Monthly Archives: September 2013

TheMittani.com is a news site that deserves your consideration.

The Mittani is a polarizing figure in the gaming industry and for good reason.

On one hand, he’s historically the most visible player in the EVE Online community who stood as a Council of Stellar Management chairman and helped to revolutionize the relationship that is possible between engaged customers and game development companies. On the other, he’s the stark visage of a griefing villain who leads the largest coalition of EVE Online players whose primary goals include raining on outsiders’ parades and perpetuating a vocabulary that could be described as slur-filled and early-2000s-era politically incorrect.

One moment he can suggest to a crowded room that they could encourage a down-on-his-luck player to commit suicide and the next he can spearhead a massive donation drive for a key alliance diplomat killed in the Benghazi embassy mob attack. Controversial and legendary at the same time.

Lending his persona to brand a niche game journalism blog doesn’t seem like a bright idea, but that’s exactly what he did just over a year ago. Regardless, TheMittani.com is the fastest growing and probably the most popular EVE Online information source available to the public.

In a scene where intelligence is a meta that is both controlled and valuable, private forums and messaging services continue to become simpler to implement, and subversion is a legitimate tactic, a public news site shouldn’t have as much gravitas as TMC controls.

Screen Shot 2013-09-06 at 8.50.41 AMIn the past year, the news organization has broken milestone after milestone that other news sites in the gaming genre could only wish to achieve. It attracts quality writing talent even though it only compensates its staff with a game-based currency. It’s one of the only organizations that filed for press credentials to E3 for its first time when it was less than a year old and received access. It was able to enter into a Twitch partnership program with one of the lowest average viewerships per game on the service. It doesn’t offer premium access and it hasn’t Kickstarted itself because the operation is self-sufficient. Even though it owes its namesake to an EVE Online personality, it covers five other online titles as well as the ever-more-relevant commercial space race and notable science fiction novels.

If you needed an example of how an esports news site could succeed, here it is. And it doesn’t claim to be anything more than a gaming news site. It doesn’t even touch the term esports.

I would love to contribute to a place like that. Sure the comment section can be toxic and spin to its own meta most of the time, but to be included in a group of folks like that would be a dream come true in a way. I’ve worked with dedicated news folks in a genuine setting and I’m still jealous of the participants in an experiment turned authority like TMC.

I’ve never applied to become a writer there, but I’m strongly considering it because I want to help grow something like TMC. But finding something to contribute is the challenge. I want to bring more general news to the site. Perhaps I can start there.

Another day, another esports scheduling crisis averted.

A short message posted to Twitter this past Tuesday could have turned the middle of next June into an interesting threesome for competitive gaming.

The announcement was regarding Major League Gaming’s Spring 2014 finale, traditionally hosted in Anaheim, CA, informally referred to as MLG Anaheim 2014. In the past, this event is one of the biggest live spectator events in esports and an event that I’ve personally attended in 2012 supporting ESFI’s on-scene coverage of the event. It was awesome.

And then, one of their European counterparts looked at their calendar.

The Dreamhack representative went on to reference this press release published in May 2012, two years in advance and also mentioned that the date was included in last year’s post-event release for Dreamhack Summer 2013.

Slasher, reporting for Gamespot, was the first to publish the story in a relatively proper context. Most notably, he made the mention that the date also conflicted with another favorite video game industry pastime—the 2014 Electronic Entertainment Expo.

With hints from Twitter posts following Adam’s informal announcement, one could conclude that there would have been some backchannel discussions taking place between MLG and the Anaheim Convention Center crew, and, presumably, the publisher/partners who would be lending their games to the show to find an alternative date.

Today, only two days after the initial announcement, a revised announcement was made via the MLG executive’s Twitter account:

Not a bad turnaround for an organization that seemed to be losing favor with parts of its audience because of the company’s switching games based on business decisions. Personally, I don’t have a problem with MLG playing favorites when it comes to making money and keeping their business afloat so long as they don’t start fixing tournaments or begin catering to a younger audience for the sake of advertising dollars. It’s a business decision and they want to create some cool entertainment that a wide-sepctrum audience can watch and enjoy, and maybe even pay for.

All of this is more impressive when you consider the following, as SirScoots points out:

I don’t think that MLG simply called up the folks responsible for scheduling the Anaheim Convention Center out and politely asked for the dates they previously arranged to have changed without a legally compelling reason, unless Blizzard or another publisher was at the table with them. I could be wrong about that, but my read on the situation is MLG had to work pretty hard to change the dates for the convention center deal they made for this next summer and the public was clued in by MLG’s SVP out of a need to appeal to their potential audience that they no longer have to decide between one of the best produced events in the business and one that isn’t. It comes down to business.

Though I also would have thought that Twitter isn’t exactly the best way to publicly announce something as big of a deal as MLG Anaheim 2014. I could be wrong about that, too.

Here’s what I learned from CheckPoint S3E12.

  • Nvidia what huh consoles huh?
  • White on Labor Day? WHOA.
  • Bad Namco games? Standard.
  • Star Citizen’s piece-by-piece release plan is simply going to create more of a mess than it already has on their hands. Instead of the traditional game development strategy that goes along the lines of build an engine, make the game and then furnish the experience, deciding to go forward with a strategy that’s so backward has to be costing them in the development process. Hell, if they wanted to release a demo in which you could fly around a space station and not do anything amazing like warp around or engage other ships, that would be fine. At this point, they’ll release a demo like that, sometime after they release the hangar that allows a player to get attached romantically to the idea of one day flying that ship around.

    I guess I just don’t get the hype behind this game. I just want Freespace 3 or a new Wing Commander game.

  • Eedar just published the most obvious report about identifying who would pay the most for casual mobile games with in-app purchases. Kathleen’s finger pointing and line at the end is the real Inception moment, here.
  • Ohhh, that makes sense. AMD has the two biggest graphical chip manufacturing deals of the decade, while Nvidia was left behind after being denied a console chip furbishing gig. Yeah, free games with graphics cards might sound like a cool deal for PCmasterrace gamers, but that’s about as far as that scheme could go, unless they start bundling their triple-A titles with new PCs.
  • Amazon what huh making bundles of money huh?
  • Pre-recorded show joke!
  • FFXIV is bad, but Magitek armor? YES, PLEASE.