The publisher is dead! Long live the developers!

So, as of today, THQ is no more. It's disheartening to see a publisher go under in a age where EA and Activision are basically locked in war with one another to see who can vacuum more money out of it's customers.

But personally, my concern at this moment is over the future of one studio formerly under the THQ banner, Relic Entertainment...and thus far, things actually look kinda hopeful.

Relic was bought by SEGA, who are also the publishers for Creative Assembly, the studio behind the Total War franchise, and who also themselves entertained into a licensing agreement with Games Workshop (The possibilities). Hopefully the transition is a smooth one, and people get to keep their jobs over there, from the work being put out by the studio, they deserve them.

Company of Heroes 2 is probably my most anticipated game of the year so far, and with any luck, things will keep rolling along towards release as if nothing really happened.

One does have to wonder though how well both the Company of Heroes and Dawn of War franchises will fair under SEGA. SEGA already owns the Total War franchise, one of the other few respectable RTS game series left out there (Command & Conquer is dead to me...). I can't help be get a slight feeling of monopoly from this.

The RTS genre itself, also just seems to be waning.


Then again...when I checked out THQ on Steam not long ago, their catalog was bloated with arguably overpriced DLC. Perhaps a key in their downfall? Hopefully SEGA will be wiser.


THQ is dead. Long live the developers.

Joe Biden to 'concrete' connection between virtual games and real violence.

 So, I decided to go browsing gaming news sites, including Gamasutra, and came across this...

 Opinion: Meeting with Biden is a mistake for the game industry

Well...

Kris Graft brings up several points, both about the violence debate, and the games industry itself, that I've thought about myself, and would like to do my own write up of sometime, and I commend him for speaking up about them.

As to the matter itself...I'm going to take a hard line stance on it.
This is a not a time for concessions. There will be time to discuss the nuances of how video games depict violence once video gaming is not being vilified.

Also, I figured I would address this to Joe Biden, too. Although, in all likelihood, he will never read this, and furthermore, I'm not an American citizen, so why would he even give a shit?

Anyway, my initial thoughts on this, spurred perhaps by reading about the Southington game burning, is this...


We need to stop educating people that video games cause violence, we need to start educate people that just because people play video games does not make them violent.