Roundtable: Revisiting Game Night

RevisitingBoardGames

Roundtable is Geeky Gentleman’s column on tabletop gaming. Here we’ll be sharing our thoughts, criticisms and praise for all things on board games, card games, and their ilk. 

The dawn of our digital age has a marked influence on the twilight of “family game night”. The installation of broadband internet has brought with it a greater persistance of web-based social interaction and networking that it makes traditional get-togethers rather boring by comparison. We’ve got Steam, Xbox Live, the Playstation Network. This places hundreds of games, thousands of matches and millions of people at your keyboard. Meanwhile, managing to convene with 6 or so of your friends and family to sit down, apart from all those Ethernet shenanigans is becoming trickier to accomplish. But the board game is not dead. This I can assure you.  I’ve played them and I have seen the light. Continue reading Roundtable: Revisiting Game Night

Crytek Aims To Improve Free-to-Play Market

Crytek has produced some of the most dynamic gaming experiences of the last few years. Best known for the Crysis series, they represent an industry leader in production of “triple-a” or top-tier games. However, they no longer appear to be satisfied in holding that title alone.

Recently in an interview with Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli shared Crytek’s new goal… to “transition entirely” to free-to-play games within 5 years.

“We decided five or six years ago that we want to marry the quality of triple-A games with the business model of free-to-play,” Yerli told GamesBeat. “And out of that position, Gface and Warface were born.”

Crytek is currently working on a new platform titled Gface which should will allow large numbers of PC gamers to connect with each-other. Those who have explored the closed beta have stated that it bears similarities to Steam. The company plans to launch GFace along with the first of its free-to-play a-lister games, Warface.

“I think over the next two to three years, free-to-play is going to rival retail with quality games like Warface,” Yerli explained. “We have quite a few console titles in our pipeline that are [traditional retail games] while we investigate free-to-play on consoles, but our primary goal is to make triple-A free-to-play games for the world market and transition entirely to that.”

For gamers in the U.S. this could be a tremendous improvement to the free-to-play genre.While it’s true that the free-to-play market has been bolstered in recent years through providers like Steam, Crytek’s undertaking will help move the genre into another league entirely.

Crytek’s latest release, Crysis 3, will be available in the U.S. on Feb. 19th, 2013, and U.K./AUS on Feb. 21st, 2013.

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Game Rated M for Mature: Blood, Strong Language, Violence.
Available on: PC, PS3, Xbox 360