Bertie
Okay, I’ll fess up – Alfred the Oranda is now fertilising the plants in the rockery, and was replaced by Bertie the, well, Common. Yes, I know, Bertie the Common doesn’t sound as fancy, but he seems to be a bit hardier than his predecessor, so we’re not going to hold that against him.
In more relevant news, I’ve been talking with people at a rather large games company down south about working with them on projects coming up after my contract at Barco ends – nothing confirmed as yet, but very interesting prospects nonetheless. It would be nice to get my hands dirty with some next-gen kit anyway, as I’ve yet to play with any of the new toys which my contemporaries have been working on, and I have a variety of interesting avenues I’d like to investigate with regards to multi-core programming.
The game proposal I mentioned previously has been worked over a couple of times to the point at which I can see a real game in there, interesting and definitely one I’d like to make. I think its got real potential to go places, if I can find enough time to develop a prototype to test out the core mechanics.
And in other news, looks like Atari are looking a little shaky. I recall this happening to BAM just before they bought VIS, although I think Atari are in a stronger position (mostly due to their size). Can’t help that Infogrames are struggling either. This is the same company that was supposedly going to grant VIS a contract for SOE2 which would bail us out of a hole, shortly before that disintegrated because they were ‘restructuring’. And speaking of the kiss-of-death which is BAM, what happened to them? Their web site’s disappeared, but they’re still being tentatively traded (okay only a fifth of a cent per share, but still). All very strange.
I guess my point is – what’s with all the publishers? Developers are always complaining about how the publishers take all the money; and yet it seems there’s always one going under or about to go. Do you think that their cut-throat treatment of developers is finally coming back to bite? Run roughshod over the developers until they go under, then find yourself short of quality products by Q4 a couple of years later? Well, its probably a lot of things, but I can’t help but thinking that the publishers who are on the brink are there because they keep churning out bad games which don’t sell; maybe a little more nurturing of developers would get them better, more reliably good products to sell.