Posts Tagged ‘rts game’

Sins of the Solar Empire to get micro ‘expansions’

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

Stardock Software/Ironclad Games’ top Strategy title Sins of the Solar Empire is expected to see new expansion packs later this year.

While expansion packs for  a RTS game might not be particularly note worthy, Stardock’s delivery and phrasing is.  While the traditional route has been to release a boxed, brick and mortar storefront version, Stardock is stepping out on a bit of a ledge here, and offering the new content as ‘Micro-Expansions’.  This new content will be made available via the company’s digital distribution platform: Impulse.  The first of these expansions, titled Entrenchment, will be made available at Impulse for $10 later this year.

If these ‘expansions’ sound a whole lot like ‘transactions’ you’re not alone.  While typical microtransactions may involve clothing or weapons for players, content in itself is a form of a microtransaction.  Interesting to note that Stardock shys away from the word itself and cloaks it under the term expansion.

Entrenchment’s new features will add “a Starbase defense platform for each race, turret upgrades for each race to make them more powerful and a Subspace Inhibitor platform that will slow enemy ships within its range.”

Ironclad is also working on two additional add-ons for players.  “one of which adds new diplomacy features to the game and another that will add new technologies and ships.”
At present, neither Ironclad of Stardock have given exact release dates for these ‘expansions’.

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Company of Heroes released as microtransaction title in Asia

Sunday, August 10th, 2008

While boatloads of information was pouring out of LA at E3, it seems like THQ decided to give popular title Company of Heroes it’s unveiling in the Asian market.

Kotaku recently reported on the release, summing up what we were all thinking….how did this one get past me?  THQ’s Company of Heroes is their push at bringing the RTS game into the Asian online market.  They’ve taken the core CoH experience, slimmed it down a bit, and tailored it for online gaming.

The ‘new’ Company of Heroes is a free to play, micro-transaction based title that falls nicely inline with the Asian style of play.  Some of the gameplay changes include persistent online characters that will help you level up and carry across battles.  These ‘Hero’ units will have charged ‘super powers’ which go along with the new commander tree which includes 48 separate abilities/powers.

In order to show it’s support and dedication to the title, THQ have opened a Chinese office in order to launch the game.   A Korean version is soon to follow, and a Western version after that.

While never having an ‘official’ Chinese release, Company of Heroes already has a massive following in China.

Relic Entertainment General Manager Tarrnie Williams comments, “We know that there are at least one million pirated copies of the game in China,” noting that every time a patch is released, more than one million updates are applied from Chinese IPs – for a game that’s never been released at retail in China. In Sun Tzu fashion, THQ / Relic thinks it can turn this retailing weakness into a strength.

Williams firmly believes that the microtransaction model’s “got big legs”. James added that market hesitation (especially in the West) is primarily due to the low graphical and gameplay quality of games available in the free-to-play online space, two counts of which no reasonable players’ or critics’ jury could ever find Company of Heroes guilty of.

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