Stewie`s Blog » EA

Stockholm, Dice

Stewie — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:28:25 +0000

Game trends

Stewie — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:45:11 +0000

BC2 servers perform very well on the new Xeon CPUs:

Contracts

Stewie — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:43:40 +0000

Signing hundreds of contract sheets is boring … very boring

We had a great time

Stewie — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 07:29:20 +0000

Visiting Stockholm

Stewie — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:50:24 +0000

Battlefield 1943 – Great game and lots of players

Stewie — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:39:31 +0000

This complete week has been dedicated to Battlefield 1943. Wow – so many players. What a great game!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Our software runs so many instances I have spend many hours tweaking the C# i3d tools and backend servers. A lot of code optimizations – new features and bug fixes have been rolled out.
Now it’s time to play!

Visit the EA Community Lounge in Leipzig for i3D.net/Heroes posters!

Stewie — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 22:51:29 +0000

See this forum topic for the full announcement on the new i3D.net posters! This years design is done by Dice and i3d’s Ramon! Check the forum for the high res version of this unique poster. We intend to print a limited edition of both posters.

At the gamers convention in Leipzig you’ll be able to grab them for free!

Free ‘webbased’ shooters for 2008

Stewie — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:36:10 +0000

This year two new online shooters will be released for free. Quake Live and Battlefield Heroes are scheduled for release in the 2nd half of 2008. Both games rely on advertising and a large online social community as they are free for download and free to play. Both games have a closed beta with a very limited number of beta testers. So far beta testing focuses on the games them self, but in my opinion the social community build around these games will need similar attention from the developers as the community site brings advertising income to the games andit’s the main starting point for both games: you can only launch the game from the website after authentication. Wouldn’t it be great if the devs opened up their platform with an API to integrate it into sites as Facebook, MySpace or the Dutch Hyves.

Will we see more games with the same sales strategy the coming years? Will this be the answer to piracy?

One game, two gamers

Stewie — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 13:53:45 +0000

Crysis released a press announcement yesterday which shed some light on the multiplayer servers of this new upcoming EA game.

“Rather than providing the community partially working features we limit this for the DX10 version only. Due to the strong hardware available with DX10, server load is less and performance is increased. This ensures the pure physics and day and night cycle experience without any limitation.

Gamers with a DX10 card are able to play on DX9 servers, but with the limitation of the respective server. Vice versa it is not possible for gamers with DX9 cards to play on DX10 servers due to the limited features.”

There is a big downside on this issue. DirectX10 is only available on Windows Vista AND your videocard has to support it. This will divide the Vista gamer from the Windows XP gamer and split the community in half. I am wondering what will happen to competitive gaming, most likely clan gamers will play DirectX9 matches as Vista is highly disliked in the professional gaming scene. As for public gaming, the DirectX10 servers will become some kind of ‘premium’ servers, but will be really hard to fill unlike the DirectX9 servers, that allow anyone to join!

Gaming Season 2007/2008 opened

Stewie — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:21:06 +0000

Yes, gaming season 2007/2008 is coming closer every day. In the next few months 6 huge multiplayer games will hit the stores:

Quake Wars
Crysis
Call of Duty 4
Medal of Honor Airborne
HL2 episode 2 with the multiplayer game Team Fortress 2
Unreal Tournament 3

I am professionally looking forward to Quake Wars, Crysis and Call of Duty 4. TF2 will be a very unique game, too bad it’s only sold with HL2. The first three games will feature perstitant statistics, much like Battlefield 2 introduced to the public. I am looking forward to work with Activision and EA, and their developers IW and Crytek. Already we have a very warm contact with SplashDamage, developer of QuakeWars. Those guys know what they are doing, and take their time in their commitment to quality.

Valve really wants to push both games. The episodic content is much less sold as expected, and it takes too long before a new episode is released. It’s not a new game, but they certainly take their time. They will push TF2 now the same as they tried to push CSS and DoD: Source earlier. Where CSS became a hit, Day of Defeat Source flopped.
With Half Life 2 & Episode 2 and TF2 combined in one package, it seems Valve is trying to sell more copies of HL2. TF2 has the potential to become a big hit, even without pushing it to die hard HL2 gamers.
Now STEAM opens up to more and more developers and publishers, it’s ironic Valve is the only publisher who’s selling their products in forced combined packages.