Last night the person in charge of Starbound’s development team released an entry on the game’s website setting out a list of the upcoming changes the team at Chucklefish are hoping to make to the game through its Beta development and potentially even after release.

Tiy explains that the list was made by a fan called Xealaz on the Starbound Reddit had made a nice list and that though there are plenty of other things they are working on that it was a pretty nice way of listing everything players can expect from later updates.

The full post is linked at the bottom of the article but among the expected changes are the implementation of ‘spaceship dungeons’ and spaceship combat (including boarding, pirates in spaaaaace!), biome hazards, NPC spawners and NPCs with better AI (they’ll know if you’re stealing their stuff!), story-missions with bosses at the end and the ability to drastically alter a planet’s surface from your spaceship.

Full post is: Here

Yesterday the Playstation Europe blog announced something that I think many fans of Sony’s console have been wanting for a while: that Minecraft was getting a console version for the Playstation 3 within the week.

In the blog ‘Owen from Mojang’ gives a quick overview of the game, introducing its concept for those not aware of it yet and answering the questions that are most likely to be frequently asked. The release will be a download from the Playstation Store with planned versions for the Vita and the next-gen Playstation 4 in the works although these version don’t yet have release dates. Upon download Minecraft: Playstation 3 Edition will be as up-to-date as its Xbox counterpart and both console versions of the game should now be released at the same time.

Skins and other content will also be available to download from the Store soon after the release, although there’s not yet word on if any of it will be Sony-exclusive. There’s also no word on compatibility with the upcoming Vita and PS4 version and as always Herobrine will remain a mere myth within the game (maybe, that question was answered with a ‘probably not’ so…)

Minecraft: Playstation 3 Edition will be available to download from the Playstation Store from the December 18^th.

Playstation blog post is: here

Yesterday I wrote up an article on what I called the ‘content ID claim wave’ that is currently sweeping Youtube, having a large effect on Youtubers who make gaming content. To do this and because I value accurate journalism (because hey, that’s my job at the end of the day here) I had to do a lot of research. This led me to a few websites with articles on the same subject and everywhere I went I saw an awful lot of the same comment…

“No sympathy, they got what was coming to them. You’ll have to get real jobs now Youtubers!”

Now as someone who used to hear the latter part of that sentence addressed to myself often 2-3 years ago, only ‘Youtuber’ was replaced with ‘media student’, I have to take issue with the assumption that content-creation or anything artistic can never be a ‘real job’.

Here you have people who spend their days putting in hours of work to make videos that might only end up being 15 minutes long. Some bigger groups put up at least one of these videos EVERY DAY. That’s a lot of filming, editing, tweaking and uploading to do. As well these Youtubers interact with their audiences and colleagues/fellow Youtubers through social media and e-mail, they have to find the best equipment both hardware and software to make sure they produce the best quality of content they can, they need to plan and schedule their days accordingly to get everything done, sometimes working ridiculous hours just to get something finished, they need to know the copyright and other related laws like the backs of their hands. Why? Because for the ones that have quit their day jobs to pursue a dream job they are constantly having to budget and watch their money flow. If they drop the ball or screw up in some way, it could have dire consequences for them. Just a pitfall of self-employment. And this is what the content ID wave has made a lot more likely for so many Youtubers caught in it, that is why they are complaining.

Boogie2988 covers this part of the argument better than I could in his video though:

Best part is so many of the ‘real job’ comments seem to assume that Youtubers love exploiting the game developers, but no this isn’t the case. I’ve seen so many creators, even before this episode that said time and time again “developers if you have a problem with what we are doing, let us sit down and talk about this so we’re both happy”. Then you have the fact that many of the developers are coming out in the last few days and saying “we’ve no idea what’s going on, e-mail us and we’ll help you” to a lot of people affected by the wave so it seems both sides here are willing to work towards a common good. Maybe this is hope for an agreement finally being made and the ‘grey area’ that a Let’s Play or Game Review video has been for years finally having a light shined on it and tidied up.

I know it seems that making videos for Youtube is an easy job but I can tell you from experience that it’s far from it. Setting up even the smallest necessary amount of equipment takes time to fine-tune and the number of times I’ve recorded something for an hour or more only to watch back the footage and find that either the sound is off or the picture quality not good enough are too many to count. Video-making is frustrating yet I keep trying because I want to get better at it, and the videos I have completed I’ve gotten some positive feedback on. For me having finished a video and thinking that it’s ‘good but I can do a little better next time’ is an amazingly positive feeling. And doing it isn’t even my job.

I know that I am biased thanks to my degree and my job, but if you still have doubts about any sort of media career as a job remember this. If you watch television, listen to the radio, read a book or indeed consume any type of media after coming home from your ‘real job’… well, you’ve benefited from the efforts of those you are saying don’t have important or useful jobs.

Don’t tell me that the media isn’t useful to society when it keeps you entertained. And as Boogie2988 says in his video – ‘Have a heart’.

Some news stories make you smile or laugh, others make you cry or rage. Then there are the elite few that make you go “WTF?” Put this firmly in the latter category.

When Democracy 3 – the latest title in Positech Games’ series of PC-based Political Strategy games – was preparing for its US launch, not one person broke a sweat. The game, self-dubbed “the ultimate political strategy game,” was launched on Steam on October 14, 2013 – as well as a retail game for PC, Mac and Linux – with nobody raising an eyelid to its game-play simulating the career as president or prime minister of a democratic government, the very theme of the series’ eight-year history. So why, in all seriousness, is a “major U.S. advertising agency” refusing to run banner ads promoting the game due to its “political content”?

Cliff Harris, the founder of Positech Games, reported on his blog yesterday that an ad for the recently-released Democracy 3 was deemed by a “BIG game-advertising agency” to be inappropriate to run on a particular website. When Harris asked why, he was told, “We can not promote any politics as this is a sensitive topic.”

Harris was noticeably unimpressed with the response, believing politics is a MUCH less sensitive subject than some of the OTHER things commonly featured in today’s games that go without criticism – as evidenced by the next statement on his blog:

“I bet ads for games like Hitman, or GTA, or games where you get slow-mo closeups of people’s skulls being blasted apart by high-caliber bullets are just fine. But discuss income tax? OH NOES THE WORLD WILL END! It’s stuff like this that sometimes makes me ashamed to be in this industry. Half of the industry wants to be grown up and accepted as art, the other half have the mentality of seven year olds. I’m pretty cynical, but I never expected my ads for a game about government-simulation to be too controversial to be shown (for money no less…).”

True enough. What’s more, the whole controversy smacks to me as discriminating against Democracy 3 rather than a genuine concern. After all, politics in video games is not exactly unheard of – there have been games as far back as the NES era where you played as a president of the United States or leader of some fictionalised land. For example, how about Civilization? A real-time strategy series inviting players to “Build an empire to stand the test of time”, Civilization has a much longer history than Democracy, beginning in 1991 in the DOS computer era and still going 20 years later. The games involve you making decisions on places to build; wars to fight; and even setting diplomatic rules – which makes them also political in nature even if it’s not as obviously signposted. If political content is really as big a problem as this unidentified agency is implying, why has Civilization had a free pass for so long? Here’s hoping common sense prevails – though sadly, it seems to do so less often these days…

One of the biggest stories to happen in the online gaming community in the last few days has been the debacle of the ‘Content ID claim wave’ currently going down right now on Youtube. Hundreds of videos have already been flagged, mainly it seems for music and sound matching third-party claims, blocking them in many countries and having a massive effect on content creators, some even belonging to one of Youtube’s many partner programs who are meant to stop this sort of thing happening to the people they sign up.

User AngryJoeShow, a content creator who belongs to prominent gaming network Polaris, itself a sub-network of partner giant Maker Studios is among the people who have been hit with the new sweep and true to his name… he wasn’t happy.

To summarise, in the video Joe accuses Youtube and Google of literally ‘screwing’ the content creators now that they have made the company an awful lot of money. Given that he is one of many people who are literally making their living by uploading videos reviewing the content that is now being claimed, and that he is within Polaris who should be offering him protection from this sort of event his anger seems justified. He also makes the point that if this system is as heavy-hitting as it’s seeming to be, it could be very hard for new, smaller gaming channels to get a foothold on Youtube anymore.

However, another Polaris creator, MaskedGamer lays the blame at a different door.

In this video MaskedGamer accuses the same networks that are meant to have protected the people they signed up of being lazy and not managing those they sign up and of greed by signing up loads of small channels just to make money from them. He says that they, Polaris included, have lied to many of the people they’ve signed up and now are refusing to release the channels because these channels are now locked into contracts that were re-signed mid-2013 and that this is why Youtube have put in place the new system: to force the partner networks into actually doing what they were set up to do in the first place and manage their users’ content first and foremost.

Another theory as to why there’s been a sudden wave of claims is that the legal troubles between National Music Publishers’ Association and Youtube network Fullscreen has caused Youtube to actually really crack down on this sort of thing.

Outside of Youtube many of the companies supposedly making these claims have come out and replied that they are just as confused as the Youtube users as to why all these claims are being issued, saying that they themselves are not responsible for submitting the claims. A few of them, Blizzard, Ubisoft and Capcom prominently among them, have even posted on their official websites and social network accounts that if one of your videos with a claim contains content from them that you can contact the companies with a link to the video and they will do their best to remove the claims. However although admitting they didn’t issue the claims themselves, Nintendo has reportedly been denying claims made on videos containing content from them.

As always the centre of this issue is once again the question of copyright and fair-use laws, and where the line is drawn between the two. It’s widely accepted that some of the current law surrounding copyright is in need of revision given the grown of new media and new ways to distribute content. Gaming reviews can be seen as giving promotion to companies and games which are a benefit to the people who make the content, but the question is whether the people doing the reviewing should be able to make money from that. The game reviewing scene right now is quite big and as seen with popular reviewers like TotalBiscuit can make or break a game, and some reviewers have made a career from gaming reviews. Game reviewing like any other business has costs to be covered. What this entire episode demonstrates more than anything else is the need for a safe mid-ground to be agreed which benefits both the companies and the reviewers.