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Hey everyone and welcome to your weekly (mostly…) helping of what’s going on in the world of Kickstarter gaming campaigns.
We’ll start as always with the updates and really, it’s not looking pleasant all round at the moment, which just lends evidence to the theory that now is not the best time to launch a campaign for a game. Both #FML and Goblin Glory have had their campaigns cancelled with their totals ending up far short of their targets, and Space Revolver has at time of writing a few hours to go until the deadline with a lot of money to make up. Other campaigns like Project Elliott, Invisigun Heroes, Mission to Mars, Ghost Theory and Dread Bot Factory all have a few days to go but again steep hills to climb.
It’s happened before that a game manages to steeply climb in their last few days but with so many struggling, I have to wonder how many will be marked as failed when I report next week.
First up this week we have a virtual reality trip in retro-style gaming
Null of Hope is to be a game that will be fully VR compatible, although it can also be played without the use of virtual reality – which is good because many people still won’t have access to that technology.It’s described as a retro ‘list and click’ RPG and one of the listed features is “Fully authentic 90’s environment that changes with the game”. Interesting.
Null of Hope is asking for $50,000 and has 29 days yet to go to reach it. It has so far raised $64.
Next we have a card game about trying to score the lowest points possible while sabotaging opponents’ boards to have the score higher.
Supposedly taking elements from many classic card games, each player will have a board of 9 randomly chosen cards which they have to try and make score as lowly as possible. The poison bottle cards are there to mix it up though and can turn a potentially winning board into a losing one.
With 19 days to go, Poison Bottles has a $850 target to reach.
Now we have a card game where the objective is to work together, while at the same time trying to come out on top.
Villains & Henchmen is for 1-4 players and sees you attempting to free a world famous evil villain from imprisonment as fellow villains and loyal henchmen. In the course of the game you will overcome obstacles placed in your way by heroes, gain new powers and take on these heroes personally. Of course, even if you’re trying to work together for a common course, you’re still an evil villain who wants to be the top of the pile and win the game overall.
Villains & Henchmen has made $2,905 of its $10,000 goal, with 42 days to go.
Another game with ‘villain’ in the name, my brain must be trying to tell me something… anyway, this is a building and ‘architect’ management game in which you manage a haunted house.
Build the manor, raise monsters to unleash within it and set traps, all in the name of slaughtering anyone foolish enough to wander inside. The people behind this one were also involved with Freaking Meatbags, so there’s some history of other games behind this developer.
MachiaVillain needs €23,000 to reach its goal, and with 26 days to go it has made €6,193
Rise of the Tomb Raider is set to get its second PC patch soon, dedicated mainly to fixing the niggling issues that players have wanted to see fixed since launch.
For starters, you’re now able to ALT-TAB out of the game while its in its Exclusive Fullscreen mode without it crashing, as well as the option to tweak the X and Y sensitivity of a mouse being added to PC versions too. An option to reduce camera shake is also being included as well as patching a bug that allowed the game to alter your PC’s screensaver settings which is one of the strangest bugs I’ve heard of.
Otherwise it’s the usual fare of optimisations, tweaks and bug fixes. They’re mainly GPU-related ones, but CPU-based issues will still be a problem until they’re fixed in another patch.
Steam users can get the patch now, but Windows Live users will have a few days to wait before it becomes available to them as well.
Just last week Chinese pirating group 3DM was saying that from the Chinese New Year (Feb 8th) they would not be pirating any new singleplayer games to see how much it would have an effect on the legitimate sales of games. This led some to speculate that they’d done it because they had previously said that anti-tamper software Denuvo was proving to be difficult to crack.
However the group has made an announcement to dispel the rumours saying that they’re on the verge of cracking the latest Denuvo, which means that games it’s been keeping from being pirated (including Rise of the Tomb Raider and Just Cause 3) could soon be made available for torrenting.
“3DM will soon announce that we have a solution to the latest Denuvo encryption used on games including ‘FIFA 16’, ‘Just Cause 3’, and ‘Tomb Raider: The Rise’,” 3DM leader Bird Sister just announced, via TorrentFreak. “We [made this announcement] because a lot of players believe we have abandoned cracking due to technical problems, but we will prove it is not the case. We have not yet been stumped [by protection measures].”
The way these games will be made available isn’t clear, but it has been said that it won’t be high-profile or an official 3DM release.
The Escapists released around a year ago and during that time it’s accumulated a sizeable amount of DLC. There’s been references to The Walking Dead, Alcatraz, James Bond, the A-Team and even Santa with its Christmas-themed DLC. Now it’s set to get another free one to celebrate that first birthday.
Paris Central Pen, as the DLC is titled, will be based on the infamous La Santé Prison which is situated within the French capital and was famous for its poor conditions. It’s housed famous crooks such as Carlos the Jackal, Jean Genet and Jacques Mesrine over the years, as well as having one particularly famous escape of Michel Vaujour who broke free via a helicopter piloted by wife in 1986. So, there’s one thing we might stand a chance of seeing.
Either way, it’ll release in a free update on February 16th.
Stats show that last year was another good one for the Internet’s most popular gaming livestream platform. Twitch’s 2015 report reports that the service enjoyed 550,000 concurrent users on any given day and hit a peak of almost 2.1 million viewers during the period of eSports finals last summer.
Footage wise broadcasters streamed 241,441,823,059 minutes worth of footage last year and Twitch also beat their Youtube rival on the monthly minutes watched per viewer, with 421.6 monthly minutes per viewer while Youtube managed only 291. Twitch’s position could only have been aided by its eSports presence, established userbase and the debute of its Twitchcon convention.
Games-wise the most watched games of the year were as follows:
1. League of Legends
2. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
3. Dota 2
4. Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
5. Minecraft
6. H1Z1
7. Destiny
8. World of Tanks
9. World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor
10. FIFA 15
And of course, gamers used Twitch to raise $17,400,000 for 55 different charities throughout the year.
Seems like Twitch continues to be the powerhouse in the world of gaming livestream platforms.
