The Public Financial Rise and Fall of THQ
Posted on Sunday, November 25 2012 @ 01:14:41 Eastern

After THQ dined and dashed out of its most recent earnings call and then defaulted (technically) on its credit facility with Wells Fargo, I became interested in the strategies and leadership that plummeted the former multi-billion dollar company down to a seven-digit market valuation that could be purchased twelve times over by Apple's 2011 contributions to charity.

But rather than consult Wikipedia or Google News, I decided to go straight to the source: the financial filings that THQ, as a publically traded company, is required to release quarterly and annually. 10-Ks, 10-Qs, Annual Reports, and earnings call transcripts were parsed together to bring you four images that encapsulate my view on THQ's historical trajectory as a public company.

This is the completely biased—yet completely factual—rise and fall of THQ, in the company's own words.

(click each image to enlarge):













The opinions expressed here does not necessarily reflect the views of Game Revolution, but we believe it's worthy of being featured on our site. This article has been lightly edited for grammar (images were created by sliverstorm). It has been submitted for our monthly Vox Pop competition. ~Ed. Nick

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Black Mesa is the Best Remake of Anything, Ever (and You Will Love It)
Posted on Friday, October 19 2012 @ 14:26:46 Eastern

Black Mesa, the Source remake of the original Half-Life, has been out for just under a month at the time of this writing. This game (and it is that: a full, triple-A, capital ‘G’ Game) is everything a remake should be: It captures the soul and essence of what made its forefather the most groundbreaking FPS since Doom, while being unafraid to apply over a decade of advancements in game design towards crafting a better experience, as opposed to merely a modern one. 

Entire treatises have been written on Half-Life’s revolutionary designs and how they moved the FPS genre out of the corridor and into genuine world-building—this article will not be one of them. Rather, this article is for the generation of gamers that never played the original Half-Life and therefore sees no reason to sink time into what on its surface might appear to be to be a hi-def reskin of a 14-year-old game. To you all I say: This game will rank in your top single-player FPS experiences for this year or any other. The Black Mesa team has given you the opportunity to play one of the best games of all time in its best form, and they’ve given it to you for free.

Let me show you what they did. Spoiler alert, duh. (Click any image for fullscreen).



The opening Black Mesa station is teeming with detail and life, despite only being visible for three seconds as the tram pulls out.  Black Mesa is more than an HD texture upgrade—it is a bottom-up rebuild of the original game with all the polish one would expect from a leading developer. 




Character models look and act like they were plucked straight out of a modern FPS (and given that the game is built upon the Half-Life 2 asset base, maybe a few were). Heads track motion, lips are synced, and animations are top-notch.




In the original Half-Life, the majority of the indoor game environments are whites and grays, giving the research facility a clinical feel. Conversely, the Black Mesa team chose to use a much wider array of colors, assigning many rooms their own palettes and lighting. Both approaches create a distinct feel: The sterile look of the original makes the monstrosities that follow feel out of place and disturbing, while the Black Mesa remake has more distinct visual themes accompanying each gameplay segment.




Of course, some areas of Black Mesa have a palette almost identical to the original Half-Life. This is the test chamber, where the player’s actions yield unforeseen consequences. The openings of both games up to this point are almost identical in terms of structure and dialogue. A wise choice—few other games have ever come close to matching the mounting tension of Half-Life’s first 10 minutes.




The Black Mesa team added several new areas not found in the original Half-Life. Allowing the player under this specific door has the advantage of adding to the story’s internal logic and giving the player a guard station to raid, but the additional freedom comes at the expense of leaving the player less directed at an early point in the game.




All the enemies not pulled directly from Half-Life 2 assets received a complete revamp in Black Mesa. Where Half-Life had to represent the Houndeye’s sonic attack as physical blue waves, Black Mesa uses a gorgeous distortion effect coupled with improved animations and sound. In addition to enhanced models and attacks, enemies are infused with more personality via AI and game design. This elevates the Houndeyes (my favorite remake) from four-legged AOE enemies in Half-Life to creatures that truly feel like they were plucked from an entirely different ecosystem and forced to adapt to a new environment.




In some cases, the stylistic choices in Black Mesa traded off against game play. In the top screen, the original Half-Life artists use deep shadows and a bright white back wall to draw the player’s attention to the window, which must be broken to progress. In Black Mesa, these decisions have been reversed, presenting a more ambiguous picture to the player.




On the other hand, most Black Mesa additions strongly enhance gameplay. Both versions of the game hide HEV Energy in the same area below the bridge, but where Half-Life only requires a box to be broken, the Black Mesa team built out a mini-puzzle room that trains the player to use the blue box (which only reappears during push puzzles) in a zero-pressure environment.




Another example of improved puzzles in Black Mesa: Where the original Half-Life featured a simple button press to turn on the above oxygen and fuel lines, Black Mesa built out a richer missing valve wheel scenario with more interesting enemy placement and environments. These types of enhancements are found all throughout Black Mesa.




This is a Gargantua. He is scary as hell in either version.




In the original Half-Life, the red arrow on the left can be shot to switch the track of the rail cart. Black Mesa replaces this mechanic with a Source-based puzzle involving outlets and electricity.




The amount of ambient detail put into each area is breathtaking.




A trapped life form in an experimentation chamber. Half-Life uses the same model as the player encounters in combat, but Black Mesa strips the alien of its armor and weapon, as it has been captured and is being experimented on. These subtle touches—and there are a number of them—show Black Mesa for the labor of love that it is and help to further enrich the story.




The Black Mesa team added a few extra combat events as well. All the objects on the right side of the graphic were added by the team to provide layers of tactical cover for an upcoming firefight. All the Black Mesa weapons have been rebuilt and rebalanced from the ground up. They are deeply satisfying to fire and are one of the most immediately noticeable improvements over the original game.




The medical device that the player must dodge and deactivate. Watching the Black Mesa version animated is an absolute treat—it slices, spins, and jolts like a practical machine gone haywire. The original Half-Life device looks like it was built specifically to kill adventurous MIT degree-holders.




One of Half-Life’s most oft-cited contributions to the FPS genre is drastically improved vertical gameplay, with the textbook example being a battle up and down the mesa cliff face. Black Mesa extends this section and turns a battle down a pipe (seen from Half-Life in the image above) into an enormous set piece.




Did I mention the puzzle enhancements? Touching any one of those trip mine lasers blows up the entire game, by the way.




This grid control launches mortars at the targeted point on the map. The one-button joystick controller from the original game has been updated with a slick point-and-click cursor interface one would expect from a polished 2012 release.




I’ll close with a screen that is 100% from Black Mesa—no Half-Life fade-in here. This is the remake of the second assassin encounter and one of the areas that best represents what is so great about Black Mesa.

In the original game, there are two assassin encounters, both similar beyond the architecture of the room. Assassins are agile enemies that snipe from cover and can leap incredible heights in a single jump. They also react to the player’s movement and sound, which grants two distinct approaches—aggressively running and gunning as the assassins dash behind cover and backflip across the room, or quietly stalking the assassins while they do the same to you.

Both of these encounters exist in Black Mesa, with a few tweaks. The first and most noticeable is the updated acoustics—dead air suffocates the entire room, muffling the assassins’ footsteps and building a dreadful sense of tension. The second is the design of the assassins themselves: They are faster and more slender, making them much harder to spot and hit. The Black Mesa team balanced this advantage by giving each assassin glowing red headgear that briefly traces her movements. The first room’s dark colors make these flashes of glowing red a great way to visually track the assassins as they dart through the environment, and the player quickly learns to keep an eye out. A pretty cool change, I thought.

And then I got to the second assassin room.

Small, glowing red lights pepper the entire area. They are nestled into high corners and walls, arranged to catch your eye as you navigate the labyrinth of walkways and shipping containers. Getting shot from behind and turning to find a door lock or a warning light grows an insidious paranoia, and the encounter meshes that nervousness with all the prior enhancements from the first room to create a memorable experience all its own.

That’s probably the highest praise I can give to the Black Mesa team—they not only remastered Half-Life for a new generation, but took the risk of innovating upon what many consider the best-designed shooter of all time. The end result is a game that any modern developer would be proud to count among their body of work.

And if you have the opportunity to experience—for free—this fantastic, seminal, flat-out fun game for the first time in your life, you would be crazy not to take it.

The opinions expressed here does not necessarily reflect the views of Game Revolution, but we believe it's worthy of being featured on our site. This article has been lightly edited for grammar (sliverstorm included the images himself!). It has been submitted for our monthly $20 Vox Pop prize. ~Ed. Nick

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Did Game Revolution Kill The Secret World?
Posted on Saturday, July 14 2012 @ 02:13:36 Eastern

If you aren’t familiar with The Secret Worldcom scandal, the story unfolds as follows: Game Revolution reviewer Jonathan_Leack, in a manner that can only be described as “horribly underprepared for the consequences,” posts a review for MMO The Secret World, scoring the game as a 2.5 out of 5. The score gets entered into Metacritic as 50 out of 100 and is one of the first six reviews posted. The Secret World’s Metascore promptly sinks a whopping four points from a 74 to a 70.
 
On The Secret World’s forums, a thread is started to inquire about the low Metascore. Game Revolution’s uninflated review stands out as the worst score by ten points, prompting an inter-dimensional invasion of the review page. Secret Worlders create over 15 new Game Revolution accounts to attack the credibility of Jonathan, his prose, the review process, Diablo III—at one point cartoons are mentioned in a context so vile that my monitor catches fire.
 
For their part, the GR natives try to stymie the flow of insults by bathing everyone in acid. The situation is not improved:




Watching the thread erupt, I was struck by the absolute ire with which the TSW forum-goers attacked Jonathan’s review. Having already purchased the game themselves, why did they care? I’m not sure I’ve ever consulted the internet to determine my enjoyment of a game post-play, and I’ve certainly never requested that assessment from people who hate the things I love. But then, it wasn’t the review in its own right that first drew attention; it was the review’s effect on The Secret World’s Metascore… which makes even less sense, at least initially. If my personal experience with a game is a 90, and then the internet tells me it thinks the game is a 70, “Fuck, I’m wrong” is not the correct response.
 
But maybe TSW players care about the Metascore not for its influence on their perception of the game, but for its influence on everyone else’s perception. If potential inhabitants of Kingsmouth are opting instead for Azeroth ‘cause Metacritic, that’s less players in a community to which less future content will be pushed by a less well-funded studio. It’s layered selfishness, a black onion of the soul—but the rationale is sound. That is, assuming the Metascore determines a game’s financial success. Which it does not.
 
Right?
 
On March 15, 2011, THQ released Homefront, a military FPS designed and marketed to compete at the AAAA level with Battlefield and Call of Duty. That same day, the embargo placed on review copies of the game expired, flooding Metacritic with middling scores. Homefront’s Metascore plummeted from an 88 to a 72, and with it went THQ’s stock price, collapsing 21% from $5.94 to $4.69 over the course of 24 hours—a loss of over $85 million dollars in market value. The same game journalists who gave the 7 out of 10s that fueled Homefront’s decline criticized investors’ over-reliance on the Metascore, citing 200k preorders and 350k day one sales as reasons that the THQ would smash though its breakeven sales target of 2 million units and hit its 3.5 million unit goal. Homefront never came close, and the remaining THQ stockholders never saw their $85 million again.
 
Did investors know something game journalists didn’t? Could they have predicted the sales of Homefront months in advance using a single, aggregated number?
 
Almost unbelievably, the answer is yes.


Source: VGChartz and Metacritic

What we’re looking at is Xbox-only US sales data for 10 weeks of each major game’s launch from 2009-2011. Xbox and US data was chosen in order to remove the effects of install base and region.
 
There is a clear exponential relationship between Metascore and units sold, but you don’t have to take my word for it. We can use a statistical method called regression to create an equation that will predict, for every Metascore, what the expected sales volume will be. At a high level, a regression (specifically, a sum of squares regression) is just an equation created with the goal of minimizing the sum of the squared distance between each real data point and the data point that is predicted by said equation.
 
If you want to put your fist through my face for starting that last sentence with the word ‘just’, think of this instead: We create an equation that takes in a Metascore (x) and spits out a sales volume (y). For every Metascore, our equation will generate a single value for the expected sales of a game. We then look at the distance between that predicted number and all of the actual sales numbers for games with that Metascore. We square and sum all of these distances.  We then repeat the process for each Metascore until we have one giant sum of all the squared distances, or squared residuals, as statisticians and ******* bloggers like to say.

We then repeat THAT entire process for millions of equations, until we find the one equation that gives us the lowest sum of squared residuals (we actually just use math). This equation is the regression equation that best fits the data.



Above is our regression trendline. The formula in red is the equation that best fit the data: it is the equation of the red line to the left, which shows that as the Metascore increases, expected sales increase exponentially. The number in black is our R^2 (“R-Square”), one measure of fit for our regression. Read in English, this equation states: “43.56% of the variability in a game’s units sold can be explained by the variability in the game’s Metascore.” I will help level-set here by saying that for a one variable, non-time series sales data regression, 40% R^2 is pretty damn significant (go here for a near-perfect graphical explanation of R^2. The picture will also help you to visualize the regression process).
 
So, given that we’ve just shown a game’s Metascore is directly related to its sales volume, we can say with certainty that Game Revolution caused The Secret World to sell poorly by lowering its Metascore. Which would be fine, except for the fact that it’s CFW.
 
As in, Completely Fucking Wrong.
 
Correlation does not imply causation. And hell, even if it did, there are key sales variables that have less than one over infinity to do with the Metascore. For example: 



I said I selected the data to control for install base and region, but there are dozens of other factors that play a major role in determining a game’s sales—none of them related to Metacritic. Timing of the release relative to holidays, new franchise vs. established, genre, exclusivity, marketing spend, and publisher (which is more a measure of marketing dollar effectiveness than game quality) are all critical components of the game sales formula and are all completely beyond the purview of game reviewers.
 
In speaking of game reviewers, a Metascore is just that: An aggregation of individual reviews. Each reviewer comes with their own preferences for genre, mechanics, story, art—Metacritic cackles as it throws all of these viewpoints into a cauldron and boils them down into a type of Average Joe brew. This makes Metacritic a terrible tool for any one individual trying to figure out how they, with their own, unique set of preferences, will feel about a game, but a convenient approximation for an investor trying to determine how the ‘expected’ consumer will react to a game, regardless of whether the actual consumers get their own, personalized feedback from journalists, friends, demos, or forums.
 
Jonathan_Leack, one man with one set of preferences, posted an honest review about his experiences with The Secret World. He values smooth, skills-based combat, streamlined gameplay, and high production values. Unsurprisingly, Jonathan did not entirely enjoy the dodge-centric combat, abstract gameplay, and lore content over polish core of The Secret World. But because a Metascore is a reflection of its game and not the other way around, the only people his review will deter from playing The Secret World are the people who share his preferences, re: everyone who would not have enjoyed playing the game in the first place!
 
So rest easy, Secret Worlders—Game Revolution has taken nothing from you and asks only that you give nothing in return.
 
Kidding; we love you all. Stick around!


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The Death of 'Teen'
Posted on Friday, February 3 2012 @ 08:48:29 Eastern

One brisk August day in 1992, a former amusement park manufacturer turned game publisher rolled a brand new cabinet into video arcades across America. It was a two-player black upright, bound with bright red bordering and sporting a generic combat gr...   read more...

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One Score to Rule Them All
Posted on Friday, December 9 2011 @ 11:53:32 Eastern

Sit down and grab some popcorn: this is a long one.

(Thanks to Bras for the article suggestion.)
 
Have I ever told you the story of Metacritic? Let me tell you the story of Metacritic.
 
Once upon...   read more...

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Why Does the Video Game Industry Hate Used Game Sales?
Posted on Saturday, September 17 2011 @ 16:38:49 Eastern

Seriously. What is the Big Fucking Deal?

Video game publishers (and by extension, video game developers) sell millions of copies of their games, and they have the audacity to complain about a few units lost to second-hand sales? Some p...   read more...

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Game Revolution Exposed: Haiku Fridays biased in favor of veterans!
Posted on Friday, July 29 2011 @ 18:57:36 Eastern

Fuck Haiku Friday

A veteran-biased scam

I’ll prove it with math
 
Haiku Friday was birthed from the moist mind-womb of Duke Ferris on April 17, 2009.

Having acquired beta invites f...   read more...

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Game Revolution Exposed: Grade Padding Scheme Revealed!
Posted on Monday, May 9 2011 @ 11:35:41 Eastern

Gamerevolution.com has been a fixture in my life for over 10 years. I was around when the only way to enter the site was through a compacted car and the home page could fit on an 800x600 postage stamp.  I even remember when the mailbag was a wee...   read more...

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