This guy is silly:
Single player games will always have an audience. The sales of the Nintendo DS have indicated that pretty clearly, among other things. Even in the MMO space, Blizzard finally understood that the solo player is valuable. ArenaNet knew that all along.
Don’t even get me started on his typical industry-popular hatred of used games. News flash, Perry: Not everyone is an early adopter, not everyone who isn’t is a pirate. Price your games well to start with, and the sales will come. (Especially for the next few years, maybe longer with stimulation.)
With professionals like this, I’ll take more armchair designers, thanks.
He is also a nobody. I guess he just wanted to say something.
It is a bit alarming that he still rides the dated “multiplayer is the future and the solution for everything” bandwaggon.
Aye, it’s baffling to me that people still believe that. It shows a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the industry. The scary thing is that it’s not all that uncommon, especially in MMO design. That’s why we get all the “meee too!” WoW clones and forced grouping.
Yes, lol, what a tool.
He also goes on to say that Western developers should beware because soon cheap Chinese and Korean devs are going to be pumping out all teh awesome free to play games.
Give me a break.
Yea I did a short writeup on his point of view the other day, along with Mr. Raph Koster’s as well. I partially agree with Raph though, as anything that can connect to gather scoreboard info, etc, regardless of whether or not you PLAY with other people, can be construed as a multiplayer game in some abstract sense of the word. Mr. Perry … is just dumb.
As Tesh says, there will always be bargain hunters who wait for used games, there will always be people who prefer an in-person experience while buying stuff … and there will always be people who prefer playing games ALONE.
Hell, Mr. Koster thinks the Internet is a multiplayer game with interfaces like Twitter.
So… life is multiplayer, since more than one person exists, and therefore, any game could theoretically be considered multiplayer as long as more than one copy is sold…
OK, that’s an extreme lampoon of the position, but at some point, this wanders into “that depends on your definition of the word ‘is’” territory. That’s the sort of inanity I expect from politicians, not game designers. Sheesh.