Some of you may have read in the most recent news update that Quake Live is now using Twitter.
Wait… what? You can’t say that! You’re breaking the beta Non Disclosure Agreement!
Well, not exactly. Twitter is a public feed. Just do a little search in Google for “Quake Live Twitter” and you’ll see that these updates are not private and they are there for everyone to follow.
Ok then. But what exactly is this “Twitter” You’re talking about?
Twitter has been the internet hype of 2008. The Twitter system is similar to “Facebook updates”, and to be honest, that’s really the only thing twitter does: keep people updated about random activities in a short sentence of maximum 180 characters.
The AGP-Tour website is being finalized and in about two weeks the last stage of its beta phase will begin. Over at fragster.de an interview was published with Jarod Reisin, the CEO of AGP’s “Quake only”-Tour.
For those of you who don’t know what the AGP Tour exactly is,… don’t worry, you’re not alone. About a year ago the organizer Jarod Reisin announced the AGP Tour would organize tournaments for several 1v1 games, such as UT, Q4 and Q3 as well as cover them in a way that’s not been done before.
Yet as soon as this news was released, the whole project just seemed to pretty much fall flat on it’s butt. Today however it seems they are renewing this dream, yet now exclusively for Quake Live duels.
After reading this interesting article “2009 is looking dry” by Peter Molyneux, head of Lionhead Studios, I wondered what games could be Quake Live’s rivals in 2009.
Any interesting games recently?
Honestly there haven’t been any good sci-fi first person shooters for ages. I might be exaggerating but actually there hasn’t been any good one since Quake III Arena back in 1999. Well, actually I enjoyed one FPS game, namely PainKiller. The game was really bad out-of-the box but when it was elected as the 2005 CPL worldtour game it had the support it needed to become a good game.
Other FPS games like Doom 3, Quake 4, Unreal Tournament 3 … never really broke through. Those games were all made very well but they missed too many features to remain interesting on the long run.
The real success games in the last few years were all realistic shooters like Mohaa, CS, COD1-5, battlefield, …
The whole world is suffering from the financial crisis. To give you an idea: since the start of the recession, the number of unemployed persons has grown by 3,6 million in the US.
Company Cutbacks
Companies start cutting on their expenses to cope with this financial crisis. The same goes for the computer business and gaming industries who are making decisions to deal with this extraordinary situation.
First there was the news that EA closes Black Box and they plan to reduce their worldwide work force by approximately 10 per cent or 1.000 people. Then I found the news that Microsoft plans to cut up to 15.000 jobs worldwide.
The Id software crew very recently announced they will soon be sending out their largest batch of invites for the Quake Live beta yet to date. It is estimated that over 10,000 new beta invites will be sent out, allowing plenty of new people to try the experience that is Quake Live, nearly doubling their current userbase.
When will they release these new Quake Live beta keys/invites? Id software sends out invites all the time. Yet this huge invitation will officially start the 5th of January.
The developers of Quake Live want to organize a crash test. They want as many people online as possible, probably to test if their servers can keep up.
This test will be during prime time in Europe, at 21.00cet to be exactly. Since people in the USA will be at school or work, I guess the Europeans will have to do an extra effort to make this crash test work.
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