firehose

Anyone looking to support women suffering from harassment online has a surprisingly simple place to start, says Anita Sarkeesian, founder of the web video series Feminist Frequency. "One of the most radical things you can do is to actually believe women when they talk about their experiences," Sarkeesian told the audience today at XOXO Festival in Portland. It's radical in part because of misinformation campaigns organized against high-profile women that accuse them of making up the threats against them — and it's an issue that Sarkeesian has recent experience dealing with.

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"Actually believe women when they talk about their experiences."

Sarkeesian was driven out of her home last month in the wake of death threats that followed the posting of the latest in her series Tropes vs. Women. The series, which was funded through Kickstarter, critiques the way mass-market video games often portray women as helpless victims and sex objects who lack the dimensions and agency of their male counterparts. It generated a flood of insults and violent threats against Sarkeesian from gamers who are threatened by her calls for more equal treatment of the sexes in their depictions in popular culture.

But while the threats have garnered the most attention, Sarkeesian says she is also plagued by two more subtle forms of harassment. There's online impersonation, in which trolls create lookalike accounts for her on Facebook and Twitter and have her say things that play on the fears of her misogynist critics. And there are conspiracy theories that accuse her of making up the threats against her to garner attention. Both tactics serve to reinforce Sarkeesian's most violent critics' perceptions of her work, and have resulted in the escalation of threats against her, she says. "Falsehoods about me are initially pushed by detractors who use them to post to 4Chan and Reddit to rally more people to the cause," Sarkeesian said. "It's bouncing from Twitter to Tumblr to Facebook to YouTube and back again. Once the cascade reaches a critical mass, it no longer matters what the facts are. It becomes a viral meme."

Sarkeesian was making her first public appearance since being forced out of her home last month, and she received a hero's welcome at XOXO, a festival dedicated to celebrating independent makers of culture. Taking the stage to a standing ovation, Sarkeesian delivered talk that wouldn't have been out of place on Feminist Frequency. Over 20 minutes, she coolly analyzed the strategies that trolls have used to harass her, rooting their fears in a gaming culture that is slowly changing to improve the depiction of women. "The perpetrators do not see themselves as perpetrators at all," she said. "They see themselves as noble warriors." To preserve that view, she said, they deny that women are being threatened at all. "We are blamed for the abuse we receive and regularly told that we are either asking for it or inventing it entirely," she said.

Sarkeesian's talk suggested that there are no easy solutions to the harassment that she and others have faced. But in the current environment, even accepting that it takes place helps to combat the spread of misinformation, she said. Sarkeesian left the stage to a second standing ovation.

Nine Dots is a small indie start-up. The studio was founded three years ago, and we're currently a team of seven full-time developers.

Here's the catch: until recently, no one was paid a salary in the company. Fellow indie developers and start-up entrepreneurs always ask me the same thing: Where and how did I get these people?

I've spoken about the cost, both in terms of currency and mental health, you pay when you open a studio. Now let's talk about staffing it with high-quality talent. When you can’t pay people up front, you need to be able to convince them that you’re a good bet. This is how I did so.

Having a vision

The first mistake most people make when they start out is to focus on their game idea. The right people will join you if they believe in the company's vision, not in a game concept.

The company's vision is not just a catchy phrase you scribble down in a business plan that will never be read by anyone. I become enthusiastic whenever I talk about the vision behind Nine Dots, and this enthusiasm helps in generating interest.

This means your vision has to be something you truly believe in. Ultimately, the company's vision is what sets you apart. In a way, it's what determines your Unique Selling Proposition to the talent you recruit. You won't have someone jump on board for an indie project with no salary if they don't believe as strongly as you in the vision.

Don't focus on the game, focus on the studio you are building. You must demonstrate that you know where you are going in the long term. The first project will not be as good as the second one, and you'll scare people away if you look like all you care about is making your game idea a reality. They aren't doing it for you.

What we had to offer

I founded the company with the intent to create a very different development culture. That alone is by far my strongest selling point. Here's a list of things we do that no other studio around can offer:

No crunch time: My team almost never works more than 40 hours a week, and we have a hard cap at 52 hours. As the CEO I can't always follow that rule myself, but that’s only to ensure that the others don't have to break the cap themselves.

Everyone has a creative input: Developers feel like they are just a cog in the machine at many studios. Here we make sure the game's direction fits well with everyone, we play the game together every Friday and we listen to everyone’s comments on how we can improve the game.

We don't claim to own your soul: No one here signs a non-concurrence agreement that states you can't work on side projects. In fact, on the contrary, we encourage our team to have side projects, as it helps them learn new skills and they bring back this experience within the studio. We don’t own the total of your creativity, just the work you put into the game we work on together.

It's everyone's success: Everyone in the team will have a cut of the revenues of the game. In our case it was the only revenue we had for quite a while, but even now that we’ve secured some funds and can pay salaries, we intend to keep a share of the revenue to split among the team, for as long as the developer stays at Nine Dots.

We make the games we want: I've heard so many developers say that in X years of making games professionally, they never worked on a game they actually liked. That’s an efficient way to kill someone’s dream and passion. You can’t understand the audience unless you're part of it.

Recruitment works just like marketing. You need a unique selling proposition, and that is your company's vision and the type of games you intend to make.

The advantages of taking part in a start-up

I didn't have a salary to offer, at least not yet. That was a cold, hard, heart-breaking truth. However, it doesn't mean that being part of a bootstrapping start-up is a bad move for your career. We intend to grow, and being part of it at the start is a sure way to climb up the ladder quickly. Also, while it's a huge risk financially, it has a much higher potential return.

My team isn't working for free and we aren't doing it because we're young and stupid idealists. We're doing it because we believe that we can make a successful product. Being a smaller team, it also means that we don't need hundreds of thousands of sales to be highly profitable. In fact, it's possible that it will end up much more profitable than getting paid a regular developer salary. Admittedly, statistically the odds aren't in our favor on that goal.

We make few compromises and that is why passionate developers would want to join us. It's important for any start-up, not only indie game development studios, to have something to offer that is clearly different from everyone else.

There are clear advantages to be taking part in a start-up, and it is important to express these advantages. From less overhead to ownership in ideas and profits, you’re taking a risk in the hopes of a large, or at least sustainable, reward.

Location, location, location

There was so much raw talent that was unused here in Quebec it made my location easy to pick. There are schools teaching hundreds of students every year in all fields related to game development.

These students are often told that studios are looking for experience when hiring, as if there was a better way to get people of experience than by forming them yourself. Many of these developers would end up in QA for a few years before possibly moving to another field.

I went straight to the source

I worked in QA for over three years and I've seen extremely talented people getting de-motivated after years working as testers. I wanted to give them a chance to make games with a professional team, and it turns out that having such an opportunity to offer was enough for a lot of them, even without a salary.

So I went straight to the source. I went to portfolio nights, I talked with the students and the teachers, telling them I was starting a business and was looking for people to join me. Schools know that most of their students won't find a job in the field in which they studied, and it looks bad for them. So when I tell them I have openings in a startup they are not only receptive, they will actually collaborate with you to great length if you show professionalism.

I asked the directors of multiple programs to give me contact information of their best students that hadn't yet found a job. I also went to industry events, and offered to go in the classrooms to talk about independent game development. To this day, even though I'm not looking for more people to join our team at the moment, I stay involved with schools and help students build their portfolios to be ready for the industry.

It has paid off. I've met a lot of students personally during these events, but I also received list after list of people to contact. I interviewed them one by one, choosing those who had talent up to my expectations and who shared the company's vision. I had to make a few tough calls, and turned down many offers. Most of them were fully aware of our inability to pay up front when they contacted me, agreeing to a revenue-sharing model.

Talk with schools directly and give the hard working students a chance to show what they are capable of.

As an anecdote, the hardest role to fill was an animator. While our need for one was dire, we decided to wait until we find someone that was truly up to our expectations, and that meant waiting for the right person even though development had already started on our first game. It's not that we didn't have any candidates, but their portfolios did not suggest that they were ready to join us. It took over a month, but we ended up with someone very talented that was clearly the right match for the team.

Even when it means getting late on your schedule, even when you don't have a salary to offer, you can't afford to let someone join the team if he's not up to par with the others. Be patient!

As a developer, how to find the right team to join

We’ve all heard the expression "this is why we can’t have nice things". I’ve heard of many persons who were exploited as they wanted to join on such opportunities as the one I was offering myself. Not everyone is trustworthy and it’s important to be aware of the risks. There are plenty of teams looking for additional talent. You can find them on Kickstarter, in forums like TIGsource, on portals like Newgrounds or simply by word of mouth.

Being an "idea guy" isn’t enough

The first thing to find out: Are the founders investing their own money in the project? I’m not talking hypothetical money here. If they aren’t willing (or able) to invest at least $15,000 from their own pocket, chances are that they are not committed or prepared enough to succeed. This one is pretty harsh, but it’s a reality; in almost every case, you need to invest that kind of money to get somewhere. If a founder doesn’t want to take risks, there is no reason why you should.

The next thing you need to know is what exactly will be the role of the founder. Being an "idea guy" isn’t enough. At Nine Dots, I was taking care of administrative duties, marketing, production, game design and level design. I’m also kind of an odd one here since most good founders will have more "concrete" skills to offer, such as coding or art.

Another thing to be very wary of is any founder who makes promises of success. Nothing is that easy, there is no recipe for guaranteed success in games and anyone claiming the contrary is either out of touch with reality or dishonest.

There are other questions you need to ask yourself before jumping in. Does the founder seem to have a sound plan and a deep understanding of the game industry? Is the vision of the company something you could see yourself dedicating years of your life to, with no guarantee to make an income out of it? Are you willing to do more than your core skill to see the company succeed? What exactly is the deal and what do you intend to take out of the experience?

The most important question of all is: do you trust the people you are joining?

Conclusion

The simple truth is that there are more people who want to make video games than there are jobs in the industry, by a very large margin. If you know how to introduce yourself, have a coherent vision as to what you want to accomplish and understand that what you have to offer is mutually beneficial, you will be able to find developers to work with you. Selecting who you recruit is more important than finding interested developers.

Of course, living in Quebec offered a lot of advantages.

In the end, what matters most is to find people who share your vision and who will be able to contribute as much as you to the project. You have to know what you're getting into and why, while being aware of what you're willing to risk and the potential rewards. We've just released our first big game, so we'll see how it all worked out. Good luck.

PREORDER Super Smash Bros for Wii U/3DS, upcoming releases

The Pikmin animated movie — a compilation of three shorts produced by Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto — will premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival at the end of October.

"Pikmin Short Movies" comprises three shorts films: "The Night Juicer," in which Captain Olimar makes his favorite beverage; "Treasures in a Bottle," in which Pikmin discover a strange treasure and "Occupational Hazards," which is an adventure at a construction site.

In March, Miyamoto discussed the film project with Polygon, including a preview of "The Night Juicer." In it, Olimar is caught blending up what appears to be a red, vivisected pikmin, and then drinking it. When Olimar sees the characters, he begins walking toward them with a knife. They back away until they bump into a massive pile of what Olimar was actually cutting up and blending, a massive pile of carrots.

The Tokyo International Film Festival will be held at several venues around the city Oct. 25 to Oct. 31.

By RPS on September 11th, 2014 at 7:00 pm.

The RPS gang have been playing with dice. Our Dungeons & Dragons campaign (DM’d by Jim) has been slaying goblins and exploring sinister caves for a few months now, so we thought we’d have a chat about it, and consider how it reflected on our many years of playing videogames.

Jim: Right so we’re going to have a chat about Dungeons & Dragons, which we’ve been playing for, what, six months now?

John: We have seen many dungeons, but ZERO dragons.

Jim: John, how much D&D had you played before this? Or tabletop RPGs generally, I mean

John: Absolutely none. I once did one evening of pen and paper when I was a teenager. In a youth hostel in Scotland.

Jim: What about you Graham?

Graham: The same. My friends and I were much too cool for D&D. I’ve played boardgames as an adult, but D&D was my first pen-and-paper.

Jim: I’ve been playing RPGs like this on and off since I was 12, and I obsessively ran campaigns for friends from 12 to 18. I have always been much cooler than either of you. Pleased to meet you. I have Dragon magazines in the attic.

John: People keep asking me about “editions” on Twitter, and I pretend that I know what they are.

Jim: Ah well, there’s a thing.

Graham: 4th edition is *definitely* the best edition. Editions 1, 3, 8 and B-12 can hardly compete.

Jim: We’re playing 4th Edition, which is my return to the D&Dings after about a decade out. I first played first edition, when it was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (as opposed to the simplified boxed editions) and then ran 2nd Edition campaigns as a teen. In truth, they were too complicated for me aged 12, and it took me years to actually run them properly or appreciate the rules, and I actually played a lot more of the Palladium games, which had the most awful rulesets imaginable. Anyway, it’s been much easier to comprehend 4th edition now that I am a grown up Dad man, and it’s been fun to learn it, and to see why people do/don’t like this edition – it’s a very “gamey” edition. Stupidly, of course, we’re having this conversation at the same time 5th edition is launching, and so we won’t have anything to say about that.

John: I think the 5th edition is RUBBISH. And everyone who likes it is the enemy.

Graham: I bet 5th edition is rubbish. We liked it before it was cool.

Jim: We’re great at this.

Jim: Anyway: what do you gents make of your experiences with D&D so far? Is sitting down and playing a game at a table everything you imagined?

Graham: It is almost exactly as I imagined it would be. Dungeons, number-y combat, and awkward talking-to-Jim but-no-not-Jim-but-a-monster stuff. I am not yet ready for roleplay. But I’m also enjoying it far more than I expected. I like it more as time goes on and we get the rhythms of it down. There’s a lovely sense of adventure to it which isn’t quite like adventure or exploration in videogames. The sense of having travelled. I come home feeling I’ve accomplished something and been somewhere. Which is weird, because I never really accomplish anything.

Jim: The slow-slow-quick-slow of dice combat is something I always relish, it’s nothing like the same processes rendered in videogames.

John: I’m thoroughly enjoying it. I’m not sure I’d imagined anything, other than a deep awareness that the version presented on shows like Big Bang Theory was likely to be utter garbage. Jim doesn’t sit behind a three-fold stand of card even one bit.

Jim: That’s only because the 4th edition ones of those have been out of print since I got it.

John: But like Graham, I find I can’t quite bring myself to “act”. I feel intensely awkward, feeling the need to frame everything in multiple sets of quotation marks. “My character says to the person Jim’s pretending to be, “Hello,” and offers to shake hands.”

Jim: The role-playing part of it is the hardest part: James has been the most aggressive about pursuing that with his meat-headed warrior and thank goodness, you’re all such cautious men.

John: Yes – but then I find it counter-intuitive to roleplay someone who would be worse at the experience that I would be.

Jim: I’m surprised you find that awkward, actually, you are not someone I’d expect to be embarassed by that sort of thing (I don’t know why I think that precisely, but maybe your youth work and general relaxed demeanour with people).

John: Because it’s YOU GUYS.

Graham: I am terrified if that sort of thing, so my awkwardness is inevitable.

Jim: I don’t think you necessarily have to play a character in a “worse than I am” way, but rather to play up to some trope, like greed or vindictiveness. Spice of character.

Graham: I find the closest I get to roleplay is doing the thing I think will be most interesting in a videogame-y context. “What happens if I–”.

John: I’m somewhat limited by the recent discovery that you wrote motivations and back stories for EVERYONE ELSE BUT ME.

Jim: You do have a back story, written when we kicked off, but I’ve not dropped an event to embellish that yet, as I have with the others. Although not Martin actually, his stuff came out through pure improv. (Go back and read the background doc we started the campaign with, that thing is still set to appear, although I realise it’s less clearly motivational than the other characters!)

Graham: Should we talk through who our characters are a bit?

John: Go for it, Graham.

Graham: Only because a lot of the fun, if not roleplay, has been finding running jokes. My halfling warlock is called Ulmo, because that sounds like Elmo. Marty’s guy is called Moron. We shout “thank goodness you’re here” as a ruse to try to convince every potential enemy that we’re on their side, because it worked that one time, etc. I’m doing other pen-and-paper games now that aren’t nearly so good at creating running jokes. Because there’s something about the structure and repetition of D&D that lends itself to it.

John: That didn’t even vaguely describe your character.

Graham: Yeah, I decided that was boring.

Jim: But also there’s a wealth of jokes connected to fantasy tropes, even when it’s dark, it’s funny.

Graham: A lot of the spell names do seem specifically designed to be funny. Dreadful word, frigid darkness…

John: I’m a half-elf ranger, and I do an improbable amount of damage. AND IN THE GAME. Our running jokes are the best running jokes. And “Thank goodness you’re here!” has worked at least twice so far.

Jim: Yes, it has worked twice, although the baddies have posted it on social media now, so they know to be aware of it.

John: Also the time we had James tie a rope to Graham and throw him across a hole, which he fell down, and nearly died, and then we realised after two tries that Graham could just teleport across, and we all laughed so much that Laura thought we’d gone mad.

Jim: The individual emergent moments in D&D are funnier than anything that could be scripted. An event in another group I played with that led to spraying naked dwarves across a battlefield as a pocket dimension they were in collapsed, remains the time I have laughed most in my entire life.

Graham: How much of this is created by the rules and provided fiction, and how much is just players filling a big possibility space with naked dwarves?

Jim: It’s the play between the two: in that case it was an esoteric spell (a place to hide the dwarves) being dispelled by a monster’s powers, so it was our idea to hide the dwarves there, but we couldn’t know we’d fight an anti-magic giant on the way out. But those emergent things aside, what do you guys think about the story generally? I’ve deliberately just thrown together trad fantasy “evil in the North” type stuff, with things lifted from various sourcebooks. I am running two campaigns, and I am aware that I’ve worked off some of the rust with the other guys and I am remembering the good tricks for you guys.

John: I’m really enjoying it. I’m liking how many unanswered questions there are, and the fragile alignments we’re forming with some extremely dubious people.

Graham: I like that it all comes from a source of trying to earn a bit of money to fix some windows.

Jim: Posing questions that seem interesting to have answered is the most enjoyable part of constructing the campaign, I think. Do you have any theories about what the larger arc of the story might be, yet?

John: It’s not just a story about repairing some windows? I don’t, no, but then I’ve sort of trained my brain not to think about such things, as it allows for more surprises. I much prefer to go, “Ahhh, so that’s why that was that, and that fit into that!” Rather than, “Ah yes, just as I expected.”

Jim: What about you, G-dog?

Graham: I’ve no idea either. We’ve met so many people that I’m mostly focused on whatever our immediate challenge is. There are themes though, I guess. We meet a lot of old mysterious and laid-back magical people… That’s not really a theme. But we do!

Jim: Yes, they’re always a good mouthpiece for a DM. A confident magic NPC is always worth listening to.

Graham: Lots of people who seem like Old Magic and want to restore things and keep balance. And then the big bad with his magical ocean fortress and inter-dimensional danger. But no idea where that’s going. I’m going to guess… Dragons?

John: Dragons!

Jim: Okay, okay, we’ll get to dragons. But re the big bad, I like him. And that stuff is part of what I like about D&D – sourcebook borrowings. He’s an altered villain from the secondary monster compendium “Threats To Nentir Vale”. What I enjoy most about D&D is reading all that pre-made stuff and working out how it can drop into the world we’re playing with. And yes, there will be dragons. My other group just slew their first. It had a lizard ninja sidekick.

Do you guys feel like you have learned anything about videogames from playing pen & paper stuff for an extended period like this?

John: So much. It’s really strange playing RPGs now, how much more present the dice feel than they ever have before. And indeed the necessary restrictions that are on them, most especially the massive limitations of defining your own character’s motivations.

Graham: Most of what I’ve learned has come from pairing D&D with sessions of another game, Numenera (which is being used as the setting for the new Torment). It’s much less about numbers and stats and combat, and much more about story, and players negotiating what happens with the DM by trading XP. The contrast is really interesting, and makes D&D feel really, really videogame-y to me. Albeit one with fewer restrictions. You mentioned earlier that 4th edition is seen as ‘game-y’. Has it taken from videogames, or is it simply that videogames stole everything from the original AD&D?

Jim: Well games had to sort of rationalise D&D rules, which early on were a lot more esoteric and far less coherent than they are now. Many folks argue that makes for a better game, and they might be right. What 4th edition did was make all classes function within in similar mechanics, which is a very videogame thing to do. So I think there’s evidence of a back and forth dialogue between what videogame designers have done with standard RPG tropes, and what tabletop designers have done with the reworkings of them in videogames.

John: Is it true that the rules for D&D are made by actual wizards?

Jim: Yes, The Wizards Of The Coasts, although they’re American wizards, so they don’t have the accents for spell-casting. That’s why they make RPGs.

John: Jim, what’s been the thing we’ve done that’s most disappointed you?

Jim: In the last session you missed all the clues for what the Hobgoblins had to trade with the thing they were summoning. So there were hillmen left chained up in a cave nearby

John: Stupid hillmen. Who cares about them?

Jim: And I had prepared a little visit to hillman country, where you would have got some interesting rewards.

John: Is that it, though? We’ve not done something that had you go, “Oh ffs, guys, this could have been SO much better.”

Jim: Not that I can think of. Your attempt to fool the mercenaries into thinking they were on your side didn’t go that well, but that was mostly me fluffing it. I do want you to start fleshing out the characters, though, even if you feel anxious about the role-playing parts. I think the improv that comes from that is the best part of D&D. It’s shared story-telling. I might guide it, but you guys ultimately act, and I have to go with that.

Graham: How much do you plan of each session in advance? I keep wondering whether you have multiple paths roughed out, or one heavily-developed path that you keep shunting us back onto. How many levels do you have, Jim? And what button is quicksave?

Jim: I don’t really have paths so much as encounters which I can drop in when I need to. And most of any session is ad lib work between encounters. Occasionally you miss them, as per hillmen, and I can’t really ever use that anywhere else. And then other times I can drop them in your journey elsewhere. An encounter you dodged in one session when you were chasing big bad, I was able to reuse in a later session when you were exploring the woods, etc. Also the ruined city stuff I’d knew we’d do, because of the ghost side quest, but I never remembered to plan it, so we made it up on the spot.

John: What’s the best thing we’ve done, the thing that surprised/pleased you the most?

Jim: I think the way you handled the big bad during the ambush was good, I wasn’t sure how that would go. If you had pressed on with the fight, which I thought you would because you were winning, I’d have had to have revealed how powerful he is, and at least one of you would probably have died realising he was going to get away regardless. But instead you played for a draw and consequently got most of what you wanted, even if his revenge meant you can’t hand in the window fixing quest…

Graham: That’s going to be in our quest log now FOREVER.

John: Man!

Jim: Greyed out, undeletable.

Graham: This is good emotional motivation to chase down that big bad. Much better than if he had just, say, killed James.

Jim: One last question from me, then: What do you want out of it? Anything? Or are you just happy with it being a laugh and a dice roll session?

Graham: I always bring flapjacks when we play. I love flapjacks. 10/10 for D&D flapjacks.

Jim: God, yes. Flapjacks are my nectar.

John: I have eaten only one cube of flapjack over all the months, which is INCREDIBLE self-control.

Jim: Well done.

John: I really enjoy a time hanging out with friends, engaging in something creative. That’s my motivation for it. I also like that the fact we’re rolling dice immediately removes any concept of shame for being imaginative.

Jim: Not sure i understand that last sentence?

John: We’ve removed a Cool Barrier, that often stops men from being relaxed around each other. There’s an expectation of certain behaviour types, but the inherent geekiness of the pursuit means that’s immediately dispelled, and we can do away with bravado and such tedium, and get on with being relaxed and unembarrassed.

Jim: Well I have a few surprises to come. Mostly nicked from old f+sf novels, but there we go.

Jim: Yes, I’ll say one thing about that, as much as I loved D&D with every fibre of my being as a kid, I am finding it no less rewarding now. I thought I’d “grow out of it”, but now I can see I am just more competent as a grown up running this stuff.

Graham: I’m mainly in it to see more of the world. We’ve covered a fair bit of ground so far, but the map has so much more on it that we’ve yet to visit. So laughs and dice rolls mainly, yes, but then that urge to explore and see what the place is like. D&D is trad-fantasy, I guess, which I’m mostly bored of, but it’s a lot better when I’m imagining it rather than clicking around it. I think it’s that, when we’re in a forest, I’m just imagining a forest. And not a forest drawn in traditional fantasy artstyles, with all the times I’ve seen that before.

Jim: That’s sort of the tension between this stuff and actual videogames, isn’t it: people’s decisions about how stuff looks can’t be moved by imagining it to be different, but in text or verbal gaming, it’s up to you to visualise, which is less intense, but far more flexible. Anyway, I think it’s clear that we give D&D 4th edition 7/10. The graphics are quite good.

D&D 4th Edition is out now. So is 5th Edition. It’s probably fine, too.

__________________

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Blizzard, World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor.

When you're as rich as Star Citizen (now $49 million and counting) you don't just announce a new starship for your game, you create your version of the show Top Gear and it announces the new starship. Say hello to the M50 Interceptor.

"Galactic Gear" here is Cloud Imperium Games' fun way of telling everyone they've updated Arena Commander, the dogfighting module that released in June, with some new ships and features. One of them is the Interceptor, which can be flown in all modes, including a new event called the Murray Cup. That's a racing mode set in an upper-atmosphere scenario.

Other additions include new hangars, a HUD update, updated ship performance and the introduction of friend codes to help pilots connect with their wingmen. There also is a co-operative horde mode called Vanduul Swarm.

For more on Star Citizen, see Polygon's impressions from the game's official unveiling during PAX East in April.

In the MWO thread, it was posted that IGP gave up/sold their MWO rights to PGI.

And I just found out that in December last year IGP more or less "fired" Blue Lizard Games, halting development, not telling their customers about either of this (they kept BLGs logo on the site for months) and still selling founder packs.

And now, the game has been on a three days maintenance downtime. For about two weeks. With a glaring typo in the very, very cheaply made announcement. (Seriously, who did up that graphic? It looks like a 2minute MSPaint job...)

Anybody got any more info on this?





(Personal thought of the day: Please, Microsoft, just take the Battletech videogame rights back into your fold again? No BT games would be a better state than what we have now. *sigh* Stupid F2P fad... I'd rather have a damn Xbone exclusive than... All this...)

The Seventh Doctor Sourcebook for Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space is available for pre-order now at the Cubicle 7 webstore! The Seventh Doctor Sourcebook is also available in PDF!
Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, this Sourcebook explores the Seventh Doctor’s adventures on Earth and beyond. With detailed information on all the allies, enemies, aliens and gadgets that he encounters,as well as examining each of his adventures, the book contains a wealth of material for the Doctor Who:Adventures in Time and Space RPG, and is also a fact-packed resource for fans of the show!
Having survived an attempt on his life from his own future self, it is the Rani who forces the Doctor to regenerate once more, into an incarnation that is every bit as sharp, cunning and eccentric as his predecessors. Battle dragons, psychic clowns and out-of-control robots, match wits with the Rani, the Master and Fenric, and destroy Skaro, the home world of the Daleks!
And remember – you can always judge a man by the quality of his enemies!
160 pages – colour interior – hardcover
Written by Andy Peregrine
PDF due imminently, print book expected October 2014

(Original RSS Post)

Reports of Microsoft’s plans to acquire Mojang, creator of the Minecraft video game franchise, surfaced earlier this week, shortly after Apple’s iPhone 6 event. Reuters now reports that the surprise deal is said to be worth $2.5 billion, and Microsoft will announce the acquisition on Monday. While there are a number of reasons Microsoft might want to secure the rights to Minecraft, some analysts and developers believe it could be related to Windows Phone.

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A Windows Phone Minecraft version could be on the way

Minecraft is incredibly popular on iOS and Android, and the game has around 100 million players across all platforms. Minecraft isn’t currently available on Windows Phone, and Microsoft’s potential acquisition would undoubtedly mean the game would make its way to the platform. "We don’t view this acquisition as a signal of Microsoft's intent to double down on Xbox but consider it an attempt to better address mobile on a cross-platform basis," says Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund. That won’t be the sole reason Microsoft is interested in Minecraft, but the company could opt to create a version for Windows and Windows Phone that has additional features and benefits over those on iOS and Android.

Markus Persson, Minecraft creator and co-founder of Mojang, has always criticized Microsoft’s approach to Windows 8, alongside its small market share with Windows Phone. “Got an email from Microsoft, wanting to help ‘certify’ Minecraft for win 8. I told them to stop trying to ruin the pc as an open platform,” said Persson in a tweet nearly two years ago. Persson might be critical, but recent reports suggest he approached Microsoft a few months ago to explore a possibility of a sale. While it’s impossible to say exactly what Microsoft is planning with Minecraft, it appears we’ll find out more very soon.