The Queue: Snow day!

It’s a snow day here in Minneapolis. And it’s two weeks into April. That’s just great.

11am Pacific.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve heard this lately, and the sentiment overall has been expressed to just about every major game studio lately. I think there’s a few things I need to point out, for both BioWare and Blizzard, that other in the Queue’s comments yesterday mentioned to some extent:

1. We don’t know what’s going on. There’s glimpses of individual perspectives, which may be big picture or not, which may still be the current plan or not, which may be tinged by personal bias or not. The key is that we don’t know.
2. Finances for games are complex, and we need to stop pretending that we know much about them. People use this line of attack against Blizzard quite a bit — and it’s not they don’t deserve scruitny and criticism, they certainly do — however, there’s a lot more that factors into how much a game actually makes (or doesn’t) depending on the timeframe, market trends and competition, and overall engagement. None of these can be looked at alone when trying to do any financial critique, and you need some significant chops to put them all together.
3. The Internet rarely matters. Consider what the purpose of the websites of videos games are — they are marketing tools. People who get out in public are doing so for, and with, public relations. We all have opinions, and yes, they’re important and often times are listened to … but there’s a whole lot of people who don’t have a Twitter and have never touched the forms that just play Blizzard and BioWare games completely happy. They’re going to buy the games when the next one is released, too. Their voices are not heard by any metric we can be directly aware of or see in our limited perception. The studios can see them though, and they’re looking at the big picture. Take the red pill.

Now with all that said — I really hope DA4 doesn’t suck. I agree entirely with you that if true, that is worrying news to me. However, take it with a grain of salt.

And for the record, I’m not picking on Jalamenos — it was a good comment, and just hit on something I’ve been wanting to talk more about lately.

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We all do!

True fact: Liz is an indispensable person. She’s one of the few (and I mean few) people that I trust in life to be completely honest with me. This has helped me become a better leader, writer, and Twitter-snark-poster. Her posts and editorial work here are central to the site and I don’t know what, or how, I’d manage without her.

My hat is always off in shown respect to her.