Sleeping Dogs 
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One of the best and most underappreciated games ever is less than $3Aug 30, 2023 - PCGamesNSleeping Dogs deserves a sequel. A wonderful variation on the Grand Theft Auto formula, it remains one of the best sandbox games ever made, combining driving, martial arts, gunfights, and a killer soundtrack with a sprawling story about the Hong Kong underworld. Varied, expansive, and consistently well-written, the forgotten gem from 2012, originally published by Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, and Deus Ex's Square Enix, is now available for less than $3. If you haven't tried Sleeping Dogs before, or want to revisit a stone-cold classic via the enormous Definitive Edition, this is your chance. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Donnie Yen confirms production on Sleeping Dogs film is underway Square Enix won't let Sleeping Dogs lie; announces Definitive Edition Square Enix to transform AAA production, make consumers more involved Beating the BullyOct 10, 2019 - EurogamerMike Skupa doesn't ship games often - two in the last 16 years - but when he does, you take notice. He was the design director of undercover cop game Sleeping Dogs, and one of two principal designers on Rockstar's back-to-school classic Bully, both still loved by fans today. Seven years after Sleeping Dogs released and three years on from developer United Front Games' collapse, he's finally ready to talk about what he's been cooking up. But as eager as I am to hear about his next game (and don't worry, we'll get into that later), I'm keen to find out how he reflects on the ups and downs of his career so far. His successes haven't come easy: the joy of creating Bully was only made possible by 80-hour work weeks that left him burnt out, he tells me. The "fairy-tale" release of Sleeping Dogs was followed by years of uncertainty and aborted projects, culminating in him being told, with no notice, that the studio was out of cash. Last month, I spent an afternoon with him in Vancouver's Chinatown, where his new company Brass Token is based, to make sense of it all. He told me how paper rounds and bottle rocket wars inspired Bully's design, how he came to dislike Rockstar's "company-first" culture, how being kept in the dark about United Front's finances made its closure hurt even more, and how he's pouring the last 20 years - the lessons, the struggles, and the grief of lost loved ones - into an unannounced story-driven third-person horror game targeting a release in 2020. Read more Star Wars' Donnie Yen says Sleeping Dogs movie in productionFeb 5, 2018 - EurogamerMartial arts master and Star Wars Rogue One star Donnie Yen has confirmed a movie adaptation of Sleeping Dogs is in development. Yen posted about the project yesterday on his various social media accounts. "Sometimes great things take a bit of time," he wrote on his Instagram. "Sleeping Dog is motion, you guys ready for this? #donnieyen #action #sleepingdog #kickass #martialarts" Read more… Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition trailer promises the real Hong Kong action flick experienceSep 26, 2014 - PC Gamer We liked Sleeping Dogs well enough when we reviewed it back in 2012, but as with most things it could still have been better. And that's what Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition promises: A more well-realized and immersive experience on the mean streets of Hong Kong. Will it be better in ways that actually matter? That I do not know, but you can shove a man's face into a running table saw, and that seems a not unreasonable place to start. Obviously it's a ridiculous place to start, too watch this if you don't believe me. But the idea here is to use the increased power of next-gen consoles and the PC to deliver enhanced gameplay, more advanced visual effects, heavier traffic and more pedestrians, making the in-game Hong Kong feel more like a living, breathing, and very crowded city. As noted in the original announcement, Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition will include all previously-released DLC, which is a fair chunk of extra content. But unlike some 'remastered' games thinking specifically of Metro Redux here it's not going to come out at a reduced price: GameStop has it listed for $60, which is actually $10 more than the upcoming (and wholly new) Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. That might be alright for newcomers, but I can't see it as a very attractive proposition for anyone who already owns the original. Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition comes out on October 14.Triad Wars will be free-to-play and asynchronousSep 23, 2014 - PC Gamer Yesterday, Sleeping Dogs developer United Front revealed the first trailer for Triad Wars, which it called an "open world online" game. Not surprisingly, it looks a lot like Sleeping Dogs. It's still set in Hong Kong and features the same driving, shooting, and fighting mechanics, but is somehow, vaguely, a multiplayer game. Today, the United Front team answered questions from fans on a Reddit Ask Me Anything thread, which clarified a few things. First of all, yes, Triad Wars for now is planned as a free-to-play game, even if United Front avoided the term in the reveal trailer. Producer Justin Bullard said that monetization is one of the things United Front will test during its beta tests, but that its guiding principle is that you should never have to pay in order to enjoy the game. "Free to play allows us to get the game to as many players as possible with the lowest possible barrier to entry," he said. "That suits our goal of exposing a massive number of gamers to the Sleeping Dogs universe." Design Director Steve Ferreira also clarified that "Triad Wars is about competing against a smaller set of players in an asynchronous world," so it doesn't sound like you'll be running around Hong Kong with hundreds of other live players at the same time. Between what United Front says in the AMA and the few glimpses of building customization we see in the trailer, I imagine that you'll be setting up defenses at your hideout and attacking other players who are doing the same (maybe a little bit like The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot), but it's too soon to say for sure. United Front said that it's still finalizing dates for the beta tests, but the Closed Beta registrations are now open if you're interested. As for a proper Sleeping Dogs sequel, United Front said only that it "would love to continue making games in the Sleeping Dogs universe."Triad Wars is an “open world action strategy” game coming exclusively to PCSep 22, 2014 - PC Gamer As promised, United Front Games has today released details for Triad Wars, the long promised follow-up to Sleeping Dogs. According to the video embedded below, Triad Wars is a "living, breathing" "open-world action strategy" game set in Hong Kong, coming exclusively to PC. Rather than focus on Sleeping Dogs protagonist Wei Shen, the online game will more closely resemble a traditional MMO, with players responsible for establishing their own turf, finding a niche in the underworld, and hopefully fighting to take other gangs' turf. According to one talking head in the video below, the ever-evolving world may evolve into a completely different game over the course of two years. TriadWarsZ, maybe? The gameplay will vary depending on how you choose to play: for example, players are free to choose which area of criminality they would like to specialise in, with smuggling and counterfeiting two options mentioned below. Meanwhile, the combat in Sleeping Dogs will apparently feature in Triad Wars. Triad Wars is expected to release in early 2015, though closed beta registrations are available right now. The video below will give you the full rundown. Sleeping Dogs follow-up Triad Wars is a PC only online gameSep 21, 2014 - PC Gamer If you were a fan of 2012 sleeper hit Sleeping Dogs and are averse to change, then the following news may concern you. According to an announcement by Sleeping Dogs studio United Front Games, forthcoming follow-up Triad Wars is an online only installment coming exclusively to PC. Sleeping Dogs was a single player game which released for consoles as well as PCs, so it's probably safe to assume that Triad Wars will be an entirely different beast. According to the announcement we'll get a full reveal this Monday (or early Tuesday morning in Australia), as well as a Reddit AMA at 12PM PST on Tuesday. It's wise to keep in mind that United Front Games described Triad Wars back in October as "another game based in the Sleeping Dogs universe", rather than a full sequel proper. Whatever the case, we'll find out more soon. For those eager to spend money on Sleeping Dogs again, the Definitive Edition will release October 10. It will feature all DLC from the original edition, as well as "improved graphics". Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition announced, will bundle DLC and improve graphicsAug 11, 2014 - PC Gamer Sleeping Dogs is a game about an undercover Hong Kong cop, whose conflicted sense of loyalty causes him to grab random civilians and smash their faces repeatedly and psychotically into a pork bun stand. At least, that's how I played it. The combination of misplaced loyalty and random violence clearly resonated with others, too, as Square Enix have announced a "Definitive Edition", due out this October. It will not only package up all 24 bits of DLC, but also upgrade the graphics. "We listened to the fans," sayeth senior producer Dan Sochan in a press release. "We tuned gameplay, we added to the ambience of Hong Kong, increased audio fidelity and pushed the visuals further than we could on the previous generation of consoles." Yes, consoles. As seen with the Metros Redux, publishers are smitten with the idea of re-releasing upgraded versions of recent titles for current generation consoles. In an environment with no backwards compatibility, it sort of makes sense. On PC? Less so. Sleeping Dogs was released in 2012. It still looks pretty good on our platform. While it will become the obvious choice for those who don't yet own the original, it's hard to imagine what price would tempt existing owners. In other words, exactly the same problem that 4A are currently facing with Metro Redux. It's a strange situation. What bothers me is that, between pre-order bonuses and "Definitive"-style special editions, those who buy games on or around the actual release date are increasingly being punished for that decision. Bundled DLC was one thing, but an entire polish and upgrade of a game. That's quite a big improvement to miss out on. That said, maybe the chance to see increased fidelity pork bun crime will ultimately prove irresistible. Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition is out 10 October, on PC, PS4 and Xbox.Gaming in 4K: the future is now, if you give up 60 frames per secondJul 29, 2014 - PC Gamer The future aka 4K gaming is made up of very, very small pixels. After spending the past two weeks checking out games on Samsung's U28D590D 4K monitor, I'm still going to call 4K gaming the near future rather than the present. Yes, you can play games at 3840x2160 pixels right now. Yes, 4K monitors are becoming more affordable. But are they worth it? After spending a couple weeks using one, I can comfortably say: no, not yet. Even for a high-end graphics card (or two), 4K is too demanding for max settings and high framerates. If you're willing to play at 30 frames per second, though, 4K is a different story. If you want to skip straight to the 4K gameplay section, click here to jump to page 2. The Samsung U28D590D and the basics of 4K The Samsung U28D590D is a 28-inch, 3840x2160 monitor that has an MSRP of $700, though it's only $570 on Amazon as of this writing. The monitor has a 60Hz refresh rate, unlike some earlier 4K monitors, though you'll have to use DisplayPort for 60Hz. The current HDMI spec only supports 4K at 30Hz. I gave a general overview of the U28D590D and the demands of 4K gaming in a segment of The PC Gamer Show, which you can watch here: The monitor looks great and I never noticed any issues with refresh rate or response time, but I didn't perform in-depth testing to determine the actual response time (never trust the too-good-to-be-true listed response time. TFT Central offers a good primer on what those specs mean). Because it uses a faster, cheaper TN panel, response time comes at a cost: inferior viewing angles and color accuracy compared to IPS displays. The monitor stand is also disappointingly limited--it has no height adjustment, rotation, or VESA mount support. Unfortunately, if you're still running Windows 7, 4K is a terrible experience, no matter what 4K monitor you're using. The OS isn't designed to scale to such a high resolution, and everything will be impossibly tiny unless you crank up DPI scaling to 125% or 150%. But that scaling is for text it doesn't properly resize other UI elements or affect some applications like Steam. Chrome doesn't scale its text properly, either. Windows 8 is much better about properly scaling, and requires no setup to scale text, UI elements like Windows Explorer, and applications to 4K resolution. Text in Steam and Chrome is noticeably fuzzier than system text, but everything is usable and legible without constantly squishing your face up against the monitor. The Samsung's $570 may be cheap for a 4K monitor, but it's still expensive for a monitor, in general. What that money buys is an extremely pixel-dense display, and games really do look amazing on it. My standard monitor is a 27-inch, 2560x1440 display, which comes out to a pixel pitch rating of 108.79 PPI. That's way higher than, say, a 24-inch 1080p monitor (95.78 PPI) or a 50-inch 1080p TV (44.06 PPI). At 3840x2160, the 28-inch Samsung U28D590D has a 157.35 PPI. As a result, games running at native resolution look sharp, even w...The best Steam Summer Sale deals: Day 4Jun 22, 2014 - PC Gamer Just when you thought you were out of the Steam sale racket, they pull you back in - today's crop boasting some delectable bargains across a variety of genres, including the pork-bunniest game of recent years. Reminder: if a game isn't a daily deal or a flash sale, it could pop up later in the sale for an even lower price. If you want to be safe, wait until June 30 to pick up a sale-long deal. Also, GOG.com are having their own, equally terrific summer sale at the moment, so be sure to check that out too. 5 - Lone Survivor 75% off: $3.74 / 2.74 - Steam store page | Flash sale: Buy it before 8 p.m. EST One of the best Silent Hill games you'll play - and a better Silent Hill game than Konami have published in the last ten or so years. The story is dreamlike and ambiguous in the best possible way, while the chunky pixel art and atmospheric soundtrack envelop you as soon as you switch the game on. If you're brave enough to face it - and you remembered to bring an energy drink - Lone Survivor is easily worth the price of a large cappuccino. Head here for the full PCG verdict. 4 - Metro Last Light 66% off: $6.79 / 6.79 - Steam store page | Flash sale: Buy it before 8 p.m. EST Some odd exchange-rating aside, this is still a good price for the mostly great Metro Last Light, which managed the heroic feat of rescuing the first game's abysmal stealth and turning it into something that works. In addition to being a solid shooter and stealth-'em-up, this is a pretty good atmospheric horror and action game too, although the plot is something that will largely pass you by (if you're lucky). You might want to wait for the remastered 'Redux' version of this and its predecessor, however - although there is a discount system in place should you want to upgrade at a later date. 3 - Sleeping Dogs 80% off: $3.99 / 2.99 - Steam store page | Flash sale: Buy it before 8 p.m. EST If Watch Dogs left you cold, you could always give the relatively silly (but still a bit nasty) Sleeping Dogs a try, which puts you in the role of an undercover cop in Hong Kong. Brawl with bad guys, eat pork buns by the truckload, and solve police cases on the side in a scrappy open world game that's never too ambitious, but manages to be a lot of fun anyway. We didn't think much of the "messy story and horrible characters" in our review, but we had time for the game's "scintillating open world city". 2.99 seems like a very fair price. 2 - Tomb Raider 75% off: $4.99 / 3.74 - Steam store page Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider reboot isn't without its problems - most of the cast are forgettable, and it's a more linear and shallow game than fans of the originals might have been expecting - but as fairground rides go, this is meticulously and gorgeously staged. Play it to prepare yourself for the recently announced Rise of the Tomb Raider, in which Lara's hopefully brought along a coat, as well as a flannel for all that blood she finds herself swimming through. 1 - The Wolf Among Us 66% off: $8.49 / 6...Daily Deal - Sleeping Dogs, 80% OffApr 26, 2014 - AnnouncementToday's Deal: Save 80% on Sleeping Dogs!* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time Daily Deal - Sleeping Dogs, 75% OffFeb 22, 2014 - AnnouncementToday's Deal: Save 75% on Sleeping Dogs!* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time The Steam Holiday Sale Day 3!Dec 21, 2013 - AnnouncementThe Steam Holiday Sale continues today with huge savings throughout the store! Check back often to take advantage of our eight-hour Flash Sales. You can even help select what goes on sale with our Community's Choice Voting Sales. In addition to Flash and Vote sales, more than a hundred games and apps will be featured as Daily Deals throughout the sale, with new deals popping up every 24 hours. Today's Daily Deals include: * Darksiders II 80% off; * Sleeping Dogs 80% off; * Counter-Strike: Global Offensive 75% off; * Star Wars: KOTOR II 50% off; * Age of Empires II HD 75% off; * StarForge 50% off; * Ace of Spades - Battle Builder 75% off; * FEZ 75% off; * FORCED 50% off; Participating in the 2013 Steam Holiday Sale will also earn customers exclusive Holiday Sale Trading Cards. Collect, trade, and craft 10 Holiday Snow Globe Cards that can only be earned during the sale. Every craft of a Holiday Sale badge will also generate a random item drop from 10 participating Free-To-Play games, featuring exclusive in-game items from Warframe, Path of Exile, Team Fortress 2, DOTA 2 and more. These items are both tradable and marketable. Learn more about this year's Steam Holiday Sale features HERE. The Steam Holiday Sale will run until 10AM PST, January 2nd. Complete information on Daily Deals, Flash Sales, Community Choice Voting and more can be found HERE. Steam Sale Starts Now!Nov 27, 2013 - AnnouncementThe Steam Sale is here! For the next six days, take advantage of huge saving on thousands of PC, Mac and Linux titles. Check back often to take advantage of our eight-hour Flash Sales. Today's Daily Deals include: * Skyrim 75% off; * Antichamber 75% off; * Left 4 Dead 2 75% off; * Outlast 66% off; * Prison Architect 50% off; * Rogue Legacy 66% off; * Sleeping Dogs 80% off; * Terraria 75% off; * The Walking Dead 75% off; Add games to your Steam Wishlist and be notified when a game from your Wishlist goes on sale, or shop for games using the Steam Mobile App, available for iOS and Android. Be sure to check Steam every day to see new featured deals. Sleeping Dogs successor announced, dubbed Triad WarsOct 7, 2013 - PC Gamer Sleeping Dogs took a strange trip before it hit retail shelves and digital download services. It started out as another entry in the True Crime series before Activision cancelled it in 2011. Then, Square Enix picked it up and re-branded it as a new game with developer United Front Games. Sleeping Dogs released in August 2012 with overall positive reviews, and now United Front Games is teasing a successor. Today, the developer announced that it is working on "another game based in the Sleeping Dogs universe" and referenced a trademark registration dubbed Triad Wars—players will recall that Sleeping Dogs starred an undercover cop named Wei Shen who infiltrated the Hong Kong Triads. This comes after the consistently bad news that publisher Square Enix has dripped out over the course of 2013. The publisher partially blamed Sleeping Dogs for its poor financial year, despite it selling near two million units and Tomb Raider and Hitman: Absolution selling over 3.5 million units. All three of those games also enjoyed varying levels of critical success and were no doubt expensive as hell. The trademark page mentions mobile phones, but it's likely that Square Enix is just preventing infringement across all platforms. After all, Sleeping Dogs was a technical behemoth on PC . We won't know until 2014 since United Front has pledged no new info until then. Maybe it is a full-fledged sequel. Or maybe it's a MOBA. Either way, it could sell 4 million copies and Square Enix might still call it a failure.Weekend Deal - Sleeping Dogs, 75% off!Aug 1, 2013 - AnnouncementThis weekend only, save 75% on Sleeping Dogs! Welcome to Hong Kong, a vibrant neon city teaming with life, whose exotic locations and busy streets hide one of the most powerful and dangerous criminal organizations in the world: the Triads. In this open world game, you play the role of Wei Shen, an undercover cop trying to take down the Triads from the inside out. Torn between your loyalty to the badge and a criminal code of honor, you will risk everything as the lines between truth, loyalty and justice become permanently blurred. PC Gamer UK Podcast: Episode 93 – Final TangentJul 5, 2013 - PC Gamer Almost all of the team converge for the final episode of the PC Gamer UK podcast. Chris, Graham, Rich, Tom and Phil discuss a great many indie games, Company of Heroes 2, Sleeping Dogs, and answer your questions from Twitter. Join us for one last wild tangent. Our US team will continue to produce their podcast, so this isn't the end of PC Gamer in audio form - but it is goodbye from us. As I say at the end of the episode, I've loved doing this and I've appreciated hearing from everybody who enjoyed the cast over the year I've been running it. We're looking into alternatives, and if you follow us on Twitter we'll hopefully have something for you soon. Graham - @Gonnas Chris - @CThursten Rich - @richmcc Tom - @pcgludo Phil - @octaeder You can download the MP3 directly if you like, and find all of our prior episodes on iTunes. Here's the YouTube version. Show notes Rich's moustache is briefly visible in this Vine. Rich's Company of Heroes 2 review. Chris has been playing Imscared, and also recommends Hide. That Creepypasta Morrowind story. Warning! It's spooooooky. Zafehouse Diaries, a game that - to be fair - should have been called Zafehouze DiarZ. Nope, I've still got no idea where Rich's Wagner metaphor was going. I got the URL for our new Planetside 2 website entirely wrong. It's pcgps2.enjin.com. Slave of God, Increpare's clubbing sim. My open letter to the internet regarding the Half-Life 3 joke. The Saints Row 4 E3 trailer. ...and that's that. Thanks for listening, for sending us questions, and for sticking with us over 93 episodes. I've had the time of my life. Nobody puts podcat in the corner. Here’s what we’re playing this weekend, how about you?Jun 28, 2013 - PC Gamer The weekend is so near I can almost taste it. Here in Britland the sky is a blank grey texture, devoid of depth - a rubbish skybox. Beholden to the circadian law of Fridays, we'll no doubt retreat from that sky to the soft, warm glow of a pub and then run home to play some videogames. But which ones? The sky will no doubt have opened by then, drumming summer rain into our window panes. A cup of tea and an adventure game might suit, or a round or two of Civilization, perhaps. Here's a round-up of the games we're planning to install, and a question: what will you play this weekend? Let's chat. Graham has just moved flat, which means learning how to play games without an internet connection to download/activate them. It's surprisingly difficult these days. His solution - put Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe onto a memory stick and spend the weekend weaving roads and railways into beautiful, efficient tapestries of traffic. It's free, so if you fancy doing something similar you can grab the latest build from the Open TTD site. Phil is going to try Zafehouse: Diaries, a game about managing a group of survivors through an apocalypse via the interface of a grimy, bloodstained logbook. Your team have a degree of autonomy, which means they'll wander around your infested stronghold, chatting to each other, tinkering with things and almost certainly splitting up and getting eaten a lot. Zafehouse promises detailed simulation without relentless micromanagement, something that plays like a work of interactive fiction but with a more complex engine behind it. Hopefully Phil will discover exactly what a "Zafehouse" is so he can tell us on Monday. Rich has spent the afternoon dipping into Rogue Legacy, a side-scrolling dynastic roguelike that lets you take charge of the next tier of your hero's family tree when they die. Your offspring have various genetic conditions that can dramatically alter their perception of the dungeon. A warrior afflicted with chronic vertigo will have to play the whole game upside down, for example. I imagine Rich will have clocked up hundreds of deaths by the time we return on Monday. Chris is determined to play something that isn't Dota 2 this weekend. Will he succeed? Well, he's got Sleeping Dogs to finish and Receiver to experiment with. The first is an entertaining, gung-ho crime adventure set in Hong Kong, the second is an exciting little shooter born out of a seven-day game jam. Considering that we've been shooting things in games since games were invented, very few have played with the idea of the gun as a complex piece of machinery. In Receiver you must manually attend to your firearm, using different button presses to free the clip and plop round in one by one. The result is a tense shooter that turns the FPS into a tactile challenge of your memory and finger dexterity. Highly recommended. I can't buy a win in Company of Heroes 2 at the moment, so I'll spend the weekend scowling over cold cups of tea learning to play, and then p...PC Gamer UK Podcast: Episode 92 – If Only You Could Talk To The Mecha-HitlerJun 21, 2013 - PC Gamer In this bumper-length episode Graham, Rich and Chris discuss E3, the Oculus Rift, new Wolfenstein, The Evil Within and your questions from Twitter. If you like tangents, this episode is basically Christmas. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes as well as downloading the MP3 directly. There's also a YouTube version. To ask a question in a future episode, follow PC Gamer on Twitter. On the day of recording we'll invite people to ping us their quandries. You can also follow us as individuals: Chris - @cthursten Graham - @gonnas Rich - @richmcc Show notes All of our E3 coverage can be found on the relevent tag page. Episode 90, in which Tom Senior breaks free of the bonds of decency in order to describe EVR. Tom's Sleeping Dogs review. That horror game we totally forgot the name of is Darkwood. Rich Cobbett on the Doom novels. Football Manager Ruined My Life, a book. Square Enix want earlier interaction with customers, look to Kickstarter as inspirationMay 28, 2013 - PC Gamer After a disastrous financial year, in which Square Enix not only failed to make their expected profits, but were hit instead with by massive financial loss, the company's senior executive managing director Yosuke Matsuda has been looking at Kickstarter as a possible guide to improving "asset turnover". Which isn't to say they'll attempt to raise $100,000,000 for a Tomb Raider sequel via the crowd-funding site. ($110,000,000 stretch goal: add some proper tombs.) Instead, Matsuda wants Square Enix to interact with its customers at an earlier stage. "One could go as far as to say that in today's times, making customers wait for years with little to no information is being dishonest to them," Matsuda said, in an earnings call two weeks ago. "We're no longer in an age where customers are left in the dark until a product is completed. We need to shift to a business model where we frequently interact with our customers for our products that are in‐development and/or prior to being sold, have our customers understand games under development, and finally make sure we develop games that meet their expectations." "There is a crowdfunding website called 'Kickstarter,'" he continued, "which does not only serve as a method of financing for developers, but I believe should also be seen as a way to unite marketing and development together by allowing us to interact with customers while a game is in development." Matsuda also pointed to Steam's Greenlight and Early Access initiatives as ways in which game makers are communicating with their community: "Valve's Steam Greenlight and Early Access, are also very interesting, in that they raise the frequency by which we interact with customers, increasing their engagement and reflecting customer needs. We are also looking at what initiatives are possible from this perspective. What should we present to our customers before a game is finished, how can our customers enjoy this, and how do we connect this to profitability, is something we are thinking about implementing, and which can improve our asset turnover in the process." Traditionally these services have been used by smaller developers, with smaller communities, making direct engagement a more manageable prospect. How Square Enix would scale these ideas out onto a much larger scale remains to be seen. But more openness and interaction from the publisher surely can't be a bad thing. Thanks, GamesIndustry.
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