Gamers Pan for Gold in Video Game Streaming

The growth of online video game streaming has greatly increased the monetary opportunities for professional gamers.  Players that have historically relied on the income from their professional teams and from tournament winnings now have an opportunity to supplement their income.  The growth especially helps semi-professional players that are either unsigned or lack the capital to attend the major international events.  The income that the streaming provides allows these semi-professional players to quit their regular job and dedicate more of their time to refining their skills or attended the aforementioned tournaments.    

            Several of the big names in online gaming such as, EGIdrA or HotshotGG of CLGaming may average between ten and twenty thousand viewers every time that they stream.  This popularity can provide these streamers with a very substantial source of income.  For instance, if the streamer averaged 15,000 viewers and played three advertisements per hour they could potentially earn a six figure salary from streaming alone.  But along with the streamers that have appeared to strike gold, there are numerous that are struggling to garner the necessary support for their streaming to be economically viable.

One example of one of these players is Nhat Nguyen, a professional League of Legends player on team EPIK Gamer.  After graduating from Pacific University several years ago, Nhat has dedicated a majority of his time playing League of Legends.  He streams on average for 6-10 hours per day.  However he averages only around 500-1000 viewers at a time.  The two most commonly used video game streaming sites, www.own3d.tv and www.twitch.tv usually offer $2-$3 per thousand viewers per ad.  Nhat has said several times on his stream that he makes below minimum wage.  He claims that even though he is making less money than a regular job does, he find his current occupation enjoyable because of how fun that he and his viewers receive.

One problem that the video game streaming industry is facing is the rampant use of adblock by viewers.  Some steamers claim that around fifty percent of the viewers are using adblock or don’t receive advertisements in their countries.  As a player relying on ad views for income, having half of your audience not viewing them can greatly reduce revenue.

The Future of Total War by Vassilis "Shogun" Roussochatzakis

Older Total War games garnered immense attention upon their release, obtaining commercial success from a vast, dedicated, and hardcore audience that followed the series. From this audience came the renowned mods such as Third Age: Total war for Medieval 2, and Darthmod for Empire: Total War. However, the last three entries in the series (Shogun 2, Napoleon, and Empire) have become increasingly harder to mod. As a result, the future of the series is in question. In stark contrast to the "overhauls" and "total conversions" of Rome and Medieval 2, the mods for the most recent three games are simply gameplay tweaks and minor unit packs.

CraigTW, The Creative Assembly's main representative on the TWcenter.net forums, has said that the increased difficulty for modding the new games is not due to Creative Assembly's push for downloadable content but rather the nature of the engine of the games. Shogun 2 stands out in this category: due to the engine being based on binary code rather than the .pak files of older games, modding is an extremely intricate and delicate process. However, this has not deterred the most committed of modders. TWcenter.net forum members such as Radious and Darth Vader have created the closest things to "overhauls" for the game. While many might think that Creative Assembly is trying to profit off of gamers' loyalty, they cannot deny that the company has returned the favor, in the form of releasing near-comprehensive mod tools for all their titles.

Vassilis

3 Question interview with Robert Berger, a therapist, on the subject of violence in video games and early exposure to the internet.

1-What do you think about violence in media in general? Is it harmful to youth, and if so, in what way?

I believe that today's youth aren't quite as susceptible to violence as most people would believe. While extreme overexposure to violence can and will always cause some degree of mental change, there's no guarantee on what degree the extreme is. Considering that each child has a different brain, and each child has been raised in a different home, I'd say that the degree of how bad violent media is to children depends quite heavily on their family conditions. For example, say a kid who is 8 years old has never had exposure to anything other than love, coming from his parents. He goes to a private school, as we'll say they're fairly wealthy. In his case, sudden and dramatic exposure to violent media causes him to cry, thus creating a kind of predesignated reaction in the future. Another kid, raised in identical circumstances might have a completely different reaction, so I don't believe that it's fair to say that violence in media is harmful or harmless.

2-Do you believe that any form of today's media has a large effect on children?

Yes. The internet seems to have a pretty interesting effect. Children who have unrestricted access to the internet at a young age tend to have problems in contacting and dealing with others in social situations where they have no penalties or consequences in saying whatever they want. For example, an 8 year old kid can post that he 'thinks you should curl up and die because nobody loves you' in response to a comment on a chat forum, and have no consequences in reality. However, the problem with this for younger children is that they quickly begin to mix the two separate worlds together, and begin acting more and more hostile in response to figures of authority at an early age.

3-Apparently, by age 21, the average American will have spent 10 thousand hours playing video games, a number which is quite close to how long they've spent in school. What do you think about these statistics, and what are the reasons for why this is happening?

In the past, when an alternative to reality has presented itself, younger people tend to seek it out, as an alternative to the reality which presents many problems and hardships to them on a day to day basis. This becomes even more prevalent in a society which is facing essentially 'repeated bad news'. If the real world proves too much, humans naturally seek an alternative. Which is why both Drugs and Alcohol are so widespread and popular. They provide an alternative world, where everyone is your friend, and you always feel good, and you seek to replicate this feeling as often as possible, often pushing you through whatever else you have to deal with during the day, in order to return home and replicate this feeling as soon as possible, or causing you abandon your responsibilities in order to replicate the feeling. I wouldn't be surprised if video games have an addictive quality to them—they cause the brain to secrete a chemical that hasn't been seen before by scientists.  

 Hard Reset

More of a soft reboot if you ask me.

Hard reset was released September 13^th of last year as a PC exclusive title, and it's available on Steam for $20.

I like first person shooters. Not the silly new ones like Call of Duty, which I can rage at for decades and decades, but the old ones, like Painkiller, Doom, Quake, Serious Sam, and the Duke Nukem games that didn't take 15 years to make. They all had something a lot of games nowadays tend to forget. They all knew they were video games. Sure, some of them had plot and sure, sometimes they were good, but usually the games were just about pure entertainment, something about yelling “OSCAR WILCO FOXTROT CHARLIE” and spinning around rapid firing a sniper rifle just doesn't give me. So I was interested in Hard Reset. I bought the game on sale on steam for something like $5, and left it in my list of games for a couple months. When I got around to installing it, it was about 3 gigabytes, so it took an hour or so, with my connection. When I got it installed, I booted it up, and was immediately hit with how nice the game looked. Of course, it was a bit too nice for my computer, so I changed the screen resolution to 4:3 and changed the rest of the settings to the lowest possible—I like my games to run fast, so that I can perform actions quickly and cohesively. The first few levels of the game were quite fun, showing a very blade runner-esque futuristic city, complete with blue lights and towering Grey buildings. Combat was fun, upgrading weapons to shoot robots in new, creative ways. And for a bit, there was a plot, displayed in beautifully rendered and displayed motion comics, which actually seemed to integrate the English language, unlike many other indie games.

However, about an hour in, after the first memorable boss, I realized something. I'd played the game for an hour, and never left the blue-grey color scheme the entire time. Sure, I’d briefly been underground in some basement structure, but I'd almost immediately been thrown BACK upstairs onto the regular 'future city'. I'd been fighting the same 5 monsters with various palette swaps the entire time, and while Atlas was a fun boss, I'd later find out that he was the first of two bosses. Yup. Two bosses. And Atlas was a little after the halfway point. Furthermore, the further into the game I played, the worse the cutscenes got, and the less cohesive the plot got. Framerate began to slow because the game had basically padded out each encounter with more and more explosive objects, from 'anti theft' shocking vending machines, to red explosive...things. Basically, I'd shoot at the first enemy in a stream of 5 or 6, and it'd set off a chain reaction. Or, I'd whip out the shotgun, and obliterate all in front of me. I didn't even really need the other weapons, and the Plasma rifle was largely useless until I got the railgun...which I only used in the final boss fight. All in all, the game was something like 4 to 5 hours long.

Which was incredibly disappointing. And the whole time, I really just fought the same 3 palette swapped enemies. The big bulky thing which ran at you, the little guys that sometimes exploded, and the medium sized things that sometimes had guns but usually just ran at you. And next to nothing was explained about the robots or the world that the game takes place in. Both topics which I found extremely interesting. The hero allegedly defends the digitalized souls of a billion people—which is incredibly awesome. But next to nothing is ever said about this. Little is explained about anything, especially later on when the grammar gets bad and the acting gets worse. Apparently the corporation that runs the city isn't good but isn't evil at the same time...? Well...That's an interesting topic to never pursue! The game ends when you shoot some giant bug creature thing with the railgun, which is only useful here because it's basically a sniper rifle. Sniper rifles weren't in Painkiller, Duke Nukem, Doom (except for the later ones), Quake (again save for the later ones), but they were in Serious Sam. Why? Because some enemies were actually far away! You're rarely, if ever presented with an enemy that isn't running directly at your face, and the weapons that aren't the base machine guns and the shotgun are really just boss battle equipment.

In summary, Hard Reset was quite promising, but it never really achieved what it wanted to do. It's only a throwback to old, early 90's strafe and shoot games in the sense that the plot is virtually nonexistant, but that's just about it. It looks nice, for it's time, but I figure the graphics are sloppy graphics—slightly unlike Crysis 1 and completely unlike Half Life 2, which I can play without problem on medium to high. The strafing barely works as the only thing you can strafe from is the thing that runs at you, but it just follows your strafe anyway. And by the time you've strafed to the slightest, you've probably shot something explosive and are taking damage at an uncanny range from both the charger-thing and the explosion. There are 2 bosses, two and half if you want to be completely precise, because there's a turret that has a fair bit of health about midway through the game, and there's no multiplayer aspect. There's achievements, sure, and there are a few secrets and such, but it doesn't really have any replay value. Doom had replay value because there were rooms and segments to explore that actually gave you rewards. You might find a shotgun.2 or a chainsaw, something cool, while in this case you'll find 200 credits which can be slightly tagged onto your quest to buy the weapons in the game. Which wasn't really a problem. Most of the secrets can be found by turning around, and I had every weapon by the end, with most fully upgraded.

If you really are interested in this game though, there are worse things than giving the people who made Painkiller and worked on The Witcher 2 twenty dollars. Sure, it's incredibly overpriced and really not that much fun later on, but it can be a fun ride for a bit of time, and you're giving money to indie developers. Maybe they'll make a new Painkiller, or maybe they'll have accumulated enough money to buy id software and get them to make a new game that doesn't suck.

In my book, Hard Reset gets 4/10 stars—slightly below average. Granted, the standards for Average and Good have much decreased over the years, but I wouldn't buy the game. It's more worth the $5 I paid for it when it was on sale, not the $20 it's worth now.  

Another Legal Dispute for EA

By Michael Weiner

            January 19 – Well-known gaming company Electronic Arts is locked in yet another heated legal battle, this time with aerospace company Textron, according to multiple reports.  The dispute stems from EA’s depiction of 3 helicopters in the first-person shooter game Battlefield 3 that closely resemble helicopters made by Bell Helicopters, of which Textron is the parent company.           

On January 6, EA filed a pre-emptive lawsuit against Textron after Textron had previously demanded that EA cease and desist its depiction of the military choppers on the grounds that the gaming company was using their likenesses without paying any sort of licensing fees.  EA claims that the helicopters are not a central aspect of the game, is seeking a ruling that protects their depictions of the choppers under the grounds that they are protected by the First Amendment right to artistic expression, citing a landmark Supreme Court decision in 2009 that granted the same rights of expression to video games that protect the content of books.

            “There are various elements to this case,” says Susan Arnold, VP of Licensing at EMI Entertainment World, and a copyright lawyer with over 20 years experience dealing with intellectual property.

            “I can imagine why it would be deemed mere artistic expression, because I don’t think Textron’s patents would cover the image and likeness of their machinery,” says Arnold.  “Alternatively, one could argue that it [EA’s use of the helicopters] is product placement, or free advertising for Textron.  However, since Textron is a weapons manufacturer, the game isn’t reaching any market that would affect the commercial value of the helicopters’ proprietary likeness.”

            This case comes on the heels of multiple lawsuits against EA by former college football players regarding the company’s use of their likenesses in the NCAA Football game series.  The NCAA forbids EA from using the names of the players due to its amateur rules, but EA does use physical attributes, player ratings, and biographical information such as the players’ hometowns that very closely resemble the real players.  In each case, the judge ruled in favor of EA, citing EA’s right to artistic expression and stating that the attributes in the game do not make the players recognizable enough to be considered their likenesses.

            This is the second time the two companies have argued over the depiction of Bell’s helicopters, as Textron sued EA over the same issue in 2006.  That case was settled outside of court in 2007.  The current case is open and ongoing.

How will the new console-sized Alienware X51 gaming computer stack up in the competitive PC gaming market?
Ian Cloutier

                Scott Lowe, of IGN, says that the concept of a cheaper, xbox-sized gaming computer is a very appealing idea, while going further to say, “The key to its strategy is the X51's small, versatile form factor, which enables it to be used in both traditional desktop setups or in entertainment centers like a game console, effectively bridging the gap between the two.” Adam Oxford of PC Gamer magazine complained that the specs were not satisfactory to a model you could build yourself, saying that, “I reckon you could build a slightly more powerful similar system (including operating system) for about [200$] less.” Rob Enderle of TG daily praised the size and comfort that the X51 has in its appeal. Enderle also specified that the tech specifications become more than satisfactory with only a hundred and fifty dollars added to the pricetag. Enderle went on to say that the X51 “is a well-priced, sweet looking and balanced product.  I expect to see more like this system over the next year as we continue to ramp towards Windows 8.” Arthur Lewis, vice-president of Alienware, said that "With the X51, we've expanded our gaming desktop offering to cater to all gamers in addition to our core enthusiast and competitive gamers. Now everyone can enjoy the latest games on a sleek, powerful, compact and customizable system. The X51 desktop delivers an incredible feature set for its size and price.”

Is the PS Vita really a contender in the handheld market?
Ian Cloutier

“Sony won't want to see this venture fail. They've staked a lot of their reputation on its success, against the odds, and I believe they have the clout to carry it out.” says Darryl Kaye of gamingunion.net. He thinks the massive amount of launch titles, along with the dedicated third-party support and technology behind the Vita will give it the appeal it needs to succeed. However the PS vitas sales in Japan say differently, with a “77% drop in sales in only its second week on the shelves,” reports Playstation Universe.  Some people like Tero Kuittinen of Forbes think that the PS Vita will be the last major handheld gaming console to come out of this dying market because “Nintendo and Sony are fighting the old war while the guerrilla attacks from mobile and social game companies steal a few seconds more of the consumer leisure time with each passing day.” The US launch is doomed because the mobile gaming market in the US has the iPhone and other tablets to contend with. The Montreal Gazette had a different view in Paul Chapmans review of the device, saying that “While gaming is clearly the spine of the Vita, and considering the PlayStation's gaming pedigree, the push for Sony on this is going to be around it being an "all-in-one" device.” Chapman says that the PS Vitas versatility, with its many different social and non-gaming related apps, could be a good buy even in the tablet flooded market of the US.

PC vs. Console Gaming

PC Gamers Have No Consolation 

by Penn Nayyim

“There is a huge divide between PC and console gamers,” says Ian Cloutier, an avid video game player. “Console gamers are more likely to play face-to-face, while computer gamers are less social in-person.” This may mostly have to do with the differences between the gaming platforms: computers, typically with only one keyboard and mouse, are less suited to more than one player per monitor, while consoles have the option of attaching multiple controllers—up to four on widely-used systems like the XBox 360. Mr. Cloutier posits that gaming culture differences accrue because of “self-selection among gamers,” or in other words, that people who prefer to play one-to-a-monitor games use a PC because it fits with that style, and people who enjoy playing with other people in person use consoles. This implies that differences do not arise because of any impact of the platform upon the user.

There is another differentiation: the pricing. Whereas consoles like the Xbox 360 may be only $199 at Kmart, computer games almost uniformly require more serious hardware to be experienced in their full glory. This might require a computer, like the $699 new Alienware X51, which comes with Intel Core i3, i5,or i7 processors and has 1 TB of  DDR2 memory and 4 GB of DDR3 memory. Before this one came out though, the “cheapest computer that could be considered a gaming computer was much more expensive,” said Ian Cloutier. “unless you were to have built it yourself.”

According to Vassilis Roussochatzakis  console fanboys say that PC gaming is dying, and PC gamers reply by saying that console gamers have no appreciation for the better graphics that the more powerful hardware of the PC platform allows. One of these is provable and correct: PC gaming is dying, and console gaming just continues to grow. From the period between 1998 and 2006, PC game sales declined from $1.8 billion to only $970 million, while console games sold for a remarkable $4.8 billion in 2006.

When he went to a GameStop, Vassilis said that he had to look hard for the PC game display among the many more prominent console game displays.  This is because, according to the industry, much of the PC game distribution has moved online. In 2005, for example, while $953 million was spent on PC games, $344 million of that was spent online. David Cole, a long-time analyst at San Diego-based DFC, said in an interview that PC gaming peaked in 2008.

This rivalry seems like it might soon become irrelevant as handheld gaming on high-powered mobile devices such as the iPhone becomes more common:  according to TechCrunch, in 2010, the new market of iPhone games had expanded to 5% of the total video game market.

Skyrim: Immeasurable Hours of Frustration

Skyrim:

 Immeasurable Hours of Frustration

Hunter Brown

I’ll admit, when I first got wind of a new Elder Scrolls game, I danced around my house with the same excitement as your dog when you come in the door. I eagerly awaited months and months since it was announced, I watched every single demo and video regarding its game play, and even went as far as renting Oblivion to get a quick fix of the epic and expansive world of Tamriel.

As the release date approached, (11-11-11) I could barely contain myself. Unfortunately, I was not able to buy the game on its release date, let alone the month it came out. After listening to in-depth and extremely charismatic conversations at school or with my friends over Xbox Live, I was dripping with envy. It wasn’t until late December that my brother and I decided to head into the Big Apple and trek on down to the GameStop five minutes from Grand Central Station. From there, we both bought a wide collection of well-received games such as Halo: CE Anniversary, Battle Field Bad Company 2, Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, and last but not least, the critically acclaimed Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I was ready to sell my soul to Bethesda’s traditionally large and immersive, open-world video game.

Words cannot describe how much money I had shelled out for food, drinks, and overall “fanboy-ism”. I sat myself down, booted up the game, downloaded the usual patch before starting any game from 2011, and even listened to the blood pumping and epic score at the title screen before even pressing start. As the game started, I was blown away by the amount of detail that went into each character in the wagon beside me. The voice acting was drastically improved from it’s disappointing little sister, Oblivion. (I was extremely amused by the hilarious Nordic accent.) As the intro progressed, I was greeted by imperials that were ready to send me to the headsman. I was then allowed to create my name, race, sex, etc. When I was just about to be executed, a dragon had swooped down onto the tower in front of me and seemingly saved my life. The ever-useful Skyrim Guide then informed me that this was in fact the main antagonist, Alduin. A handful of us escape through a cave, filled with disturbingly large spiders, bumbling Imperial soldiers, and a bear that is just trying to take a nap. When we reach the exit of the cave, I am finally allowed to gawk at the unreal and absolutely gorgeous landscape of Skyrim.

All right, I’m done buttering up Skyrim for you. Much further into my play through, I noticed many problems within the game. First of all, the loading times between locations were atrocious, and made Skyrim’s over-hyped “addictive nature” die very early in the crib. I could only play about 4 to 5 hours before becoming heavy-eyed and in desperate need of sleep. Another gripe I have about this game (and rest assured, there will be many) is the color scheme. During certain parts of the game, I was just completely and utterly bored when exploring new areas because of how dull and grey the background was. I understand that Skyrim takes place in the North-most area of Tamriel, and contains a plethora of mountains and snow, but they could have added a few more bright colors to spruce up the mood. Hell, even the darkest caves were more interesting than the outside solely because of the fluorescent mushrooms on walls, and whatever the hell that bright blue crap was on the ceilings. As for glitches/ bugs that I encountered, the majority of them were not threatening at all, but instead some degree of fun. For instance, during a battle with a dragon, he had pulled up to avoid my onslaught of arrows, and somehow got stuck in slow motion until I freed him with an inevitable and cheap death. But where the glitches hurt, they REALLY hurt. For instance, certain quests couldn’t be completed, or even started because of stupid technical issues. For example, one quest that I was hunting for was The Cursed Tribe, which involved a tribe of Orcs, a Daedric Prince, and giants that could launch you into the next dimension with one swing of their club. (Seriously, you go FLYING.) But, unfortunately for me, I could not even start this quest because an NPC (non-playable character) was stuck in attack mode and wouldn’t even answer me when I spoke to her.

Another group of problems never really annoyed me, but rather kept me disappointed by Bethesda’s performance. Among them were that many characters have the same voice actor, horses can climb up mountains at a 60 degree angle, and poor A.I. for your followers. My list can go on and on, but I suppose I should start giving the game credit where it deserves it.

The story for this game is well written and created very carefully, giving me pleasure in knowing that I was embarking on a humongous quest filled with blood, betrayal, and perfectly designed characters to accompany me on this ride. Even when you finish the main story line, the credits don’t start rolling. You can continue playing the game how you want. You can either finish up quests that you never started, get lost in the expansive and Indiana Jones-esque caves and underground structures, or do what I did, and just go around murdering innocents while wearing nothing but an execution hood and wielding Sheogorath’s reality bending staff, the Wabbajack. Now I’m not trying to completely rag on this game, because I enjoyed it thoroughly, and was extremely impressed by the drastic overhaul that Bethesda had given the Elder Scrolls Universe. The amount of content that this game offers you can completely blow you out of the water. I even lost myself because I felt like doing some “hard labor”, which included helping out farmers by harvesting their crops for them and splitting firewood. If you really want the biggest bang for you buck, then get off your couch, and go buy Skyrim!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRIUk32zYv4

Meta-Busting the League by Vassilis "DEMACIAAAAAAAAAAA" Roussochatzakis

Currently, League of Legends is a marvel of online game balance. While not as perfectly tuned as StarCraft, the fact is that Riot Games has taken 90 different champions and has created a mostly balanced game (excluding the stealth champs, who have been in dire need of a rework for many months now). That being said, a ubiquitous metagame has developed on Summoner's Rift, and it must be changed in order to keep the classic map fresh.

Firstly, the setup of AP Caster mid, Tanky-DPS/Mage top, AD Carry and Support bot, and a bruiser-jungler must change. Riven, Gangplank, and Irelia are amongst the strongest solo-top champs. Ahri, Morgana, and Brand dominate mid. While this atmosphere creates a close competition for the most skilled players to shine in, it also develops a tendency to become extremely repetitive. Since the majority of the community plays almost exclusively on Summoner's Rift (Twisted Treeline and Dominion are not nearly as popular or balanced), it is important that the game does not take on one unbeatable (and more importantly unchangeable) metagame.

There are two ways that this can be fixed. The easy way out is, of course, a series of buffs and nerfs to champions and items that enable  new team layouts to really shine. The second and ideal solution is a large community effort to create a new metagame. Anyone browsing the forums will see that nothing motivates the LoL community like dissatisfaction, and there have been a few threads lamenting the current metagame and obsession with tankiness. A select few of those complainers have stated that the only reason that so many people follow the current meta is because very high elo-level teams do so. I believe that by experimenting in low elo games and even in the madness of level 30 normal games, a new and refreshing group of team configurations will bring a new flavor to this already diverse and engaging game.

Vassilis