Two teenagers were given one-year probation and a ban on violent video games after they were convicted of placing a cat in a microwave, and killing it by cooking it alive for 10 minutes. Where does the video game punishment stem from? Nowhere at all…this case has nothing to do with video games. Unfortunately, now we have the pleasure of video games being tied to such a disgusting act.

This judge has no rhyme or reason to ban these teens from violent video games. I just hate to see games used as the scapegoat here. The judge said the reason for the video game ban was due to a prior ruling. None of that matters though…games should not be tied to this at all.

I so badly want to go into the punishment that the boys received for such a heinous crime, but I will bite my tongue.

Link

Back in May I asked whether or not WoW was an unstoppable train. To sum it up briefly and simply, I didn’t think so. With today’s news of Blizzard selling 2.8M copies of WotLK and breaking their previous first day sales record of 2.4M with the launch of TBC, I am starting to rethink things a bit. That is 400k more copies, which can be represented as a 14% increase.

I was basing my earlier theory on a bit of expert opinion by none other than MMO Chart‘ s SirBruce. This guy has been analyzing the MMO scene for a long time here and he had put together a presentation with the following:

• The MMOG subscription market continues to grow; 16M+ now, 20M+ in 2009 (pred. 2006), 30M+ in 2012
• World of Warcraft to peak at 11M – 12M by 2010
• Most retail-launched MMOGs have an initial growth phase during the first year, followed by 1 – 3 years of a more stable, “mature” subscription base, and then a noticeably and often sharp decline.
• New markets grow subscriptions, but expansions packs mostly cover churn and provide a retail presence.

I don’t know about the overall subscription market, but I’m going to assume it is growing. Also, Blizzard recently announced that they now have over 11M accounts (however you slice ‘em up), which is pretty much on par with his second bullet. We’re on the brink of finding out what will happen with the third bullet as WoW celebrates its fourth birthday. Will it ring in the next 12 months with a “sharp decline?”

I’m most interested in the fourth bullet. According to Sir Bruce, MMO expansions cover churn, aka, player loss. Well, since the release of TBC, WoW’s population has shot up from 8M to 11M, an increase of roughly 3M players. Obviously, you release expansions to keep your customers in new and exciting content, but are they also serving the purpose of helping World of Warcraft grow? Without TBC, I don’t think we’d see the current numbers at 11M…

Let’s talk a bit more about player retention here. My WAR guild is made up entirely of ex-WoW players. We were a WoW guild that moved to WAR (even though I had quit WoW a long time before WAR was even in the picture). At one point we had 69 members in our guild. We now have about 20 “active” members (active yet ultra casual). Where do you think the other ones went? Back to WoW for the most part. The most I have seen online at prime time these past couple weeks has been 8 players. Most of the time it is 3 to 4.

This isn’t an isolated occurrence either. Last night I did a quick server check and found about 70% of them to be low/low, 30% of them to be med/med (or some variation of med/low or low/med), and none of them was showing a “high” value anywhere in the entire list. During WAR’s first free month it wasn’t uncommon to see dozens of “high” and “full” values.

Having spoken with another blogger who shall remain nameless (protect the innocent!), he went from having a guild of 150 to about 20 actives as well. Even one of his best friends and a family member quit - though I don’t think those two in particular went back to WoW. Most of the rest? You guessed it.

You can blame some of this on the fact that these people weren’t enjoying WAR enough to stick around regardless and that many of them may not have run back to WoW, but you’d be a complete fool to say that WotLK hasn’t had a huge impact on WAR’s retention rate…

WotLK is definitely addressing WoW’s churn issues.

I think the next 12-months will be exciting for both WoW and WAR and we’ll start being able to see where the chips are falling. A couple of the original bullets are a bit conflicting on second glance: First he says that WoW will grow to 11-12M by 2010 but then he says that most MMOs see a sharp decline in their fifth year. Will WoW be able to break the industry norms by actually continuing to grow into their fifth year (2010) and beyond? Could the expansions help this to happen rather than simply addressing churn?

If I had to make a prediction, it would be this:

WoW will do extremely well for the next 6-12 months and may even reach that 12M peak, but without another expansion on the horizon for an additional 6-12 months beyond then, they will start to see that sharp decline SirBruce talks about. No MMO launch since 2004 has yet managed to make a permanent dent in WoW’s subscription figures, including both Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. There’s still a chance for these MMOs to gobble up the players getting bored of WoW in the next year, but I don’t think it will be too substantial (maybe a total loss of 1-2M, which is still pretty good). They’ll also have to share those fleeing subscribers with a number of other MMOs, including those joining the scene.

Both WAR and AoC are in a subscription slump compared to the momentary peaks they attained in their first months of launch, however, the numbers are bound to rise back up again as people experience all or at least most of what WotLK has to offer. And as I said, I believe this will happen within the next 6-12 months, but it could happen even sooner.

I’ve personally been so up and down with WAR lately because I have no other MMO to run back to. I’ll never touch WoW again and I don’t feel the slightest inclination to start up a new MMO. The game has immense potential and I know it will be 10x the game it is today within the next few months. The trouble is that WAR is highly population-based as an RvR game and right now the servers are feeling dead to me. Ostermark was a destination server for many of the recent transfer pushes and yet we’re still maxing out at Med/Med. Even at that number, oRvR seems dead most of the times I log on and I usually spend 10-20 minutes in the scenario queue before anything pops. The PvE is sub-par at my current-rank and until I can get into Bastion Stair, it’s just painful to do.

I know it’s a difficult thing for Mythic to do, but they truly need to merge servers ASAP. Mark shot off his mouth about the state of your game being not-so-hot if you have to resort to server merges rather than adding new servers shortly after launch, but he should take the blow to his ego and help out his players.

Waiting 4-12 months for the slow trickle of WoW-quitters to fill these servers back up again isn’t a smart move. Listen to the people playing your game. Listen to your paying customers, man… Otherwise you’ll see a slow trickle the other way - people getting fed up and quitting WAR for something else or nothing at all.

If you aren’t having fun - why are you paying/playing, right? Here’s a quote from my May WoW-Train article:

I’m not trying to pick on World of Warcraft specifically with this post, but it’s a proven fact that time has been the dark red line creeping slowly towards the heart of every MMORPG to date. Time allows for competitive growth. Time leads to player complacency and boredom. Time is what makes the present become the past.

I think the same can be said about not responding to big game issues quick enough.

I should also mention this little anecdote: When I quit DAOC for WoW, it didn’t take the first time. I spent about 3 months in WoW then went crawling back to DAOC for several more months. DAOC eventually lost its charm and I went back to WoW, where I spent almost 2 years. I would imagine the same thing is happening with a lot of people who are leaving WoW for other games: their first or second attempts may not work, but eventually they’ll break the habit.

Related posts:

1. Is WoW an unstoppable train? Right now? Perhaps, though I haven’t really been a part...
2. Upping the 30-day free trial to 90-days? Here’s an interesting idea: I firmly believe companies like Mythic...
3. Playing the “WHAT IF” Game… Syp asks some interesting WHAT IF questions, so I decided...

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Welcome back to another look at Fallout 3 coverage from around the web.

We’ll start with a few interesting articles I’ve read this week. Before reading these, be warned there are spoilers within these articles. Up first, GamesRadar’s Tyler Wilde has a three-page feature detailing how you can become “evil” within the game. Rather than just looking at things from the dark side, D. Riley at The New Gamer discusses morality issues from both sides — focusing on Tenpenny Tower quests. Meanwhile, at GamaSutra, Duncan Fyfe shares his opinion of the game while sharing what he believes the game signifies. Here’s a snippet:

“On your tour of D.C., you’re made to revisit all the initial promise inherent in that document, while you’re picking up the pieces and kicking around the ashes. The buildings stand remarkably intact, frozen in time, for you to look up at and think about how this all went to hell.”

Moving along, last week we let you know that Pete and Emil would be answering questions for their old friends at The Adrenaline Vault. That podcast (#8) is now available here. In other podcast news, there’s a new interview with Pete at Gamers with Jobs. To hear Pete, tune in around the 38-minute mark.

More reviews are showing up online for Fallout 3. You can check out new reviews at Gaming Life, GameFlak, Heroes of Gaming, GameZone, VideoGameMedia, and Aeropause. On the subject of reviews, Fallout 3’s reviews at IGN helped it earn Game of the Month honors on both PC and Xbox 360.

Having trouble finding all the Bobbleheads in the game? Check out this guide to locating all 20 at GamesRadar.

That’s all the news for now.

Okay, I don’t hear any Internet squeeing yet. You must not be looking at the above picture hard enough. Do you not see the classic Bionic Commando box art front? Have you not noticed the 8-bit graphics that line the sides? Are you having trouble making out that it is A FREAKIN’ BIONIC COMMANDO METAL LUNCHBOX?

What? Still not sold? Well, for the love of all that is retro, please click here to check out what’s on the back of said lunchbox. Seriously, prepare yourself. It is that awesome.

If you preorder the new Bionic Commando for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 this beautiful lunchbox will be yours ... but only if you preorder from Game Crazy. Also, these are extremely limited, so hurry and preorder now before they are gone forever.

If you don’t want to use Game Crazy (and are apparently just really crazy), you can also preorder from GameStop and receive some fun old school and new school Bionic Commando patches. Not as cool, for sure, but still pretty neat!

Why are you still reading this post? Get to preordering! GO! GO! GO!

[Via Capcom’s Official Blog]

The recent announcement of this stunning Guitar Hero controller from Logitech got me thinking about the varied shapes and sizes of gaming interfaces over the past 30 years.

Logitech's Wireless Guitar Controller with its wood neck and fingerboard and metal frets will be one of the most expensive gaming peripherals ever released, but will certainly have many guitar heroes salivating and willing to "hammer on" some more damage to their long-suffering credit cards.

Today Screen Play looks at other notable gaming controllers released over the past three decades that have been designed to provide a unique new experience, increase comfort, assist immersion, improve realism, or just to help gamers show off.

I'll also be keen to hear about your favourite gaming controllers, as well as those that you hated because they caused blisters or simply didn't work...

Surely the most extravagant controller ever commercially released, this peripheral devoted to a single obscure Xbox mech game features 40 buttons, two joysticks, three foot pedals and a throttle.

There have been many, many lightguns released over the years, but Namco's G-Con for the original PlayStation is probably the most fondly remembered because of its reasonable accuracy and that it supported great games like Time Crisis, Point Blank and Rescue Shot.

An exact replica of the flight controls on the F-16 fighter aircraft, these full metal controllers might help bring the Thrustmaster name back to where it was in the mid 90s among flight sim enthusiasts. I certainly fondly remember Thrustmaster's early equipment - I had a joystick, throttle and foot pedal set-up to play pioneering online flight sim Air Warrior.

Notable because its analog controller facilitated two of the best games of all time - Super Mario 64 and GoldenEye. Sony's Dual Analog Controller (which later morphed into the DualShock) with its twin analog sticks took the concept even further and enabled simultaneous movement and camera control - a much more elegant solution than the N64 pad's yellow buttons. The N64 pad's unusual design certainly wasn't flawless in other areas, either - if you used the analog stick you couldn't reach the left shoulder button, and if you used the D-pad you couldn't use the trigger underneath the analog stick - but its legacy was enormous.

An exquisite racing wheel for the likes of Gran Turismo and SimBin's PC simulators complete with a leather steering wheel with force feedback, a six-speed gearbox and quality non-slip pedals that include a clutch. Screen Play still has a soft spot for the ColecoVision steering wheel, though.

Released in 1998, this motion-sensing gamepad worked well with Microsoft's Motocross Madness but wasn't terribly comfortable and soon sank without a trace until Peter Moore regularly referred to it when questioned about Microsoft's response to the Wii Remote and Sixaxis. "Been there, done that. Consumers said it was interesting, but there was a collective yawn from the gaming community," he told Screen Play in 2006.

Originally released with the GameCube's Donkey Konga, one of Nintendo's (surprisingly rare) rhythm action games, these bongos were also utilised brilliantly in platformer Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat, with players clapping and tapping to control their monkey mate. Sadly, here in Australia Donkey Konga 2 and 3 were never released because of the poor sales of the original, depriving us of the chance to play bongos to Hilary Duff and REM tunes.

Now you're playing with power! But only a select few NES games supported the device and
few players had much success controlling the ones that were compatible.

Designed for use with Resident Evil 4, NubyTech released both PS2 and GameCube versions of this delightfully balmy controller back in 2005. The controller has all the standard buttons plus a motion sensor that makes your character raise and lower his weapon by moving the chainsaw up and down. It also has a ripcord and chainsaw noise to scare your mates, plus a handsome display case for collectors.

While otherwise very similar to the Sega Saturn's analog controller, the Dreamcast's pad was notable because of the Visual Memory System which slotted into one of two slots in the middle of the peripheral. VMUs were not just memory cards, they could play mini-games loaded into them by Dreamcast games and even connect to another unit to exchange data.

Manufactured by Namco, this unusual controller had a central swivel joint and was excellent for racing games like Ridge Racer once players acclimatised to its unusual feel.

To replicate the experience of the delightfully crazy arcade gem, Sega used ultrasonic transmitters to triangulate each maraca's position from a sensor bar. Surprisingly, it worked a lot better than this year's Wii version.

You'll find various snowboard and skateboard controllers at your local Cash Converters, but the Wii Balance Board's extremely sensitive pressure sensors make it far more sophisticated than similar devices that have tanked in the past. Astonishing sales of Wii Fit should ensure the board enjoys wide support well beyond the likes of EA's Skate It and Ubisoft's Shaun White Snowboarding this Christmas.

Beatmania was one of the first popular rhythm action games, but home versions didn't enjoy success in the West because of the size and cost of its dedicated DJ turntable controller. While over a dozen Beatmania games were released on PlayStation in Japan, we only got one.

An important weapon in Sony's arsenal for widening the PS2's audience, this set of four USB buzzer controllers with their irresistible flashing red button are simple enough for anyone to use. In addition to Sony's range of Buzz trivia games which explor topics like music, film, sport and general knowledge, the Buzzers are also utilised in kids games like Jungle Party. Wireless versions are now available, saving us the trouble of spending hours untangling the cords every time we want some trivia fun.

Released for the Dreamcast's Sega Bass Fishing, this controller had a built in motion sensor almost a decade before the Wii Remote. It could also be utilised for other games, leading to the bizarre sight of someone playing Soul Calibur using a fishing rod.

A mechanical system featuring a retractable cable and glove that enables games to track three-dimensional movement. Games included beat-'em-up Black Wind and Real World Golf. Developer In2Games is currently working on a wireless version as an alternative to the Wii Remote for the PS3 and Xbox 360 formats.

So bulky it caused some hands to cramp, few players could get their mitts around the original gargantuan Xbox pad, and it was thankfully soon replaced by the much smaller "Controller S" when Bill's behemoth came to its senses.

For millions of gamers around the world, this ergonomic disaster was the first joystick they ever picked up. And they still have the calluses to prove it.

The NES pad has become something of an icon in the industry, celebrated on t-shirts, belt buckles and all manner of merchandised tat, but the SNES pad was far superior: wonderfully comfortable, responsible and reliable. It also introduced shoulder buttons and the four button layout still seen today in PlayStation and Xbox controllers.

Atari was already in huge financial strife before releasing the Jag, bumbling from one disaster to the next. But what chance did the hapless console have with one of the most ridiculously uncomfortable controllers known to man?

Has any controller had the impact on the gaming industry that the Wii Remote has had? Doubtful. It might not be suited to all types of games, but the novelty and accessibility of this wonderful device has almost single-handedly attracted millions of players to the Wii console.

“No trouble at all, friend! The Albion Public Library is just two blocks down and then take a righ-OH MY GOD, I AM SO SORRY!”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve meant to amuse and delight my adoring legion of fans with a manly heroic pose or moving lute solo but have instead unleashed fiery death from my hands, giving the poor townsfolk a terrifying memory that no amount of guilt-ridden gifts will ever truly ease.

Thankfully, a Facebook support group has been established to help people like me, people who have accidentally and unintentionally blasted their fictional families with a searing gust of Arctic wind. The Association of Accidental Arsonists is a self-described support group for players who’ve “set spouses, houses and mouses ablaze in err.”

MTV Multiplayer’s guest writer, Tracey John, got to play e-mail tag with one of the group’s founders, Kevin Paul with the Community Team at Xbox.com. Apparently the idea for the group came about when he and his co-workers started sharing similar accounts of “accidental spell-casting” upon their spouses and children during their sojourn in Albion, a world where domestic violence goes unchecked and unchallenged by the local constabulary. And we’re not just talking about arsonists.

“Those of us at AAA are accepting of all forms of accidental property damage and manslaughter!,” according to Paul. “Have you accidentally manifested a bevy of blades which found their way into the Town Crier? We’re here for you.”