Today we get a new president, the 10th in my lifetime and the third during the life of the blog. The state government here in California has declared itself opposed in all ways possible to the new president, which I find mildly amusing because the last governor of the state was Arnold Schwarzenegger and in the last election we not only failed ban the death penalty, most voters actually went for the ballot initiative that promised to speed up the process of killing. How very liberal we are.
Back on the video game front, it is a rainy Friday morning and I have a few small stories I want to mention but which are probably not worth a whole post. None of them, to my knowledge, involve the new president.
Pokemon Billionaires
An article up over at Venture Beat gives the total 2016 revenue for Pokemon Go as $950 million. For a game that launched on July 6th of 2016, that is a pretty impressive take. To put that into MMO perspective, World of Warcraft was raking in over a billion dollars a year at its peak, but nowhere near double Pokemon Go’s six month total.
Now, of course, there are a lot of “buts” to that story. The earnings were very much front loaded, with the initial $600 million coming in the first 90 days before revenues began to taper off. This isn’t going to be a year over year Juggernaut like WoW. And, of course, revenue isn’t cash in the pocket. Apple takes their cut off the top, then Niantic takes theirs, after which they pay the Pokemon Company their licensing cut, from which eventually Nintendo gets some money.
But for the meager amount of effort Nintendo put in to the whole thing, it did pay mighty dividends, boosting sales of other Pokemon games and even of 3DS hardware. Even if everybody stops playing Pokemon Go tomorrow, Nintendo, Game Freak, and the Pokemon Company have done very well out of the deal.
Hero’s Song Refund
We heard the tale of the end of Hero’s Song late last month as Smed’s first post SOE/Daybreak gaming venture had to fold up its tents and call it a day. The game walked a troubled path, with a failed Kickstarter campaign and, later, an Indiegogo campaign that fell short of the funding target. But with Indiegogo you get to keep the money pledged, even if you don’t make your goal, so Pixelmage got some money out of the deal. It just wasn’t enough to carry on.
Then Pixelmage did the unexpected and said they would give people their money back. And they did. I got my refund via PayPal for the two licenses I bought.
Refund
Not every crowd-funded project is going to have the luxury of doing that, but it is nice to see one make the effort when they had the means.
Refund Splurge
So there I had $28 in my PayPal wallet, and I never carry a balance with PayPal, so I turned around and blew the whole lot on three games from Steam wish list. I grabbed Orwell (plus the soundtrack), Atlantic Fleet, and Death Ray Manta. So those, along with my Steam Winter Sale purchases, give me a small pile of games to work on.
Ruse of the Day
One of the things that Pandemic Legion does is put out invites to high profile players in other groups. Asher reports that he has three such invites to different corps in PL. Apparently gigX, the leader of Circle-of-Two, took one of those invites, joined ElitistOps, (which has been part of GoonSwarm, Band of Brothers, and Pandemic Legion) and then let his mates in CO2 blow up three of his capital ships (Moros, Apostle, and Revelation) just to mess with their kill board stats before rejoining CO2. Was it worth it?
New Eden Good News/Bad News
Elsewhere on the EVE Online front, we got a look into what is coming up in the game, which includes the ability to insure ships in citadels finally. On the down side, the game has been experiencing rubberbanding, latency, and desync issues since the last patch. CCP is working on that, but it isn’t fixed just yet.
So that is all I have. Back to the rains here. We only seem to have two settings in our part of the state; drought or deluge. At least during the deluge I can take a nice long shower.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 