Minecraft gives players more control over gender with feminine option

When Pauline Stanley's 6-year-old daughter, Isabell, started playing Minecraft, she was excited to join her fellow first-grade players, who'd become obsessed with adventuring around the game's vast digital universe and building with Lego-like blocks.

But there was one problem: In the boundlessly creative world of one of the most popular video games, the only character she could play was Steve, a bulky character with short, dark hair and a 5 o'clock shadow. If she wanted to discover and build as a girl, she needed to pay extra.

"Only having boys is telling everybody this is a boy game only," said Isabell, who knew girls in her class who had quit playing the game. "It just doesn't seem fair."

It's a shortcoming that has long plagued the Minecraft franchise, which Microsoft bought last year for $US2.5 billion after it sold more than 50 million copies and become a massively popular children's game and in-class teaching tool.

But the makers of the "sandbox" game first released in 2009 now say they will let gamers play with a more feminine character, named Alex, free of charge.

"Everyone loves Steve — he's probably the most famous Minecrafter in the world, and he has excellent stubble," Owen Hill, the chief word officer for Mojang, a Swedish game studio that created Minecraft, wrote in a blog post on Monday. "But jolly old Steve doesn't really represent the diversity of our playerbase."

Starting Wednesday, Minecraft players on Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox consoles will be able to select Alex, a seemingly female character with thinner arms, pinker lips, and a swoop of hair around her neck. An update for the game's Pocket Edition, played on phones and iPads, is planed as well.

Alex first appeared on Minecraft versions on the PC and Mac, although her use was randomly assigned and she could not be selected in-game. In console and mobile versions, players had no female option but eight "skins" of Steve, including Prisoner Steve, Tuxedo Steve and Athlete Steve.

For all of Minecraft's blocky veneer, the game is incredibly intricate, allowing players to build tools, homes and nearly anything else their imaginations allow. Isabell, for instance, was tickled to learn that the flowers she had placed on her bedside table would keep dying until she installed a window to give direct light.

But because of that intricacy, the game's choices on gender had baffled fans, parents and teachers of the game, who were increasingly viewing it as the hallmark of a generation's creative pursuit. In March, the game won the 2015 Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards for "Most Addicting Game."

Fans of the game created detailed guides for how to play it as a girl, although they often involved paying money or changing the game's code through methods that proved too complicated for children or teachers with many versions of the game.

Nearly all of the characters, like villagers, appear male, with the exception of the villainous witch. And for a long time it appeared that Mojang wasn't interested in adding female characters.

Mojang's founder, Marcus "Notch" Persson, said in 2012, "I've tried making a girl model in Minecraft, but the results have been extremely sexist". He added: "Blocky things are more masculine." In a blog post later that year, he said he had designed Minecraft to "be a game where gender isn't a gameplay element."

"The blocky shape (of Steve) gives it a bit of a traditional masculine look, but adding a separate female mesh would just make it worse by having one specific model for female Human Beings and male ones," he wrote. "That would force players to make a decisions about gender in a game where gender doesn't even exist."

Girls and women are an increasing presence in video gaming, playing more on everything from mobile apps to larger living-room consoles. The number of female gamers who said they played Sony and Microsoft's gaming consoles, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, grew 70 per cent between 2011 and 2014, to more than 30 million, data from market researcher Newzoo shows.

But a large gap still remains in who makes the games, and 4 in 5 game developers are men, International Game Developers Association research shows.

For Isabell, the Minecraft change will help her identify a bit with the creator on-screen while she does her favourite thing: building houses. She has a lot of them in different worlds, and her favourite is made of gold and diamonds.

"It's not perfect, but it's way better than before," she said. Next, she'd like to be able to change the way the character's clothes look. She suggests a rainbow dress.

Game development

The employees at Pixotri Game Studio have vast experience in creating games and are always trying to push the boundaries of technology and creativity. The games are created using the most popular game enigine Unity, which provides robust, high performance, platform independent solution to creating games.

Pixotri technology is a  creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

Contact us for your mobile gaming requirements. email-info@pixotritechnologies.com. Visit our website: www.pixotritechnologies.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8

The seven deadly sins of mobile games

We love our mobile games, but there are a few tendencies -- annoying, manipulative, or sometimes both -- that need to go away.

Always online

If you're designing a game for a mobile device, it makes sense that the game is, in fact, mobile. Not every mobile device has internet connectivity -- iPods and some tablets, for example. Additionally, there are times when the connectivity will need to be turned off -- flight mode exists for a reason. And, of course, some users don't want to use up all their data on games.

This makes it rather vexing when a game, particularly a single-player game, simply won't load unless the device is connected to the internet -- rendering the game's "mobile" status completely useless.

Midnight Castle is a perfect example -- a single-player hidden object game that can't be played offline, at all. More recently, I've been playing the otherwise excellent Spirit Lords, an adventure RPG that can be played either multiplayer or solo -- yet there's no offline mode.

Female character? Pay up.

12-year-old Madeline Messer was shocked to discover that only 46 percent of the top 50 endless runners on the iTunes app store contained female characters (compared to 98 percent for male characters) -- and that only 15 percent of these apps allowed you to play female characters from the outset, without needing to unlock them with some sort of currency -- either in-game or via in-app purchase.

This is not unique to endless runners, and it's never a surprise to find a game that either doesn't have female characters at all, or expects the player to wait or pay to unlock them. It's pretty frustrating -- yet having unlockable content is clearly here to stay.

The best solution to this I've seen is actually an endless runner by the name of Running Quest. When you launch the game for the first time, it gives you a choice of male or female character. The character you don't choose then becomes unlockable with in-game currency.

Persistent pop-ups

We understand and we're totally on board: if you make a game, you deserve to see some sort of return on your hard work... but with the expectation that mobile games should be cheap or free, that's not always easy. Many games subsidise with advertising; the most popular kinds are banner ads and 30-second pop-up videos.

Some developers will remove all ads with either a "remove ads" IAP or simply if you make any kind of IAP. This is a wonderful solution: it allows the developer to get paid either way, and gives the player a choice.

Some games, however, simply don't have that option available -- and, when it seems that every loading screen becomes an opportunity for an unskippable pop-up, the game becomes too much of a drag to play, especially with so many other titles to choose from.

Copycats

At the height of Flappy Bird mania, every day saw dozens of Flappy Bird clones uploaded to the iTunes app store -- never mind Google Play. Actually, go have a look at the latter for yourself.

Mobile provides an incredible, accessible platform for creative, original indie developers who might not have otherwise had a chance. But that very accessibility also provides a platform for every bandwagon-jumper with two coding skills to rub together. The wake of every popular game is peppered liberally with unscrupulous clones trying to cash in.

Some developers get a little creative with it, mixing two different games to make something new while still leveraging search terms. Apple cracks down on these a little harder than Google Play, where you can find such gems as Five Nights at Craft: Freddy, a bizarre mash-up of Minecraft and Five Nights at Freddy's.

Pay to win

Other developers use IAP to help solve the problem of how to see a return on their hard work. This can work well -- allowing players to purchase in-game currency for a bit of a boost forward of they feel the game is progressing too slowly, or cosmetic items such as different costumes for their characters.

When it becomes a problem is when you can't reasonably finish a game without spending money -- essentially, "pay to win," such as My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which, at launch, technically could be played for free from start to finish -- if you played every day for 10 years or so. It was a clear cash-grab in a game for children.

This is frustrating enough in a single-player game, but where it gets even more frustrating is when IAP gives players a competitive edge in multiplayer titles. This means players who don't pay money simply can't compete -- necessitating IAP if one wants to continue to progress.

Sudden difficulty skyrocket

Have you ever downloaded a new arcade or puzzle game and had a really nice time initially, getting the hang of play, scoring three gold stars on the first 10 levels or so -- only to suddenly find yourself losing repeatedly? There's probably a technical developer term for this sudden, extremely sharp difficulty curve, but we don't know what it is. It's an insidious, tricksy thing, usually paired with the deadliest mobile gaming sin of all...

Wait or pay

Say you're playing a game, merrily just minding your own beeswax. All of a sudden -- you run out of lives, or "energy" -- there's some sort of meter that determines how many turns you're allowed to have.

Once this meter is depleted, you'll have to stop playing for a bit. Sure, it regenerates over time, but you still have to wait. Well, you don't actually have to wait... if you're willing to part with a few dollars via IAP, you can continue playing.

Yes: your game is held for ransom. Some argue that this is akin to feeding coins into an arcade machine, but there is a crucial difference: an arcade machine is understood to be a temporary experience, and all arcade machines are created equal. That is the standard model of payment for arcade machines.

For mobile games, there are other options available... and if gamers are forced to stop playing a game, that is time they will spend playing games by other developers. Deliberately and actively preventing people from playing is a surefire way to see players look for their mobile entertainment elsewhere.

Game development 

The employees at Pixotri Game Studio have vast experience in creating games and are always trying to push the boundaries of technology and creativity. The games are created using the most popular game enigine Unity, which provides robust, high performance, platform independent solution to creating games.

Pixotri technology is a creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

Contact us for your mobile gaming requirements email-info@pixotritechnologies.com. Visit our website: www.pixotritechnologies.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8

Video game hardware sales plummeted in March, survey says

Sales of devices like the Xbox, PlayStation and Wii U drop by more than a fifth, repeating the post-Christmas lull of earlier this year.

Has everyone who wants a new video game console finally gotten one?

That's the question facing the video game industry after new hardware sales in the US fell by more than 20 percent both in March and earlier, in January, according to surveys by industry researcher NPD Group.

The poor performance, totalling little more than $311 million, dragged down aggregate US sales of new games, hardware and accessories to $963.7 million, down 6 percent from the same time a year ago. One bright spot was sales of video game titles, which fell only 3 percent to $395.4 million, likely bolstered by the highly anticipated Electronic Arts' cops-and-robbers shooting game Battlefield Hardline, released on March 17.

Microsoft tried to play up the industry's poor performance, saying sales of its Xbox One console still outpaced its predecessor's at the same time in its release, according to a statement. Microsoft didn't provide any other sales data. Nintendo said sales of its Wii U so far this year rose 20 percent over the same period a year ago, but offered no other specifics. Sony, which makes the PlayStation 4, didn't immediately provide a statement.

Perhaps even worse, the number of video game consoles sold only fell 9 percent, NPD analyst Liam Callahan said in a statement. It was the amount of money made per console that fell even more.

The industry's lagging sales underscore the continuing struggles to market the latest video game consoles from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo to potential customers. After a rush of customers snapped up the consoles when they launched more than a year ago, sales data has been inconsistent. For much of last year, for example, software sales underperformed historical averages, while hardware appeared strong.

When sales and downloads over the Internet are factored in, software sales are even stronger. SuperData Research said downloaded sales of games and game storylines for PCs and video game consoles rose to $314.7 million, up 16.7 percent from the same time a year ago.

The top selling game both at retail stores and online was EA's Battlefield Hardline, followed by Sony's action game Bloodborne and Take-Two Interactive's year-and-a-half-old crime drama game Grand Theft Auto V.

Sales of video game accessories also grew, helped in part by popular releases of new action figures from Nintendo's Amiibo collection, which are designed to interact with games playing on a screen.

Game development 

The employees at Pixotri Game Studio have vast experience in creating games and are always trying to push the boundaries of technology and creativity. The games are created using the most popular game enigine Unity, which provides robust, high performance, platform independent solution to creating games.

Pixotri technology is a  creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

Contact us for your mobile gaming requirements email-info@pixotritechnologies.com. Visit our website: www.pixotritechnologies.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8

http://www.cnet.com/news/video-game-hardware-sales-plummeted-in-march-2015-survey-says/

U.S. group and Macau gaming firm propose two Philippine casinos

(Reuters) - A U.S. Investment groups and a Macau-based gaming operator said they are in talks with regulatory authorities in the Philippines to spend $1 billion on two new casino resorts, potentially heating up competition in a rapidly growing gambling market.

The Philippines, like South Korea, has emerged as one of Asia's hottest gambling hubs, as China's crackdown on corruption scares wealthy Chinese punters away from Macau - the world's biggest gaming centre.

Sino-American Gaming Investment Group, controlled by Denver- based consultant RiskWise Group, and Macau Resources Group told Reuters they have proposed large scale resorts - one on Cebu, an island popular with tourists and one on the island of Napayawan, near a proposed airport.

Francis Hernando, vice president at gaming licensing and development at regulator PAGCOR, said while letters of intention from the groups had been received, the regulator currently had no categorical position on the proposals as it is working on an existing pipeline of resorts.

The proposals, however, may be viewed favorably as the locations are away from Manila, which already has two in Entertainment City, an area modelled on the Las Vegas strip with another two set to open in the next three years.

"For areas outside of metro Manila, especially in underserved areasthe chances of looking into a casino license would be higher than in Manila," Hernando said.

Michael Foxman, managing director of Sino-American Gaming, said hotel chain Banyan Tree would take part in the development and that they were also negotiating with the Marriott group. They have also signed on with a Las Vegas partner for entertainment.

The Philippines gaming market is expected to grow up to 20 percent over the next three years to become a $4.8 billion market, Macquarie Research said in a January report.

Other international companies that have proposed casinos include U.S. gaming firm Caesars Entertainment Corp which tapped regulators at the end of 2014 for a spot in Manila.

Melco Crown, owned by Australian billionaire James Packer and Macau businessman Lawrence Ho, opened the City of Dreams resort in Entertainment City this year.

Entertainment City is also home to the Solaire resort owned by Bloomberry Resorts Corp which said the group posted its highest gaming revenue on record in the last quarter of 2014 and now has 64 junket operators that are actively targeting foreign players. (Reporting by Farah Master; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

Game development

The employees at Pixotri Game Studio have vast experience in creating games and are always trying to push the boundaries of technology and creativity. The games are created using the most popular game enigine Unity, which provides robust, high performance, platform independent solution to creating games.

Pixotri technology is a  creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

Contact us for your mobile gaming requirements email-info@pixotritechnologies.com. Visit our website: www.pixotritechnologies.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/09/philippines-casino-idUSL4N0X61W520150409

Modern Games Are Easily Patched. So How Can We Review Them?

SOMETHING WEIRD HAPPENED to me last year, when I wrote about a game called Rollers of the Realm. It was a fairly positive review of a unique pinball-role playing game hybrid, with a few caveats, like an impossibly difficult final boss battle.

Towards the end of the review, I noted a funny typo buried in the game’s menu (a character was said to be highly skilled in “marital arts”), and pointed out that it would probably disappear after the game’s first patch or update. It’s a reflection of the reality of today’s constantly updated games that what you play on launch day might not be the same experience months or even days later.

What I did not expect was the game’s developer, a small Canadian outfit called Phantom Compass, would respond thusly on Twitter: “Hey Chris, thanks for the review and feedback! … Should we nerf the final battle a bit?”

My fingers froze above my keyboard. I’ve reviewed a lot of videogames. This was the first time I’d ever had a developer write back to ask if they should make a major change to the gameplay that would impact players’ experiences.

“For me to say would be too much power to invest in one man,” I replied. “But maybe.”

This was a profoundly strange situation to find oneself in. Prior to this I’d considered a game review to be more or less a postmortem. But in the case of Rollers of the Realm, it was clear that the developers were taking the initial batch of reactions as something of a beginning. And why not, when games are so malleable today after they launch?

So, where does this leave the “game review?”

In general, gaming enthusiast sites that publish reviews day in and day out have had to think about this quite a bit over the last few years, as the nature of a typical “game launch” has changed from a complete product being pressed to discs and sent to stores to an incomplete game being rolled out in stages onto online servers.

When Vox Media launched Polygon in 2012, it said that it would not leave its reviews untouched, as a static archive of how the game performed on the day the review went live. It would not hesitate, it said, to update a review and alter the score if it felt that the game’s quality had improved—or declined—after the review embargo was lifted.

In an extreme case like Electronic Arts’ SimCity, which was excellent when reviewers played it prior to the game’s launch on private servers but utterly failed to function once it was available at retail, it lowered the review score, from a 9.5 (out of 10) to a 4.

Earlier this year, Polygon went even further; after a holiday season of similar broken games including Halo: The Master Chief Collection, which worked fine prior to launch but collapsed upon release, it said it would introduce “provisional reviews.” It will still score the games, but the review will not appear on the Metacritic aggregation website until after the game’s release.

Other websites have not gone so far as to formalize the policy, but other sites have begun to publish more “reviews in progress”—stories that evaluate the game when the review embargo goes up, but refrain from rendering a final judgment until the writer has had more time with the final product.

These sorts of moves are more to ensure that a publication doesn’t end up with egg on its face if the final product ends up differing significantly from what was provided for review. But as my experience with Rollers of the Realm shows, the nature of reviews is changing even if the review is perfectly in sync with the final product—because the “final” product isn’t what people buy on day one.

I was reminded of this recently because Nintendo just released a patch for its recent Nintendo 3DS game Code Name S.T.E.A.M.. It’s a turn-based strategy game that got mixed reviews, but one point that almost every review, positive or negative, had in common was that it took far too long and was far too boring to wait for the enemy characters to take their turns.

Waiting around for aliens to make their decisions and scurry around the battlefield was a big pain in the ass and probably ended up lowering the game’s aggregate score, just by itself. Now, Nintendo was introducing a patch that would eliminate that problem.

It’s especially interesting that Nintendo, the most conservative, insular company in the whole game industry, would make such a major change to its design post-release, based on feedback. That, more than anything, tells me that these sort of post-launch changes can happen to any game, anytime, in today’s world.

What, then, should writers do? It’s likely that this is a big enough change to the game that Polygon, which hammered on this as a major issue and scoredS.T.E.A.M. a 3.5, would go back and issue a review update. Other writers may also see fit to do this.

I would never suggest that it is incumbent upon everyone who wrote about the game to revise their reviews, as that introduces a precedent that is absolutely impossible to maintain; I already would never, ever envy anyone that has to run the reviews section of a gaming enthusiast website, as it involves insane work hours just to keep up with all the major releases, let alone go back and update each one as the game is tweaked. (Moreover, an online publication is an archive, a record of what happened on that day, and not a wiki that must be endlessly updated.)

How this  has really changes reviews is how it will affect a writer who sits down to pen one (or a YouTuber who sits in front of their camera). The era of review-as-postmortem is giving way to the era of review-as-wishlist; less a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of a product that’s finished, and more of a discussion of concrete improvements we’d like to see in the first patch. The fact that even brick-wall Nintendo is responding so quickly in the case of S.T.E.A.M. is an indication that it is actually possible to get fixes implemented in a relatively short time.

As for Rollers of the Realm, I checked today and it turns out they did make the final boss battle easier, just one week later. I’d already moved on to other games by then.

Game development

The employees at Pixotri Game Studio have vast experience in creating games and are always trying to push the boundaries of technology and creativity. The games are created using the most popular game enigine Unity, which provides robust, high performance, platform independent solution to creating games.

Pixotri technology is a creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

Contact us for your mobile gaming requirements info@pixotritechnologies.com. Visit our website: www.pixotritechnologies.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8

Zynga CEO Mattrick leaves abruptly, replaced by founder Pincus

Zynga CEO Don Mattrick has abruptly left the company, to be replaced by his predecessor, company founder Mark Pincus, the company announced Wednesday.

The company said in a statement ahead of its planned first-quarter conference call in May that Mattrick, who joined after leading the Xbox video game group at Microsoft, is leaving Zynga and its board of directors after less than two years at the helm.

"I believe the timing is now right for me to leave as CEO and let Mark lead the company into its next chapter given his passion for the founding vision and his ability to couple our mobile progress with Zynga's unique strengths," Mattrick said in a statement.

Mattrick's exit may not come as much of a surprise, say analysts. "In the game industry circle, Don Mattrick was presumed to be seeking an exit," said Colin Sebastian, an analyst at RW Baird. "More of a surprise is Pincus returning. He clearly wants to reestablish credibility with gamers and Wall Street."

A lot will be riding, Sebastian added, on how Pincus steers Zynga's new game releases in the coming months. Pincus owns around 10 percent of Zynga and has about 60 percent of voting rights, which allowed him to remain influential at the company even during Mattrick's tenure.

Following Mattrick's announcement Wednesday, the company's shares fell more than 9 percent to $2.63. The company's shares have fallen more than 30 percent in the past year.

Struggling for a hit

Zynga made its name by popularizing games made not for enthusiasts or war buffs, but for general audiences. One of its biggest hits was FarmVille, which encouraged players to tend to a farm in the game, plowing fields, minding cows and helping friends. The game became a hit, particularly on Facebook's website, where players could send messages to friends enticing them to play.

But the move to mobile devices -- a major shift of players within the video game industry turning to titles made for smartphones and tablets -- was faster than the pace at which Zynga's teams could make games. Ultimately, Zynga failed to garner as much influence as it did in its earliest days.

"There's a lot to be said about being early," said Adam Krejcik, an analyst and managing director at Eilers Research. "They absolutely had that on Facebook. For mobile, they entered the space late and it was a much different competitive landscape."

By the time Mattrick was named CEO in July 2013, Zynga was in free fall. The company's revenue and user base were declining rapidly. One of its highest-profile acquisitions, OMGPOP, had failed and the company began a series of layoffs that hurt morale and signaled trouble.

Mattrick promised change. He explained a plan to investors to make reliably successful games, largely by following industry trends. He also set agreements with the National Football League and Warner Bros. to create a series of sports games and titles based on the popular Looney Toons characters.

His highest profile acquisition was $525 million in cash and stock for NaturalMotion, a British video game technology company whose programs powered popular titles like Take-Two Interactive Software's Grand Theft Auto V. Using its technology, Natural Motion also developed games for mobile devices, earning it the credibility and proven track record Zynga lacked. Yet new titles developed with the Natural Motion team have hit delays.

What Zynga does next depends largely on how well its titles developed under Natural Motion perform, Sebastian thinks. "It still seems like a show-me story," he said. "If you're bullish join Zynga, you have faith in Natural Motion."

Meanwhile, Zynga continues to struggle financially. The company's investors haven't returned to their early enthusiasm that pegged the company's value as high as $20 billion shortly after its initial public offering in 2011. Since Mattrick joined, the company's stock has hovered around $3 a share.

While the stock has remained flat, the company's sales have sunk since going public. Last year, Zynga pulled in $690 million in revenue, down from $1.14 billion in the 2011. The company's fluctuating losses also continue to cause concern, reaching $266 million last year, up from $209 million in 2012.

Game development

The employees at Pixotri Game Studio have vast experience in creating games and are always trying to push the boundaries of technology and creativity. The games are created using the most popular game enigine Unity, which provides robust, high performance, platform independent solution to creating games.

Pixotri technology is a  creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

Contact us for your mobile gaming requirements  email-info@pixotritechnologies.com. Visit our website: www.pixotritechnologies.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8