Coop play is used to let players play multiplayer without the stress of competition. But does coop serve this purpose?
Most coop games simply duplicate the singleplayer gameplay mechanics to create coop play, this technique inherits the problem of competition because the players are now competing for the same objectives or, worse, taking seperate paths as in Gears of War which makes play singleplay but with extra penalties of death.
A more interesting use of coop are the paralell objectives for squads in Resistance 2 online multiplayer or the paralell objectives on battlefield in the upcoming RTS Battle Forge.
Perhaps paralell multiplayer is a better goal for cooperative play.
What do you think?

Check out my post (and the rest of the discussion) about cooperative game play on the developers blog Understanding Games.

Home has launched. It’s in beta but still released for all PSN users. The launch is covered in bugs but Sony has already come on record with a release plan of fixes.

But will Home lift the Playstation 3 to new heights? Well Home in itself is not much more then a glorified chat client. So it’s kind of surprising to find that Sony has released home without any real content…
There’s great avatar customization and a few games. But not much to look at, no game rooms, not even any real content to purchase… It’s more or less an empty store/club. Which is more then mildly depressing.

Sony has once again released a platform and forgotten to give the developers a heads up.

When can we expect to see some cool game rooms released then? There is no word…
Sony is shooting itself in the foot. Content is king, it’s because of compelling content we’re supposed to buy a PS3 from the start.

This is like the Nintendo Wii all over again, I loved my Wii before I sold it, used to boot it up and play with the menu for a few seconds several times a week. But I never did anything else.

Today I’m booting up my PS3 each Thursday to download some more clothes to LBP (which I still play whenever I have a friends nearby) but other then that.. I checked the weather last week?..

Sony, get smart really quick. This isn’t hard. You create platforms, for them to sell you need talented developers to fill them with content. If you really can’t think this far ahead maybe you should just hand over the Playstation brand to Microsoft. I would hate that, but at least developers would have a go at the platform.

A lot of core gamers and core game developers are, more or less, opposing accessibility design for the reasons that making a game accessible “dumbs down” the game or “makes the game shallow”.  Players and developers pushing for accessible games claim that this is not the case. Well let’s just set the record straight with some quick analysis:

Accessability does dumb down gameplay and does make games more shallow.  But, this is only true for a very small part of the target demographic. This is only true for the power- or core-gamers that fully learn the micro strategies of playing a game and then use that knowledge to play on a macro strategic level. For these players games will become to simple or shallow and certainly dumbed down if we make the games more accessible.

But how many are the core gamers? We have absolutely no idea. But paying core gamers we do know. Very few games, ever, have sold more then 10 million units. But games aimed at the hardcore crowds do tend to sell close to ten million (close in the millions that is, Halo 3 sold 7 million I believe). That means that there are about 10 million core players that really don’t need more accessible games. Doesn’t that make accessability pointless? No. Certainly not.

How many paying players are there? We don’t have a clue. What we do know is that the previous generation of home consoles (dominated by the PS2) sold over 200million units. Even if every single gamer bought two consoles that still 100million home consoles… On the handheld side the GBA sold about that many units alone. So for every core gamer there are about 10 less then core gamers actively paying for consoles and games, maybe just not as much.

This is the crowd that developers are aiming for when they’re focusing on accessibility. This does not mean that all games should be accessible. After all, selling 10 million units of a game is plenty. But selling hardcore multiplayer shooters alone as the industry is doing today is simply incredibly stupid from an economical perspective. No wonder the Wii is selling so well, what else are these gamers playing? Online games some of them for sure (like the 11 million current subscribers to World of Warcraft).

So have no illusions, games are a low entry entertainment. Most gamers don’t want to learn how to play a game. They don’t want to compete or be the best. They simply want to play. Sound odd? Think about why PvE is more popular then PvP in MMO’s or why Multiplayer didn’t explode before the instant respawn became standard or why coop shooters are doing better then deathmatch shooters.

Next time I write about accessibility I’ll adress what low entry entertainment really is and how to focus on it.

“PC gaming is dead” has been the mantra of hundreds of developers for the last 3 years now, and as more and more titles move on to consoles it seems like open platforms have been abandoned due to rampant piracy and non-existing demand…

Wait! What am I saying? Rampant piracy AND non existing demand? Impossible. Rampant piracy can only exist with rampant demand, why else would anyone do it?

This week a couple of publishers/developers have gone on the record to say that, in fact, PC gaming isn’t dead… It’s actually at an all time high. With more then 20 million westerners playing MMO’s each week and a hell of a lot more then that playing online games in general PC gaming still far outnumbers all console platforms excepting the PS2.

So what the hell are developers whining about? The answer: non existent sales. Believed by many to be due to rampant piracy. But this is about as intelligent as a doctor that your hair falling out is due to lack of calcium (or whatever) while he’s blasting you with radiation.

Let’s analyse what the hell is happening with piracy and see if we can find any advantages that may sway the public away from buying games:

Non pirate game:

• It will cost you $50.
• it will (with a massive margin compared to DLs) cost you a trip to a store or a few days while you wait for the game to arrive.
• It will take time and irritation to install (install, serial, download patches)
• You’ll need the damn CD/DVD to play it (does everyone even have an optical drive nowadays?)

Pirated game:

• It will cost you very little (Internet bandwidth mostly)
• It will take less time then a trip to the store
• It will install easily
• You’ll never wait in line or be left without it on launch day
• It’ll be easy to install
• Once installed you can play it whenever you feel like it by just clicking the icon.

I don’t even know what to say to this. This is the dumbest way to market something, ever. It’s like selling coke is 1CC bottles that require tools to open them. And what do publishers do to stop piracy? They either hunt down the END USERS of the products and slap them with subpoenas or they install ever worse DRM software making games even harder to use.

Now, I’m not a genius in any way. But anyone can see where this is heading. Piracy will never end while publishers continue this crazy blitzkrieg against their customers.

Hey publishers, need ideas about how to make money from games again? These are just some short idea, I bet a lot of smart people can think of even more ways:

Tips for publishers:

• Only sell high value content in stores (boxed content with extras, more content or just a really nice box)
• Sell ALL games online. There are already services for this, all you need to do is give them a master copy of the game.
• Let gamers register their games for something worthwhile (all multiplayer require an account, don’t be asses though, let customers be able to use their google accounts, open ID accounts and so on. Oh, and make games available for re-download to those accounts)
• Don’t go after end user pirates, that just sows seeds of distrust. When a pirated version of a game is logged online, email the customer informing them that their issue is illegal and give them a credible reason, and easy way, for buying the real thing. How about they cash in but don’t need anything else, they’ll just get an automatically updated serial and the optional box in the mail.
• Learn from other entertainment industries. There are hundreds of possible tie-in products available from toy makers, novelists, children book writers, painters, t-shirt producers and so on. Sign on with a few, it doesn’t matter if you don’t make enormous amounts on the first deal, get the ball rolling and the cash will start flowing.
• Open API for your games information. Most of the successful web apps available today use open API’s so that other services can exchange information with them. Why not in games? Should I, as a player, really need to find my online friends AGAIN for every single online game I play? They all use the same mail addresses anyway. And I can’t even search through my Gmail contacts damn it.

These are just a few suggestions, feel free to pitch in with even more and send this to a publisher near you. Maybe someone will have an epiphany and realise “ooh, keeping customers happy is a good thing!”.