* Despite the push behind The Old Republic, a Janco Partners analyst has proposed that the Mass Effect would make a more profitable MMO for EA.

* Bethesda have revealed that Brink will contain 102 quadrillion unique characters appearances, as well as over 26,000 lines of dialogue (a refreshing high number for the company behind Oblivion).

* Crytek reported around 50 lay-offs, a large hit for the company behind Crysis.

* Sadly, we’re told not to expect a Super Meat Boy 2. After the trials of making the first, Team Meat wants to wash its hands and move on.

* On the plus side, though, there is finally a level editor for the great indie hit.

* Deep Silver, it has been reported, needed Square-Enix to distribute Dead Island.

* Ubisoft have released details about the new Assassin’s Creed game, Revelations.

* The Ages of Empires Online beta is available for download, but best hurry or you will miss the boat.

* Increased game sales of its video games division have partly offset the decline of media giant, Warner Bros.

* EA have reported stated that it expects Star Wars: The Old Republic to be ready and released before March 2012.

* Mass Effect 3 will expand its target market and increase its commercial appeal to a wider audience.

Quick cap news

* League of Legends developers, Riot Games, announced that 100% of sales on the Akali character would go towards relief in Japan. Also, a rare copy of Final Fantasy Tactics is being auctioned by Play for Japan.

* Value have upgraded Steam’s VoIP system by using the SILK codec most commonly found in Skype, increasing bandwidth but allowing much greater quality.

* Crytek are still pretending that they think DRM is at best “a minor inconvenience” and about trying to stop piracy, using simple arguments that have already been knocked out.

* Darkspore gets delayed for another month, but news of an open beta should keep the waiting bearable. New date is 26th April.

* Bioware have warned that SWTOR beta scams have been appearing on the net. Watch out any would-be beta testers that you aren’t getting a raw deal.

* Battlestar Galactica Online was BigPoint’s biggest game launch so far and success was attributed to strong community involvement.

* UKIE welcomed the new budget benefits being offered to UK developers. The benefits are designed to increase investment and encourage smaller developers to grow.

* EA are getting rid of physical copies of manuals in favour of electronic-only copies.

* Deep Shiver has given a very convincing reason why the child violence in the trailer of Dead Island is acceptable. However, there were assurances that there would be no children in the game.

* Finally, the Torchlight MMO will not be charging a monthly subscription, with developers Runic Games arguing that model is no longer viable.

Main news

In a twist of fate, Gearbox announced that Duke Nukem Forever will be delayed a little longer. This means everyone can stop the “it’s finally going to be released” and switch to the “it’s fated not to be released” jokes. Randy Pitchford later explained the delay as trying to bring the game more up to scratch. There was a reveal of a tongue-in-cheek game which lead to the usual sort of responses that most of us are tired of, and once again, Penny Arcade states the obvious and wins my heart.

Also, Peter Molyneux has once again followed his old tactic of slamming his last game to make his next look better. This after Molyneux had already apologised for leading game journalists on a merry chase half the time. Game journalists themselves were unsurprised by his interview. Molyneux also, strangely, claimed that Minecraft was the best game he played in the past ten years, giving rather unusual reasoning, which implies a distinct lack of gaming on his part (not that Minecraft is actually bad, I can just think of a lot better). This shows that Molyneux can occasionally ramble on semi-coherently about games that are not his.

The Background

Crysis 2 and Killzone 3′s early leaks were not the only news last week on the subject of piracy. The PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA) reported a drop in overall piracy rates and yet, despite this, PC gaming fans were the first to turn to self-censure and even go as far as accuse the majority of PC gamers of being pirates in some cases. Personally, I know of very little piracy that goes on amongst my own gaming circle and I think digital distribution is largely the cause of the drop in piracy reported by the PCGA.

If this is the case then why is there this gnashing of teeth and wailing of the damned coming from several gaming magazines and electronic publications about piracy? First of all, regardless of the amount, it is still a bad thing as it is ultimately the pirates playing for free something that funds further work by the developers. I will leave aside arguments over whether software should be open or closed source; neither side disputes the idea that if you use a piece of software then the best thing to do is to help contribute to future development and, in most situations, that means with money.

Are gaming publications biased? If so, why?

But the fact that piracy is bad is not the issue, no one except a few people on the peripheries on this debate would argue against that. I think the reasons for an extreme response like my example above are more complex than a simple dislike of pirates. One thing I think has a large part in this is the influence large game publishers have over games journalism.

Around July of 2000, someone at Sony invented a fictitious film critic named David Manning. Manning produced blurbs praising various films from Sony subsidiary Columbia Pictures, which had been reeling out pieces of trash, one after the other. This was all revealed and Sony had to allocate blame and wipe the egg off its face.

One thing Sony never did was threaten real movie critics with bans on attending review screenings in response to bad reviews, but this is not an uncommon event midst the youthful games journalism we know today. A certain magazine starts really criticising a major games publisher? Quite a few publishers are going to make as much trouble as possible for that magazine (my about page mentions the example of Team 17 with Amiga Power in the 90s).

I would like to mention another thing that points to this problem. Look at Metacritic and you’ll see that it has given DC Universe Online, at the time of writing, 73% based on 21 reviews. Metacritic considers this a mediocre score and this is not an oddity of Metacritic. Picking out a film that got 61% on 17 reviews (Cold Weather is my example here), Metacritic gives this a green light, signifying positive reviews overall. Why is that dichotomy happening? Look at the review listings for Eurogamer for your answer.

Eurogamer reports 5/10 as “average” and 6/10 as “above average” in its score key (it scores games on a scale of 1 to 10). Out of the 865 PC reviews, 529 of these (just over 61%) are 7 or above. The breakdown is below.

I’m not the first and I won’t be the last to point this out about professional games reviewers. What does any of this have to do with piracy though? The answer is that it was a rather detailed way of saying that publications could have a very strong bias in overestimating the prevalence and effect of piracy. I argue they make efforts to appease the games industry, reviewing policy shows this when contrasted to things like the Team 17/Amiga Power dispute, and that the vitriol in their reports about piracy is a manifestation of these efforts.

This is what I argue they do, it is not the case that the majority of PC gamers are pirates as was claimed. Yet still, as the articles in the last week in gaming seem to proclaim, we ought to not be surprised that developers and publishers hate PC gamers, we ought not to be surprised if Crysis 2 fails at the marketplace because pirates will make sure that 95 out of 100 PC gamers have cracked, illegal copies of it, we ought to accept that we have to remain constantly connected to the internet to play Assassin’s Creed 2 even when Ubisoft can’t keep the servers up under demand or that we should need an internet connection and a limited number of installs for Spore before we have to contact EA again.

There is a fallacy called the base rate fallacy. It comes in quite a few forms and both Jim Sterling’s article at Destructoid and Miklós Szecsei’s article at Lazy Gamer commit it. A while ago, the author and supposed expert Carole Lieberman told Fox News that sexualised violence in video gaming is responsible for the increase in rapes, even when there is no such increase (the US, like most if not all Western nations, has a low and rapidly decreasing number of rapes per capita). She committed a form of this fallacy because she ignored the base rate. Most games journalists were very quick to point such out, as quickly as some would accuse the majority of PC gamers of being pirates.

So how much piracy is there?

Maybe they are not exaggerating the amount of piracy. One often cited example of the prevalence of piracy is the successful indie hit World of Goo. The developers reported, on their blog, that piracy was around 90%. The method was quickly pointed out by many as flawed and the developers added in some corrections that reduced the rate of piracy to a still considerable 82%.

I still have multiple problems with their stat gathering that lead me to believe the numbers are much lower than their corrected estimate. I won’t list them all here, but my choice problem is the equation of what raises and lowers the rate of reported players out there. It’s extremely crude and such a equivalence blows it out the water as a groundwork for any claim about the prevalence of piracy. Still it gets presented on several gaming websites as near objective despite the fact it doesn’t even remotely approach the vigour of serious statistics.

So I have no clue how much World of Goo has been pirated and neither do the guys at 2D Boy because they don’t have any concrete data. So where do we get the real data from? It’s hard to actually find anything approaching good statistics, even the sources of the PCGA’s claims are obscure in the publications I have checked.

Look at the Seventh Annual BSA and IDC Global Software Piracy Study from 2009 (2010 has not yet been produced) and you’ll see that overall software piracy (not just including games) has risen, on a world scale, “from 41% in 2008 to 43% in 2009.” Already a lot lower than what 2D Boy’s statistics and the prophets of doom would indicate, but the report goes on to say the piracy increase is “largely a result of exponential growth in the PC and software markets in higher piracy, fast growing markets such as Brazil, India and China.”

What does that mean?

These higher piracy markets (the report states software piracy is as low as 20% in the USA) are developing nations with recent growth in the sales of PCs. What is important in calculating the effect of piracy on sales is how much of those billions of dollars in software would be converted to real sales and this data shows that software piracy occurs most in the poorest markets, ones where consumers have the lowest capital to invest in software if it is available and the lowest availability of software legitimately anyway. This certainly matches what the PCGA have been saying as well as the experiences of companies like Valve, who reported much higher sales in nations with high piracy rates like Russia simply by making their games more readily available via digital distribution technology. Further, since pirates are known to pirate more software than their normal incomes would allow as legitimate purchases, that cuts into how much of that piracy can be converted into actual sales even in developed countries (but by how much I would not want to say).

What I am saying is…

What I want people going away from this concluding is that software piracy, while wrong, is not the problem it is presented to be by the media. The age-old problem of the media blowing things out of proportion has reared its extremely ugly head once again and people would be wise to note that games with very noted piracy problems like Spore or Bioshock have still been overwhelming commercial successes. The level of piracy does not justify this almost “Nietzschean ascetic” view of PC gamers; we are not criminals or thieves, nor does it justify the failed attempt at preventing piracy that DRM represents (if pirates are indeed the target of DRM).

Yet piracy does exist and it should be stopped. The answers lies in the sort of responses to it that Valve gave above, or those by Positech or Ice Pick Lodge that I mentioned last week. I am led to wonder, however, if the removal of all piracy would simply rob folks at EA or Ubisoft a much beloved and very useful bogeyman.

The quick cap news

* Richard Garriott returns with his latest offering Portalarium and talks about the costs and distribution model of social games. On the other side, Braid designer, Jonathen Blow, criticised social games for the way they treat consumers.

* Civilization IV became the first game to win a Grammy award for the song Baba Yetu. It took the “Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s)” in the 53rd annual award (incidentally, both it and the sequel, Civilization V are in the Steam deals as of the time of writing).

* Dragon Age II has gone gold, with a demo coming out in the next few days (the 22nd, to be exact). The completion of this demo unlocks a special dwarven weapon for use in the full version of this game upon release.

* Microsoft have been teasing people about a potential new Halo game, in a demonstration of the Kinect, they briefly displayed an image showing “Halo 5″ for a second or so. What happened to Halo 4, anyway?

* Magicka, the new indie hit with its innovative magic system, has hit 200K in sales. Certainly, with a lot of the bugs patched, it is a much more solid, enjoyable game and with only a few more minor tweaks, proper online play is viable. DLC is forthcoming.

* Activision Blizzard has been in the news a lot recently, with Blizzard announcing that its upcoming Starcraft II expansion, Heart of the Swarm, will likely not see a 2011 release.

* On the same front and despite its recent redundancies and the closing of a studio, rumours abound that Activision are interested in acquiring Take-Two Interactive. The rumour comes from British gaming magazine MCV and, for those not in the know about European media, the tendency to be as vague as possible about your sources here leads me to take this rumour with a pinch of salt.

* The open beta of the F2P MMO APB: Reloaded has attracted over 100k sign-ups. With a beta program set to begin on the 28th of this month, there is hope to revive what was one of the biggest flops in video gaming history.

* In other F2P news, Champions Online’s switch to a F2P model seems to have propped up Atari’s failing boxed retail sales and there is more news on Paradox Interactive’s Salem popping up, confirming perma-death.

* Finally, it seems Bungie are working on a new MMO FPS, possibly titled Destiny. Rumours abound about this ambitious project, which will be Bungie’s first post-Halo offering.

Main news

The big story today is that Crysis 2 and Killzone 3 have both been leaked onto the internet by pirates. The PS3 Killzone 3 leak comes after the Sony’s failed attempts to subpoena Google and Twitter in relation to PS3 hacks. In a joint statement, EA and Crytek lamented the leak of Crysis 2 and encouraged players to buy the game.

What this has lead to is two rather undesirable groups emerging: on the one hand we have the pirates themselves who use all sorts of justifications for their illegal activity and on the other PC gamers who run to levels of self-depreciation that would make Opus Dei members pause. What is needed, in my opinion, is a middle ground between these ultimately unhelpful extremes.

As an example of a better middle ground, l would present the reactions of people like Ice-Pick Lodge in response to the piracy of The Void and that of Gratuitous Space Battles creator Cliff Harris. They spoke with and tried to understand why pirates pirated games, Ice Pick even made a torrent of bonus content available. They were not sympathetic to pirates, as Cliff Harris wrote in his summary of events, but they tried to tackle the problem without useless recourse to DRM or talking about pirates while using the noun “fuck” or the adjective “fucking” every five seconds. As to The Void and GSB, I encourage everyone to look at and buy those excellent games.

Our second story is about the fate of Mirror’s Edge 2. EA rejected the pitch given by Swedish developer DICE after what was acknowledged to be less than expected sales of the first game. Despite excellent reviews, the game only entered UK charts at 20. While people at DICE have moved on to Battlefield 3, EA commented to 1UP claiming that the game was still in the background, refusing to confirm the game’s cancellation, and that it was “an important franchise” to EA. Further news on the future of the game as it comes. I personally find it telling that EA thinks of it as “IP” and a franchise rather than as a game, but that is inevitable given they are a large publisher who think in terms of what sells or does not rather than the innovation, beauty and grace of a game.

That’s all for the second week in gaming. Have a good weekend.

The quick cap news

* The Battlestar Galactica Online beta is open.

* LittleBigPlanet shoes auctioned for Child’s Play, but you wouldn’t find that out via Fox News (see below).

* A new Dungeon Siege III trailer, as well as a preview for Dragon Age II.

* For fans of F2P games, Eurogamer reviewed Bloodline Champions, giving it a respectable 8/10. Also, Paradox Interactive announced the F2P MMORPG Salem, set in the early days of American colonialism.

Main news

It’s been a very interesting week for the first of my blog’s existence. The first item is that EA has closed three Warhammer Online servers, two American and one European, it is offering free character transfers off the closing servers.

In the PC v. console wars, there was talk of the effect console porting might have on Dragon Age II. On the other hand, despite not being a PC exclusive, Crysis 2 will be superior on the PC in every way according to Crytek. Quite frankly, if they can make the game stand out from the crowd in something other than its graphics, like perhaps gameplay, they will have made a superior product to the original as far as I’m concerned. There’s also a rumour that Battlefield 3 will be supporting extra features on the PC as well as the higher player limit.

Of the two big pieces of news, first we have the whole nonsense from Fox News. In service to their dark gods of hyperbole, Fox has attacked Bulletstorm on the grounds that it “ties the ugly, graphic violence into explicit sex acts: ‘topless’ means cutting a player in half, while a ‘gang bang’ means killing multiple enemies.” The fact that people at Fox think being topless is an explicit sex act almost worries me more than the fact that they won’t listen to the more rational arguments, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone; these are the people who think Bill O’Reilly is a journalist. The good news is that, apparently, if you pre-order Bulletstorm (made by People Can Fly, the makers of the excellent Painkiller) from the EA Store, you’ll get Shank for free. Fox have nothing to say on whether Shank will increase the likelihood of rape, so be careful.

Activision has cut quite a lot recently. There was news of job cuts at Vicarious Visions and FreeStyleGames as well as the killing off of Guitar Hero. This got expanded when the 2009 acquisition, 7 Studios, was closed down. This prompted Harmonix to encourage GH fans over to Rock Band. Not that Harmonix has had the best time of it, either. Activision Blizzard’s share price dropped 8% after reporting 2010 financial results on Wednesday.

That’s all for this week. A good weekend to all.