Tag Archives: dave perry

Future said today that GamesMaster mag is to relaunch in the UK in May, and that the TV series may even return.

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Big Dave Perry’s Gaikai game service has raised $5 million in venture capital funding, according to a US SEC filing uncovered by Gamasutra.

According to the doc, Mitch Lasky, a former Activision exec and current partner at tech-investment firm Benchmark Capital, is a contributor.

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Dave Perry’s Cloud-based Gaikai system is to get a closed beta in Europe this month.

“Over 30,000 people have already signed up to help test and many came from Europe, they were really bummed that they would be left out of our launch plans,” said Perry, speaking in a statement you can find after the break.

“Gaikai is all about reaching a massive audience, so we are embracing Europe right away.”

Europe first, America next.

“After we choose the hardware configuration in Europe, our next phase will be our USA Nationwide Network Test, that will be using 8 Tier-1 Data Centers, getting hammered by Closed Beta testers,” Perry added.

“During that process, will be identifying the other data centers we need to include to blanket the USA in a low latency array. Phase 2 of that is Europe, in exactly the same test.”

Gaikai is a service product that allows clients to let users play or test games remotely. The concept’s similar to OnLive, but it’s not a subs-based thing. Publishers will hire Gaikai to let you play a demo without installing it, for example.

Want to try it? Sign up.

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Dave Perry has said that cloud gaming service GaiKai isn’t not aimed at the hardcore market at all but he’s hoping to bring the wow-factor to the non-gamer.

“GaiKai is not built for hardcore gamers – those are the guys that want HD, 60 frames per second, who are happy to sit for an hour and a half, download and install it… that’s just not our audience at all – it’s trying to reach out to new players, the hundreds of millions of people who never touched Mario Kart but would like to,” he told GI.

“They don’t know it yet, but when they click – they’re clicking on games on Facebook, on their iPhone, on MySpace, on Flash games sites – and they haven’t experienced games like EVE Online, or Spore, or LEGO Star Wars. They haven’t bought a console yet, they’re not there yet.

“So that’s the audience we’re going after initially – and it’s a very different approach,” he went on. ”

“To them it will be shocking: ‘Good God, what the Hell is this?’ And that’s the experience we want people to have.”

Dave Perry told us at Develop last week in a video interview that he hopes GaiKai will launch in early 2010.

Full interview through the GI link.

David Perry says that gaming should be more convenient for players and the limitless power of cloud computing could help consumers get games easier and eventually lead to less clutter on shelves at home.

“Facebook is a really good example of how data ownership is changing,” Perry told attendees at Develop. “People don’t really care if they own a version of Texas Hold’em or Yoville as long as they can access it easily.

“YouTube didn’t try and drive everyone to their portal. Instead, they allowed videos to be distributed across the web. How many videos would you watch if you had to register with every video maker? How many videos would you watch if you had to download the entire video first? And yet that’s something we ask our consumers to do.”

To demonstrate this, he used World of Warcraft as an example. While commending Blizzard for the realively small download, he took the audience through the thirty-one clicks it takes to start playing the game.

“I get twenty clicks in before I see a play button; but then I still get another legal agreement.” he said.

Perry then stated that Gaikai would allow users to start playing with just one click which he says is absolutely critical and gaming companies need to get behind it.

“If Eidos wanted to do this, they couldn’t cover the world in game servers,” he said. “But if all our companies worked together, we could.”

We have a video interview with Big Dave which will be posted later.

Meanwhile, get more regarding his streaming games philosophy via Gamasutra.

GameQuarry has published a list of the most and least consistent publishers according to review scores. Rockstar is at the top, Ubisoft at the bottom.

The research firm assigned points to each scoring bracket in the Metacritic system. Two points were awarded for games in the 90-100 bracket, 1 point for 80-89, zero for 70-79, -1 for 60-69 and -2 points for anything with a Metacritic average of 59 or below.

Rockstar received a total of 19 points from 23 titles and Ubisoft received the lowest, with -148 points from a total of 237 games.

“Using this method, publishers who may have created stellar titles, would also be penalized for each low scoring game and given no credit for average games,” wrote the report’s author.

Dave Perry wrote on his blog that this data may provide an interesting argument over the validity of using Metacritic data in the industry.

“This is based on Metacritic data, and let’s just say many of my friends are having a VERY heavy discussion (right now), on the validity of the Metacritic data. (So this is incredibly timely and will add fuel to that fire for certain!)”

The report author did note that the data does not “reflect trends towards an increase or decrease in quality trends”.

A consistent publisher may be may in fact be trending towards a decline in quality whereas a publisher on the Least Consistent List may “trend towards an increase in quality”.

More through the links.

Acclaim boss David Perry has twittered that Sony is to drop UMD support for “PSP2″.

“I hear Sony FINALLY has the PSP 2. And thank goodness, they’ve removed the stupid battery-sucking UMD disc drive. I’m excited!” said Dave.

We told you about PSP’s heavily rumoured revamp on Monday, in all its sliding screen wonder. Go read.

Thanks goes to GAF.

Acclaim boss Dave Perry said at DICE yesterday that single-player games will not be able to compete with online free-to-play games.

The creator of Earthworm Jim told the crowd that “the days of single-player games are numbered,” and added that his company’s focus is “entirely on multiplayer.”

More over on Gamasutra.

It’s so on. VG247 has learned this morning that Will Wright, Warren Spector, Neil Young, Rob Pardo and Phil Harrison are all confirmed for Dave Perry’s Luminaries Lunch at GDC next month.

The chat takes place on March 25 at 1.00pm PST.

The inaugural event at last year’s GDC bore witness to some spectacular quotes from Harrison, who openly criticised Sony’s approach to gaming as a whole. He quit the firm days later.

The addition of Wright and Blzzard boss Pardo to the line-up for 2009′s panel will only add weight to what was dubbed “GDC’s best session” last year by some.

Discussion will be about the future of the industry, new concepts in technology, recent non-gaming related developments and entertainment trends.

It’s invite-only, Ringo. We’ll be there, obviously, which means you will be to. See how that works?

Speaking at the Games Convention Developers Conference this afternoon, industry stalwart Dave Perry said that Sony has lost more money selling PlayStation 3s than it made selling PlayStation 2s during the entire five years of its peak.

Perry backed up the statement quoting statistics that he obtained from research firm, DFC Intelligence.

He added that according to DFC Intelligence, Microsoft lost $4 billion dollars on the original Xbox and the PS3 is first in overall software sales this gen.

Loads more over at 1UP.

By Mike Bowden

Speaking after collecting an honourary doctorate in Belfast, Dave Perry has claimed that piracy can be beaten through making games free.

“The next big thing will be free games,” he said, citing Asian success for the model.

“They had so much piracy that they decided to stop charging for the games. Instead, there’ll be a charge for things you might want to use in the game,” he said.

“Your character might have a plain white T-shirt. If you wanted a nicer one you could have it for a dollar. Or perhaps you could buy a magic sword for a knight for a dollar.”

Perry added: “It’s going to turn our industry on its head and I want to see the same thing happening in the USA and Europe.”

More on the BBC.

Dave “Shiny” Perry decided to arrange lunch at a posh San Francisco hotel for some industry luminaries, and let us sit in on it. The session, which was hosted by ex-PC Gamer editor Gary Whitta, was attended by Sony’s Phil Harrison, EA’s Neil Young, Peter Molyneux, Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor, Mr Perry himself, and MMO visionary Raph Koster.

The lunch began on the topic of what “next generation” actually meant, taking its cue from recent discussions of the term by David Braben, who had argued it had been devalued by the latest hardware failing to deliver actual next generation gaming experiences. The diners decided that what was truly next-generation was, as Phil Harrison put it, what was “in the spaces between what we do,” with the community, with networking, and with user-generated content.

Koster summed it up most succinctly, saying “It’s not the graphics, right? Xbox Live is the next-gen game you play on 360. It’s the connectivity and the meta-games. Next-next-gen will cut across more platforms.”

Koster said that things like achievements across a number of games, and connectivity between them represented genuine innovation for the gaming platforms.

Harrison also highlighted the ideas of what Wii had been capable of in shifting the emphasis of how games are played to social, family gaming, the kind of stuff he’s long been talking about with the SingStar and dance games. Harrison noted that there was something informative in the fact that “the Wii adverts were all from the perspective of the TV, looking at the players”, rather than being focused on impressive game footage.

Molyneux, meanwhile, wanted to maintain respect for other advances, such as those in graphical fidelity. He argued that while the industry heads might call meta-gaming and Wii control systems “next-gen” a consumer was just as likely to tag Call Of Duty 4′s incremental improvement to the FPS as next-gen. “Call Of Duty 4 is about how much you experience, and I think that is next-gen,” said the veteran Brit.

Perry chimed in agreement, saying “the games I want to play aren’t on the Wii.” Molyneux did concede that the Wii was too valuable to ignore, saying “the numbers for Wii are massive, we have to bring games out for it.”

The discussion moved on, with Neil Young (the EA one, not the singer) saying that because of the cost of Wii game development was slightly less the big companies could “afford to be a little more experimental.” He argued that the development community needed to learn to utilise the specific features of what made the Wii appealing such as “family play”, rather than simply porting PlayStation 2 games over. Young highlighted action-quizzer SmartyPants as an example of how this could be done effectively.

This led Phil Harrison to point out that games are taking too long to make. “The speed of iteration has to change,” said the Sony giant. Koster argued that games were shamed by the web, whose speed of iteration of web-sites was lightening fast. “Flickr patches ever half hour!” he exclaimed.

All this talk of the status of traditional game development segued neatly into the second topic, which was the status of simplicity in gaming. Gas Powered’s Chris Taylor argued that “people want simple and deep”. He cited WoW, saying “When WoW starts out the screen is clear, when it’s level 70 it looks like a helicopter. That’s exactly right, and we know its right because of the numbers WoW has done.”

The discussion then moved rapidly into discussion of casual games, piracy, and all the other bugbears that terrify the classic large-scale development companies. Koster, ever the fact-machine, noted that PopCap’s casual gaming surveys had suggested that there were around 20 million people playing casual games like Peggle. Molyneux was aghast and didn’t seem to believe the figure: “200 million? It’s inconceivable!”

“There are 500 million phones going to be sold with games on in the next year,” offered Harrison. Again Molyneux was incredulous, only this time at the idea that people would really use those phones for gaming.

Returning, via love for the iPhone, to the notion of simplicity as a driving principle for game design, Neil Young argued that older generations, who had played the early arcade games and then been out off by difficulty and complexity, were now returning to gaming in droves. “The Wii is bringing people back to gaming,” he said. Harrison took it further: “It’s not just the Wii, it’s the web, and everything else.”

Perry agreed, telling a tale so many gamers have told about non-gaming friends picking up the plastic guitar and then wanting to go right out and buy a PlayStation. “The cost of making a peripheral is not too much,” said Perry, who argued that hardware costs should be accepted when developers can come up with such impressive design as Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Hardware interfaces, he said, should not be a problem.

Molyneux agreed, saying that he wanted the new Fable game to be picked up by newbies: “We’re just using one button for Fable 2. For us there are too many buttons on the controller.” Koster had another fact, saying that there were “eighteen dimensions” of control across the 360 controller. “I counted,” he affirmed.

Harrison too wondered if the controller was the biggest stumbling block for accessible game design. He said that handing a non-gamer a gamepad was like “handing them a loaded gun, or a grenade with the pin pulled out.” He waved his hands about the emphasize the point in comedic fashion.

This brought the discussion full circle, with the lunch gang seeming to agree that next-generation interfaces would have to be simpler. Koster delivered a provocative tangent to this idea, saying that “Flash is the next gen console.” He illustrated this by citing the fact that he could play a Flash game at home on his PC, or with a stylus on his pocket PC, or even on his phone. “There are more Flash installs that there are consoles in the last two generations,” Raph pointed out. And it’s a technology that is evolving exponentially, as GDC keynote speaker Ray Kurzweil (who was referenced several times in the discussion) had highlighted. Koster also said that Flash will have 3D polygon transforms in Flash10, and OpenGL in the canvas tag was something that was being worked on for Firefox.

“Good luck making money on a Flash game,” said Neil Young. He saw the current trends as simply dispersing how and where games were played. Flash games might be ubiquitous, but they were not the future for the man from EA, who argued that the proliferation of platforms and interfaces simply served different needs for different games. He did have some suggestions about what that might mean for hardware, however. “Maybe there doesn’t need to be a device in the home,” he suggested. “Can it be rendered on a server and delivered via the network?”

Harrison said that the speed of light might have something to say about such undertakings, but journalist turned developer Gary Penn, sat in the background, said that it was already happening.

Chris Taylor seemed to think that something like that was close to the nature of where he wanted to go with gaming. “Secure PC gaming is the future,” he said. “All server based.”

At this point Whitta chimed in, paraphrasing something Harrison had said in a previous session. “Is this the last generation where physical media has any relevance?”

The group seemed unsure, but Harrison was admitted that “it’s moving away from the disc as a business model.” Was Whitta’s Blu-Ray collecting the behaviour of a dinosaur? Yes, they joked, but the reality seemed to be that no one saw physical media has having much traction in the coming years. Koster underlined he point by recalling a student recently asking, “What’s a CD player?”

Finally Molyneux made us all turn off our dictaphones so he could talk off the record about Fable 2. And… we can’t talk about that just yet, but obviously that was next-generation too.

David Perry, previously of Matrix-developer Shiny and now of the reborn Acclaim, has told videogaming247 that he believes the MMO space is led by an “extremely nerdy” game in World of Warcraft and that an attitude shift is needed for the genre to break out into the mainstream proper.

“I believe there’s a 70 million player MMO idea and no one’s done it yet because we haven’t got anyone that’s thinking down the Will Wright path,” he said. “There’s people that get close. There’s people that do Club Penguin, or Maple Story, games that are more simple to play, and people like Disney buy them for $500-$600 million and no one bats an eyelid and everyone goes off and makes another Bioshock.

“I know this year at GDC there’s going to be a lot of discussion on this stuff, and I’m expecting that by GDC next year there are going to be a lot more people thinking that way. We need to grow our market.”

Perry, currently working on free-to-play licensed MMOs from Asia, such as 2Moons and Dance Online, believes that World of Warcraft’s growth is hamstrung by its setting.

“It’s extremely nerdy, World of Warcraft,” he said. “You have to be really into fantasy. I’m great friends with the creative director of the game and they’ve done a great job. They’re making more money than you can imagine. It’s silly at this point.

“They’ve grown the understanding of how MMO games work, and the whole idea of levelling up is a concept that’s definitely out there. There are 9 million people who are paying to go and do it, and I’m sure there are another 9 million that aren’t willing to pay but would love to do it. If you were to release World of Warcraft free-to-play it would not be 9 million people playing. It would be more like 25 million people playing.

“So going free-to-play would be a way to get their market bigger, but they’re always going to saturate based on how many ‘fantasy people’ there are in the world.”

Perry added that 2Moons, a free-to-play MMO using the Asian model of micro-payments for items as its main revenue stream, is working well for the new Acclaim and that cash gathered from the project and Acclaim’s other games will now be pushed back into unique development.

“Absolutely,” he said, when asked if 2Moons was making money. “Absolutely. No problem whatsoever. We didn’t do a single bit of marketing… and we had 150,000 people sign up to help test it. And now we’re at 5 million, so we now have 5 million signed up people at Acclaim. Probably more than now, actually. So, do people want free-to-play? Ask the 5 million that have already signed up.”

He added: “We’re making a whole slew of new games. Acclaim is basically going to be a full publisher as you know it, making and licensing games. And it’s from the ashes, too, because remember the old Acclaim is dead and gone. This is Acclaim 2.0.”

According to this, Dave Perry – long-standing developer of dozens of games, including the Matrix titles – was more than a little shocked that Microsoft recently decided to bin Cryptic’s Marvel MMO.

“That is stunning to me, absolutely stunning to me,” he said. “Marvel, as a property, is more mass-market than World of Warcraft.”

He continued: “World of Warcraft sells because Blizzard made it, and Blizzard is a fantastic company, right? The talent at Blizzard is just phenomenal. If you can get a team that’s got the same quality and you have that licence, I’ll take the Marvel licence every time over Warcraft.”

Perry is currently working on free-to-play MMOs at Acclaim, among other projects.

Go Dave. David Perry is to receive an honorary degree from Queen’s University alongside the likes of Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern for “distinction in computer game development and design”. He gets a DSc in engineering.

We had dinner with Dave last year at GDC, and he’s a very nice man indeed. So congratulations to you. Don’t get too near Tony Blair. You might get infected.