The Week in Review: It watches you sleep. This week, we get Steamy with Stardock CEO Brad Wardell, ice a cake of delicious stupidity with a litigious shut-in, consult the Great Law-Devil, pour a 40 on the curb for Pandemic, and watch Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford let out some hot air.
7 in 10 Gamers Prefer Steam
Stardock CEO Brad Wardell is a classy kinda guy, I know this because it takes class to admit that you’re not the biggest game in town, and Stardock’s digital distribution platform Impulse is by no means the biggest game. By Wardell’s own admission, Valve’s Steam platform is seven times the size of Impulse, and represents nearly three-quarters of the market. According to Wardell, Steamworks and Valve’s exclusive content makes it difficult to compete. (link)
Crazy Man Goes Mad For Litigation
You might recall the story of Erik Estavillo, the agoraphobic man who sued Sony after his own bad behavior got him booted from PSN. Well, he’s up to his old tricks again, this time suing both Microsoft and Nintendo. Estavillo wants $75,000 from Microsoft after his Xbox 360 red-ringed, and $5,000 from Nintendo for blocking the ‘homebrew’ channel and forcing Estavillo to put some actual effort into unlocking characters on Mario Kart. To be fair to Mr. Estavillo, he does suffer from a fairly long list of quite nasty medical conditions, but that doesn’t excuse him from being a greedy jerk. (link)
Atkinson Continues to Insult Australian Gamers
Australian Attorney General Michael Atkinson, or the Great Law-Devil as I like to call him, has reaffirmed his stance on an R18+ rating for videogames in a letter to a constituent. According to the Law-Devil, parents would be unable to prevent children from playing violent games at home, and so it is safer all round if Australia continues to be the censorship capital of the English speaking world. Noting that he is up for re-election this year, the Law-Devil goaded Australian gamers to field a candidate the stand against him, clearly subscribing to the ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’ school of politics. Classy Mike, classy.(link)
Pandemic Studios Closes Doors
Pandemic Studios, creators of the Mercenaries series, is to close down as parent company EA seek to cut costs. EA will keep a small core team, presumably to complete work on Saboteur, but 200 employees, including all the upper management, have lost their jobs. The Brisbane office of Pandemic, which was responsible for the Destroy All Humans games, was ‘let go’ by EA earlier this year after the stalled Dark Knight game. The thoughts of everyone here at The Escapist go out to those who have lost their jobs, and we hope they find their feet quickly. (link)
Gearbox CEO Bashes Crytek, id
Seemingly bored with taking pot-shots at Valve, the Gearbox head honcho Randy Pitchford has turned his attentions to FPS veterans id and Crysis developer Crytek, bashing them for making games that push technological boundaries rather than focusing on current hardware. In Pitchford’s eyes, id and Crytek are risking failure by assuming that this console generation will last the same length of time as the last one. Does he have a point, or is he just attention starved? (link)
