Yesterday at GDC Bigpoint announced that it was making a BattleStar Galactica MMO and that the game would be releasing later this year. Gamasutra has a full write up.

So first reaction was W00t i loved the show.

Second reaction was who the hell is Bigpoint. Looking at their list of games i don’t know any of them except for Puzzle Pirates. None of them are the triple A title that we are used to. They are most browser based game that you can play online for free. So i am expecting a browser based MMO similar to the other ones that they currently have (Not what most Battlestar Galactica fans will want).

Steam is coming for the mac. W00t. On top of that all Source based game (half life, tf2, portal and so on) are also coming to the mac.

On the TF2 blog they had a few FAQ that i’ll copy and paste here.

Q: I own TF2 on the PC. Do I have to buy it again on the Mac?
A: No. If you own TF2 on the PC, you own TF2 on the Mac (and vice versa). You don’t have to buy the game twice. In addition, the Steam Cloud will automatically propagate your configuration settings and custom sprays to your Mac for you.

Q: Is it just some crappy emulated version of TF2?
A: No! Also: How dare you! Mac users aren’t getting a crappy emulated version of the game. TF2 will run natively on OSX, like an actual big boy game for adults.

Q: Hmm, that all sounds pretty good. But I’ll bet I can’t play with my friends who own Macs if I’m on my PC.
A: Mac and PC users will all play together, on the same servers. We’re not creating two separate universes. We’re all going to be one big, happy family with guns locked in a bloody, never-ending struggle for cap points.

On March 16th Dragon Age: Awakening the first expansion to Dragon Age is coming out.

I never got to play through the entire game. I originally played through roughly 1/2 and then upgraded to window 7 and forgot to make a copy of my charter. And it really really hard for me to want to play through 50 hours worth of content that i’ve already played through just go get back to where i was.

So I am not sure if i want to buy Dragon Age Awakening or not. From the amazon.com info it sounds like you can make a new character so i guess i could start fresh .

Sorry about the lack of blog post, every time work get stressful the first thing i cut out of my week is blogging. Not sure why, but it is. Good new is all the stressful stuff is done so i’ll be blogging again.

Comedy central is about to remove all their content form hulu at the end of this week. There doing this because they feel they are not making enough money off the content from Hulu.

This is pretty sad.  Like most tech savy geeks i no longer watch or have cable tv. Everything i watch comes from either Netflix or Hulu. From what i heard Comedy central will go back to have the show on their website.

The the Comedy Central did streams before sucked. The ads where blaring the picture quality was terrible, so was the sound. For year or 2 i gave up watching both shows because of that.

Overall this is a bad decision for Comedy Central. There going to lose a huge audience of young people who only watch tv online now. Most of those young people are perfectly happy with torreting, and will end up doing that then suffer through Comedy Central crappy attempt to put the content online by them self’s again. And Comedy Central will end up losing money.

How much is content worth? Well that depends what your selling. You can sell an MMO with the content of WoW or eq2 for 49.99 and every year sell an expansion for 29.99 every year and people can justify it. But if you where to sell an MMO with 10 times the content of WoW and Eq2 for twice the price (100 bucks). Next to no one would buy it.

When you think about it you’ll end up paying more money for the same amount of content in WoW or eq2. But you can’t justify paying 100 bucks for an MMO no matter how much content it has.  Why? Because there is a certain dollar value you no matter the amount of content will add extra value.

But on the other hand people can justify paying 5, 10… maybe even 15 bucks for a mount, or a pet that just follow you. Or armor for 5-10 bucks just for show, because people can justify the cost.

Why? I believe there is a certain dollar amount. My guess is about 20 bucks, where below that amount people will buy pretty much anything. Armor, mounts, house items, you name it people will buy it because in their mind 1, 5, 10 bucks, isn’t that much money in  most peoples head. While 25, 35, 40 bucks is a lot of money in most people eyes.

What you’ve seen over the last year or 2 is each most MMO companies have been trying to find the magic dollar amount. Each company raising their price just a little.  2 Years ago maybe the most expensive thing was 2-3 bucks. Now we have 10 buck pets from WoW..

I love amazon.com!!!

Apparently when i ordered (i don’t know if it is still valid). Amazon.com was giving 10 bucks off FF 13 if your pre-ordered, which bought the price down to 49.99.

On top of that when ever you pre-order a game at amazon.com you get 10 bucks off your next pre-order game. I pre-order Star Trek Online. So i get an extra 10 bucks off.. 39.99. So i got roughly a 33% discount, and free shipping!!!!

And this is why if amazon.com were a person, i would make love with them…

So Kenn and Grave’s asked a very good question, should MMO’s have a expected life span. While i think it is a great idea, i don’t think any company will want to kill off a MMo that is currently making money. Even if they have one ready to replace it, (they rather have both out there making money).

What i rather have is episodic content. That you follow a story, that is played out over a year, or 2. Not what we currently have in MMO’s which is the entire story line pushed out with the expansion, and then update over the next year or so to keep us interested.

I rather have bits of the story come out every 2-3 weeks. Which is something i’ve heard 38 studios hit at a few times. Also something i hope Bio Ware will do with Star Wars the Old Republic

So over the weekend i was moved to my own office. (Instead of being doubled up, i now have my own office).

Which is all great except the box with all my stuff did not make it to my office, it also isn’t in my old office… it gone.

Sigh…

So i went down stairs to the post-move command center… And filled out a form and they will call me, when they find it.

Well i enjoyed Mass Effect 2 that i kind of forgot about writing blog post about it… Its a great game, (minus the resource harvesting which sucks).

I won’t give any spoilers on the story line for thous who haven’t played it. But compared to Dragon Age the game felt shorter, not sure what it was, but the game felt like it was shorter than Dragon Age. It might be that i was playing this on the Xbox rather than the PC and for what ever reason made it feel shorter.

I never played Mass Effect 1, and i’m assuming it is totally worth picking up, right?