Intellivision Amico seems to be the Anti-Corporate gaming machine.
They state they FORBID on their system these things, and I believe most people at SRK hate most things but find one a little random.
- No incomplete games where you must make deluxe to make complete
- No add on purchases period, because of hiding code that changes game balance between humans in what’s advertised as a fair gaming system
- Requiring a multiplayer mode, and (if I’m reading the copy right) FORBIDDING multiplayer online.
- $10 maximum price for a game. ( I guesd that discourages games primarily played for the story, like these Hollywood-budget games.)
- E10 is the most mature rating allowed (would that limit fighting games to just “first contact wins” games like Karate Champ and Divekick?)
- No ads.
I think 6 is the most random one because currently, advertising is against Nintendo’s, Sony’s and Microsoft’s policies.
A NOTE TO SRK MODS:. At this point I would encapsulate long details in spoiler tags, where readers only reveal the details if they want, but can skip the details if they get the idea in one sentence, but there was a no way to do it on my Android phone using the SRK forum app. I see preview, add picture, trash, tags, main topic, and the 3 line option symbol just backing you up one level. I don’t want to lose my progress but, I you like to make TLDR complaints, come back when I can add spoiler blurs and wait to finish. People like long articles… If they like the subject, the author, or only want details if they are unconvinced of my statement being true.
I understand some games can be artistically and ludistically compromised if the game is 100% funded by one company. But the independent advertiser model, like that used on broadcast TV from the 70s onward, has it ever been tried in the gaming arena,. Primarily because commercials cost memory and until recently constantly variable memory is scarce. now with the internet you could in theory download a commercial live and it be totally independent of the game content.
I tried calling Microsoft Sony and Nintendo,. Asking if I could give a game for free as a download and in return put a commercial in every so often. I was thinking like a card game when multiple hands could like have two 30 second commercial every five minutes of gameplay. Dead be 50 minutes of game time for every hour real time, in 10 minutes of commercials for every hour real time. Which is a lot less commercial-packed than even basic cable what you pay for partially.
I said whether the 30% licensing fee comes from game sales or whether it comes from advertising revenue, as long as Sony Nintendo and Xbox get their 30% share, does it really matter where it comes from?
I started noticing that and the transition from Xbox 360 to Xbox one. in the 360 days Microsoft proudly proclaim that all games that are download only must have a try before you buy demo. That way no one can complain if they buy the game blind and want a refund. It’s like ordering a triple scoop of something you’re not sure you’re going to like if they offer you a milliliter spoon of it, you refused and you buy it anyway. caveat emptor.
That’s a pretty fair pro-consumer sales model. Unfortunately enough developers and publishers. It was anti-gane maker. People just play the demo over and over, and live on free samples forever and not pay for the content. The game makers wanted to be paid for the content and the free demo was the easy way out.
Now I understand Microsoft’s concern,. They don’t want to endlessly Challenge your refund request. Of these three systems: the PS3, the Wii and the Xbox 360, the 360 was the most supported of the three, by me at least, because I had the freedom to try before I buy. Some of these Nintendo wiiware games sound interesting on paper, but I’ve been burnt by enough rentals of Wii disc games to know that motion controls doesn’t make everything lollipops and unicorns. Some games are actually crippled because of it. And if the motion controls are not intuitive, good intentions pave the path to gaming hell.
So literally the only games I took a chance on on the Wii and PS3 werethe games I pretty much understood the content, like wheel of Fortune press your luck, mega Man, elevator action, and other familiar names, or also had try-before-you-buy which was legal on the other two just not required like Xbox.
Now if you call Microsoft and talk to them about their Xbox 360 try before you buy mandated demos, they deny they ever did that.
The only exceptions were games that were available on disc because you could rent them add GameFly Redbox and, before they went out of business Blockbuster and Hollywood.
I guess developers complained that people are playing free games and not getting any money. but the solution isn’t to put a veil over the games and put a toll gate to take a peek.
Advertising would be the perfect way to do this. If you put a 1-minute commercial for every 5 minutes of game content, and your game is played a lot and even replayed and played online against human opponents, if you charge $10 for such a game, and we come up even at 500 minutes of game content, or 8 hours and 20 minutes of game content, and you get paid for 1 hour and 40 minutes of commercial content.
If you have something like Street fighter, where anywhere from 50 to 99% of the fun is challenging real live humans around the world, then if you were Capcom, would you bet on the fact that it would be frequently replayed, or bet on high initial interest and low replay by paying for it upfront? If the big three allowed it they probably would have made it a free game with one out of every six minutes of content being commercials. it’s kind of like paying by the game at the arcade instead of you plunking in a quarter, you plunk in 30 seconds of ad time when you start.
All three Microsoft Sony and Nintendo said it’s illegal to have independent ads on there without the system maker’s approval. So literally the only advertising funded games are Doritos games, which are given free, and 1 vs 100 which had 3 one minute commercial breaks for every half hour game and one of those sponsors was pre-approved as Sprint.
If Intellivision wants to stop bad cheap rip-off games, like Hollywood size budgets funding primarily story games is very little innovative gameplay, with hardly any replay value once you beat the main story, then these three things combined should tamp them down, a $10 price cap, allowing for ads (because ads ruin proportionately story-based games far worse than game play based games) , and forcing them to either pick pay license or ad base funding, not both.
the main reason why I had talked about making an Amico game was because I thought my game of triple topper, available at tripletopper.com , which is a set of card games with special deck that’s more advanced and build off current public domain games, would have a tough time selling it if I ask people to pay for it, so my gaming model would have been to have basic public domain card games,. Show ads every so often,. when you shown yourself proficient at a certain basic games you are in the special triple topper version, (a free unlock) and using some of the ad money to fund a prize pool for a tournament every so often. And because you don’t have to pay for the game it’s legal in all 50 states and everywhere except places where free contests are illegal.
I found a company that successfully does it arkadium.com. they make their money by having free flash games showing ads in front of every credit and at the end if you’ve earned some raffle ticket points, which could only learn by doing well in the games, which cannot be bought for any price except learning them on games, and have no cash value until put in a raffle and still no cash value unless your raffle ticket gets picked.
It’s just a couple things that we’re not a good fit. One was my game requires human competition to do well and all of Arkadium’s games are single player versus “the system”. (Implying no AI CPU opponent, like a solitaire.) And the other is my games are unique games where most of Arkaium’s games are they’re unique versions of public domain games.
Since console gamers are more adventurous then flash gamers, I assume consoles are the way to go. But consoles would only make sense if my economic plan were in place, free to play as much as you want, paid for by advertising, with the more you play, the more I get paid. No one had tried that before with completely independent ads.
I know people who gamble real money to see who could achieve an Xbox achievement first. Some people also research how easy or hard achievement is and buy games off that. Pretty much every one of those people would love the chance to have a free game to get free achievements, and that’s free money.
Unfortunately Nintendo Microsoft and Sony do not allow for advertising these games. I tried to tell him that if the only tool you have is game licensing then everything looks like a sellable copy of a game. I understand not requiring game companies to use advertising, because story games would ruin the mood with an ad, but forbidding advertising takes away a tool in the toolbox. You don’t have to use that tool in your big-budget Hollywood type game where story is more important than gameplay, but don’t keep it from people like me.
Now I understand the issues with a company whose most mature game is stated to be E10. I know you don’t want any Budweiser or Victoria’s Secret commercials. R rated movies are probably a No-No, same with TV MA shows an m rated games. And only “green banner” previews of PG-13 movies tv-14 shows or t rated games.
And I believe the broadcast restrictions on kids advertising are reasonable. Requiring content minimums, and clearly differentiating ad content and game content. So would be reasonable that if Sega made an Amico Sonic game, Sonic cannot appear in any commercial between the time you select the game and the time you go back to the operating system. Ever wonder why the toys r us commercial always showed your favorite character based toy only in ads that are not on that toy’s show? Kids TV advertising regulations. Toys r us had to make so many cuts of their commercial because of that regulation.
The funny thing is it only applied to broadcast TV. Basic cable’s first big hit show Double Dare, did something that was common in all adult game shows that was challenged when the rights moved from Nickelodeon to Fox ( and in syndication where there was no Fox station in the TV market) they had to take out of the show the fact that every contestant gets a copy of the home game. The made for cable versions had that pitch, but not the made for Fox ones.
So yes, annoying the hell out of people with ads every minute of gameplay and coming out of it, a pitch to say “remove ads? pay so much now.” is annoying, but if you make a guarantee of maximum one minute of ads for five minutes of content, which comes to 50 minutes of content per hour,. Which is good compared to basic cable which started that high and it’s become as bad as popular broadcast being 42 minutes of content per hour, and also make promises that game design and story will not be compromised by ads with any decree of intellivision, (I guess the exceptions would be Midway’s Tapper, which was conceived as a Budweiser pitching game, because the game concept wouldn’t make sense unless you were in a bar, and other stuff that’s a game maket’s decision.) Kid-friendly ad content, kid friendly products advertised within ads, and no ads by characters within their own game of real products.
I know there’s a good way to do ads and a bad way to do ads. For example, one ad placement theory is the cliffhanger theory, where you always put the hero in mortal danger just before the commercial break hoping people stick around to see what happens, and people remember the commercials in between.
That does that has the opposite effect in games. If you are in the middle of a shooter and since someone is on your tail Amy at you and you got to make the right Dodge, and a commercial break is called, that affects the game. you have 30 seconds to think about your action plan your move think about possible reactions by your opponent and plan.
That does two things. One is it removes the instantaneous hair trigger action associated with the game. The other is the commercial be completely ignored because you’re too busy planning and out thinking and counter planning in your opponent.
Instead the Miller Time theory would be a better replacement. When you just speed a tough boss, the last thing you want to be as hair trigger. You’re happy you did well there and want to relax. That’s the time you want to watch a commercial. get your brain and fingers and reflexes out of hair trigger mode and just relax and enjoy the commercial.
Also the Insert Coin theory might make a decent ad placement theory. Where instead of plunking in a literal quarter, you watch an ad and they plunk the virtual quarter for your credit. It’s an incentive to do well.
Another thing it does is if the game is played on twitch or mixer not only does the player see the commercial but the twitch and mixer viewers also see it as well. More eyeballs means more bucks.
However I do have a friend who says commercials even as an option to pay for Xbox servers and games would be an awful idea. Maybe a flex license would be possible, where is considered an advertising model until you pay for an ad free pass. so therefore instead of having Xbox live gold be the only way to play online multiplayer, Xbox live silver would be free online what would be a supported online play. if you have more money than time and you like the free games at gold gives you you probably prefer the gold,. If you’re not that big a fan of most of the free games, have more time than money, and are a more occasional player than the hardcore top 10% of games, then maybe silver is a better path.
My friend says I’m making gold worse. Gold would be exactly the same. I’m just making silver better. I think my friend is trying to make Xbox an elite brand kind of like the Mercedes or Cadillac of online games, add anything that plays for free like the Sega Dreamcast model today, is basically the Chevrolet or Volkswagen of online games.
All the good companies have both an elitist brand or package and the people’s package. In America Mercedes is associated with luxury, because in the old days sheriff import taxes benefited luxury items proportionally better than cheap items. That the lack of tariffs made economy more value than luxury on imports. However in Europe during war common folk Mercedes brands, so in Europe they do run the gamut from bare basic to ultra-luxury, it just because of old import laws that benefited luxury is a reason why Mercedes in America is associated as such.
The other issue which made my temperature go up was requiring multiplayer local yet at the same time forbidding multiplayer online. I know this is much more of an issue for me than the average person because most of television gamers probably now have wives (gaming started out mostly male,) and kids, heck maybe even grandkids.
I literally have only one other person remotely interested in games in my house,. And he’s more of a mythophilr liking the NES SNES and Genesis era of games. I’m more of a ludophile more at home with ColecoVision, Intellivision, and Atari. Also remember the arcade scene of the nineties or Street Fighter was in which brought back the ludophile game in arcades.
My brother thinks story games have gone too far to be more movie than game. The most competitive my brother has ever been in was getting a one-credit Ghouls and Ghosts completion and a couple other one credit completions like tiger road, and mercs, and challenging people in the arcade to Cyberball, and challenging both the level nine bot and a few friends at BallBlazer for the Atari 800.
I got the twin galaxies world record on Simpsons arcade for one player one credit most points standard settings. And when my right-handed fightstick did work… Oh! What mountains I climbed on Street Fighter 2.4.
My point is that I am more of a game gourmet, willing to try more games than by brother, steady diet of the same game to the point where he masters it and finishes it.
By the way I used to be more like my brother until Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time broke me. But years later he did give me the courage to have the two of us beat the Saturn version of Rayman. How many people did beat the Saturn (or PlayStation 1) version of Rayman?
I doubt we’ll find a two player game we’d like to play together as either a co-op team or head-to-head competition. And don’t get boring the play the same partner / opponent over and over. Crippling the system by intentionally blocking the future that would make Amico more fun it’s probably the stupidest idea out of some ideological principle the games have to be played local co-op.
In the old days it was arcades as the social gaming scene. Later, while most people did it with GoldenEye, our clan was mostly Saturn Bomberman, local versus was cool too. and Sega predicted the downfall of the arcade when they added Internet gaming steam to the Dreamcast.
I say limiting our options to just local multiplayer is working at cross-purposes with what they’re intending at Intellivision. How you go out and play with friends if your friends are very far away? How do you play with family if there is no such thing as family as far as you’re concerned? You’re only social connection is literally the internet,. And when your maximum home speed is 1.5 Meg, it’s like having body odor when you go outside in the internet, and being unable to use deodorant to make your network tolerable.
I know I am most likely the outlier, but social gaming should be for everybody, not just the well-connected.
One last time, sorry for the long post but there’s no way to hide extra details the people who complain about TLDR. As indicated I’m socially isolated. until it gets better speeds, or a cure for my Asperger’s syndrome, this is literally the only way I can reach out and talk to people.
