Richard's blog at AMD
I’m just putting the final touches to a feature for PCFormat about DirectX 11 which is essentially a stitching together of two interviews, one from an AMD spokesperson and one from NVIDIA, about how the two companies see the new graphics API that’s coming with Windows 7 and what it means for both gaming graphics and GPGPU computing.
There’s a snippet about Google’s Chrome OS from AMD’s Richard Huddy which isn’t related to the final piece.
“As a company that loves competition in the industry we have no problem at all with supporting Chrome. From a philosophical point of view there’s absolutely no loyalty to Microsoft. We clearly love working with Microsoft and they’ve driven this industry really hard over the last ten years or so, but we’ll love the competition as well, and Google will engender the same loyalty and passion that people have towards Apple when it comes to MP3 players…
We love all these alternatives and transitions, not just as a business, but because they give us the interesting cadence of our lives where we have this new tech to play with, this new experience we can create for consumers, this dramatic newness to the world.”
A similar sentiment, albeit more enthusiastically put, to NVIDIA’s excitement about Google’s forthcoming OS.
On which note, there was quite a stark contrast in the two interviews on DX11 between how “wildly, insanely excited” Huddy claims to be about the new tech coming through for its own sake, and the way the NVIDIA spokeperson kept steering the conversation round to the potential for the DirectX Compute element of DX11 – which accelerates video transcoding under Windows 7 – to open up a new market for graphics card sales to people who wouldn’t normally buy them.
Apparently one guild has already downed Yagg-Saron in WoW. Impressive.
It's hammer time... sorry
Just finished off an interview with Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games on the subject of Demigod. I don’t do a huge amount of games writing these days, but this was a favour for James over at Gamerzines. It went Gold on Monday and is looking like a lot of fun – although a bit spoiled for me that only one character is a giant man-fort with ballistas on his shoulders.
The interesting part of the interview was where Chris explained a bit about the development cycle. He said they’d had a team of just three people working on the core mechanics for a long time, so when they went into full development it took just a year to produce the whole game. An interesting alternative for those who were holding their heads in their hands at GDC about the cost of producing games these days, and a far better vision of the future than tosh like SAAS gaming OnLive.
Here’s the choice bit, the full article is out next week I think.
With a small development team over a longer period of time you have the ability to test gameplay mechanics and make sure they are delivering gameplay that is entertaining before spending a lot of money. More often than not what I’ve witnessed in this industry is the Lead Designer being forced to design the game in his imagination and it being halfway through production where that set of ideas manifests itself in the game in a meaningful way… at which point you’ve got to hope that whatever was written is actually entertaining because there’s little to no time to change it.
That ‘more often than not’ comment is very telling…
Slashdot | Game Companies Face Hard Economic Choices.
Then stop making games you can’t afford to sell… There are other ways you know.
So World of Warcraft is being passed over from Blizzard US to Blizzard Europe, according to this mail being received by players.
We have a short but important announcement that we wanted to share with our players. World of Warcraft is currently an operation of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. (USA), but starting April 14, 2009, the game operator will be Blizzard Entertainment’s central European entity, Blizzard Entertainment S.A.S. (France), and will be referred to as such in the game’s Terms of Use going forward. Our European office has been an essential part of our global operations since before the launch of World of Warcraft, and this update better reflects its role within our organization, as well as our continued commitment to our European players.
Since the dollar/euro exchange rate hasn’t changed that much (compared to, say, pound/dollar) this is presumably more to do with shifting the focus of the internal ‘A team’ to work on still-secret Blizzard MMO2. I’d love to see the mechanics of it though – after all, the hundreds of millions Blizz rakes in every month must have some small effect on the local economy where it rests.
YMCA versus the Hell's Angels
