Morning DLC: Video Game News & Rumors 1/18/2016
"The Division’s beta will run from 28th-31st January on Xbox One, Ubisoft has announced.PC and PlayStation 4 owners then get the beta from 29th-31st January – so a day less in total.Ubisoft just revealed the dates via The Division’s Twitter page. Access is open to everyone who has pre-ordered the game, as well as folk who sign up to the waiting list on Ubisoft’s site."
The partnership deals for beta windows always seemed pretty dumb, so Xbox One getting a whole day’s worth of first access exclusivity to The Division’s beta isn’t that bad for other platforms. I mean, the point of betas has, traditionally, meant to reflect a video game in a beta stage, not as a marketing tool to promote a tease of a game under the guise of something else. The data retrieved from online sessions should help Ubisoft prepare for the game’s full launch, however.
"Kickstarter continued to grow in 2015 — especially as a destination for games, with nearly 1 million backers contributing more than $133.6 million to 2,259 successful projects, according to statistics published by Kickstarter today.Both the funding and the number of projects were up significantly from 2014, when gaming Kickstarters raised a total of $76.1 million for 1,980 successful projects. That puts the year-over-year increases at 75.5 percent for the amount of money raised, and 14.1 percent for the number of successful games-based Kickstarters."
Kickstarter also underwent a major identity transformation as an entity, shifting from a for-profit company to a Benefit Corporation. That change will certainly be important over the coming years as more and more gaming projects start to fail and neglect properly paying back pledges. The impact of blowing through a sizeable chunk of peoples’ money and how such projects are punished need to weigh the positive and negative effects towards society, which may impact what can be considered a fair response.
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Finally, the infamous visual novel series makes its way off the PS Vita ghettos and onto the PC platform. Considering the series’ cult status (also known as prominent status for those who happen to own Sony’s fledgling handheld), the goal is for word of mouth to spread and much larger audience are exposed to the stories at hand.