Where Everyone Knows Your Name

Not being a World of Warcraft player, I have not been following the Blizzard RealID controversy very closely, but the furore has been such that it has been impossible to ignore. I read that Blizzard have now backtracked on their stance, but not fully. Anonymity seems to be one of the founding principles of internet interaction, and while it is the root cause of much of the undesirable behaviour on the internet, I can certainly understand why in many cases it needs to stay that way.

I read this comment on Metafilter, linked from Penny Arcade, and I have to say I found it a bit shocking. The assertion that every female player will be harassed and many of them will fear physical confrontation if it is made easier to e-stalk them would seem like scaremongering overreaction if it weren't for the scores of follow-up responses pleading with people not to belittle the problem.

I know WoW has more players than the population of many small countries, and that with such a broad spectrum of humanity online you are bound to get a fair number of maladjusted miscreants, but it is a pretty sad indictment of online game players that harassment and abuse seem almost guaranteed.

As is visible on the right hand side of the blog, I currently use my full real name as my Gamertag on Xbox Live (and Games for Windows Live, as they use the same tag). I set it up at a time where I couldn't be bothered with all the hiding behind aliases that happens on the internet, and I haven't got around to changing it. Every time I play online my name is available to the people I play against, which has never really concerned me before. It no doubt helps that I don't play any MMOs - even if I were to really piss someone off, the transience of the games I play would mean it wouldn't be worth their while to really try and grief me, they'd probably never come across me again. I have had a few insulting messages typed at me in Dawn of War 2, with one person even feeling the need to send a swearword-filled rant to me on Live after a game, but it really didn't bother me. It would probably be different if I knew I was probably going to be sharing the game with that person most of the times I wanted to play.

Trying to bring bit of accountability to people's interactions in a game is certainly a worthwhile goal; unfortunately, Blizzard's attempt with the RealID system does not appear to be a workable way of achieving it.

The Boon and the Bane of Metacritic

I think Metacritic is a fantastic tool (well, Metacritic for games at least, I don't use it for books, movies, music or TV, as I'm less interested in critical opinion of those things, I prefer personal recommendation). Previously, I used to skim over four or five games sites in an attempt to get a broader view of the reception of a game, as different reviewers' tastes can vary. Now, thanks to Metacritic, I pretty much just read Eurogamer, and for an overview of any particular game's score I can have a look on Metacritic, and possibly read a few more reviews if I feel the need.

The problem with Metacritic is that some people take it way too seriously. I'm not sure if the system wars (I hesitate to use the term console wars, because they probably go all the way back to Spectrum vs Amstrad) were always this belligerent, and it's just so much more noticeable due to the internet granting every deranged lunatic a pulpit from which to declare how fiercely invested he is in his gaming platform of choice, but it seems that for many, the enjoyment of gaming is entirely secondary to the quest to prove that any other system, and all the games for it, are rubbish. PS3 owners are required to belittle Gears of War, Xbox owners to dismiss Killzone 2, and PC diehards have to deride anything that is console exclusive.

Metacritic, by reducing the critical reception of every game to a percentile value, allows for the explicit comparison of these games. It's not perfect as it can struggle to equate different sites' reviewing methods (a 6/10 from Eurogamer is probably a better score than a 7.8 from IGN), and it does allow completely different games to be compared on the same scale (For example, are you aware that the Xbox version of Peggle is a much better game than Assassin's Creed?), but the system is about as objective as it could be, and it has become the de facto standard for measuring games.

This causes an issue, especially in the context of the console war, because a bad (or even not stellar) review can damage a games' metascore, especially those with metascores in the 90s, where every less than perfect score drags the metascore lower. I recall the huge uproar when Eurogamer gave Gears of War 8/10, and I recall the comments thread had more than 1200 posts when they dared to give Metal Gear Solid 4 a similarly "low" score. I have seen some ridiculous comments on review threads, such as people saying "well, the game has a metascore of 78 at the moment, so your score of 6/10 is clearly wrong", as if they believe that the metascore should determine reviews, rather than the reviews determining the metascore.

I suppose that vocal idiots are a problem endemic to the internet (warning, link contains bad language), and we shouldn't let this detract from the highly useful information that Metacritic aggregates.

Some useless facts: Grand Theft Auto IV has the highest metascore of any current generation game at 98. At 97, Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii has the highest metascore of a game exclusive to a single console, followed by Uncharted 2 on the PS3 with 96. The highest rated Xbox 360 exclusive is Gears of War with 94.

The Problem with Digital Distribution

I don't think any of us would try to argue that digital distribution isn't the future of games retail. However, at the moment, there are a few things holding it back, often making digital purchases notably inferior to regular retail. One of the issues is simply bandwidth (although this is far less of a problem in the first world) and another is transferability (digital purchases are often locked to your PC or console, whereas you can lend a disc to someone), but what really sets them back is price. By doing away with the middlemen, and almost all of the physical costs of the product (no boxes, manuals, discs, freight charges), digitally distributed titles should be cheaper than conventionally marketed ones. However, this is seldom the case, and the lack of discounting causes significant price discepancies once a game has been out for a while.


Regular readers of this blog, or anyone who knows me in general, will know I am fascinated with retrogaming and the history of videogames. A little while back I bought a copy of the Namco Museum Virtual Arcade collection for the Xbox 360. Essentially, this is a collection of 9 games previously released onto Xbox Live Arcade (when the disc is in the drive, you can even select them from the games menu as if they were XBLA titles installed on your hard drive), as well as 25 other retro titles from Namco's back catalogue.

When Namco Museum Virtual Arcade was released on disc, it was probably a full price (or close to full price) title, but over time the price has gone down, and I bought it for £12.99, which was about R155 at the time of purchase (or 1530 MSP for the sake of comparison). Despite the fact that many of the games released on XBLA have been there for years (according to Wikipedia Pac Man was released on XBLA in August 2006), I believe that all of them are still at the full price they were released at. Even assigning no value to the other 25 games not previous released on the Xbox, the 9 XBLA titles included on the Museum collection alone come to 4800 MSP (£40.80 / R486), which is a pretty poor comparison, even if you could argue that a person might not choose to buy Pac Man as well as Ms Pac Man, or that you probably wouldn't want to buy New Rally X at all.


The problem with digitally distributed titles is that they are immune to the regular pressures of retail, as there is no cost to holding stock and therefore no real need to keep it cycling. This is great for the retailer, but not so good for the consumer. If you look at Microsoft's Games on Demand initiative, many of the games loaded onto the service cost more than a boxed copy now does at retail. Valve's Steam service is great for indie games and the occasional weekend deal, but the standard pricing on new titles is often higher than a boxed version. Until this is sorted out, digital distribution is not going to be able to make substantial progress in supplanting the retail games market.

Selling For The Loss

I read a most bizarre story just now. As just about everyone should know, tomorrow is the second coming of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and all sorts of sales records are saying their last goodbyes before they are cruelly shattered (oddly enough, I'm not planning to buy a copy until some time in 2010, too many other things to play).

However, in the UK, there is a bit of drama because certain supermarkets are planning on selling the game below cost price, which is causing havoc with smaller retailers and threatening to destabilise the used market (which I don't really care about, as I'm not in favour of used games sales anyway). I don't really see the logic in doing this. I'm not stupid; I know about loss-leading, and I also understand how volume retailers can make money by having a negative cash cycle rather than through the size of their mark-up, but a game seems like a strange thing for a general retailer do this with. A modern game now costs so much that it would to justify a trip solely to pick up a copy - people might go into the store, pick up a game for less than cost, and leave without even considering buying anything else. This would be a particular risk for the so-called "core gamer" market, which must surely make up the largest part of MW2's inevitably massive sales. Perhaps these retailers will be short-stocking (at least relatively) the title to prevent too great a loss on it, in an attempt to get more consumers into the store than who would be able to buy it at the special price, consumers who probably would feel the need to buy something else to avoid making a trip out for nothing.

Unfortunately, this is not a "problem" we have to contend with in South Africa, as pretty much all brick and mortar stores are happy to charge the full RRP for games, with only online retailers like Kalahari.net willing to provide a meaningful discount to RRP, and even then they don't provide any further discounting, even when games have been out for a long time.