Hasta La Gadget!

Ever since Oculus Rift hired Doom co-creator and legendary game designer John Carmack as Chief Technology Officer a few weeks back, he’s been hard at work on the Rift’s SDK. “John likes to do what he likes to do,” VP of product Nate Michell told attendees of an Oculus panel at GDC Europe this evening. “He’s got a ridiculous amount of good ideas that he’s working into the SDK. Especially around mobile, frankly,” he added, coyly teasing an update to the Oculus SDK that’s apparently coming sooner than later.

Mitchell’s speaking to the SDK’s promised Android support, which company CEO Brendan Iribe revealed as a forthcoming goal in an interview earlier this year. When asked by a panel attendee when iOS support is coming, headset creator Palmer Luckey smilingly admitted, “It’s Apple’s fault!” Mitchell quickly jumped in, explaining that the Android platform is simply more open to peripherals like the Rift. We’ll have more from Oculus as the week goes on, so keep an eye out for even more.

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Software, HD, Mobile

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Microsoft’s attempt to reinvigorate its aging Age of Empires game franchise most recently resulted in a free-to-play game distributed on the company’s (now shuttered) Games for Windows Live service. The game, Age of Empires Online, launched as a free title with two civilizations available to play as; any additional civilizations (initially) cost $20 apiece, a hefty price despite the amount of content therein (30ish hours per civilization). Longtime AOE fans, understandably, reacted negatively to the game’s business model, which took the content previously offered in full from older AOE games and broke it up into an a la carte, F2P title.

As Microsoft AOEO executive producer Kevin Perry told a crowd of GDC Europe attendees this morning in a panel titled “F2P the Wrong Way: Age of Empires Online,” the game outright “wasn’t ready for launch” when it arrived in Summer 2011. Though Perry ran through a variety of ways that his team helped to fix AOEO‘s course, he brought up one particularly interesting factor: Valve’s Steam game service. When the game hit Steam in March 2012, the game’s DAU (daily active users) spiked by more than three times — a larger bump than any other change by far, including new content (as seen in the above image).

Filed under: Gaming, Software, HD, Microsoft

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