Posted by - Andy
11/08/05 - 02:44PM
Rumors have been circulating around industry corners for months about the number of employees earning their daily bread at Blizzard have greatly diminished due to “creative differences”. (Mostly, that Blizzard was attempting to spin their way out of promised overtime and stock options). Safe to say these have moved from rumors to fact, but hey, who can afford another lawyer these days?
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SOE and Free Games?!?!
Posted by - mala
10/30/05 - 12:18PM
A rather suprising move by SOE, as originaly reported at Gamesutra, if it does come to fruition with the release of a free mmorpg. The is modeled after a non-subscription method whereby you get to play the game for free but are charged for the extras such as higher level items and so forth. We'll just have to see where this one goes I guess but for fear of prophesying a bit too early I forsee another miss for SOE.
Sony Online Entertainment has announced at the Austin Game Conference that one of their next releases will be an experiment in following an alternative revenue stream. Traditionally, it has stuck to the model of charging for the base game at retail for titles such as the EverQuest series and Star Wars Galaxies, as well as receiving income from subscriptions, but, according to SOE president John Smedley's AGC keynote, its next title will adopt a model pioneered by Korean and Chinese MMOs of allowing users to play the game for free.[Read More]
News of the assorted variety
Posted by - Andy
07/26/05 - 12:05PM
Yesterday, FunCom, makers of Anarchy Online and the recently announced Age of Conan announced that they were going to be the first game to run ads in the game. As this information was obtained from a primary source, there is no word on who will be hawking their wares there. How do they plan to keep their ads from killing immersion? GateCentral has several friends at FunCom, so we’ll reserve scathing commentary until they’ve actually started running the in-game ads. Stay tuned.
This really isn’t very breaking, but just in case you haven’t heard, Mythic Entertainment, makers of Dark Ages of Camelot has pigeonholed Imperator and is planning to proceed with Warhammer online. In related news, Mala still plans to put up an Imperator site as a form of protest (even though he is hyped up about the other title).
Sources on the inside are telling us that IGN has bought out the site formerly known as mmoradio. Still working on the inside dirt as to why the reigning kings of gladhanding would do such a thing, but then the answer becomes too painful and apparent.
Here we go...again.
Posted by - Andy
07/25/05 - 09:37PM
Welcome to GateCentral. This project is the result of months of planning, bitching, threatening and outright extortion, but enough about how I treat the SysAds. The goal, simply put, is to enable the average gamer to have access to the constant changes that impact this imaginary world that seems to take up so much “productive” time. We plan to focus on both hard news and soft news. From our perspective, most fan sites offer only soft news. They accept the fluff from the development companies and pass it along to their readers as gospel truth. That won’t happen here very often. We question all soft news and tend to be a little critical when the Devs are just in spin mode. Hard news, of course, is items such as major announcements or happenings in the gaming industry. We attempt to do this while remaining true to our motto “Educate, amuse or entertain”. Perhaps more importantly, we offer an opinion based on our own perspective versus those pandering or jockeying for favor. In short, we will tell you if we think the game sucks and why the game sucks.
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