The man who left behind $78 million to revamp a classic space shooter

Eric Peterson has dedicated 20 years of his life to the video game industry, handling development and production in startups and large studios alike. He has a passion for space games, and in April 2012, he helped found Cloud Imperium Games, the studio building Chris Roberts’ massive interstellar simulator Star Citizen. Cloud Imperium has since raised $78.6 million from nearly 900,000 dedicated fans, with more adding to the pot every day; it’s the largest and most ridiculous crowdfunding campaign in gaming history. Late last year, Peterson walked away from Cloud Imperium, Star Citizen and that pile of cash. Not because he wasn’t into the game anymore; he just didn’t want to leave his home in Austin, Texas.

“I loved working on the project; I just didn’t want to move to Los Angeles,” Peterson says. “They’re my friends. Look, I built that company with them. … It’s just that, I’ve made sacrifices before in this industry for games that almost cost me personally with my family. So I’m just not willing to do that anymore. The priorities for me are family first.”

Family may come first, but it’s followed closely by his new passion project, Descent: Underground. It’s a new take on the classic space shooter, Descent, and Peterson is trying out his crowdfunding luck once again. His new company, Descendent Studios, is looking to raise $600,000 on Kickstarter to make the game a reality. The campaign ends on Friday, April 10th, and as Peterson and I talk, it’s about $120,000 shy of that final goal. Still, he’s “cautiously optimistic” that things will work out. He’s done the research: Kickstarter projects that are 60 percent funded by their final two days receive a 40 percent boost in donations right at the end.

“We don’t go into anything planning to fail,” Peterson says. “There are other options that we’ve discussed, but right now we’re totally focused on getting the Kickstarter to the finish line. … Kickstarters are kind of a weird deal, where you have to capture that imagination in the timeframe that you’re given, or else you don’t get anything. We are in the final days. We’ve done pretty well so far.”

Peterson witnessed the miraculous nature of Kickstarter first-hand with Star Citizen, a campaign that asked for $500,000 and ended up with more than $2 million. Funding for Star Citizen continues on its own website, and Peterson will use this same model for Descent: Underground.

“If we came out and said we wanted to do the whole big experience with single-player and everything, we’d be between $1.5 and $2 million.”

The Descent: Underground Kickstarter is step one: $600,000 is a lot of dough, but it’s only enough to fund the main multiplayer portion of the game. Descendent Studios plans to add a robust single-player campaign and user-created content (with revenue share for successful creators), but the initial game will not contain every aspect on Peterson’s production list. The Kickstarter campaign promises an introductory single-player mission, cooperative play and multiplayer modes, with a variety of ships and maps. After that, the full Descent: Underground will essentially be released in phases.

“If we came out and said we wanted to do the whole big experience with single-player and everything, we’d be between $1.5 and $2 million,” Peterson says. “I think that’s probably too high for Kickstarter today, at least for us as developers.”

The team didn’t even set out to build a new Descent game. After all, Peterson notes, anyone who wants to boot up Interplay’s original Descent can do so now. Peterson did want to build a space shooter with six degrees of freedom, meaning the ships can move in ways that mimic real space shuttles or planes, and he was a longtime fan of Descent‘s mazelike corridors and tight-quarters battles.

“We were building a six-degrees-of-freedom game called Ships That Fight Underground, or STFU for short as a working title,” Peterson says. “And we were approached by Interplay, who said, ‘Would you guys like to do Descent?’ Of course the obvious answer is, ‘Heck yeah.’”

Building something in the Descent universe brings its own set of issues. Nostalgia is a driving force for many backers, though the game is something different in every player’s memory. To some players, it’s a maze-solving kind of game, while others loved it for the co-op and still more fondly recall the competitive multiplayer experience.

“The one thing we didn’t see or didn’t understand was how fractured or how different everybody views what Descent was,” Peterson says. “Descent, to each individual person, is a different thing. … As we’re going through this, we have to make sure that we are satisfying all of those people with what we’re developing and giving those people something that scratches that itch.”

Of course Descendent Studios can’t rely on the nostalgia market alone.

“My kids are 16 and 12,” Peterson says. “They’ve never played the original and they look at it now and say, ‘Well, those graphics look bad.’ It probably wouldn’t hold their attention as much as some of the games that are out there today that have all of these other, richer experiences. We want to make sure that we get both. Most people on Kickstarter, honestly, have never played Descent.”

The new Descent: Underground will feature all of the modern bells and whistles that Peterson’s kids expect, including achievements, unlocks, modding and a class system that makes each ship powerful in its own way. The goal is to create a fun, arcade-like experience, where players can load up a game and play for just 20 minutes at a time, if they want.

First, Descent: Underground needs to raise $600,000. Peterson isn’t planning on failing, but this is a potential reality he has to consider: If the Kickstarter doesn’t make it, Descendent Studios may not exist anymore.

“You can scream in the wind and publishers are not going to listen.”

“We’re all working right now for free,” he says. “Essentially this is a passion project. I put in quite a bit of money out of my own pocket to make this work, so that we have lights, an office, all this other stuff.”

Kickstarter is Peterson’s opportunity to turn passion into a product. He loves Kickstarter, he says. It gives people the ability to create cool and innovative stuff, if the project picks up speed, if enough people back it, if it looks fun to a large enough audience with deep enough pockets.

“People have a voice, but you can scream in the wind and publishers are not going to listen,” Peterson says. “They’ve got their numbers; they’ve got their bottom line. ‘We’re going to make another Call of Duty,’ whatever, right? So, what Kickstarter allows people to do is to create cool and innovative stuff.”

If enough people support those cool projects. If enough people support Descent: Underground.

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‘Grand Theft Auto V’ at 60 frames per second looks incredible

I know, I know: The PC version of Grand Theft Auto V seems like it’s been delayed at least a dozen times, but maybe the snazzy new 1080p, 60FPS trailer below will help heal those old wounds. Predictably, it looks gorgeous and should give the PC master race something to antagonize console gamers with for just a bit longer — last fall’s current-gen re-releases couldn’t hit that silky frame rate or quite that level of detail. The sun reflecting off those slow-mo shell casings is pretty great, right? Come April 14th you’ll be able to see that sort of thing first-hand, and then regale us with your tales of glory when we stream it on Twitch the following week.

http://www.rockstargames.com/videoplayer?id=11267

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Source: Rockstar Games

Inside the UK’s first dedicated eSports arena

The sound of gunfire echoes across the room, followed by an approving roar from the crowd. A five-man team called “Ninjas in Pyjamas” has taken the lead and fans can hardly contain their excitement. Another counter-terrorist suddenly drops to the floor and the noise from the crowd rises again, as two suit-clad presenters babble feverishly into headsets about the tactics at play. There’s no time for celebration though. The players remain fixated on their PC monitors, fingers dancing across keyboards and mice as they guide their virtual characters around an abandoned warehouse complex.

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Welcome to “eSports,” the highest level of competition for video games. Players around the world practise tirelessly in the hope of making the upper echelons of their favourite title, where professional teams, lucrative sponsorships and huge cash prizes await. Inside the new “Gfinity Arena,” on an overcast Friday afternoon, four teams face off in a new tournament for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a tactical shooter developed by Valve. On a normal day, these teams would be competing online, from the comfort of their bedrooms or dedicated squad houses. But the popularity of eSports has given birth to physical tournaments where players compete side-by-side, with adoring fans celebrating every kill.

Gfinity is an eSports organiser based in the UK, catering for some of the biggest games including League of Legends and StarCraft II, as well as British favourites such as Call of Duty, FIFA and Halo. It’s only been operating for a couple of years, but already management has decided to take the plunge with the UK’s first dedicated eSports venue. A permanent fixture is incredibly rare for eSports; the biggest and most reputable competitions, such as Evo and The International, are annual affairs that represent the pinnacle of their respective games. An “arena” that stays open all year round is a far riskier proposition. The number of people watching eSports online continues to grow, but no-one knows if that huge volume will translate to consistent audiences in the real world.

“The demand is there,” Neville Upton, CEO of Gfinity says. “If we want to raise our game and get a higher level of quality and production, having a fixed site makes a big difference. If you’re always moving around and setting up kit, it’s hard work and it’s more difficult to focus on quality. Now we can just focus on the players, the spectators and the experience because everything is rigged up and ready to go. So every time we do an event, it’s going to get better and better, because we’ll be focusing on the quality of the output.”

The “Gfinity Arena” isn’t a stadium like Wembley or the Bernabeu. The company partnered with Vue, one of the biggest cinema chains in the UK, to convert part of its theatre inside the Fulham Broadway shopping centre. It’s still a cinema, first and foremost, but Gfinity has turned three of the screens and some of the adjoining rooms into a professional gamer’s paradise. Two of the screens have been set aside for the competitions themselves; each one is fitted with two glass booths, where up to five players can sit inside with monstrous desktop PCs. A huge screen overhead gives an overview of the action, while smaller monitors underneath track the individual players. Bright spotlights sweep across the crowd and commentators chatter in front of a small backdrop at the side of the room.

It’s like a boxing match, music concert and film premiere all rolled into one. Presenters in a separate studio preview each game and offer their best post-match analysis, culminating in a show not too dissimilar to Match of the Day. Gfinity doesn’t have the history of a legacy broadcaster, so the production is a little rough around the edges, but none of the fans in the theatre seem to mind. They’re here to watch their favourite players duke it out and the action alone is enough to sustain their enthusiasm. As the players begin a new round, the crowd hushes while each team disperses from their respective corner of the map.

“At this point, everyone on our team isn’t really in it for the money,” Sean Gares, a member of the Cloud9 Counter-Strike team says. “We’ve all played this game for so long, and had dry spells where there was no money, so we understand what it’s like to not have Counter-Strike be the source of income that it is right now. It’s about winning, and about making sure we’re on top of our game and doing the most we can to succeed.”

Cloud9 is sponsored by a host of companies including Logitech, Alienware and HTC. All of their Counter-Strike players are professionals, which means they’re earning a respectable living from video games alone. Counter-Strike is one of the oldest franchises in the eSports scene, and doesn’t attract the same level of funding as League of Legends, Dota 2 or StarCraft II. While the latest instalment, Global Offensive, has given the game a new lease of life, players know their time in the spotlight will eventually come to an end.

“If I really wanted to go get a job in the eSports industry now, I could probably work in product development for one of my sponsors or something. But that’s not how I view it,” Jordan Gilbert, another member of the Cloud9 team says. “I just know that I could make a living if I needed to support myself. But the whole point of doing this is that we’re at the forefront of eSports, something that’s developing right now. It’s an honour to be a part of that and obviously I did it for a while without being able to make a living. But now it’s not crazy for me to say I can make six figures in a year if I work hard and do a good job.”

Gilbert and Gares are keen to support the new Gfinity Arena in London, and with good reason; any Counter-Strike tournament, no matter how big or small, could raise the profile and develop the community around their favourite game. If there’s prize money involved, it’ll obviously benefit the professionals in particular, but any organised competition could attract new viewers and players at the grassroots level. And all of that ties into Gfinity’s vision. The company has a six-month season planned with regular competitions for all of the top games. An organised tournament is set to take place every weekend, but the company wants to go further with corporate and community-centric events.

“We’re going to do charity events and ‘Play like a Pro’ style events so people can come down and see what it’s like,” Upton says. “We’re going to do corporate events too. Companies have five-a-side football teams, so there’s no reason why they shouldn’t have FIFA teams, Call of Duty teams, Counter-Strike teams and Hearthstone teams.”

The new Gfinity Arena isn’t without its problems. Outside of the screens themselves, the decor isn’t particularly impressive. The walls and doors are plastered with Gfinity posters and branding, but it still feels like a temporary venue. The press room is effectively an empty cinema screen and beyond the two main stages, there’s little for spectators to see and do. The tournament on Friday night was also overshadowed by technical difficulties during the first match. It’s a rocky start, but a start nonetheless. Gfinity has plenty of time to build on this foundation and make its eSports venue a best-in-class experience.

But that’s no easy feat. Just like real sports, each eSports game is drastically different. The players’ equipment, the competition formats and the rules vary dramatically from one title to another. Gfinity has to be experts in all of them, and attract the relevant commentators and players that will make each tournament a success. Without this level of expertise, the company risks the trust of the community and, as a result, future ticket sales.

Serving the audience is one thing, but Gfinity knows they need to make their arena accommodating to players, too, if they want to be considered a leader in eSports. “The top players are professional sports people,” Upton says. “They train incredibly hard and they put a lot of commitment into coming over here, training and playing, so you need to look after them. Both in terms of giving them the right platform to play on, and a competitive environment, but also just the basics. So we made a few mistakes to begin with, like you always do. For instance, giving players the wrong food — you suddenly realise that what they really want is pizza, as well as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

The UK is a small figure on the global eSports stage. But a venue like the Gfinity Arena, if successful, could help the region to raise its profile. Attracting the best players from around the world will give British teams better access to top-level competition, so they might improve their positions in the world rankings. Each tournament will also raise public awareness of eSports, and hopefully encourage new players to join competitive teams.

But for now, it’s early days; an ambitious idea with enormous potential. There’s plenty of ways that Gfinity could improve its first eSports arena, but already the company seems to be nailing most of the fundamentals. I’ve never played Counter-Strike: Global Offensive before, but within minutes of taking my seat I was captivated by the firefight between “Ninjas in Pyjamas” and “Gamers2.” That has to count for something, right?

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