Tag Archives: david perry

Update: Kotaku caught up with Perry today and he said he know someone who’s working on it. Take a look.

Acclaim boss Dave Perry has backed up a tweet earlier today on the lack of UMD support in the heavily-rumoured upcoming PSP revamp, saying he’s “certain” the disc’s out of the new design.

“I can’t reveal my sources, but you can be certain there’s no UMD, which means fully digital online device, and you know I know people,” the exec told GameDaily.

For the record, he’s right. Hit this for the latest on PSP-4000.

Thanks, Joystiq.

Update: There’s a new interview with the developers on Gamespot. Thanks, Peffy!

Acclaims’ David Perry has told GI that he believes Battlefield Heroes will do the business for EA later this year, going so far as to use the word “phenomenon.”

“I think Battlefield Heroes is going to be a huge hit, it’s going to be a bit of a phenomenon,” he said. “I have incredible faith that EA is going to pull this off.”

Heroes is a free-to-play shooter from DICE, funded entirely from ad sales on the game’s website.

There’s loads more through there, including Perry saying he reckons some punters would pay up to $10,000 on Halo if they were allowed to. He’s probably right.

According to this GI report, Acclaim’s David Perry is to keynote GCDC this year.

The conference is the development-led precursor to Leipziger Messe’s Games Convention.

Frank Sliwka, project director for GCDC, said: “David Perry has helped shape the history of videogaming having worked on some of the industry’s best-selling titles over the past few decades.

“His keynote is definitely going to be one of the big highlights of this year’s GCDC and we look forward to hearing his perspective on the global games market.”

More through the link.

Speaking to GI, Shiny founder David Perry has branded E3 in its current format as “broken”, “stupid” and an “embarrassment.”

“I’ve got to agree with the comment by John Riccitiello, about E3. If there aren’t dramatic changes to the format and staff, I’m never going again,” he said.

“The concept is broken, it’s expensive, messages are diluted, consumers are ignored (remembering that the future of this industry is direct connections with consumers – not retailers), the ticket policies are stupid, and if the entire industry worldwide doesn’t participate, it’s not real anyway.”

Perry added: “I used to bring major investors to E3 to get them excited about our industry, which worked every time. Now it’s just an embarrassment.

“Thankfully we still have GDC to bring them to, if they want to see the talent, passion, and energy this industry has.”

More through the link.

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.

Acclaim has announced that Michael “Doran” Zummo is the winner of its Project “Top Secret” competition and therefore will be offered the directorship of an upcoming game, working with David Perry as executive producer. Every man’s dream.

“I think we’ve proven that this is a great way to find super passionate people, by creating an incredibly difficult task, unleashing it on a massive amount of people who live for games, using the latest internet technologies, and hiring the ones that rose to the top,” said super David Perry.

“It’s a win-win and you can be sure we will be doing more of it in the future.”

Thanks GI.

By Mike Bowden

Acclaim’s David Perry is about to announced the winner of Project Top Secret, a program that allowed a gamer to design a professional title from scratch.

More than 60,000 people signed up for the project.

“There was no book we could follow on how to do this. In fact, the books out there seemed to think it was impossible! Could so many non-professional developers come up with new game designs never seen before? Of course they can, and they did,” said Perry.

According to a press release, Project Top Secret “is about to reach an historic landmark when one lucky contributor is chosen as the winner this month, and then their dream comes true.”

Full thing after the link.

More »

Everyone’s favourite developer David Perry today announced the completion of the beta testing phase and launch of the games industry resource GameIndustryMap.com, which has apparently grown in 12 months from an initial 1,500 data points to 17,584 locations for 9,741 organisations across 63 countries.

It really is an amazingly useful bit of internet, that. It’s basically a searchable global map covered in companies. Take a look for yourself.

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.