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My Bold Predictions for 2013

Leave a Comment Posted by on January 2, 2013

Happy New Year! Alrighty, now that I’ve judged myself on my Bold Predictions for 2012 (and done not so badly overall though always with room for improvement), it’s time to spit em’ out for 2013. I’m hung over, have a sore back, haven’t slept and oh yeah, have to head back to what will be an insane merger-induced grind tomorrow so I’m actually not in a blogging mood but dammit, predictions must flow! I’m going to try to put in everything I can think of before posting this but I do these kind of off-the-cuff and with no pre-planning so I am going to reserve the right to add to the post for up to 48 hours after publishing it in case I remember anything. These are also tech and gaming predictions. I have predictions in the economic and political arenas too but these will be long enough and frankly, I don’t have the time or the energy for political arguments.

And away we go!

Gaming

  • THQ’s new private equity owner will ensure all their games in the pipe come out but the company will be split up and sold off shortly after. This is honestly a shame because despite the absolute idiocy of that company’s management (Jason Rubin being very much an exception), they’ve managed to keep a lot of talent and put out some pretty good games. That said, the AAA industry is in a state of massive flux right now (more on that later) and even the big boys can’t figure out how to reliably succeed in it so I can’t see who would want to fund another go for THQ in that arena. There’s a lot of mystery around this eleventh hour deal but from what I’ve read, it looks like vultures who want to ring out whatever profits they can from the nearly finished games in the pipe and then sell the studios and IP for some additional profit. I hope I’m wrong but I don’t think I am.
  • Mobile gaming will continue to grow but the honeymoon is over. This is kind of an extension of a prediction from last year but I’m declaring it to have a bigger effect this year. I’ve banged on about how the meteoric growth of this industry (and the companies whose platforms it runs on) is a fashion trend, that the growth is unsustainable and that a big equalisation adjustment is coming as it already has in the social space. Mobile has quickly been usurped by big companies and the only games that are attaining mass scale success are from big companies with the occasional fluke like Angry Birds was. It’s a super hit driven industry just like AAA is and the press will no longer be able to ignore that as they’ve been doing for a while now. This type of gaming’s not going anywhere and that’s a good thing but this is the year reality hits and people realise it isn’t all milk, honey and guaranteed riches. Mobile will continue to exist and thrive but it’s not going to replace other ways of gaming any time soon if ever. To tie into this…
  • The general public will start to tire of free-to-play Skinner Box mechanics. This right here is why I can’t stand most mobile games. Everything’s filled with microtransactions, nags to spend money and a damn store front between every level, whether it makes design sense or not. It’s a terrible, exploitive way to design games, I hate it and I’ve already heard more than a few other people who are tired of it too. When people look at their credit card statements and realise those 5 $0.99 games they bought actually cost more like $25 in total in order to make them good and not just grind fests, they get frustrated and I think we’ll see more of that. This mechanic isn’t going away but I do think we’re going to start seeing mobile games that offer complete experiences for a higher price.
  • The WiiU will be a modest success. I’m sure Nintendo realises that much like mobile is now, the Wii’s growth was fashion driven and I’m sure they have no such expectations with the WiiU and have budgeted accordingly. I got one of these for Christmas and despite some dumb decisions they made (largely regarding patch structure, DRM and the GamePad’s battery, all of which can be fixed), this is an amazing platform that offers a lot of promise and uniqueness. This isn’t a Wii with a low-rent tablet attached and anyone who thinks so is either uninformed or more likely an Apple fanboy. I still don’t see Nintendo winning over third parties in a big way with this but as always, their own stunning developer talent will carry the WiiU to profitability.
  • The Vita will go from limping to crawling. Naming the Vita one of my disappointments of 2012 hurt because I love this thing so much. It’s incredible hardware and it’s a steal at $250 and it shows how you can do good portable gaming without compromise but no one’s making games for it. Even when they’re hurting bad though, Sony’s not one to throw in the towel and I don’t think they will here. They’ll keep pushing it and I do believe it will continue to sell small numbers and probably will never be a runaway success but I do think it will advance enough this year to keep owners like myself in some decent content. I also believe Sony’s next home system will give it a big push but more on that later.
  • Console shovelware is dead. It’s already happening and good bloody riddance! The Wii and DS were kind of the last bastions for the vulture publishers who make their living cranking out cheap, garbage games for $30-$40 in the hopes of catching suckers at Wal-Mart. The increased development costs of the new systems (which many believe to be 2-3x what they are now at a minimum) will make this slimy practice an impossible model. These publishers won’t simply move to mobile either because there’s already too much garbage in that space and because they were run by scummy businesspeople who didn’t really understand the industry as a whole, they won’t know how to adapt to the realities of the mobile market and will likely just up and die off. They deserve to rot.
  • The first major Kickstarter disaster will happen and will test people’s faith in the crowdfunding model. I think this model of funding games is brilliant and I spent way too much on Kickstarters this year. However, at least one of these projects is either not going to come out and zero out everybody’s “investment” or it will come out, be far below the majority’s expectations and people will feel ripped off. There have just been too many projects and a big portion of those are fuelled by rose-tinted nostalgic expectations. I know I’m probably going to hate at least a couple of the finished projects that I backed. No disrespect to Brian Fargo and I so hope Wasteland 2 is killer but inXile’s track record is not good. The Peter Molyneux and David Braben projects are also just gross and while perfectly legit, abuse the Kickstarter spirit in my opinion. The thing is, I fully knew what I was getting into when I backed them and the whole point of Kickstarter and that you roll the dice and take your chances. Most people don’t know that though or they say they do but don’t really mean it. When one of these games comes out to poor reviews or worse yet, doesn’t come out at all, a lot of people are going to feel burned and run away from crowdfunding. The people that do get it will continue to make it a viable means of indie development which is awesome but much like mobile, we’re still in the honeymoon phase.
  • The OUYA will come out and find niche success. I don’t really think the OUYA folks believe this is going to be the thing that overtakes Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo but I also think the fanboy press who largely hated on this thing not because of it’s ideas but because it’s Android and called it no less than a scam were dead wrong. None of them will do the right thing and eat crow of course but I didn’t expect it as such. Developer kits for this have already shipped whereas the press’ golden boy project I’ll talk about next is delayed until March, maybe. There seems to be a lot of developer hype for this and I think it’s a really cool idea. I actually backed it but had to reduce my pledge due to money issues but if this makes it to market, I’ll happily grab one to try it out.
  • The Oculus Rift will come out late and underwhelm. The same press outlets who have been dumping on OUYA have used such fashionable terms as “the future” to describe this thing. I think it’s very cool and if it does what it does well and gets game support, I’ll totally get one. However, all attempts at virtual reality have proven cumbersome and not generally worth the experience and I’ve seen nothing to indicate this will be otherwise. I do think this could find niche success but I think the press’ own hype of this will be to its detriment when normal consumers start getting their hands on it. I’ll be happy to be wrong about this.
  • Layoffs, studios closures and the viability of AAA development will be a bigger story than ever. This was one of the dominating themes of 2012 and as we go through yet another year waiting for new consoles, I think it’s only going to get worse. Sales are falling (no one’s 100% sure of why but many think it’s not just the normal end-of-cycle downturn), costs are set to skyrocket and anything that isn’t a sure fire hit is a recipe for financial catastrophe. Any studio that hasn’t consistently pumped out critical and commercial successes can’t get work anymore and we now have fewer publishers able to fund new AAA projects than ever before. I love AAA gaming and it pains me greatly to see it in such decline but unless people get bored of mobile games and come running back to it, I don’t see how they fix this going forward. My hope is that this is an adjustment and the industry will realign itself and come out stronger but that requires new players to enter the space and no one is.
  • Valve’s Steam box will not release this year but will enter the promised beta phase. My feeling is it will be a standardised PC design that runs customised Linux with Steam on it. And for that reason, I will probably not care because it will have a fraction of my library available to me and most of it is going to be indie stuff I don’t need to play on my TV or that I can play by running an HDMI cable from my laptop. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a cool idea and from the way they’ve talked about it being able to run competing software, it might even be Valve’s own attempt at an OUYA-like thing which could be something special indeed.
  • Steam on Linux will remain niche at best. Despite the hypocrisy of Valve and others towards Windows 8, I do get where some of their concerns are rooted and I share them. However, to think Linux is going to ever gain mainstream adoption of any kind, especially gaming at this stage is a pipe dream. Even the versions of it that are designed to be “desktop friendly” are a nightmare to maintain, drivers are a mess and the community as a whole is still full of elitists who drive the mainstream away and like it that way. All that’s fine, I’ve got nothing against any of that if that’s the way you want a platform to be but all of those things mean it will never take over Windows. Kudos to Valve for making a concerted effort to make the platform viable for gaming and I do hope they can succeed in some way. But if they do, it won’t be for a long time to come.
  • Cross-media gaming will be attempted multiple times and never take off. Frank Gibeau from EA as well as babbling heads like Kevin Dent say that big gaming franchises have to have components everywhere. Beyond your console or PC game, there has to be a tie-in product on your phone, your tablet, your browser and anywhere else in order to keep you engaged at all times. I think this is a dumb idea and a waste of developer talent and resources. EA tried it with Mass Effect 3 and all the tie-in content sucked and no one really cared as far as I can tell. I won’t talk about this too much here because I have a future blog post about it planned.
  • There will be no new games announced or released from Valve this year (Dota 2 excepted). Forget Half-Life 2: Episode 3, we will get zilch from them in 2013. Between their new hardware experiment, Steam for Linux and whatever else, they aren’t going to be in a rush to put anything out. I excepted Dota 2 from this because it’s technically out to anyone who wants it already but it may exit beta.
  • DayZ standalone will launch late and be a buggy, hacker ridden mess like all Bohemia Interactive launches. Don’t get me wrong, I think the ideas of DayZ are absolutely fantastic, even if I burned out on the game after a month and I respect Bohemia as a developer a ton for finding a super tight niche and thriving in it. But the fact remains that their launch track record is abysmal and I don’t expect that to change with the standalone DayZ game. I hope they buck the trend this time because they might have the birth of a new genre on their hands and they’d be foolish to burn it right at the start.

Next-Gen Consoles

This gets its own section because there’s just too much to talk about regarding the next Xbox and PlayStation. There’s no doubt in my mind that these machines will be radically different from anything that’s come before. They have to be because making themselves stand out against phones and tablets (for better or worse) is a must.

  • Both the next Microsoft and Sony systems will be announced and shipped this year. Rumour is the next Xbox was supposed to come out in 2012 and got delayed for major retooling. The industry can’t wait any more, new hardware has to happen this year or there will be no one left to make stuff for it.
  • Both platforms will use far fewer specialised parts and be more like PCs than ever. It’s cheaper, most of the off-the-shelf parts are more powerful and most importantly, it’s much easier and faster to develop for. The days of Cell processors and weird memory allocation issues are over, they have to be. I’m guessing each system will have a minimum of 4GB RAM and hard drives will be standard but not SSDs.
  • Both platforms will offer every title in every tier for sale digitally on day one. Sony’s already trying this with select PS3 games. We’ve reached a tipping point where despite the telecartel’s best efforts, broadband is becoming a viable way to get large content and video game retail is losing its stranglehold on publishers and platform holders. By selling games digitally, the useless middleman who rips off the industry and consumers with used games gets cut out, pricing flexibility and sales are easy obtained and everyone makes more money. Retail is the only reason this wasn’t done before and Microsoft and Sony realise it’s time to throw caution to the wind and just do it. Whether I embrace this depends on whether they do DRM intelligently. They can look to Nintendo for how not to do it.
  • Free-to-play will become a big deal on consoles. Again, Sony tried this first with DUST 514 and Microsoft tried it with an XBLA title that wasn’t very good. However, they both know how much money there is to be made here, Sony especially since free-to-play is where Sony Online Entertainment makes most of its money now. The ability to handle microtransactions will exist at the system level and seamlessly integrate into both platform’s store front systems. For this to work though, another major change must happen and that is…
  • Console certification processes will continue to exist but will significantly lighten and be sped up. Free-to-play titles live and die on how quickly they can iterate. PlanetSide 2 has probably had a dozen or more patches since it left beta and it’s a better game for it. If each of those patches required weeks of sitting in certification limbo, it would have been disastrous. One of the big complaints from developers big and small over the last year has been how expensive and unnecessarily burdensome the console certification process is. Given that numerous games still ship completely broken or in some cases unfinished, it’s clearly not working as it is. Games shouldn’t have to wait weeks to make sure they prompt you to select your storage device and specifically tell you “Don’t turn off your console” when they’re saving data. I don’t know enough about the current processes to know how they will be streamlined but this must and will happen.
  • SmartGlass will be a big deal for Xbox and Vita integration will be big for PlayStation. Being able to have your console content interact with your phone or tablet is largely a dumb gimmick right now but Nintendo is showing how you can do it in unique and interesting ways. Microsoft will expand their SmartGlass platform to make this a much bigger (yet still optional) component of the gaming and media experience on Xbox. I believe Sony has plans to do something similar but on a more unique scale with the Vita due to the things it offers that phones and tablets can’t. I don’t know if tightly integrating the Vita into the home PlayStation experience can save the platform but I really hope it breathes new life into it.
  • Motion gaming is over. The Kinect was a fad and it’s largely dried up and almost no one’s making games for it any more, certainly nothing with a decent budget. Move died even quicker. The public’s got over motion gaming and I don’t think putting it in the box with the next systems is going to make it popular again. No matter how precise you make it, it’s still not the best way to play games. The next Xbox might support the current Kinect but I don’t think we’ll see another one.
  • Like PC, AAA games will be only a single segment of the gaming experiences available on consoles. This industry simply can’t afford to focus on AAA content exclusively, especially since costs and risks are only going to get more insane. But variety is good and despite some incredible gems coming out of console downloadable services (including half of my top 10 games of 2012), there’s really only the AAA stuff and the high-end downloadable stuff. I believe that free-to-play and a newly refocused effort on promoting and fostering smaller indie development, consoles are suddenly going to have the wide variety of game types, production values and price points that you could previously only get on PC and on mobile to a lesser extent. I think this is going to be the single biggest paradigm shift in the history of the console industry and it’s sorely overdue. This is what’s going to keep it relevant against up and coming platforms.
  • Sony will offer backwards compatibility via their Gaikai acquisition at some point but likely not at launch. They bought that company to probably eventually make PlayStation a platform that isn’t dependant on hardware but for now, I could see them using it this way since the rumoured radical hardware changes in the next console will likely make built-in backwards compatibility impossible. I don’t know if you’ll buy individual games or a subscription service or maybe some kind of hybrid tied into PlayStation Plus. Personally, I’d happy pay a few bucks a month to get access to a huge PS2 and PSP library. I do sincerely hope people who made PSN purchases on PS3 will get automatic Gaikai versions. I’m not counting on it though.
  • Microsoft will not offer retail game backwards compatibility but will offer it for certain XBLA titles like the 360 does with original Xbox games. I don’t think they want to risk pissing off people who will lose access to everything XBLA but they also aren’t going to go through the headache of making every game work. Most XBLA titles never pushed the 360′s processing power very hard so in theory, software backwards compatibility could be enough for most of those titles. I imagine they will also keep the 360 on sale and the Live system for that system up and running for a while.
  • PC gaming will keep getting bigger and challenge the notion of whether many hardcore gamers even need a console. Due to the PC-like architecture rumoured to be powering the new systems, making quality PC ports will be easier than ever and with that goes the reason many PC gamers had for also owning a console. If I could be assured that the majority of AAA PC ports were well done and more like they’ve been in the last year, I’d seriously consider only buying the next consoles when they were cheaper for exclusives.

Technology

  • The Apple fashion trend will finally begin to normalise but the press will ignore it. I’ll say it again before fanboys lose their minds: This does not mean I think Apple’s going away. They aren’t and despite being a mean-spirited, greedy company riding a choreographed public and press perception, it’s a very good thing that they’re around. However, between market saturation, maturing competition and people realising that a lot of their products are underpowered, overpriced and riding hype and form rather than function, their growth is going to start to go from bubble to something more realistic. This is what happens with bubbles. Their stock price has already slid 25% in 2012 but you know how many stories about it I’ve seen from the numerous tech sites I follow? Zero, even though many of these sites live blog their earnings calls. There’s a trend in modern media to build people or companies up high and then kick them back down but that’s never how it’s worked with Apple. They always get a huge free pass that others don’t and I think that’s going to continue. The market’s waking up though and whether fanboys like it or not, a lot of people still don’t use Apple products and many more realise their stuff isn’t necessarily the best at everything.
  • The Apple television is not coming. I made this prediction last year but the rumour won’t die so I’m reserving the right to make it again. Nearly everyone who is big in the TV business is bleeding to death right now. The HDTV market is saturated with people who see no compelling reason to upgrade. Paying 30-50% more for a screen with an Apple logo and the guts of a $99 Apple TV box (especially when many already have iPads you can plug into any TV) is simply not going to happen. Steve Jobs had one line in his biography where he said he’d figured out how to innovate in the TV space. Only for Apple does that one throwaway bit of information lead to an endless stream of speculation on how they’ll somehow revolutionise the TV space. It’s not going to happen.
  • The iPhone 5S will be the next model but in the Fall, not the Spring. Many think that after Apple burned their hardcore by announcing a newer iPad only six months after the previous one that the same thing would start happening with the iPhone too. Aside from the fact that iPhone sales are down because the 5 doesn’t offer anything worth upgrading for, the 6 month iPad debacle was I think just an experiment to see how far they can push people. I don’t think they’re going to keep doing that.
  • BlackBerry 10 will sustain RIM, not catapult them forward. By all accounts, it’s a fantastic operating system and their stock has been reflecting the buzz. The problem is that all 3 of the other major mobile platforms all tie into something bigger. iOS ties into Apple, Android ties into Google’s many services and Windows Phone ties into PCs. All RIM has is mobile and that’s going to make things tougher for them. I imagine that it’s extreme manageability, security features and flexibility will still make it the ideal corporate platform and most of their current corporate and government base will continue using them, as will a niche group of others. But their previous leadership was too short sighted to see the consumer battle approaching and they’ve lost it. I think they’ll refocus on what they have and serving that well.
  • PC sales will slide a bit as the industry normalises but the slide will not be huge and it will settle. While I think tablets are a horrible way to do anything but the lightest computing tasks, there’s a big segment of the population that only has to do the lightest tasks. Those people are buying tablets instead of PCs and with good reason. In addition, a weakening global economy means enterprise spending is slowing across the board and that’s where a lot of PC sales come from. The PC will be the dominant computing platform for the foreseeable future, anyone who says otherwise is clueless. But the industry has been red hot for too long and some cooling should happen. I hope this will thing out some of the garbage vendors and maybe stop the race to the bottom for a while.
  • Windows 8 will sell well below expectations. I think the hyperbolic hate for Windows 8 is way overblown but I get and share some of the big concerns about it. I’ve used it but not full-time and at some point soon, I will be upgrading my gaming rig to it so I can properly judge for myself. Depending on who you ask, it’s either selling OK or worse than Vista which was a dud as Windows sales go and for good reason, it was garbage. Some sales softness can be attributed to slowing PC sales but there has rightly or wrongly been some poison injected into the mainstream consciousness about Windows 8. Microsoft’s been desperate to chase the anti-choice, closed ecosystem model that Apple made popular and I think that’s stupid. They should be running the other way, embracing the opposite side and evangelising that. I believe that the poor sales of Windows 8 and the Surface tablets will cause them to re-evaluate what they’re doing with Windows and maybe back off or make optional some of what people hate about it.
  • Windows Phone 8 will rise to a respectable market share. I was wrong about this last year with Windows Phone 7 but my girlfriend is in love with WP8, as is everyone who buys a phone with it. There’s been lost of buzz slowly building about it and when the platform launched in China, it sold out everywhere in 2 hours, far outpacing the iPhone 5, even though it also set a record. Android is decimating all right now and that’s not going to change, nor are a sizable number of Apple faithful going to jump ship. But there’s still a big market out there of people who don’t own smartphones or who want to switch away from BlackBerry or older Android devices and I think there’s a big chance for Windows Phone there. After playing with my girlfriend’s Lumia 920, it makes my BlackBerry 9900 look last century and if I could afford a new phone tomorrow, it’s without question the one I would get.
  • The TV industry will make a new push from 3D TVs to 2K or 4K TVs. I said we would see no mention of 2K/4K TVs last year and I was right, as I was about 3D dying off. However, the Japanese TV manufacturers are bleeding out fast and they need something, anything to resuscitate their fortunes. I don’t think the market is ready for 2K/4K yet but damned if they aren’t going to try to make it ready.
  • Sharp will go bankrupt and Panasonic will have a massive restructuring. Whether Sharp goes the Japanese equivalent of Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 I don’t know but there’s no way for them to recover from the death spiral they’re in. Panasonic is already talking about shedding Sanyo and I think that’s only the tip of the iceberg for them. Sony is well underway with it’s restructuring now but Panasonic’s going to announce some kind of similar radical plan that will involve much deeper cuts due to them not being as diversified as Sony.
  • We will start to see more mainstream PCs come standard with SSDs or a combination of SSD and hard drive. SSDs have gotten so incredibly cheap that it’s becoming worth it for PC manufacturers to put them in medium-class models just to boast about how fast they are. There are even low-end SSDs that are so inexpensive, they could even make it into some of the cheap big box systems.

And after another epic length post, there’s all my predictions for 2013! There’s a lot of uncertainty in not only the tech and gaming industries but in the world in general. Still, I think there’s a lot to look forward to and I’m very curious to see what lies ahead. I hope your 2012 was good to you and yours and that your 2013 will be even better. I’m very stoked for a lot of things coming in my life this year and may only my good predictions be the right ones. Happy New Year once again!

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My Top 10 Video Games of 2012 (And A Bunch of Other Stuff)

1 Comment Posted by on December 30, 2012

It’s that time of year again, when everyone in gaming starts banging out their lists of top titles for the year. I actually really like these lists, not just because they gives you insight into the tastes of the various people you follow but also because for some reason, I tend to see less of the Internet vitriol that plagues the gaming community with them. Not to say there is none but the arguments seem less heated over top lists, maybe because they’re multi-item things and not focused on just one game bar none. I’m not daft enough to think that my list really has any bearing on the tastes of anyone but I like making it because of the challenge it poses. I play a lot of games every year and like to think I have fairly wide reaching tastes so distilling it down to only 10 games and then ranking those 10 is something that really makes me exercise my brain, trying to organise my experiences and literacy of the industry from the year past. Hopefully some of you reading this will hear about some great games you hadn’t thought of and maybe I can lead you to some good experiences. I hope so.

With that out of the way, I’m first going to list my Honourable Mentions, games that are still very excellent but not quite enough to make the top 10. These are in no particular order and despite not being top contenders, I think they’re still great and people should check them out:

The Pinball Arcade – FarSight Studios is normally a budget developer and most of their catalogue can be considered shovelware with one exception, their pinball stuff. These guys not only clearly love pinball, they get it. The Pinball Arcade is their attempt to recreate a bunch of popular real tables from the past with an obsessive devotion to accuracy and boy do they do that. You can get this on almost every platform but it’s best played on a tablet, partially because of the ability to get proper vertical screen orientation and also because thanks to stupid console certification processes, non-mobile platforms are getting new table packs at a much slower pace. I do also own it on the Vita and it’s fantastic there as well if you can wait for the tables a bit longer. They’re still trying to get a PC version out so please go vote for it on Steam’s broken Greenlight system.

Borderlands 2 – It’s more Borderlands but tightened up and that’s really all I wanted. The story’s still dumb, the writing is still full of lazy Family Guy-style references instead of original jokes and Claptrap should be melted into scrap but this is still an absolute blast in co-op. Just like the first one, a friend and I would start playing it and not realise how much time had passed until we noticed that we should have gone to bed hours ago. Were the writing not so poor, this might have actually made the top 10.

Sine Mora – I love shmups despite being no good at them and this game, developed by two companies who had never done one before, is fantastic. Gorgeous art and music, unique mechanics, challenge that’s present but not unreasonable and a deep and very dark story make this a treat for fans of the genre. I now own this on 360, Vita/PS3 and PC and I don’t regret buying it in multiple places.

FTL: Faster Than Light – A Kickstarter success story and for good reason. It’s part starship command simulator, part rogue-like and a ton of fun. The only reason this doesn’t make the list is because the game flat out cheats with the last encounter and I think that’s a bad mechanic that should never be used. Strong challenge is fine but not when it’s done by exempting something from the rules. Even on easy mode, I’ll likely never finish this game but I don’t care because the rest of it is so good.

Hotline Miami – A one man project that somehow manages to make 8-bit pixel art that can be disturbing with how graphic it is. It’s tough but incredibly satisfying. This doesn’t make the list because it’s still a bug ridden mess. I still haven’t finished it due to collision detection and slowdown issues and it still has a notice on launch that Steamworks support is broken (despite it being approved for sale on Steam). We keep getting told fixes are coming but they never do, yet the creator has found time to port it to Mac and oh yeah, announce a sequel. The game is great but this isn’t how you treat your customers.

Hitman: Absolution – Potentially the most eyebrow raising of my choices. This game had polarised reviews but I think it was held to an unfair standard. It deviates in many ways from traditional Hitman games but I really like what it did. You can still make it brutally tough if you want, the grindhouse goofy story I thought was fun, and the mechanics make it feel like the old Splinter Cell stealth games. Unfortunately, that type of game play is considered obsolete by many but I still love it. The Contracts mode is also a brilliant way to do multiplayer without just having the usual deathmatch mode tacked on. If you’re a Hitman purist, this may seem like a step back to you but I thought it was a ton of fun and a great time value if you play it as intended.

Torchlight II – I only got to play a couple of hours of this in the last week with a friend but I can already tell this is the game Diablo III should have been. Light-hearted, fun and fast with mechanics and systems that are easy to learn but can be very deep if you choose to get obsessive with them. It’s also a lot cheaper than Diablo III and unlike that game, you get a complete experience for the initial buy-in price.

Asura’s Wrath – If you told me I would enjoy a game that’s almost entirely quick time events and based on a story that’s ridiculous and dumb even by anime standards, I’d laugh in your face but that’s exactly what Asura’s Wrath is and I loved it. It just keeps getting crazier and crazier and you’re compelled to push forward just to see how insane they can get. I rented this, “beat” it and then bought it later for cheap. In true Capcom fashion, they are trying to screw people with DLC by hiding the proper ending behind a paywall but since I got the game for $20, I can live with that. I haven’t played any of the DLC yet but I intend to. I don’t want to see a lot of these kinds of games come out but this one was just so nuts, it kept me smiling.

The Darkness II – The original Darkness was an underrated gem, not unlike most titles from Starbreeze Studios. When I heard a sequel was coming from Digital Extremes (who has a spotty record at best) I was nervous but I really loved what they did. It’s a very linear game but the action is incredibly violent, visceral and satisfying, the story is unique and tense and it has some of the best voice acting I’ve ever heard in video games. I fully intend to play this again and still want to try the co-op out. It’s criminal that this game by all accounts was a sales bomb and we’ll probably never get another one. It goes on sale on the PC constantly so pick it up and let’s play some co-op!

Tribes: Ascend – When I heard that the company behind the middling Global Agenda had bought the Tribes license and intended to make a free-to-play game out of it, I was bummed. I didn’t play much Tribes back in the day because I didn’t have a good enough PC then but I know how widely regarded it is. In the end though, Hi-Rez Studios made a fantastic Tribes game that kept everything great about the series and attached it to a free-to-play model that’s perhaps a bit imbalanced but not at all exploitive. I love this game, it’s just unfortunate that I haven’t been able to keep up with the community and have gone from being pretty decent at it to getting flattened almost constantly.

Next up are my Disappointments for the year. These are all games or concepts that I had high hopes for that just weren’t met. Not to say they’re all terrible experiences. Some were but others I still really enjoyed, they just didn’t meet the expectations I feel their pre-release hype created for me. Again, these are in no particular order:

Diablo III – As stated above, I think Torchlight II is what this should have been. I still haven’t finished my first normal difficulty playthrough of this and every time I think about it, I decide to play something else. I love this genre and played a ton of Diablo and Diablo II but this is a regression of what made the series great in every way. The systems have been dumbed down, everything has been engineered around monetising their broken and unbalanced real money auction house, it looks technically outdated and oh yeah, it has always-on DRM that prevented people from playing (even in single player) for several days after launch. Between this and purposefully splitting StarCraft II into three games, I honestly think I’m done with Blizzard for the foreseeable future. This makes me sad but they are running away from the values that made them what they are and way too much Activision thinking had penetrated their management.

Retro City Rampage – I was stoked for this game for months. A Grand Theft Auto style open world game in 8-bit style with music by Virt? Yes please! I grabbed it day one on my Vita but the more I play it, the more disappointed I get. The ideas are great but too many of the missions are horribly designed and even after a patch to substantially lower the difficulty on some, they’re still way too hard and often require sheer luck to get through. Again, I’m all for challenge but when it feels like it’s being brute forced on you, that’s no longer fun.

Mass Effect 3 – Alternatively titled The EA Effect. I love this series but the last game was ruined simply because of EA’s greed. Multiple critical story elements were held back as paid DLC. The ending was atrocious and rendered all of the choices you had to make in the series irrelevant (sorry but you are flat out wrong if you think otherwise). Rather than own that, BioWare caved to the whining fans and released an extended cut ending as DLC which was supposed to provide “clarification” but actually significantly retconned and altered critical elements of it. To their credit, the DLC was free but that’s still ridiculous. If they couldn’t do the ending right, at least they could have defended that position. Add to this a multiplayer mode that was actually good but was locked behind an online pass, had Skinner Box microtransactions and required you to play it in order to get the best ending to the campaign and that only makes things worse. This series deserved better than the treatment EA gave it with the finale.

Max Payne 3 – The game looked and ran great on PC and the action was as awesome as it was in the previous two Remedy-developed instalments but the story was a huge let down. These are supposed to be dark narratives and Max is supposed to be a torn, broken character but this whole story was about him voluntarily putting himself in horrible situations he didn’t have to and then endlessly whining about them like an emo teenager. In the other games, he had tragedy and conflict forced upon him. In this one he just runs head long into it and then bitches about how it’s everyone else’s fault. It ended up turning the game from a fun experience to one I wanted to finish just to get it over with. After a few cheater-filled multiplayer matches, I uninstalled it and will probably never touch it again. It sold badly so I don’t think we’ll see another one for a while if ever.

PlayStation Vita – This breaks my heart. I pre-ordered a Vita on the strong belief there was a market for it and I love the system to death. It’s a wonderful piece of kit and shows that Sony still gets quality hardware. The problem is, there haven’t been a lot of games for it. A lot of the releases have been stellar and I’ve bought more than $200 worth of stuff for it but the new releases have quickly dried up and even Sony’s barely talking about it. Two of the big tent pole releases for it this year were supposed to be new entries in the Resistance and Call of Duty franchises, both of which were hot garbage by hot garbage enthusiasts Nihilistic Software, who decided to rename and focus on mobile games after these. Good luck guys, a new name can’t change the fact that you’re bad at your jobs. The Vita’s in a horrible catch 22 where no one wants to buy it without games and no one wants to make games for it because no one’s bought it. With how much the mobile gold rush has taken off, I honestly wonder if the Vita can succeed and if there’s only enough room for one dedicated system to thrive, that being the 3DS. I so hope it can but as an early adopter, I’m disappointed even though I don’t regret my purchase and I can certainly see why any potential Vita buyer would be turned off right now.

Mobile Games As A Whole – Now before anyone starts spitting game names at me, yes there are a number of exceptions to this. I’ve played several mobile games I thought were very good but I’ve probably bought over $100 worth over the course of this year, mostly on recommendations and I’m sorry but most of them are garbage. Everything’s become about monetisation at the expense of good design. The majority of the games are boring, shallow, a regression in terms of systems design and every game has to have a bloody store front in between levels where they’re trying to get you to spend more money. These mechanics in free-to-play PC games are considered abhorrent but they’re somehow a revolution on mobile devices. To hear people call mobile gaming superior because the games are cheaper drives me nuts because it’s largely a lie and many of these games cost substantially more in the end. I’m happy to pay to get a complete, deep experience on a mobile device and there’s no doubt that the platforms are capable of those things and some even exist but the majority of what’s succeeding is Skinner Box garbage. It’s a de-evolution of the gaming medium and it’s turning a potentially amazing new way to get interactive experiences into a cesspool of the worst kinds of design ideas. That it’s popular doesn’t make it good. It can get better and it needs to get better. If this is where the majority of games end up, I’m going to have to find another hobby.

Next up is a quick list of Exclusions. These are games that very well could have made my top 10 based on my tastes but that I just couldn’t play enough to judge. Unfortunately, between work craziness and the new puppy we got a few months ago, my available gaming time has shrunk substantially and I just didn’t have time to get to everything I wanted:

Fez – Didn’t buy it at the time because I was busy, then the whole save corruption thing happened. I’m waiting for the PC version that’s been hinted at and if it doesn’t come, I might buy it on sale next year on Xbox 360.

Far Cry 3 – My car decided to be a bitchy pain in my arse this month and between it and Christmas, I got screwed for money and couldn’t afford this. Everyone says it’s awesome and I bet it is but I just wasn’t able to play it.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown – I pre-ordered this but have only had time to put about 2 hours into it. I’m liking it but I haven’t progressed enough to judge. From what I understand, it’s still extremely buggy and has largely gone unsupported so that may have kept it from the top 10 anyway.

Persona 4 Golden – I don’t like JRPGs at all but I’ve been told by many people that this is the game that transcends prejudices towards the genre. I intend to take a chance on it but again, money prevented me from buying in right now.

ZombiU – I wasn’t expecting to have a WiiU this month, then I got one for Christmas! This is a polarising game but the positive reviews have painted it in a way that could make me appreciate it, even if it might end up being a rare title I can’t finish. I managed to find the money to buy this on a Boxing Week sale but I won’t be able to put in enough time before the end of the year to render an opinion.

Assassin’s Creed III – I’m a huge fan of this series and pre-ordered this one but have only put in enough time to barely get past the abhorrently long and boring open. I hear the beginning and ending are poor but the middle is among the best offerings this series has made to date but I just haven’t gotten there yet.

And with all that, we finally come to the meat of this massive text wall, my top 10 video games of 2012. These are listed in order from lowest to my game of the year:

10. Spec Ops: The Line – This is a game you should experience not because it’s plays great but because it’s important. It’s a mediocre shooter developed by a studio whose only other known project was a B-grade flight shooter for the original Xbox. It plays OK but not as good as many other games and the multiplayer is laughably bad. However, the story is an absolutely incredible tale of a soldier’s descent into madness. It’s dark, it’s emotional and it’s very moving by the end. Nolan North gets made fun of for how many games he’s in but the man is one of the finest voice actors working today and I believe this role is his greatest achievement. If you have any interest in game narratives and want to see how a mature story can be done right, you should play it. It sold poorly and I get why but it shouldn’t have.

9. Tokyo Jungle – This is a game that sounds too crazy to exist but it does and it’s great. It takes place in a future version of Tokyo where all humans have disappeared, leaving the animals to ruck amok. I won’t spoil it but that concept actually gets fleshed out narratively. It’s developer had never made any games remotely like this before and it’s an experience I’ve never seen anything close to. It’s cheap on PSN and if you have any interest in the idea at all, you should check it out. It’s one of a kind.

8. Syndicate – It got all kinds of pre-release stick for having the name of the revered strategy game and instead being a first person shooter but it’s pretty damn good. Developed by the underrated Starbreeze Studios and covered in their unique style, it lets you play in a great dystopian cyberpunk future. The campaign is average yet still fun but the co-op is some of the most multiplayer fun I’ve had this year. It’s criminal this this game sold so badly, they even canned the DLC that was already near complete. It’s a co-op experience like no other and I still play it with some people on a regular basis to this day. They took the concepts created in the original strategy game and actually found out how to make them work well in a shooter. This deserved to succeed.

7. Sleeping Dogs – Another open-world crime game that seemed to be aiming to hit the middle of Grand Theft Auto’s seriousness and Saint’s Row’s insanity. And it did just that. It was in development forever by a studio who only had a kart racing game to their name, got dumped by Activision because it couldn’t be turned into a yearly treadmill and eventually came out through Square Enix of all people. It looks gorgeous on PC, the game play systems are deep yet arcadey and tight, the story is actually pretty decent and there’s a lot of great voice acting. I figured I’d enjoy this but not nearly as much as I did. After I finished it, I actually went back to keep working on side stuff which I never do in these games, I just wanted to keep playing in the world. The DLC has been a let down so far but the core game is great and any open-world fan should get it. This apparently also sold under expectations but I really hope it gets a sequel.

6. Dishonored – What’s that Frank Gibeau from EA? New IP this late in the console cycle can’t succeed? Yeah, shut up! And this one didn’t even need tacked on multiplayer or stupid cross-media stuff either like you also insist everything needs. I had high hopes for this game and they were largely met. The story is very good but sadly falls apart at the end and Bethesda’s obsession with celebrity voice actors again proves pointless. The game play and level design are incredible though. You can approach every level in this game in a myriad of different ways, all of which work. There are only has two endings but you can replay it half a dozen times or more to see every way it can be completed. Whether you like action or stealth, this is worth checking out. I’m very happy this sold beyond expectations and is becoming a series.

5. Dust: An Elysian Tail – Go watch some videos of this and prepare to have your mind blown. Ready? This whole game with the exception of the music and voice acting was made by one dude who only learned to program a few of years ago! I know right?! I still am amazed at that accomplishment but beyond that is also a fantastic game. A dark and moving story that also manages to be light and funny in places, super tight and fast combat, surprising length for a downloadable title and a gorgeous world with interesting characters. A not insignificant number of people avoided this because they apparently thought the art style was too “furry” like. If you’re one of those people, stop being an idiot and go buy this amazing game. Dean Dodrill deserves to succeed in a big way.

4. Mark of the Ninja – I love Klei’s style and I love stealth games, despite the genre largely dying away. Even though they never made a stealth game before, Klei managed to make one of the best ones of all time. It demands that you be stealthy but doesn’t outright require it. If you manage to alert someone, there are ways out of it but it’s tough. The systems take what is often a hard to learn concept and makes it accessible without having to hold your hand, something a lot of AAA designers never managed to figure out. It does stealth in a unique and fun way and with Klei’s amazing art throughout. This didn’t sell well on Xbox 360 because Microsoft doesn’t know how to market but it apparently did well on PC. I really hope we see more of these.

3. PlanetSide 2 – As I said above, free-to-play is maturing nicely this year and nowhere is that better demonstrated than Sony Online Entertainment’s incredibly ambitious MMOFPS. This isn’t an easy game to get into but when you figure it out and get in a good squad, it’s massive-scale mayhem like you can’t get anywhere else. I’ve had so many hours of fun in this already and every time I get into a groove with my squad, I have to tear myself away from it. And so far, I’ve only spent about $20 of real money and all of it on stuff I could have got without spending a cent if I had the time to put in. SOE is iterating constantly on the game and it’s getting better and better all the time. If you’re unsure if this is for you, it’s free so just go try it! I haven’t had this much multiplayer fun in years.

2. The Walking Dead – Mature, dark, deeply emotional storytelling in games has a new poster child. Many say this is better than not only the TV show but even the original graphic novel. I can’t speak to the latter but it’s definitely better than the show for me and I like the show. Barely a game at all and more of an interactive story, every episode ended with me in a depression flare-up but still very glad I had played it. All of the characters are interesting, have deep backstories that get fleshed out naturally and while not all perfectly executed, every episode was full of shocking moments, many of which I never saw coming. This was in a dead heat tie for first place but ultimately didn’t get it because despite of how good a game it is, it’s full of bugs on almost every platform and Telltale Games has not dealt with any of them. Combine that with the engine showing its extreme age and it doesn’t take the top spot. Nonetheless, this is a series everyone needs to play and given its massive success, I really hope Telltale has the resources to polish the second season properly and hopefully, go back and fix this one too.

1. Journey – I’ve always thought thatgamecompany’s stuff was neat in concept but that was about it. What footage I saw of Journey looked neat but I only had a passing interest in it. What I got in the end was one of the most beautiful, artistic and emotional experiences I’ve had in gaming. Not a word is spoken through the entire experience, yet volumes are conveyed to you. It has co-op that is integral to it but it’s only ever with one person that frequently changes, who you can’t communicate with beyond some chirping noises and whose identity is not revealed to you until after you finish it. I won’t spoil the story but never has a game had me on the edge of my seat pushing so hard on the controller that I had a bruise on my thumb afterwards. This can be held up as an unquestionable example of how games can be art. Until finishing this, The Longest Journey (which oddly has the same word in the name) was my favourite story based game of all time. It’s still amazing but this moved me in a way that couldn’t. Everyone who owns a PS3 needs to play this and if you don’t own one, find somebody who does and play it there. It’s one of the best games of its type ever made and without question my game of the year.

So there it is, over 4,500 words later according to my post editing tool. It took me a surprising amount of time to come up with these lists but I feel good having done it. I’ve done a lot of complaining on this blog throughout the year of the bad directions I feel parts of the gaming industry are going. I still have those worries but for all the thoughts I had about 2012 being the beginning of the end for the kind of games I enjoy, never have I had such a hard time picking only 10 games as the best ones I played this year. I’m a cynical guy and have never claimed otherwise but even as that person who feels the gaming business is going to a creatively dark place, this has been an incredible year for the gaming medium and for games that are based around design, narrative and experience rather than just the easiest paths to quick money. I really hope this side of it continues to grow, mature and most of all succeed in 2013 and the years ahead. Congratulations to everyone who won, you made amazing games and I hope you all get to keep doing so. Best of luck to the industry in 2013, I get the feeling they’ll need some of it.

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The social games bubble is bursting and mobile is next

3 Comments Posted by on October 25, 2012

I’ve said for a long time that the explosive growth of social and mobile gaming is a fashion trend. Many a clueless analyst and click driving “journalist” has latched onto this trend as a clear and irrefutable sign that this is where all gaming is going and those who doubt it just refuse to embrace “the future”, sentiment that always makes me chuckle and roll my eyes. This does not mean I think they are going to go away or that they won’t be a major part of the gaming landscape going forward, that couldn’t be further from the truth. However, how anyone can look at the growth in both industries and say that it isn’t a bubble is either clueless or just doesn’t want to see the truth. There are many industry bubbles throughout history to refer to and this bears many of the same signs.

There has been much proof of the cracks in the bubble appearing of late but few have been as dramatic or sudden as the implosion of Zynga. They had a meteoric rise with their shovelware skinner box Facebook non-games and were reporting staggering and ballooning revenues that made many believe they’d finally cracked the nut to make gaming something everyone could get into, even when drenched in scummy business practices. It caused a gold rush of investment and many more companies to spring up in the space, few of which got the same level of attention. They quickly tried to expand into the similarly exploding mobile space, paying insanely overvalued prices for studios that had hit titles like Words with Friends and Draw Something.

Zynga quickly went public and has been cratering ever since but not before their scumbag extraordinare CEO Marc Pincus got his big pay day. From an IPO price of $10, they are now around $2.10 and their market cap is worth less than their physical assets such as real estate. They are losing money, closing studios and laying off employees, bleeding users, writing down mobile studio acquisitions made just months prior and are desperately trying to restructure themselves as an online gambling company. As is the case with most fashion trends, people got bored with what they were offering and moved on. Though Zynga is the biggest example of this, they’re also far from the only one. Lots of front line workers are now out of a job while the people who led them into oblivion are still rich. It’s the opposite of any kind of justice or fairness.

I am not a stock market analyst, I am not a professional pundit and I’m certainly not any kind of journalist so why does it feel like I’m one of the few who actually saw this coming? I certainly didn’t see it happening this fast but I was laughed at when I said this type of growth was unsustainable. When companies grow too fast, they tend to crash down hard. It’s the ones that have measured, controlled growth that tend to survive and thrive. It appears an upheaval is happening in the social games space right now, one that’s going to decimate a lot of what was quickly built, leaving behind something that will be much smaller and certainly not something that represents the future of all gaming. Many of those in charge of these companies deserve to have some hard questions asked of them but so do the analysts and press people who overhyped them and now act like they couldn’t have known this would happen. If a clueless armchair commentator like me could see it, what’s their excuse?

Make no mistake, while this may be a bubble that started to burst in the social space first, a similar reckoning is coming to the mobile games industry as well. A bazillion and one mobile studios are starting up every day and many former AAA developers are switching to mobile development, many as a means to try and survive. The AAA industry is without a doubt in a chaotic state right now but as I’ve said before, mobile is quickly becoming just as risky and hard to succeed in. It’s gone from a space where nobody could fail to a space where your cost of entry may be low but you’d almost have better financial luck buying a lottery ticket. Those who succeed either do so hugely or just well enough but the majority crash and burn. This isn’t being talked about because no big players have been affected by it yet, the same as in the social space. But make no mistake, it’s coming. A lot of hyped games will fail, a lot of studios will fold and a lot of talented aspiring developers will be left disillusioned and will give up on the craft. That’s a crime to the medium.

To be clear, while I don’t care for more social and mobile games, I’m not getting some sick sense of schadenfreude from this happening. I don’t like to see people out of work and I think the more people there are making video games of all types, the better off everyone who is into this hobby will be. However, as someone who isn’t into those forms of gaming, it has frustrated me greatly to see pundits proclaim that the types of games I love are dead, they’re no longer possible and that we either need to embrace “the future” or get out of the way. Social and mobile games will be here for the foreseeable future and that’s a good thing but they’ve started themselves off on very shaky ground, largely led by greedy businesspeople and the analysts and press puppets that propped them up and ignored valid questions that needed to be asked of them. As business does, it will adjust, adapt and what’s left will be strong and know how to thrive. But the time for meteoric growth is rapidly ending,

Ask yourself this question: Why have the majority of big publishers who have been around for decades only dipped into social and mobile gaming (yes, EA being a notable exception who is also feeling the pain right now), instead choosing to focus on their core console and PC businesses? Is it because they’re just clueless old guard types who stubbornly refuse to embrace reality and will end up in the footnotes of gaming history? Or could it be that businesspeople with a history of success saw the signs of another bubble and decided to feel things out before jumping into bed with the unknown? No one’s saying so we don’t know for sure but consider this as well: Zynga once had the financial might to buy almost any AAA publisher and now, despite EA’s stock price and market cap being a fraction of what they used to be, EA could now buy Zynga lock, stock and barrel with cash they have in the bank. That flip happened in less than a year and I think it speaks volumes.

The last few years of social and mobile’s stratospheric rise has been very interesting to watch. And the next couple of years after the bubble bursts and it begins to settle into a more sustainable model will be even more interesting.

Business, Predictions, Video Games , , , , , ,

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