Triplepoints of Interest: Jan.29

In this week’s TPoI, GDC withdraws award for Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell, Ubisoft cancels Rainbow Six Siege price hike, and EA CEO Andrew Wilson defends the company’s current games lineup.   

GDC Rescinds Pioneer Award for Nolan Bushnell Due to Past Sexual Misconduct  

The Game Developers Conference announced in a blog post on Tuesday the recipients for the special awards at the event, Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail, Double Fine Founder Tim Schafer, and Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell’s nomination for the award drew a huge amount of criticism from members of the industry, which The Verge collected and featured in an article which detailed reports of Nolan harassing and sexually exploiting women. Glixel reports that GDC acknowledged the feedback and has decided to rescind his Pioneer Award nomination. Nolan Bushnell also came out with a message on his Twitter account praising the conference’s decision to rescind the award and has apologized for his past transgressions.  

Ubisoft Withdraws Rainbow Six Siege Price Hike In Response to Community Backlash

Ubisoft’s tactical first person shooter Rainbow Six Siege has built up a large community over the last 3 years, with the game receiving regular updates and re releases throughout the game’s lifespan. While fans have generally enjoyed the updates that Ubisoft have brought to the game, a recent price increase announcement drew criticism from the community. Gamesindustry.biz explained that the price increase would affect all retail copies and would raise the price of the base game from $40 to $60. Paste Magazine reports that the developers have retracted their decision and are now offering rewards for player who play before the next content expansion as a way to give back to the community.

EA CEO Defends Company Line Up

During the company’s quarterly earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson reportedly defended the studio’s recent releases, praising his employees for their hard work and the diversity of content they have put out. Kotaku reports that while critical reviews of Electronic Arts recent releases haven’t been overwhelmingly positive and some titles have underperformed, EA’s stock as continued to rise and the company plans to continue developing new titles while employing the same design strategies. Variety recently covered the company’s decision to reintroduce microtransactions into the controversial title Star Wars: Battlefront II so that it aligns with their current design strategy. While the company has prospered and generated lots of revenue due to big budget launches and microtransaction sales, this has come at the cost of their image, with Comicbook.com reporting that EA was named one of the worst companies in the world in Wall Street’s newest ranked lists, which cross references customer satisfaction surveys, employee reviews, and the American Customer Satisfaction Index to find out which companies are disliked the most.  

TriplePoints of Interest – Week of October 26

The end of another week, another edition of TriplePoints of interest. This week Nintendo’s first mobile game gets a name, PewDiePie squares off against AdBlock,

Nintendo goes mobile in March

Nintendo has this week announced their first mobile game, Miitomo, which will launch in March of 2016. The app appears to be a messaging and communication app that will use Nintendo Mii characters to communicate with other players. GamesIndustry.biz has their take: Nintendo is taking a careful and thoughtful approach to mobile.

PewDiePie vs. AdBlock….FIGHT!

Last week, YouTube launched YouTube Red, a subscription service allowing viewers access to their favorite channels and content without having to watch ads. One of the more interesting threads to come of this was many viewers proclaiming that it didn’t matter to them because they use AdBlock, effectively enjoying YouTube ad-free and subscription-free. But cometh the hour, cometh the king – this week PewDiePie took to his blog to explain the pros to YouTube Red and the cons to AdBlock, noting particularly that AdBlock has a hugely negative effect on smaller channels trying to grow.

EA is going to sell so much Star Wars

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away the beta for Star Wars Battlefront attracted over 9 million players, making it the biggest video game beta in history. Based on this, Electronic Arts now expects to sell more than 13 million copies of the game by March 2016. That’s a lot of Galactic credits!

People on the internet are terrible

SXSW Interactive found itself in the middle of a bit of controversy this week when it cancelled two planned panels focused on online harassment in the video game space in the face of threats of violence on the – you guessed it – internet. In response to the conference’s decision, Vox Media boycotted the event, pulling it’s CEO from a featured speaker slot. SXSW has since apologized and begun building out a larger Online Harassment Summit to feature at the show. Can’t we all just get along on 6th street?