Gaming Legends Open New Business
Scott Orr and Bart Besseling aren’t new to this business. Scott Orr is the man behind John Madden NFL, NHL Hockey and NASCAR Racing, to name a few. Bart Besseling has, since 1995, run Quarium Inc., a development company that has contributed to LucasArts, Pogo, EA and many others. To say that these two guys know the games business, is like saying that Michelangelo was a doodler. So, why do I mention all this? They’ve just opened the doors on their latest company, and it looks like something we may want to keep an eye on.
D2C Games is the latest project for Scott Orr and Bart Besseling. After leaving Electronic Arts, Orr started Sorrent (now known as Glu Mobile), which has done very well in the mobile market. Now, with D2C, Orr and Besseling are moving into casual gaming and episodic sci-fi/horror gaming, as well as digital comic distribution, that’s targeted towards console downloads (Sony PS3, PSP and XBox 360) as well as some work in the mobile space. Using a set of tools developed by Quarium, known as Hydrant Technology, D2C will also be helping other independent developers produce games for their digital distribution platform.
Watch Giga Gamez early next week for an interview with Scott Orr and Bart Besseling about D2C games, digital comics and where we can expect to see D2C going in the near future.
Ugh, shit. Another warning flag goes up here, with their tagline of “Casual games for a new generation”. I guess it’s to be expected from people who worked for EA AND made a living from the cell market, but there’s just all kinds of fucking wrong with that sort of mindset.
The gig is, the current conception of “hardcore” gamers and “casual” gamers is extraordinarily perverted in the first place. The hardcore got turned off by rampant bullshit, and the loser hangers on saw that they were the only ones left and, as such, became the de facto “hardcore”. The actual hardcore, having seen it all already and no longer willing to fund abject stupidity, stopped buying as much as they did. And with that lack of things to buy, their interest dropped; they were pushed out so much that they were at the same distance as non-gamers.
Then something completely fucktarded happened. The de facto hardcore put their cognitive faculties into full swing and concluded that being hardcore did not mean an inexplicable fascination with something inherently cool, but instead simply meant “people dumb enough to pay for this bullshit when they have every reason not to”.
The point finally being, i now dread that all this “casual gamer” shit isn’t going to result in any sort of progress or understanding on the industry’s part. I dread that it’s going to be rather like Valve’s M.O. of paying lipservice to a problem while not actually understanding either the problem or why it was a problem in the first place.
I dread that “casual games” are turning into a new genre, when by all means the term has a very short shelf-life and only exists within the context of the complete idiocy that permeates the industry. In other words, its life as a concept is directly proportional to how long the real problems remain unfixed.
It’s not a new generation, mother fuckers; the new generations are the ones eating your filth and calling it ambrosia for lack of experience. This “casual” thing is largely a matter of the OLD generations finding you all completely intolerable.