“We’re doing a lot of pretty neat things in terms of mixing it up, introducing some non-linearity, some free exploration."Awesome, sounds good to me.
“This is also a mystery story so there’s a lot more clue-finding and mystery-solving than you would normally find in a game of this kind — nothing that strays too far from the fun ‘Halo’ experience, but we definitely decided to take a little bit of risk and have some fun with this one.”
“I absolutely think Reach could be enabled with [Natal]."
“One of the reasons that StarCraft II had some delays very early on in development is because a fair amount of the design team went onto World of Warcraft for a year to really help finish that game off."
“They had a lot of really great experience to bring, with their knowledge of how they approached the map editor problems, how they dealt with balancing - which we could then leverage into class balancing.”
“There’s still much work to do and many details to iron out, but the basic idea is that players will be able to use the service to transform an existing character into a roughly equivalent character of the opposing faction on the same realm."No mention of when it'll go live but stay tuned.
“Players who ended up creating and levelling up characters on the opposite factions from their friends have been asking for this type of functionality for some time, and we’re pleased to be getting closer to being able to deliver it.”
We don’t currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.Ultimate suckage eh? So when do we get the BETA?
Several Battle.net features like advanced communication options, achievements, stat-tracking, and more, require players to be connected to the service, so we’re encouraging everyone to use Battle.net as much as possible to get the most out of StarCraft II. We’re looking forward to sharing more details about Battle.net and online functionality for StarCraft II in the near future.
“The number of games traded annually is striking; we estimate the overall used game market to be $2 billion in the U.S., with an average ticket of around $20 per used game."What was also interesting is that the reported stated the sale of full price games at retail wasn't affected anywhere near as much as people have complained about:
“This means that an estimated 100 million units of used games are traded in each year, representing around 1/3 of all games sold annually.”
"We think that used game sales benefit new game sales by providing currency to gamers with less disposable income, thereby enabling the purchase of additional games. The vast majority of used games are not traded in until the original new game purchaser has finished playing, typically well beyond the window for a full retail priced new game sale. Thus, while there may be some limited substitution of used game purchases when GameStop employees “push” used merchandise upon consumers lined up to buy new games, the vast majority of used game purchases occur more than two months after a new game is released. Other than the potential impact at holiday (when new game lives are extended beyond the typical two month sell-through pattern), used game sales just don’t impact new game purchases very much…. To the extent that there is a substitution effect, we estimate that fewer than 5% of new game sales are impacted."
“We [have considered] doing PSN after we finish PC and XBLA."It'll arrive on Xbox Live Arcade and PC this Autumn.
“However, we keep hearing over and over from publishers, investors, marketing and other suits that players from one console, in this case PSN, wouldn’t want to get it later, let’s say eight months and seven days after, if it’s released sooner on the other console, here that would be XBLA. I would normally say that’s a lot of bull, but I will refrain here from my comment. What do your readers think?”
“It is not clear to us that OnLive will dominate any time soon, but we are confident that this breakthrough technology will ultimately be widely adopted."The service is said to be launching sometime this year.
“The possibilities are endless, but the technology is quite appealing, and we are confident that OnLive will end up as part of the video game culture some time next decade.”
“It’s hard to forecast, but I think we’re probably looking at two to three new IPs a year."Gibeau also commented on the mistakes made in 2008 by releasing too many new properties within a short period of time:
“We’re looking at a three-year SKU plan right now. Between EAP and our internal studios, both of which are in our group, I can safely say it’s at least two to three new IPs.”
“I think we launched too many new IPs all at once in Q3. I would have spread them out and found better windows for them. I would have had longer marketing for them. The marketing cycles were fairly short."
“We didn’t have enough assets to really build the fanbase, build the community, and get that long lead demand built.”
“Last year was one of the most transformative in history in terms of defining the audience for gaming."
“Even with the increased competition from mobile and social network gaming, the console gamer segment added the most new participants to its ranks in the last year.”
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