General gaming |
| Missing Songs in Jet Set Radio-HD Shows Need for Game Preservation Movement Posted: 14 Mar 2012 12:58 PM PDT The upcoming HD update of Jet Set Radio will feature only around half of the music tracks that appeared in the original game. Sega says it made every effort to re-acquire the rights to all of the game's music, an undoubtedly a lengthy process. When the publisher signed the licensing agreements for the game's soundtrack in the late '90s, nobody could have foreseen a market that demanded the re-release of classic games in the quantities we see today. Sega wasn't alone in their short-sightedness -- until quite recently, most publishers never gave a second thought as to how they would sell their game ten years into the future. Very rarely, if ever, do filmmakers have to eliminate licensed songs from their scores when releasing their movies on DVD or Blu-ray. The games industry, on the other hand, has never been in the bargaining position to or had interest in demanding licensing arrangements that will continue into the future and cover all further releases of their games. Until this current console generation, the business side of the industry didn't see any money in old games at all. Occasionally they'd throw fans an overpriced compilation of some kind, but by and large games have always made money in the first weeks after release and been considered essentially worthless afterward. The current world of HD updates and cheap downloadable games is still young, and the financial realities of game making before the existence of services like PSN, XBLA, Virtual Console, or Steam encouraged short term thinking. Sega signed the licensing agreements for the game's soundtrack because the publisher never imagined a world where they could make a profit selling decades-old Genesis and Dreamcast games. |
| Wasteland to Get Kickstarter-Funded Sequel After Almost 25 Years Posted: 14 Mar 2012 12:51 PM PDT Double Fine amply demonstrated what Kickstarter is capable of. Its proposed old-school graphic adventure set a record for the service by raising more than $3.3 million in just over a month despite its goal being to generate only $400,000. That was an unusual set of circumstances though, as Tim Schafer has built up a tremendous amount of good will with gamers to the point where they're willing to hand over their money to get a game that doesn't have so much as a name yet. But for all of the talk over the last month about how Kickstarter could change the industry and fund all sorts of projects fans have been wanting to see for years, we've yet to see a significant amount of money generated by anyone other than Schafer. While it's impossible to say right now whether this is another exception that can be added to the list alongside Double Fine or a demonstration of what can happen when turning to the Kickstarter community, we now have another project asking for a good deal of money that is likely to get it. |
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