Worst. Excuse. Ever.

So, Bungie’s new project was supposedly going to be unveiled this week and was called off at the last minute.  Why?

Bungie wasn’t really saying except that their “publisher” was responsible for it.  Said publisher turned out to be, unsurprisingly, Microsoft, as the LA Times discovered.  What was their excuse?

Don Mattrick, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Xbox games business, said the company decided to pull Halo …

… to help trim its E3 presentation to under 90 minutes, from 2 1/2 hours, to accommodate attention-challenged reporters. “We had an embarrassment of riches,” Mattrick said. “We felt we could do this game more justice with a more dedicated event.”

This has to be one of the lamest excuses I’ve ever heard, and is not believable at all.  If this is true, then Microsoft is being ridiculously stupid here.  Bungie had been hyping a big reveal for weeks on their website, so the stage was already set for them to make a big splash.  And when you have an “embarrassment” of riches to show, you don’t hold back on your biggest franchise from your most successful developer at the biggest (or one of the biggest now) industry-specific events just because you think you already have so much great stuff to show (which something like “You’re in the Movies” would seem to disprove).

Some have theorized that they didn’t want to take away from their Final Fantasy XIII announcement, but that honestly doesn’t make much sense to me.  Do they really believe that people couldn’t get excited for more than one thing at a time? Instead of just “Wow, FFXIII coming out to the 360!” it’d be “Wow, FFXIII coming to the 360 AND this awesome new Halo game!  I’m sure happy to be a 360 gamer now!”  No, I’m sorry… if you have something good to show, you show it at what is arguably the most important trade show in the industry (or at least, it used to be).

Which brings up what may be the more likely reason it wasn’t shown yet: it wasn’t good, or, at least, it wasn’t ready.  Based on how one bad E3 experience can potentially (unfairly) shape the future of your game (ahem), maybe Microsoft just didn’t think the game was in a good enough state to show yet.  I don’t really have a problem with this, but it’s strange that they would give such a weird excuse rather than just tell the truth.  If Bungie ends up revealing their game in just a week or so and it looks amazing, I’ll admit I was wrong, but right now I don’t believe their excuse for a second.

Microsoft Gains First Strike and Scores a Critical Hit!

You’ve probably heard by now that one of Sony’s biggest theoretical exclusives, Final Fantasy XIII, is coming to the 360.  To be honest, even before I owned a PS3, this was never a huge concern of mine.  To begin with, I knew the game was basically never coming out.  And as much as I liked Final Fantasy IV, VI and VII, I never really got too into any of the other ones (got close to the end in VIII, barely started IX, played a little bit of X… X-2 and XII are on my shelf unplayed).

But, yeah… I know there are a lot of Final Fantasy fans out there and this will make probably half of them ecstatic, a quarter furious, and a quarter who don’t care.  Either way, this is, at the very least, a major psychological blow to Sony and a big coup for Microsoft.  A friend of mine was literally trying to sell his 360 to pick up a PS3 MGS4 package because he figured he could play MGS4 and (what he most wanted) Final Fantasy XIII whenever it finally came out.  Based on this news, that is no longer going to happen and he is keeping his 360.

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E3 Sneaks Up Next Week

Kotaku was nice enough to point out that E3 was coming up next week and while I’m sure we’ll hear more about games like Gears of War 2, Resistance 2, Far Cry 2, Rock Band 2, and Killzone 2 (that’s a lot of 2’s), I’m actually more interested in seeing if we’ll get more information about games that we DON’T already have some decent information about.  So, here’s my list of things, divided by platform, that I’d like to see next week (and that I have no clue if they’ll be shown or even exist):

• God of War 3 (PS3)
• New Ico/Shadow of the Collosus team game (PS3)
• Heavy Rain (PS3)
• New Zelda (Wii)
• New Nintendo IP (Wii)
• Peter Jackson Halo collaboration (360)
• Amplitude 2 (Non-Rock Band Harmonix game, perhaps the name “Wavelength” would be more appropriate) (Multi)

Admittedly, there are other games I’d still like to see more about (including the ones listed before, and others such as Resident Evil 5), but these are ones that we basically have hardly any information on, or don’t even know if they exist, and would make great surprises for E3.  What does everyone else think?

Sweet, 8-Bit Mega Man

As much as I liked some of the later MM games, I always felt like Mega Man 3 was the pinnacle of the genre, and so I’m glad to see that Capcom’s ninth entry in the series looks like it’s getting back to its 8-bit roots.  Three cheers for Dr. Wiley, Dr. Light, and the classic style I remember so fondly.  Hope it’s good.

A Plague Of Locusts O’er The Land

Tadgh Kelly has a post up at GSW arguing that the delisting approach that Microsoft will be taking with XBLA marks the end of the platform as we know it.  Unfortunately, he makes his argument so hyperbolically that it obscures some of the good points that underlie his point.  Although I agree with his basic premise entirely, his conclusions start to run off the rails.

Kelly and I are in agreement that searching for games in XBL is currently unworkable.  Unless you know what you’re searching for, it’s nearly impossible to search for games with some reference to quality, popularity, or gameplay type.  We’re also in agreement that the proposed solution isn’t necessarily the ideal way to handle this concern.  But that’s where our opinions largely begin to diverge.

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A Question For Which I Have No Answer

Your preferred next-generation DVD format fails.  Your biggest competitor backed the winning format.  What do you do?  Deny that you’re considering bringing out a new disc drive to play that format!

Naturally, I have no idea why Microsoft would possibly want to do this.  What is the disadvantage to acknowledging that you’re thinking about supporting Blu-Ray?  It takes away a competitive advantage from Sony, commits you to nothing, and it’s already widely suspected as it is.

The Difference Between Fads And Trends

The title of this post is slightly misleading, but I think that Microsoft and Sony may be on the verge of compounding a major strategic error with another strategic error.  The jumping-off point for this post is a New York Times article that reviews GDC speeches by the major manufacturers and developers, with the nominal topic being social gaming.

Naturally, there’s a hagiographic section on Nintendo’s prescience in identifying the gaming casual market, and highlighting how successful that strategy has been.  But I’d like to focus a bit more on the competition’s response.  Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft Live Royalties

Well, if this is true, it seems like a terrible move on Microsoft’s part.  Kotaku reports that MS has decided to cut the royalties that it pays to indie developers in half, from 70% to 35%; the rationale for this move is unclear, but might be related to a push to use the XNA package for future development. 

This seems like a bad idea for two reasons, 1 practical and 1 theoretical.  From the latter standpoint, it’s unclear to me why Microsoft deserves to earn a 65% cut of revenues when it provides no actual content development - its role is purely distribution and QC (both of which are traditionally low-margin businesses, since they’re not responsible for actually creating anything).  And from a practical standpoint, XBox Live derives most of its advantages - absolute and relative to the PS3 - from having lots of exclusive content, not from its interface or style.  If the PlayStation network had great games and a lousy appearance, we’d still use it. 

 This move is clearly going to discourage many developers from continuing to stay with the Live network, and to the extent that it hurts creative content development, is dangerously close to ceding ground to Sony.  We all saw what happened when Sony’s hubris led it to disregard its consumers’ needs and create an expensive product without enough content.  I would caution Microsoft to be careful about doing the same.

This is still just an unconfirmed rumor, but Microsoft’s response is hardly encouraging.  Good job to Kotaku for investigating this.

Color Me Unskeptical

EGM’s gossip column is reporting that Microsoft recently started development on a first-party sequel that was initially going to come out for the 360, but is now slotted for its successor.  Joystiq and this 1up author seem to think this is silly - the 360 is still a very young console.  But this strikes me as eminently reasonable.

It’s not unheard of for a big franchise to make only one appearance on a given generation: look at Zelda, which had only one entry on the SNES, or Mario, who took two whole generations to come up with a true sequel to Mario 64.  Given the enormous time and effort that would no doubt go into, say, Halo 4, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that it might take a couple of years to really get off the ground.  Plus: the 360 has been quite successful so far this generation - if I were Microsoft, I’d definitely want to try and solidify that lead by having a must-buy launch title for the Xbox 720 or whatever it’ll be called.

Riddle Me This…

How exactly can SCEA state that they don’t disclose console unit sales until NPD releases them, while providing percentage increase figures over a previously disclosed figure?  Moreover, it seems quite odd to dispute a competitor’s claims while not providing evidence of that claim.

Does that mean Microsoft is correct?  By no means.  But it would’ve made sense to wait to prove it.