Platypotamus

This was a really fascinating read about a developer's attempt to get an admitted cash grab game into the Xbox Indie Game Marketplace

The Controversial Saga Of The Zombie Massage Makers.

Jeremy Eden believed this past summer that he had concocted the recipe for a hit. It would be, he and the rest of JForce games thought, their second big success.

This great new thing would be a cheap downloadable Xbox game, of sorts, that would satisfy the public's proven appetite for three things the public had already shown — statistically — it loved: Xbox avatars, zombies and massage.

Then, one day in August, Jeremy Eden made a mistake.

Today's Penny Arcade has started a bit of an online dialogue, focusing on the topic of buying games used vs. new.

Penny Arcade! - Words And Their Meanings.

A quote from the accompanying newspost:

The idea that THQ is somehow "disrespecting customers" with this kind of rhetoric misunderstands the situation as completely as it is possible to do so. In a literal way, when you purchase a game used, you are not a customer of theirs. If I am purchasing games in order to reward their creators, and to ensure that more of these ingenious contraptions are produced, I honestly can't figure out how buying a used game was any better than piracy. From the the perspective of a developer, they are almost certainly synonymous.

(more…)

Gamasutra - News - In-Depth: No Female Heroes At Activision?.

"Most of the focus tests that I have seen run at Activision are very questionable," says one source, an assertion with which the other sources agreed. "If someone from publishing has a point to prove or can't get an idea in the game, the focus test questions are skewed, and the Activision feedback is skewed in their favor," he says.

"I have sat in a focus test that in the team's opinion went exceptionally well, but the feedback sent to the higher-ups from someone on the publishing side were skewed to be the exact opposite," he adds -- even in cases where according to the source "some of them stepped in our studio maybe twice in two years."

(via Ron Gilbert's twitter)