Open Forum Radio - Episode 441

OFR Season 10 (Episode 10) - Loot In A Box

Tuesday, Jan 29th  2019 10:00 EST.

Introduction & Roll Call: TMO, Derek, Jason, Vladz

(Feedback at [email protected])

* Failure to launch….. and in Anthem news: * the problem has seemingly extended to other games as well. EA has confirmed FIFA is "experiencing connectivity issues across all platforms" and we've seen examples of this on the Xbox One version of Battlefield V too. * – Connectivity Issues Resolved, Infinite Loading Screens Still Occurring * That being said…. The game looks beautiful! Very Mass Effect/little Destiny-ish like visuals, super bright colors, monsters and explosions are big a beautiful. * Anthem Follow The best way to sum up Anthem, BioWare's online third-person shooter, is to call it a cross between Mass Effect 3 and The Division. * Day 1 of the VIP Demo didn't go as planned. We'd like to let you know what happened and what we're doing to fix it. * Not feeling Steam Metro Exodus, BioWare's Anthem, and Sumo Digital's Crackdown 3 all won't be available on Steam Metro is releasing on the Epic Games Store, while Anthem is launching on EA's Origin, and Crackdown 3 is releasing on Microsoft's Windows Store. It's a trend that will continue throughout 2019. Although February's Far Cry New Dawn is releasing on Steam, another big Ubisoft game--March's The Division 2--left Valve's store and is now scheduled to launch on Epic.* And is that a loot box or is it just "paid cosmetics" ?

* LOOT! addictive gaming and betting on it for a successful game  (13th paragraph into the article)* If even then only 4% of free-to-play gamers pay in North America, and less than 2.5% in Europe. Let's say that actual gaming addiction is rare, like less than 1% of the population rare. So in that case, as much as a quarter of the paying user base for free-to-play games in North America are addicts, and more like 40% in Europe. When you have a business model driven by a relatively small portion of players, exploiting the addiction of a relative few becomes a larger part of the business than it might appear at first glance.

* Nintendo's Damon Baker joins Microsoft as Head of Portfolio for Xbox

* Heavy Rain studio Quantic Dream no longer making PlayStation exclusives

Our World (Top Things you saw, heard or played)      

Gotham, AC Odyssey, (Strange story about a cat) More RDR2, The Bodyguard, Polar coldest week of the year so of course dealing with heater prob...