Sixense Finally Falls after Years on the Fence
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/21/18 at 03:13 PM CT
For years, I’ve been covering the non-appearance of the STEM, a wireless, v2.0 successor to the incredible Razer Hydra PC motion controller. Sixense, the company that owns the technology patents used in both the Hydra and the STEM, successfully ran a Kickstarter campaign in October, 2013, where they raised just over $600,000 to fund development of the new hardware. Preorders for non-backers opened in October 2014, which is when I submitted my $300 for a 2-tracker STEM system.
This past week, though, Sixense’s web of promises and delays came crashing down, when company President, CEO, and overall terrible person, Amir Rubin, sent a mass email to all STEM Kickstarter backers and pre-order-ers stating that all STEM pre-orders were canceled and would be refunded via PayPal. I reached out to my contact at Sixense, Steve Hansted, Director of Business Development, for an explanation, and he directed me to this article on VentureBeat.
Apparently, Sixense’s leadership made the …
Could Copyright Crush CD Projekt?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/14/18 at 02:57 PM CT
News broke recently that the Polish author, Andrzej Sapkowski, of the original novels upon which CD Projekt’s blockbuster videogame franchise, ‘The Witcher,’ is based had decided to sue the Poland-based developer, publisher, and owner of DRM-free PC gaming superstore GOG, for $16 million in additional compensation. It seems that Sapkowski originally agreed to accept a lump sum payment in order to license CD Projekt with the rights to make a game based on his novels instead of accepting a percentage of the total profits because he “didn’t believe they would be successful.” In a classic case of sour grapes, Sapkowski has decided to take legal action now that the scope of his poor judgment has become apparent.
The sad thing is that Sapkowski actually has a leg to stand on thanks to Poland’s version of the Digital Millennium Copyright act. Copyright has existed in Poland since 1926, and originally favored the Public Domain quite heavily, with a meager 10-year term. …
Goodbye Gamers
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/06/18 at 02:33 PM CT
I have some sad news for readers in Western Iowa and Eastern Nebraska: Gamers is gone. As reported by KETV Channel 7 this past week, every store in the Midwestern used videogames chain were seized by their bank and shut down without warning. Not only did this leave Gamers employees in the lurch, with no idea if/when they’ll receive their final paychecks, but any customers with store credit may as well have thrown their second-hand merchandise in the nearest pond, as they’re almost guaranteed to receive no compensation.
As someone who found his feet and identity as a gamer in the ‘90s, Gamers was like a home away from home. Between that place and Spellbound Books & Games (which has been closed for just over a decade already), I always felt like there was a local place to let my geek flag fly. In the ‘90s, it seemed like every Midwestern city had a second-hand videogame store and a local comic/tabletop RPG shop. Frequent family trips to Kansas saw me becoming a regular at …
Backlog: The Embiggening – October, 2018
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/30/18 at 04:20 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! October will be here in the blink of an eye, and since October is traditionally associated with horror thanks to the Pagan holiday of Samhain, upon which Halloween is based, we should all be well and truly prepared for the horrors the Games Industry will heap upon us in the coming month.
No, NO WAIT! I’m not ready for this much shovelware! After becoming complacent that perhaps intentionally-terrible garbage might be falling out of favor with publishers, October is bringing a downpour of no less than 20 shovelware releases, and in all of the major categories. We’ve got games based on other IPs, including anime/manga games like “Punchline,” “My Hero One’s Justice,” and a new game based on a very old anime “Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise.” Also in licensed crap, we’ve got “PAW Patrol: On a Roll” for the pre-school crowd (and whenever I hear people say the name of that IP aloud, I look around for a …
Telltale is Done For: Narrative Minus Cinematics Apparently Can’t Turn a Profit
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/23/18 at 02:52 PM CT
This past week, Telltale Games, the Indie start-up Adventure game developer that worked closely with popular IP holders, revealed that they had fired 90% of their staff and cancelled all of their remaining game development projects except for “Minecraft: Story Mode.” Once that last project is finished, it is almost guaranteed that Telltale Games will be done for good.
Perhaps the company, which was founded in 2004 and which I constantly confused with the completely unrelated British game developer Traveller’s Tales, will find its fate the same as so many other failed small-time game developers within the colon of a huge “AAA” conglomerate like Electronic Arts – Microsoft seems to be in the mood to buy failures lately, so maybe they’ll try to acquire Telltale’s remains.
Regardless of what happens to the last dregs of Telltale once “Minecraft: Story Mode” is out the door, it’s bad news for any gamer who loved narrative-driven games, and worse news for anyone …
Something Worse than Hitler is Now Threatening to Conquer Europe
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/16/18 at 02:27 PM CT
*sigh* Meh. Videogame news has been pretty dead lately. Nothing to get excited about or enraged by.
On the other hand, those crazy kids in European government are trying to destroy the online world as we know it. Articles 11 and 13 have successfully passed the first of a handful of hurdles required to become continent-wide law.
Article 11 is intended to limit how much material content aggregators can display without forcing the reader to visit the actual originating site. Apparently the attention span of the average Internet user has degraded to the point where they can’t even be bothered to click on the links they find in Google, but merely read Google’s summary before walking away. Publishers are naturally upset about this because users who don’t click-through don’t get to view their tasty, tasty ads or bump into their friendly, friendly paywalls.
Article 13 is intended to hold platform owners responsible for user-generated content. So when Joe Schmoe uses his …
Confessions of a Square-Enix Enabler
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/09/18 at 03:14 PM CT
Those who follow this blog or interact with me regularly via other online media know that I am vehemently opposed to the corrupt practices that have begun to infest the Games Industry over the last decade or so. The gold-digging behavior of big, corporate “AAA” publishers makes me sick, and when I look back on the truly classic games that emerged during the 16-bit Golden Age, I can’t help but think that the Golden Age never could have happened if game publishers then were as greedy and profit-mongering as game publishers now.
Square-Enix has been the subject of my ire for a long time as well. Not only has the merger of my two former favorite dev/pubs continued to poop all over its flagship franchises with the likes of THREE undesirable ‘Final Fantasy 13’ games and wasting several flagship sequel slots on subscription MMORPGs (“Final Fantasy 11,” “Final Fantasy 14,” and “Dragon Quest 10” for those who haven’t been paying attention), but after buying the …
Review Round-Up: Summer 2018
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/01/18 at 02:11 PM CT
Welcome back to another installment of the MeltedJoystick Review Round-Up. Here’s what our staff has reviewed since last time:
Nelson’s Reviews:
I wasn’t as productive as usual this Summer, largely because I spent the bulk of July and August enjoying (!) the “Dungeon Defenders II – Protean Shift” patch, endeavoring to get as much pleasure out of the game as possible before Trendy Trendies it up again in a different patch. Aside from that, the MJ Crew managed to touch upon a lot of really terrible coop games, and I got to play a great RPG, a good FPS compilation, and a handful of ecchi games about boobs.
“The Yawhg” – 3.5/5
“Dungeon Defenders II – Protean Shift” – 4/5
“Spelunky” – 0.5/5
“Hard Reset Redux” – 2.5/5
“Girls and Dungeons” – 4/5
“Time Tenshi 2” – 3.5/5
“Time Tenshi” – 2.5/5
“We Are the Dwarves” – 1/5
“Shadow Warrior (2013)” – 3.5/5
“Torment: Tides of Numenera” – …
Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2018
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/26/18 at 08:01 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! All of the adorable little school shooters are back in their hunting grounds, so naturally, the Games Industry traditionally choses the month when that happens to end the Summer Game Drought and start releasing things again. Of course, as we should remember from the past few months, the Summer Game Drought of 2018 was cleverly concealed by the release of dozens of ports. I can’t help but compare the Summer’s game releases to an Orwellian conspiracy, where the Industry titans acted like Big Brother, deluging us with artificially-created dehydrated raindrops in order to convince us that there was no drought, while those of us with our eyes open realize that if you dehydrate rain, you actually have nothing. With 45 releases dropping in September, I wonder how many will actually be “real.”
Ready your shovels, folks, as there’s a LOT of licensed garbage to cast aside in September. Sports seem to be the biggest offender here, …
Upcoming SteamOS Feature Could Finally Revolutionize Linux Gaming. Or Not.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/19/18 at 02:50 PM CT
Earlier this year, Valve quietly removed the Steam Machines section from the Steam Storefront. Many industry watchers and gamers took this to mean that both the concept of Steam Machines – console-sized PCs that are built specifically for couch gaming – and the Linux-based SteamOS that powered them were dead, despite official word from Valve PR stating otherwise.
Recently, some clever delvers into the behind-the-curtains goings-on at Valve noticed that a new feature will be coming to SteamOS soon, and it’s the one I said Valve needed to put as much effort into as possible. Steam Play has been around since 2012, when it was introduced as a “Buy Once, Play Anywhere” marketing strategy that allowed Steam customers to buy a license for a specific game, rather than a specific game version for a specific OS, thus gamers could buy “Half-Life 2,” for example, and play it on Windows, MacOSX, or Linux, without having to pay a separate fee for each OS, as things had been done …
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