Like Father, Like Sony
The real face of SCE's press department.
You would think, after the huge nose-dive in profits SCE saw this month, they’d stop making cocky jabs at Microsoft’s console. But sadly, the maturity that Bill Gates and co exude is not something shared by the home of the PS3. “This is not meant in terms of numbers, or who’s got the biggest install base, or who’s selling most in any particular week or month, but I’d like to think that we continue official leadership in this industry.” I’m sorry, Kaz Hirai (SCE head honcho), let me take a quick minute to ridicule your arrogance. I hate to break it to you, but the official industry leaders are dictated by statistics like install base, sales numbers or numbers in general. Your profit margin is terrible. Your game lineup is in tatters. The font on your console was bought from Spiderman, for goodness’ sake. There’s more to industry leadership than statistics, yes. Here we agree. But when you offer up a soundbite that reads like the adult equivalent of a child putting its fingers in its ears and stamping until it is no longer told to go to bed, you damage your credibility somewhat.
It seems today is a day for moronic soundbites from industry figureheads, as Peter Moore, head of EA Sports, has once again made himself look moronic via use of his blog. To quote directly;
“There’s a lot to learn from the EA alumni who started 2D Boy and built something as creative and unique as World of Goo with such a small team and little money.
“It’s that type of creativity and entrepreneurial spirit that can really drive innovation, and I’d like to think we’re setting the right priorities and taking the right steps to deliver more experiences in this vein from EA Sports,”
Let me stop you there, Peter. Do you remember your wonderful little rant about Eurogamer, and how dare they put World of Goo, some stupid, indie, 2D game, above your beloved, repetitive, unimproved FIFA ’09? I do. I remember very well, and back-tracking like this isn’t going to do you any favours. You managed to offend one of the biggest games sites in Europe with your own ignorance of a list created by the top tens of individual human beings, and now you’ve managed to make yourself look completely sycophantic in the same month. EA, seriously, stop allowing your employees to promote your company as stupid. Some of your business decisions may have been questionable, but if you were all this ignorant I doubt you’d still be financially afloat. Moore’ll be the first up against the damn wall come the revolution, I tell you.
Dawn of War II‘s release date has been moved up in the USA, but lo and behold, not in Europe. You’d think by now game developers would understand that global releases are what is slowly beginning to lower piracy rates, but then another big player in the industry decides to chuck out a game that’s going to get ripped all the way from London to Stockholm and no one’s going to care, because you didn’t release it here. The thing with PC games that makes this failure to release globally such an issue, is the fact that they can distribute these games so much more easily than say, the DS or the PS3; via the Internet. Steam hosts the original Dawn of War, so why not just stick it up there, sort the pre-order goodiebag emails globally pre-release, and be done with it? Though, British Steam owners are still getting royally screwed, as EA’s titles are still to pop up on the store page.
Another angsty quote today! It’s like Yahtzee’s perfected a stream-of-consciousness ray that works through a PC monitor. This time, it’s Paul Wedgewood, boss of Spash Damage, the developer of games such as Quake Wars: Enemy Territory. His woe-ridden quote states that Metacritic values are flawed, because no games rank lower than 60, the scale therefore being only around 40 percent of the ranking system anyway. Regardless of what his titles have gotten in the rankings, he has a good point. It’s the same with British universities; in order to get a First, the top grade, you need 70%. However, since only around 0.1% of English students actually achieve anything around 80% or higher, isn’t the system flawed? Do we need that extra twenty percent? I’d argue no, we don’t, as it makes the gap between a good grade at 60%, and a great grade at 70%, seem a lot wider, while making you seem like an underachiever for simply doing very well, due to a flawed numerical representation of your literary accomplishments. I hope Metacritic do review their system, though it made me giggle when GamerNode managed to singlehandedly ruin a run of thirty-odd 100% scores for GTA IV.
Now to wait for the news from the USA-based sources, though if there’s anything seriously of note I shall update, but I doubt it, that amount of drama will keep people interested for weeks, let alone a day. Good on you, you little brawlers, you.
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