Bummer. Game Informer was the leading game magazine when Game Pro and Nintendo Power were around, though? I think not. Game Informer was third fiddle at best.
2006 is a bit late in the game. Game magazines as a relevant medium peaked in the 90s. By 2006 you have a pretty robust internet, what’s the point? Yeah, sure, if you stick them in every single B&N they’ll sell, but Game Pro and Nintendo Power were institutions in the 90s. If you wanted to know about games, that was the way.
Fair point! Looks like Nintendo Power had well over a million throughout the 90s and Game Pro sat around half a million. GI didn’t start until 1991 so it would’ve been significantly lower, but it started getting pushed harder by 2000.
We’ve probably done more research in this thread than the person writing the article lol
Honestly I mostly just know because I have a big stack of old Game Pros and Nintendo Powers from the 90s and I only ever remember seeing Game Informer in Barnes and Noble once those became a thing.
Same here, back in the 90’s had multiple year’s worth of Nintendo Power magazines & later on Game Pro as well. I do remember seeing Game Informer around & sometimes bought those issues but never really got into them. I can’t even think of any friends that had Game Informer magazines back in those days.
TBH I’m kind of surprised at those numbers /u/GammaGames@beehaw.org posted, maybe Game Informer was a bigger thing outside of the northeast U.S. where I was.
It was mostly distributed by FuncoLand, and only really started to pick up when they included it in their Fan Club subscription. B&N bought them in 2000 and pushed it hard while expanding stores, eventually they got big enough that they could get exclusive reveals.
So it’s a case of pretty much always being bundled in with another service!
What’s up with everyone calling it ugly? It’s a shit car, but I think it looks cool. Something that has no place in reality, but fitting in a video game.
The cybertruck has enough issues that I wouldn’t want one, but yeah I would like a car looking like that, if it was actually a good car not made by Tesla.
Yet another reason for me to never play this game. It’s full of contextless characters, appropriated and stolen dances/animations, microtransactions and now this rubbish.
Sadly, it remains a great game to play with friends bc even casual gamers understand the appeal. So alas…it continues to take up 60gb on my games drive.
I hope this person tries out real games. Like counter strike 3, halo 1, battlefield 3, call of duty 4 or something like that. Current games kinda suck.
Why is Fortnite not a real game? It’s fine to not like things, and good to criticize Epic for their terrible practices in and out of Fortnite, but saying it isn’t a real game smells gatekeepy to me.
I always wonder this with these brand crossovers that fortnite has become synonymous with. My guess is that it’s something close to “neither” - there is a contract that is signed, but I think because both parties benefit, very little money actually changes hands between Epic and the IP owner.
Car manufacturers get the last say on how their cars are used on any media; and they typically go with licence agreements of some sorts.
The licencing is typically done on a set time frame (which is why most car games that uses real cars does get taken off of stores like 5-7 years later.).
On Fortnite, revenue sharing is done between the IP owner and Epic Games based on how much the said item sells. Since they can this item launch as a limited time sale; this gives a big playerbase an incentive to buy it.
Usually, when it’s a one-off like this, the video game gets “paid” to put the stuff in their game. That payment may be in-kind advertising campaigns, etc.
For something like Need for Speed, Forza, etc, the game will be licensing the likeness of the vehicles and the company logos in the game. I don’t know the costs, but the fact that it’s also advertising will factor in.
In this case, there are a few likely scenarios:
The game director or art director or someone high up at Epic has a hard-on for the Cybertruck and really wanted it in the game. So they pursued Tesla and made a deal.
Epic wanted to add vehicles to the game and decided to go with licensed vehicles. Their merchandising people reached out to merchandising people at all the auto companies and then figured out some deals.
Someone high up at Tesla (maybe even Musk) loves, or has a kid who loves, Fortnite and decided they want the Cybertruck in the game. So they pursued Epic to make a deal.
Number 2 is most likely, but I don’t know the game well enough to know the vehicle situation in it.
For all of them, you have to factor in a bunch of details to figure out who is paying who:
who wants it more (/ power imbalance)
how much money is it going to cost to make the models, animations, etc
how much is it going to cost players to get the item
are there aspects that either company finds undesirable (E.g. sometimes car companies don’t like their cars shown with damage)
who will be doing the bulk of the marketing, and who has the marketing budget to spend on the venture
probably a lot more
So, it’s hard to say without more inside info. Games I’ve worked on have had 1 and 2, but not 3 as far as I know. I think it was pretty much an in-kind deal for the 1 situation though (like we got the likenesses, they got advertising through the game, ostensibly we sold more games with the likenesses, but I think it just stroked someone’s ego…) All of the 2 situations were done to bring in money for the game’s marketing budget / or were in-kind marketing deals, possibly bringing money directly to the bottom line, but I don’t know.
It says the beta was to test multiplayer so hopefully that means the PvP multiplayer mode and not the campaign co-op mode. If so, I’m fine with that; the pvp mode looked interesting but that’s not what I’m really buying it for.
Traditional, pre-2006, beta tests were bug hunts in feature complete software. Then public beta tests became a thing that rapidly evolved into marketing for a finished game. Most public betas don’t see any bugs fixed on launch.
Generally, devs have felt very pressured when given multiple release date goals. By that I mean getting out a playable E3 demo, a “beta”, a demo, an early access for preorders…
It means if, say, the character has always had a clipping issue with their holster but it’s not a priority, the team can focus on important work/bugs first and their QA just kind of acknowledges the weird holster. But anytime they’re releasing, every detail like that has to be trimmed up for however many levels are coming out.
So yeah, I’m in favor of them avoiding any marketing betas if it helps them.
kotaku.com
Gorące