Sometimes math can really sum up a situation well.

.Today brings both interesting news and bad news out of Electric Arts. It was announced that EA has sank $300 million into purchasing Playfish, a casual game studio that’s made a splash on Facebook. While casual web games are certainly no new thing for EA, there is no doubt in my mind that they’ll be pulling in some good revenue with this purchase. Which makes the other news announced about them today all the more surprising:

Even though they just spent $300 million on that purchase, EA has also laid off a significant portion of their employees, and sources are saying that includes 40% of Mythic. According to EA, the total number of people being laid off totaled to somewhere around 1500 – no small amount – and was done because it was necessary to transform their company. Gamasutra has a ton of information in those links on this if you are looking to find out more exact details.

This was surprising for me to hear, and definitely pretty depressing. To all of you who lost your jobs, I wish you the best of luck. To EA… Probably not the best idea to announce a major studio purchase when you’re laying off a bunch of people, related or not.

I’ve also had one other thing dropped on my lap too, that isn’t so related to the job of Community Management: performance testing. However, that comes with a certain perk: two nice towers and a shiny new monitor which are stored at home. The machines are for testing purposes, of course, but still!

Basically it boils down to this: I had a job that I really didn’t like. There was nothing wrong with the company or anything, but it just wasn’t the position for me. I had very little work to do – which actually benefited this site, but I’d rather be engaged with my work. That was something I very much was not. I hate being bored and I hate not having something to keep me busy. I was actually strongly considering heading back to college and grabbing a PhD in Information Sciences, and finding myself a nice research position, either at a University or at some epic company. That would have been along the lines of what I wanted to do with my life, although not exactly it.

Of course, to do grad school, I’d need some money first. I’d also have to go through the application process which would take around a year. That would be a problem though, because after a while I realized a major problem: I wasn’t going to keep my job. Now, I didn’t do a bad job, mind you. However, I didn’t have enough work. Things took to long for management to approve, so I was often stuck waiting around until I could move forward on my project. Management realized that and, in a recession – or ever for that matter – you don’t pay someone to sit around doing nothing, because you don’t have enough work for them. Thus, I was let go.

This as a problem, because I had little in the way of savings. I lost most of my money trying to get that one job, so it was a pretty rough place to be in. I saw it coming for a while, but just didn’t have any luck turning anything up.  The greater problem was that I had a year long lease to sign and no way to pay for it if I didn’t get something pronto. I also didn’t have many places to turn, with my family in a major financial crisis over all.

This could probably have quickly turned into a pretty depressive story, except that I’m apparently retardedly lucky, so I get to provide a happy ending (for now at least). I received a call from a company that I had applied to, and interviewed with, shortly before I got the other job, Bigfoot Networks, the creators of the Killer NIC gaming network card. It was for a Community Manager position. They called me up and asked if I was still interested – and I said yes! Absolutely! It took a few phone interviews, but then I was offered the position on a contractual basis (which will grow into full-time).

It’s weird, you know? I was in what felt like the worst place in my life. I was stuck, had no where to go, no way to get out of my situation, and nothing was working out. It was stressful as hell. Then, out of the blue, my dream job just showed up and was dropped on my lap.

Go figure.

This will have some affects on this blog though. I’ve not started posting here before, because I wanted to really focus on this position for a while. It also involves me blogging over on the company blog, too – which is still small right now, but I have… high hopes for, let us say. I don’t want to let this site die, though. Luckily, I think I can continue to blog there and blog here just fine, too. Over time, I’ll port some more game news over there, but I’m going to still talk an awful lot about major news from the game industry here, like I did before. I’ll also happily discuss hardware, too. Most importantly of all, I get to talk about community management as a professional in the field instead of just some random dude. Woo!

So, yeah. I’ll try to get the place runnin’ smoothly again.

Autiofill is quite useful, of course, as it lets you quickly enter in information like user names, your address, e-mail, etc… and it is an excellent implementation of it, but something I was surprised Chrome didn’t have earlier. The ability to remove websites from your “Most Visited” list, which appears when you open a new, blank tab, is nice. However, I never actually make use of the opera-esque feature. If I could assign websites to each of the squares specifically, then I might. Otherwise, I’m scanning my bookmark toolbar first.

The new JavaScript engine and Webkit have certainly helped things out though, and the already-fast browser seems even more speedy. Over all, I’m pleased with the update and it is nice to see Chrome hit this latest milestone – although I still hope to see a Linux and Mac version soon.

I have been using Chrome as my primary browser lately and I’m actually finding myself being won over from Firefox. While there are still a few features I am missing – which will hopefully be fixed once Google implements extention support – Chrome offers up a number of its own benefits. The faster browsing, slick interface, and general usability is pretty nice.

According to 3D Realms, the $12 million that Take-Two is suing the company for is baseless. They claim that while Take-Two may have paid that much to get the rights to publish the game, 3D realms never saw any funding from them until July of 2008, which totaled a much smaller $2.5 million. That is compared to the $20 million 3D Realms claims to have put into the project.

Duke Nukem Forever, indeed.

I find this to be an interesting route for online games to be taking. We’re starting to now see a number of them targeted toward a younger audience, which never seemed to be the case with past online game titles. In a lot of ways, I find this to be rather telling. There is, of course, a sizable segment of gamers out there in the world that are rather young. Plenty of traditional games are created to suite this audience, but few online games are. As society becomes more and more connected to the Internet, people of younger and younger ages are becoming citizens of the web.

While none of these games will be pushing the graphical levels high, it also shows a continued step toward more browser-based games, which seems to be a new trend gaining popularity. I’m curious to see how this trend will develop as well – but time will tell on this one. Games that run through a browser aren’t likely to ever compare with the performance you could get out of a local copy, but there is a certain amount of convenience to it as well. Then again, most of these sorts of games require sizable plugin installs anyway.

Back at the Game Developers Conference in 2007, there were a few major topics/buzz words being tossed around at the time. One of them was “emergent gameplay,” which actually inspired the name of this website, and the other one was “micro-transactions.” When I say micro-transactions though, I don’t necessarily mean the flood of downloadable content that has become available for purchase for many games, but rather for the use of them in MMOs. (Yeah, shockingly I attended most every MMO-related session.)

Following that announcement, I hadn’t seen anyone actually use a micro-transaction model, except for games coming out of Asia, which had been using them for some time already, and were the reason it was such a big deal at that GDC. Still, very few of those games were very high profile, nor did they capture much of a Western audience. Plus, an awful lot of them were not fully featured games with a lot of polish and content. Basically, most weren’t up to “subscription-level quality,” so to speak.

Then Runes of Magic launched recently. It is an Asian game, coming out of Taiwan originally, but it was made with an awful lot of Western influence. In the first two months of launch, the game has gained a million accounts in North America and Europe. Props.

However, Sony just demolished them.

While Sony certainly has its roots as a Japanese company, games developed by Sony Online Entertainment come out of the United States. While every major title under Sony’s MMO selection thus far has been subscription titles, they’ve changed that with the launch of Free Realms – an MMO designed for a younger audience. There is certainly a market for online games amongst the younger crowd, as well evident in the success of Club Penguin. SOE was able to tap into that market quite successfully, gaining an impressive one million accounts in just 18 days.

That, of course, speaks absolutely nothing about how profitable the game actually is – we aren’t likely going to find that out for quite a while. It does show that the concept of something having a ‘Free2Play’ (god, I hate that term) model isn’t going to scare everyone away. While Free Realms does have an optional, low cost subscription, they are pushing the idea of being a free game pretty strongly. I mean, its in the name of the game after all. So, I expect that they’re hoping to get quite a bit of their revenue from micro-transactions.

It will be interesting to see how these games develop, and how many other games with micro-transaction models we will see popping up.

You think you're gunna get money from me?

Frankly, I’m surprised that Take-Two stuck with the project for so long. Apparently they even renewed the contract in 2007 – which, given that was already a decade in development, should have been a clear sign that it just wasn’t happening. Given that Duke Nukem Forever has been the butt of jokes for years, I’m more surprised that they didn’t seek legal measures before, not that they’re suing now. So, while Duke Nukem Forever may potentially never be released, I’m getting the distinct feeling that we haven’t heard the last of it just yet.

Just goes to prove that you can’t bring down The Duke. …You just can’t push him out in game-form these days, is all.

Metaplace runs in a browser. Just about any browser will do, as long as it runs Flash. It is also cross-platform compatible, although there are some problems with 64bit Linux and Flash 10 – really more the fault of Adobe than Metaplace, as near as I can tell. Currently, everything does run in a 2D environment, with the ability to display worlds in isometric, side-scrolling, or top-down view points. The platform is powerful enough that if you wanted to, you could theoretically create your own 3D engine through it, and even your own client software.

The platform takes advantage of being on the web, and certainly has learned it lessons from modern web trends. The web portal is quite powerful, allowing users to search for worlds, try them out, rate them, comment on them, and more. You can find like-minded people and friend them, like you could on any social network, leave comments on their profiles, and play numerous games with them across worlds. Effectively, Metaplace is a full fledged social network centered around the platform, and not a bad one at that.

Worlds themselves can pull in content from various web sources, including RSS feeds, videos, music, streaming media, and more. This integration allows for some interesting world ideas. As for actually building those worlds? Creating a simple social space is a snap and can be done within five minutes. You can spend some time painting the terrain and populating the world with objects, but none of that will take much effort on the part of the user, and no real technical background is necessary to do so.

For more complex worlds, Metaplace offers scripting in LUA to create everything from simple scripts to game systems. Everything from high sea battles, space shooters, classic titles, and more can be created through this scripting process. However, you will have to have an understanding of LUA to actually do this. The language itself isn’t very difficult and should be easy to pick up if you have even a small background in coding/scripting. Still, if you’re not well suited to the task (like me) it can be difficult to create new systems.

That said, the Marketplace is filled with modules, systems, scripts, and objects created by other Metaplace users. If you need something specific for your world and you can’t make it yourself, there’s a chance that someone else already has – the probability of which will get greater the longer the platform exists and users add to it. If you can’t create your own scripts, you can piece together modules to create your full game anyway, without ever having to write a line of code.

That’s what Metaplace is, but how good is it, and does it have a future? Well, I’ve been following the platform since it was first announced back in September of 2007. I’ve been involving in the testing for a long time, and I’ve seen the progress that they’ve made. If they keep up the pace they’re going at, I expect good things by the time it is actually, officially, released. To be honest, I’ve already seen some pretty neat creations already, and while it still has space to develop as an easy-to-use game development platform (admittedly, most everything is still pretty rough), as people learn the platform, develop newer and better modules, and have more time to tinker, I expect to see some pretty good stuff out of it.

It is a rather nice social networking platform with a very strong community, and it isn’t a bad virtual world either. It isn’t quite like Second Life, but it certainly isn’t like any MMO, or even like most every virtual world out there. It is an odd creation, but a very interesting one that is filled with a lot of potential – a fair amount of which is already being tapped into by creative users and a strong development team that has been very close to the testing community.

So, my verdict so far: should you jump into the open beta for Metaplace? Absolutely! I believe it is definitely worth checking out.