allowing users to pay for subs using the paid currency is simple – I don’t care who’s paying the sub for someone else and what for, as long as the money keeps flowing in. The $20 option means you’d be giving out three subs for the price of two, but I bet most of the money would actually go towards spending it in something else. And of course, it would allow people who grind to grind, and the people who want to purchase the results of the grinding pay for the grinding, in a manner where the money goes through the publisher.

Dunno if that’d work. Feel free to criticize! :)

I happened to bump to Game Developer Tools site which apparently is pretty new. GDT claims to be the “comprehensive library of game development resources” so I’m blogging this partly as a personal bookmark.

I didn’t check the other parts of the site comprehensively, but the book section looks useful since each book appears to be listed only once. This is much better than doing searches on Amazon where you get every darn print of every book appearing in the results. Some of the contents are a bit dubious though, making me think maybe it’s all been scraped from Amazon, after all… :)

Blizzard has released a cinematic trailer of Wrath of Lich King. I suggest you get the downloadable HD version for full screen goodness.

The video looks very pretty but is very thin on actual content. Compared to the Warhammer trailer I blogged about yesterday, the WAR trailer has tons of fun stuff on the expected gameplay of the game, in addition to looking great. I think Paul Barnett knew what he was talking about when he said they’ve fully embraced the rich background of Warhammer, while the WoW folks always need to come up with new IP.

Just as I scorned Warhammer Online, Massively pointed me to a new Warhammer cinematic trailer. I suggest you check the HD version. My favorite part is the Goblin Squig Herder summoning the Squig for riding into the city.