Loudcrowd Marries Gaming And Music In A Virtual World
Startup Conduit Labs has launched Loudcrowd, a online community that integrates a virtual world with social gaming and music. Loudcrowd users can create their own virtual world with avatars and access music playlists while playing a series of music-themed games with friends. Loudcrowd is launching with 50 artists and over 250 songs featured on the platform, including music from the Indie rock bands Justice, Phoenix, Santigold, and Friendly Fires.
Loudcrowd wants to create the feel of an online concert or dance club for users. The site will feature social games that will be played simultaneously with music tracks as well as daily playlists from guest DJs. Loudcrowd’s feature Dance game is similar to the popular game Dance, Dance Revolution and is pretty innovative. Loudcrowd says that the dance game has been played more than one million times since they entered private beta, with over 25 percent of users visiting the site more than 100 times a month. The games are all built on Flash and the animation is disarmingly good.
See the full article at TechCrunch.
Do Video Games Cost Too Much?
Valve’s Gabe Newell gave the keynote address at this year’s Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain (DICE) Summit about the cost of games, the effect of piracy, and how to reach new players. Valve undertook an experiment recently to test how price affected the sales of their popular survival-horror FPS, Left 4 Dead. They Reduced the price by 50% on Steam, which “resulted in a 3000% increase in sales of the game, posting overall sales that beat the title’s original launch performance.” They also tested various other price drops over the holidays, seeing spikes in sales that corresponded well to the size of the discount.
See the full article at Slashdot.
Zerg rush week: UC Berkeley opens StarCraft class
We’ve seen colleges, in an effort to coolify their stuffy catalog, offer classes that use video games to explain academic concepts, applying a chocolate coating of gaming fun to help the pill of education to go down easier. What we like about a new StarCraft class being offered at UC Berkeley is that it’s just that: A class to help you be better at StarCraft and enjoy playing it more. Really.
From the course description: “What may look like complex topics are just ways we want you to think more deeply about the game to derive a greater satisfaction from playing. Furthermore, this understanding should have applications in real life, to further synthesize new information from limited inferences.”
Read the full article at Joystiq.
People are now playing Quake Live
Quake Live, the upcoming free in-browser version of Quake, is sending out beta invitations to the service. Users are directed to beta.quakelive.com
This is a grand new experiment in gameplay. Instead of charging users a monthly access fee, id Software is teaming with IGA Worldwide to add advertising and sponsorships to the game to make money. Early reviews of the game are a thumbs up, and it looks to be a one way train to zero productivity at work. We’re trying to track down video of the beta environment.
The trailer for Quake Live is here.
Logitech G18 gaming keyboard shows its not-so-ugly face
We spied the Logitech G13 Gamepad when it was announced earlier today, and now Engadget Chinese has caught wind of something else that may be in store for us. The keyboard pictured above is apparently the G18, and we while we have almost no solid info on it, we can glean a few things, such as the apparent groupings of fast function keys on the left side of the board (some which seem to be numbered G11-G15), not to mention that tiny display at the center. We don’t know when we can expect this beast to arrive, but the G13 Gamepad is expected in January so fingers crossed.
