Conference Call

GWJ Conference Call Episode 141

Ghostbusters With The Drunken Gamers, Magic The Gathering on Xbox Live, A Little WoW, The Rental Industry & First Impressions, A New Good Old Games Contest, Your Emails and more!

We have a very special episode this week with a new contest, a special appearance by the Drunken Gamers and a great deal more! To enter the contest, send in your pick for which game you'd get from GoG.com and why to [email protected]. If you want to submit a question or comment call in to our voicemail line at (612) 284-4563.

To contact us, email [email protected]! Send us your thoughts on the show, pressing issues you want to talk about or whatever else is on your mind. You can even send a 30 second audio question or comment (MP3 format please) if you're so inclined. You can also submit a question or comment call in to our voicemail line at (612) 284-4563!

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Show credits

Music credits: 

Intro/Outtro Music - Ian Dorsch, Willowtree Audioworks

"Anxious Tedium" - Ouranos OST (Tom Quinn) - http://thomashquinn.googlepages.com - 0:26:06
"The Way Your Journey Ends" (Tom Quinn) - http://thomashquinn.googlepages.com - 0:48:11

Comments

Plus, I'm even on the show. SUPER special.

What you guys said about rentals, that they may have caused lost sales

Don't forget that Blockbusters buys a TON of games. Games bought for rentals do count and you cannot remove rentals from the equation because some people just don't buy game-- they rent 'em. Someone who has a renting habit is different than someone with a purchasing habit. I subscribed to GameAccess.ca to try to rent instead of buying and it's just not working.

Rob's disclaimer is a lie. I was just doing my best Jeff Green impression.

Great show, even if you failed to hide your extraterrestrial vocal cords this time around.

I have a feeling the rental industry will adjust just fine; it's not the disc we need, just the game and the alotted timeframe to play it.

P.S: When's Katerin coming back on?

I think Rabbit makes an excellent point about rentals. I don't think that the majority of people who rent games play through those games if they don't like them and don't rationalise the rental price away as opposed to buying it.

I mean, i have a service which gives me one game at a time for a price of £10 a month. Out of the 15 games i've already rented i've completed one and that was Mass Effect. Every other game i rented i either hated or didn't care enough about to play through to the end or even past the first few levels. I definitely use it as a litmus test service - there are too many 'poor' games out there to just buy games without extended demos when often there aren't even demos at all. If i like the game i'll probably end up buying the game on sale somewhere once i've returned the rental copy. Other titles like Viking and Conan i really liked but i don't feel like i would pay all that much for them so i sent them back with the possibility to play them 'fresh' when i eventually buy them.

RE emails/voicemail: I know that my emails aren't good enough for the show - it's why i stopped sending them

Sean - RE Sims 3, please see The Outer Limits episode 'Sandkings'.

RE Bioshock 2 - i'm in complete agreement with you guys on the game.... it's a little bit of "been there, done that" the game just doesn't look interesting to me from what i've seen. (BTW, the lovely "Not at all, not at all!" double voice was awesome and should be in Bioshock 2)

I enjoyed the unholy chorus that is Rabbit's voice when he speaks over Elysium.

harrisben wrote:

I enjoyed the unholy chorus that is Rabbit's voice when he speaks over Elysium.

He reminds me of a Vogon.... please don't recite any poetry!!

FenixStryk wrote:

P.S: When's Katerin coming back on?

I'm in the middle of moving house. When I'm done, I promise you won't be able to keep me away.

I think 10-15 hours has been the average length of a big $60 "AAA" game since the middle of the last generation ... so the trend away from the 40-60 hour game has been happening for a long time IMHO. I don't think you can pin this on any larger trends in the distribution channel.

I say thank god. Most 40-60 hour games are really 10 hour games with a lot of boring crap and bad pacing in the middle acts. Even the recent masterpiece Bioshock dragged in the last two thirds and could have been four or five hours shorter with no real loss.

I wonder when developers that are not in the MMO space will be able to figure out the how to exploit the WoW model where you can take a single big game and power it for years and years and years off of a subscription model.

Finally. For me a game has about an hour. Games that are no good at the start hardly ever get better. And don't tell me about your favorite game that was awful until the last ten hours. Because the truth is that it sucked.

As far as I can tell, most of the complaints about the rules system in MTG:XBLA (I'm making that my official acronym ;)) have been confusions over the rules changes in the Magic:2010 edition of the rules. The XBLA version seems totally consistent with the 2010 version of the rules as far as I can tell, for example, combat damage doesn't use the stack anymore and multiple blocking works differently.

Duoae wrote:
harrisben wrote:

I enjoyed the unholy chorus that is Rabbit's voice when he speaks over Elysium.

He reminds me of a Vogon.... please don't recite any poetry!!

Awesome.

I have to say it.

Cory is like the official GWJ ninja, he comes in, hosts the show, and then next week??.... ninja vanish!!!

Re: Renting games and demos:

Why has no demo since, ever been as good as the crackdown demo? To me, it was everything a demo should be and I haven't really seen anything like it since.

It gave a very accurate representation of the entire game, not just the training level or the first mission.

Re: Selling/Renting games

I'm adamantly opposed to selling games, especially to G$. However, I've done it on occasion. When I was writing this I originally thought I'd say that I would never sell back a game that was "really good". However, I realized that's just not true. When I look back at the decisions I've made it's been mostly based on the games "I don't think I'm going to play again." To me, this mostly has to do with DLC and multiplayer.

I just sold back Killzone2 and Gears of War 2. Both good games, but I got all the badges I wanted in Killzone, and didn't really like the slow (anchor-drag) walking speed in gears so I sold them to get Red Faction, which has arguably lower production values.

Speaking of selling/ trading games, have many people around here tried Goozex? I've been looking in to it lately, and it seems interesting, as long as you can successfully trade.

Squishy.Turtle wrote:

I have to say it.

Cory is like the official GWJ ninja, he comes in, hosts the show, and then next week??.... ninja vanish!!!

I don't think I'm a full-on ninja. At best, a Foot Soldier.

Poppinfresh wrote:

Speaking of selling/ trading games, have many people around here tried Goozex? I've been looking in to it lately, and it seems interesting, as long as you can successfully trade.

I used it before I moved out of the country. It works well with older games, just don't expect to get ones that have come out in the past couple months.

psu_13 wrote:

I think 10-15 hours has been the average length of a big $60 "AAA" game since the middle of the last generation ... so the trend away from the 40-60 hour game has been happening for a long time IMHO.

Ok I'm Canadian and at some point, our dollar was weak, but I recall my mother paying 89.99$ + taxes for RAMPAGE on the NES back in the 80s which is, in comparison with today's minimum wage, probably the price of a freakin' PSP.

Now RAMPAGE had 'infinite' replay value since if it had an end, I never saw it despite playing 6 or 7 hours long sessions at a time sometimes, but it's an exception. Most games back then had 30min-6h of play.

I think the average gamer has become spoiled and that's it. The cost of making games is at least ten times what it used to be yet the price of games hasn't really changed (actually, here in Canada you can get most games for 59.99$ nowadays, so in fact they're cheaper)

Certis your "stranger" allusion in the spoiler section made me bust a gut!

interstate78 wrote:
psu_13 wrote:

I think 10-15 hours has been the average length of a big $60 "AAA" game since the middle of the last generation ... so the trend away from the 40-60 hour game has been happening for a long time IMHO.

Ok I'm Canadian and at some point, our dollar was weak, but I recall my mother paying 89.99$ + taxes for RAMPAGE on the NES back in the 80s which is, in comparison with today's minimum wage, probably the price of a freakin' PSP.

Now RAMPAGE had 'infinite' replay value since if it had an end, I never saw it despite playing 6 or 7 hours long sessions at a time sometimes, but it's an exception. Most games back then had 30min-6h of play.

I think the average gamer has become spoiled and that's it. The cost of making games is at least ten times what it used to be yet the price of games hasn't really changed (actually, here in Canada you can get most games for 59.99$ nowadays, so in fact they're cheaper)

Of course there are many factors as to the reason why games are cheaper these days.... two of which are:

- Economy of scale: the market for computer/video games is huge compared to what it was in the '90s.
- Transition from cartriges to optical media: discs and SD cards are so cheap in comparison to producing a cart, it's unreal.

flashbolt wrote:

Re: Renting games and demos:

Why has no demo since, ever been as good as the crackdown demo? To me, it was everything a demo should be and I haven't really seen anything like it since.

There have been some great demos recently. The last one that sold a game to me was the UFC 2009 Undisputed, which showed me everything I needed to know that the game was for me.

I just want to say thank you to Rabbit for mentioning Galaxy on Fire for the iPhone. I literally installed it after hearing it mentioned, and that is the most fun I have had with my new 3GS. I have done no work today, all thanks to that little game.

Duoae wrote:

- Economy of scale: the market for computer/video games is huge compared to what it was in the '90s.
- Transition from cartriges to optical media: discs and SD cards are so cheap in comparison to producing a cart, it's unreal.

Two things:

wikipedia wrote:

(about Super Mario Bros. 3) Guinness World Records listed the game as the best-selling video game to be sold separately from a system, and reported worldwide sales of over 17.2 million copies.

17.2 million for a blockbuster in the 80's but I think that's extraordinary by comparison to its contemporaries.

Secondly: I'82 sucked! Bad!!

Just listened to Rob's intro, I'm gonna say thanks Rob for getting it all together. I know working with people like Elysium can be a challenge,

Elysium is great to work with. We just had some bad luck with the tech this week. It happens every now and than, and this weeks problems were minor in comparison to our other glitches. I hope everyone enjoys the show.

interstate78 wrote:

17.2 million for a blockbuster in the 80's but I think that's extraordinary by comparison to its contemporaries.

Over 12 years with a 20 year console lifecycle (61 million units). It's not a great stat really and not indicative of the then-current console industry.

from the same article wrote:

by 1993, the game had sold 4 and 7 million units in Japan and the United States respectively

So it only actually sold 11 million by the time the SNES had been out for a year. For a modern example that's equivalent (bear in mind that both Halo 3 and Mario 3 were bundled by retailers with consoles):

Halo 3 wrote:

On January 3, 2008, Microsoft announced that Halo 3 has sold 8.1 million copies.

So, Halo 3 reached 8 million worldwide in just four months compared to 11 million worldwide over 5 years. I think it's pretty clear that the games market has increased by a large proportion.

Elysium wrote:

Rob's disclaimer is a lie. I was just doing my best Jeff Green impression.

Just listened to Rob's intro, I'm gonna say thanks Rob for getting it all together. I know working with people like Elysium can be a challenge, but thanks for getting this thing worked out and to us listeners who would probably cry ourselves to sleep tonight without our Conference Call fix and discussion about WoW.

Seriously I am SOOOOOO looking forward to the WoW discussion. Nothing like falling asleep while at work.

So was everyone appropriately intoxicated during the spoiler section or were the Drunken Gamer guys forced to do it sober?

I know working with people like Elysium can be a challenge

It's true. It _can_ be difficult to work with the criminally awesome.

On how long games have to grab you: I can't really think of any game that I like that really sold me in the first half hour. Metal Gear Solid came close - I was hooked completely by the time I made it 2 or so hours in. The one game that I think really grabbed me in the beginning was, oddly, Half-Life 2, which sold itself really well simply by having the courage not to do a big whiz-bang "look at me!" intro. It started you off wandering through City 17, looking at the sights and listening to the inhabitants, with no weapon and no real idea of where you are supposed to go until you get all the way past Dr. Kleiner's lab. That was just a great mission statement, and upped the ante even further from the tram ride in HL1.

In general, I really need to settle into a game before I start to like it, so I find myself really dependent on finding people with interesting and varied opinions to prescreen stuff for me.

Elysium wrote:
I know working with people like Elysium can be a challenge

It's true. It _can_ be difficult to work with the criminally awesome.

So, are you a 'method' podcaster like all the greats (Elliot etc) or do you do follow the 'Stanislavski' system of control with detachment (like Green et al.)?

I just want to say that releasing a 10 hour game with a series of DLC add ons afterwards is a sure way to not only get me to not rent the game, but to make me completely pass on your game.

That model is a slap in the face to consumers.

I would rather go back and play old games that I've played before than play new games on that business model.