Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: SpyCat on March 10, 2008, 08:46:55 AM
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The head cheese at Activision, Bobby Kotick, recently made headlines for his assertion that, in order to compete properly with World of Warcraft, publishers may need to invest nearly a billion dollars in such a venture. Fortunately for Kotick and crew, they now have access to the big brains at Blizzard and Vivendi, a group of folks who know quite a bit about the MMO business. How then, can Activision exploit its biggest earners into even bigger financial monsters?
The Activision CEO says that during the first few months of integration planning with Vivendi, they asked themselves some serious questions about what they consider "the fastest growing markets in the world", including Asian markets and MMOs.
As an example, Kotick said to investors at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference, "What would be the natural evolution of a property like Call of Duty into a massively-multiplayer environment and how do you monetize that?"
Kotick parlayed that into a thought on in-game advertising, in which he pointed to Starcraft as a model for short-session, ladder tournament play that can easily support ad spots. While a Call of Duty MMO may be a long way off, if it ever gets off the ground, it's starting to sound like Activision execs may be giving it serious thought and we'd expect it to be a big focus for the publisher's ad revenue model.
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Personally, HTC should get themselves into the STEAM network. :D
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You mean "Steam(ing pile of crap)"?
Steam is atrocious in almost every respect. Buggy as hell, to boot. Many games that have no issues off a retail CD-ROM have many bugs when ported into steam (chernobyl being one of 'em) that make the game almost unplayable.
The ONLY (and I mean ONLY) reason I have steam at all is because I have no choice since they shut down the old network (WON, wasn't it called?) and no non-steam games will run anymore.
That would be a death knell for HTC.
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Instead of investing a billion dollars in making a new game engine and infrastructure with graphics that can compete, just skip all that and go straight to the best graphics possible: real life.
Spend a few thousand dollars buying rc planes with cameras on them. Get tough ones that can take abuse, then have them be controlled over the Internet. Add smoke and gunfire digitally, a modest task, and stream live video. The graphics would be better than anything else because.. Hey, you can't beat real life, right?
Sure, there would be occasional wrecks requiring expensive repair, but that could probably be managed through a lttle bit of preventative UAV code.
The rest of the industry either bankrupts itself developing game engines that try to compete, or they set up rc battle farms of their own.
Imagine the fun modelers could have, building cities and bridges at small scale to populate the landscape. The shot in the arm for model shops wouldn't hurt either.
A fraction of the budget needed for 3d game engine development and you have the first truly new thing under the sky in decades. You can't buy that type of free publicity!
Its brilliant, I tells ya, BRILLIANT!
;)
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Good, well-funded game development with intricate phsyics and effects does not pay. Don't believe me? WoW, the most popular and profitable game on the planet doesn't even have player & NPC model collisions.
Big marketing bucks does pay.
So we'll get massive E3 displays, commercials licensing popular songs and look like CGI movies, but no real game-play improvements that can't be coded on the cheap. Execs are more concerned about product placement and showing you ads while you play, than what you're actually playing.
Few exceptions to the rule... very few :(
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I can see it already...
Just right when I'm on someones six....
(http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g185/s0da72/addvert2.jpg)
then BAM>>>
(http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g185/s0da72/addvert1.jpg)
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hehehe
:noid
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You mean "Steam(ing pile of crap)"?
Steam is atrocious in almost every respect. Buggy as hell, to boot. Many games that have no issues off a retail CD-ROM have many bugs when ported into steam (chernobyl being one of 'em) that make the game almost unplayable.
The ONLY (and I mean ONLY) reason I have steam at all is because I have no choice since they shut down the old network (WON, wasn't it called?) and no non-steam games will run anymore.
That would be a death knell for HTC.
To take that one step further...Look at what has happened' to other Flight sims; AW and WB's, both, were done in by takeover aquisitions'. A gaming 'network' would just do it in alltogether...