Nuclear Monster

  • Road to VR’s Ben Lang:

    For VR to succeed in the consumer space, an ecosystem of developers making content that users want to buy is an absolute must. Oculus for its part has attempted to kickstart that ecosystem by investing hefty sums in content developers, and now the company says it’s starting to pay off.

    This is immediately followed by three different bolded UPDATES: (with three months in-between some of them) desperately assuring us that yes there is money in VR, supposedly more than eight games have made over one million dollars. They might even be able to fund their comeback game if there’s no money in VR. Sure glad I didn’t name this site “Road to VR.”

  • This follow-up to Dust: An Elysian Tail from Dean Dodrill is a Nintendo Switch exclusive for later on in 2017, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if Never Stop Sneakin’ came out on other platforms next year.

  • Humble Bundle was bought out by IGN last week.

    The increasing reliance of writers on affiliate marketing deals is extremely bad. Most larger sites have some kind of wall between their editorial department and any advertising or affiliate linking, but it still looks wrong. I’ve done the same kind of linking myself, but never kept up with the process to where we are today when many sites have a daily or weekly roundup of deals that are almost entirely affiliate links.

    Humble has had their own affiliate program for some time now, and this may end being a pretty big deal for games that have distribution in their Humble Store (outside of bundling) and even bigger for games that they’re publishing.

    There were other options for how this was presented. IGN is really one part of a larger company called Ziff Davis that has been bought and sold so many times. The announcements could have said that Ziff was buying Humble, but the people making these decisions must have thought that IGN was going to look the best, or the actual organizational structure will have IGN on top.

    I wouldn’t be upset with anyone writing at IGN for this, and it depends on what changes a result, but whatever changes happen to IGN and the Humble Bundle probably won’t look good either way.

  • Kotaku’s Heather Alexandra:

    Whether they dole out cosmetics or gameplay-affecting items, loot boxes of any sort exist for the purpose of exploiting players. Whether it’s offering the chance to get Symmetra’s new skin or get a better rifle in Battlefront II, the only reason the loot box exists is to prey on the economically vulnerable. You are not a valued player; you are a statistic on a spreadsheet. You are red or black ink. Loot boxes certainly aren’t there for fun. They have always been designed for the purpose of making sure that a company turns a profit.

    They’re in so many games now. This garbage needs to stop.

  • As good as interviews with game designers can get, designers are sometimes more open about their work when they’re talking with other designers. The Idle Thumbs podcast network has two great podcasts with these kinds of interviews, get blasted:

    • Tone Control
      Steve Gaynor (Tacoma, Gone Home) interviewed developers for 13 episodes. You’ve got your Ken Levine and Tim Schafer interviews in addition to greats like Tom Francis of Heat Signature and Gunpoint and Brendon Chung of Atom Zombie Smasher and more.
    • Designer Notes
      Adam Saltsman (Canabalt, Overland) and Soren Johnson (Civilization 3 & 4 and Offworld Trading Company) even interviewed Steve Gaynor with their take on this genre of podcast. It’s so good at giving you insights into game designers. I’m currently on episode 2 of the 4 episode series with Sid Meier and there’s so much great stuff in there about the process of working on his incredible games. Some of the best episodes are with designers I wasn’t familiar with at all. One of the recent episodes had Margaret Robertson on and she discussed her work with a game about a movie where a woman was found dead in her apartment after three years.