With the high-profile success of projects like Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2 and Republique, Kickstarter is fast becoming one of the most viable routes to market for the sort of risky projects that publishers wouldn't dream of green-lighting.
Wanderlands is a Melbourne-based indie studio that I’ve written about a couple of times before. The small team has a habit of making ludicrously smart Flash games with simple visuals and ingenious central mechanics. Remember Midas? That was Wanderlands, as was Impasse, which is one of the cleverest puzzle games I’ve seen in years.
Brian Fargo, founder of InXile Entertainment, is clearly enjoying development of Kickstarter success Wasteland 2, but admits that working to player, rather than publisher, expectations brings with it a very different type of pressure.
The first images of Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 have been published, showcasing the company's next-generation technology.
The powerful engine will usher in an era of real-time dynamic lighting, extensive particle effects and a range of other effects that are currently beyond today's consoles - at least without using inefficient work arounds like baked-in light sources.
Next week, the Nordic Game conference returns for a ninth year, based as always in Malmo, Sweden. While luminaries from the region's ever-increasing number of game studios will of course be present, the conference maintains its global focus, with a list of speakers containing some of the biggest names in videogame development. Edge will be in attendance, with news, session reports and tweets from our man on the ground; below you'll find a few selected highlights from the conference schedule.
Yesterday we looked at ten games that successfully found funding through Kickstarter despite having no big names attached to help generate that all-important publicity. Here we look at ten less fortunate projects that failed to reach their targets for a variety of reasons, from not successfully communicating the game's premise to alleged dishonesty.
The multiplayer-only Warhawk of 2007 broke away from its title-sharing 1995 singleplayer predecessor by shifting towards large-scale shooter action and exploiting PS3’s networking capabilities. Five years later, Starhawk – developed by LightBox, a studio home to members of Warhawk maker Incognito Entertainment – has returned to the singleplayer game.
Activision and EA have settled a lawsuit over the latter's alleged courting of former Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella. The pair's legal fight with Activision is, however, still headed to trial.
The traditional RPG isn’t quite the force it once was: developers continue to marry the obvious pull of the genre's underlying systems to more immediately gratifying play mechanics, thus offering the satisfaction of progression without the grind.
We might think someone a little unusual if they didn’t listen to any form of music, or watch any genre of movie. But would we have the same opinion if they didn’t play games? I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people I know who fit into the former categories, but I can easily think of friends who have either never played games, or used to but don’t anymore. It’s these would-be gamers - a vast potential new market - that many studios would be keen to sell to if only they could be persuaded that games were for them.
Blizzard Entertainment has apologised for the connectivity issues that have plagued Diablo III since its release on Monday night, admitting that it did not prepare adequately for the rush of players simultaneously trying to log in to its long-awaited action-RPG.
With so many big names turning to Kickstarter to fund their projects, it's little wonder that the majority of press attention has fallen on the high-profile sequels and reboots that have filled the site.
A kidnapped stuffed toy, a plucky protagonist with a cardboard helmet, and a fantasy world accessed through the gaping doors of a bedroom closet: for the first thirty seconds or so, My Little Hero has the makings of a real charm offensive. For the next twenty minutes, in fact, you’ll probably be beguiled and entertained, enjoying the smart virtual controls, the knitwear enemies, and combat that comes with the one-two-three rhythms and hefty knockbacks of the early Zeldas. After that, however, things start to stagnate.
It's fitting, given Agent 47's difference from his contemporaries, that the assassin’s first appearance in six years should be part of a pre-order bonus that defies convention. Hitman's protagonist doesn’t wisecrack or fist-bump, and the games he appears in prize a patient, methodical approach over gung-ho gunplay.