| Set On Stun |

It has been said from time to time that the videogame industry was one of those recession proof industries because in times when people are down and out they seek solace in escapist entertainment/activities like movies, videogames, drinking and drunk videogame movie watching.

We’ve certainly seen our share of profit drops and layoffs in the last year to prove that it’s not an entirely recession proof industry after all but truth be told the industry is still doing better than say .. the automobile industry.

So the big news that top online entertainment media company IGN  fired a lot of  people from the top down in many departments wasn’t so much a surprise but the reasoning sure was.

• We’re they going out of business? No
• Were they involved in a debacle that involved consoles crashing into TV’s? No
• Were they perhaps part of the fat cat banker/investment crew that drove our economy into the ground? No?

So what then?

They have been doing well in the last year but figured in order to continue to do so meant they had to fire people. What?

Company head honcho Roy Bahat issued this statement in a press release so secret it’s been leaked all over the internet …

“We’re doing this to reduce costs. While we’ve been doing well — we’re profitable and our audience continues to grow — we’re still feeling the effects of the economy, and we need to make sure we can invest where there is opportunity.“  The memo went on to add as a further punch in the face to the dedicated employees who have helped them succeed, “We’ve had to reduce the size of our organization and are eliminating roles today in every part of the company. We are making every effort to be compassionate and fair to the people whose roles we’ve eliminated.”

Translation: We want to keep making money without paying the people who got us here so have a nice life and good luck finding work when there are no jobs and everybody and their uncle would kill to get a gig working with videogames.

Listen, we all understand how this works. Times are tough and you have to cut costs. But for a corporation to outright say that you’re going to fire people to cut costs instead of cutting costs first, it just seem a bit absurd. Maybe IGN did try to cut costs (like stop spending money on Jessica Chobot’s video pieces) but that has not been communicated to anyone. The memo even revealed that despite their 40% growth– #1 in games and men’s lifestyle — they have to get rid of  “colleagues who played an important role getting us to where we are.” Nice reward for helping make your company a success.

It’s not often, at least these days that a company grows 40% in a down economy and then fires people. Our hearts go out to all our unemployed brethren who have been let go and hope you find success in your future endeavors.

Sony people in the house wave your Move in the air!!

So everybody sitting around at GDC and then Sony starts their presentation ….

Tough year … blah blah, great games Heavy Rain, Uncharted 2 blah blah ….Mag blah blah … God Of War 3 system seller million unit release blah blah blah… more stuff coming at E3 blah blah …. and then we finally get the big announcement ….

The PlayStation …. Move?

All that buzz about it being called the Arc well that was just the rumor mill at high speed. It’s being called the PlayStation Move System — as it was pitched during the presentation “from the tiniest twitch to the strongest punch, it’s ahead of it’s time”  The folks at GDC got a chance to try out this new peripheral first hand and reports are so far so good. Forget kicking balls and painting things, this motion controller had  actual games to show off and not just any games, they brought  PlayStation staple, SOCOM to the party.

In the contest of show me your stuff, Sony didn’t just blow people’s minds — they kicked Microsoft’s ass.

kicking balls? Puleeze -- we so got that beat

Here’s the breakdown

It sort of looks like a Wiimote  except for the weird glowy ball (changes colors too)  but make no mistake — this aint no Wii

• The controller has less buttons and is more streamlined
• It charges using a USB connection just like it’s big brother controller — battery sucking? Not
• The main controller and it’s nunchuck counterpart (known as the subcontroller) are not tethered by a wire.
• The colored ball — that’s your motion detector.
• The report from those who played SOCOM say the functionality blows the Wiimote/nunchuck combo out of the water. What would normally be a clunky interface is now a seamless transition with weapon and movements nicely paired out.
• Depth sensing — if you don’t know what that is well then you haven’t had a chance to not experience that with the Wii. The Move pupports that the glowing  sphere at the end of the controller along with the PlayStation Eye camera work together to solve that issue.

If you’re wondering — those are actual games that you’ll be able to use this new peripheral with. Along with games like cheating golfer tour (Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11) and Little Big Planet (retrofitted). Granted the promotional video is replete with cheese and then some but  this goes so far beyond what Natal showed us last summer.

Natal offers no controller at all but here’s the question — where’s your stuff?

PlayStation Move has

1. An estimated fall launch possibly ahead of Natal
2. A rumored starter package price of $100 (depending on if you already own a PS3 and what you’re planning to buy)
3. Titles that already look cooler than anything we’ve seen on Natal.

The path has now been paved. Come this holiday season the Wii will not be the only game in town and tapping into that casual gamer market when you already have the hardcore gamers as part of your core audience  will be a lot easier for Sony and Microsoft.  For Sony to use GDC to drop their Move bomb was a bold and absolutely brilliant move. These are the folks who you want to sell this system too more than anyone else because they’ll be the ones making games for it.

Tough act to follow? Without a doubt. So Microsoft — show us what you got.

Yeah I'd like AC2 and ME2 with some large fries to go

Up until now if you were a Mac gamer then you did not have access the to catalog of games that was offered up by Valve’s Steam service. Although we did report here last week that there’s been rumblings about Steam adding Mac to their subscription service. Well until they stop dragging their mice to get that rolling Onlive, a startup game-on-demand service will launch their subscription service for Mac and PC in June.

With a catalog that’s set to compete with Steam, OnLive will serve up a slew of top-notch games from a variety of publishers for a monthly fee. A big plus is that you don’t need a G5 or Alienware CPU to run the software as that will be taken care of from the Onlive side. Announced at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference, this throws down the competition gauntlet as this service brings Mac users into the fold and gives PC gamers a chance to get their hands on top titles a lot sooner than they usually do. OnLive CEO Steve Perlman for just  $14.95 a month gamers will have access to titles from EA, Ubisoft, 2K Games, THQ and Warner Bros just to name a few.

The launch promises 12 to 25 titles and depending on how well their deal making goes that will surely increase. The big edge here is unlike Steam, OnLive is looking to give gamers fresh titles that haven’t been around gathering dust. So how exactly can the run these high end games from their servers?  Simply put — compression baby.  Game data stuffed into  a tiny package that gets transferred  over a broadband connection to a server, where the data is computed. Then a video is sent back over the broadband line to the user’s computer. So that’s how.

For Mac users this service  is a big boon because up until now even if they could get a game like Mass Effect 2, they would have to wait a really long time. The big launch is set for June 17 just around E3 time. It’s a good guess that if Steam is really going to compete with this, then they now have a deadline.

So word has it that not only is Sony looking to push their motion control peripheral into the fray before Natal even has a chance to start running ads, but they’re doing it on a franchise that well — they doing it for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11.

You know, they guy who is not only one of the world’s most well known athletes but now he’s also one of the world’s most well known players. I guess EA is sticking by Tiger and his game hoping by the summer that other people will want to play with Tiger besides waitresses and escorts. Even weirder is that the cover will be shared by Irish golfer Rory Mcllroy.  In the 11 years they have made this game, Tiger has never shared a cover. What? Have a looksie.

Please play with me?

But that’s not the head scratcher? The game will be embedded with motion controls  in advance of the allegedly-named “Playstation Arc” peripheral which by the way has no official drop date

WTF??????

Questions
Why announce this at all? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to tell people after Arc drops that “Hey everybody, here are the games we’ve already coded. No waiting.”  This method is like buying Wii Sports without owning a Wii.

Two words — Tiger Woods? Really? The game is slated to launch in June for all three systems but who will be brave enough pick this up as a family game while explaining to their kids that just because the actual Tiger Woods is a douchebag cheater, the videogame version is way cooler. Is this the game you want to pin your first test of new technology on Sony?

Where’s Natal? EA did not mention Natal at all in the release. So that means one of two things.

1. It hasn’t been developed yet so they figured why be a boob and announce something preemptively like Sony
2. Or Natal was not a factor for the 360 version because maybe they want a game without a Scarlett Letter on it as something people won’t feel embarrassed about playing

So with every advertiser this side of Doritos dropping Tiger like an anvil on Wile E Coyote’s head it’s amazing that EA decided to launch this game before Mr. Woods officially returned to golf.  This dude’s actions were and continue to be big news. No one is going to forget this by June! In any case kudos to Sony for greenlighing the Arc game announcement for no reason other than to get press. Nice work.

Crowbar? Yeah I've got an App for that!

Take at look at the picture above — you see the little apple on Gordon Freeman’s chest? You have to look real close — it’s obscured by the crowbar. Yeah. WTF? Not that anyone would scream bloody murder if Valve made the big switch to the Mac OS for future games but what does that mean for the PC folks? Up until now it’s been a fairly solid split of PC and console offerings. And does this have anything to do with the distribution service Steam gearing up for Mac support? The question here is what’s with all the subtlety?

So many questions but seriously what is going on Valve? Look it’s not that it’s would be a bad thing for Valve and Steam to get Apple-friendly but why go with this ambiguous strategy that more vague than messages from Half-Life’s G-man? Especially since in 2007 we heard this from Valve about why they didn’t want to work with Apple. This was around the time of the Orange Box release

..We have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go “wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming”. And then we’ll say, “OK, here are three things you could do to make that better”, and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. Those words from the mouth of Valve’s co-founder Gabe Newell.

To anchor that quote was this from Newell — “They seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there’s never any follow through“.

So you can see, there really was no love for the Mac OS back in ‘07. What changed in three years? Well for now we have no idea. All we know is this Sam Fisher sneakfest coupled with some weird things going on on the Steam site means change is a-coming. It’s highly possible that Valve will spill the beans at next week’s GDC but until then we have to sit around and wonder.

could you be more obscure?