I was surprised yesterday to see 148Apps run a post on the Atari Pong Developer Challenge. I’ve written about this before on Revert to Saved, and the Atari competition is essentially spec work. Presumably gullible and desperate (or perhaps just naïvely optimistic) indies get to submit their ideas, which become the property of Atari, and one lucky winner ends up with a huge wodge of cash, although as Brian Robbins pointed out in February, said huge wodge might not be quite as huge as the dev was expecting. In his words:

If this were a typical publishing contract, there’s no way I would recommend any developer to sign these terms, no matter how desperate or cash strapped they are.

This is something of a far cry from 148Apps’s take:

Now is the chance to cash in that indie cred for a beefy paycheck.

More like cashing in your soul for a chance to win the King of the Spec World crown.

Like others who have run this story, 148Apps claims Atari is somehow extending an olive branch to the indie dev community, but there are other ways to do this. Atari could so easily have created its own shortlist of indie devs that create great games—perhaps great retro games, in some cases—and chucked a dev fee at them, thereby commissioning exciting and innovative indie games based around the Pong theme. This could then have been released as a series on the App Store, and if Atari was really wanting to doff its We Love Indies hat, it could have revenue-shared. But the Pong Indie Developer Challenge? That still, like a synonym of the original game’s name, stinks.

Kotaku reports on a tragic incident involving two children, from a story that originated at WJBF. They’d reportedly been playing Call of Duty, when one picked up a semi-automatic belonging to his parents and fired off some rounds, one of which fatally wounded the other. This is, of course, a horrible and tragic event, but the inference from the reporting is crazy.

The case—which has led to a charge of involuntary manslaughter—is being called an accident. Still, the television station reporting the incident spoke to child psychiatrist Dr. Dale Peeples…

Here we go.

who said that playing games like Black Ops could have contributed to this terrible event

Because kids never played ‘war’ before modern videogames arrived.

“A game that is rated M for Mature, probably doesn’t belong in the hands of a 12 year old”

Neither does a SEMI-AUTOMATIC GUN.

While it’s common to dismiss media outlets’ convenient linkages between violent video games and crime as sensationalist, this time—because of the closeness of the crime and the gameplay—it might not be as easy.

How about this for a link: had the child not had clearly far too easy access to a dangerous weapon, the other child would not have been shot. This has nothing to do with a videogame and everything to do with the gun.

Hat-tip: Xander Davis

Michael French for Develop writes about his GDC experience in GDC and the death of the gods. He notes that the gaming gods of the industry—Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo—once offered keynotes that defined the future of the industry, but now the gods are dying, largely due to competition from newcomers. He makes one point that I find particularly interesting:

As journalists like me say, ‘the [blank] happened’. The Internet happened. Facebook happened. iPhone happened. The power shifted. And Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony—they all lost some relevance. They had to share power with platforms that were built, at a macro level at least, to not be so draconian. For better or worse, platforms like the App Store are free markets instead of walled gardens.

In case you didn’t catch that:

platforms like the App Store are free markets instead of walled gardens

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this. At an EA event last year, I spoke to a few developers who’d created games for a number of platforms. They glumly told horror stories of their experiences on the ‘god’ platforms, before brightly saying what a breath of fresh air the relatively open iOS ecosystem is for gaming. Yet we most often only hear about the times when someone at Apple comes down with a bad case of the stupids, rejecting a game or app for spurious reasons, and not the many thousands of games that have ended up on the App Store that simply wouldn’t exist for any other mobile platform.

I’m not suggesting iOS is the most open of platforms, because it clearly isn’t, and it would be great to see the likes of OS X’s Gatekeeper arrive on iOS, providing a little extra freedom regarding apps that can be installed. But open and not-open isn’t black and white—instead there’s a diverse range as you move from one extreme to the other, and this is especially true when it comes to mobile gaming.

An amusing post on the icon update for Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint, a superb iOS physics puzzler. The previous version had a fairly abstract take on the game itself, but now we have one of the beardy programmers staring wild-eyed at those who might buy the game. The slightly less beardy of the two says:

We’ve already seen it described as frightening, terrifying, and the scariest icon on the App Store. Oh well, that’s what happens when I try to draw ‘cute’.

In which case, I look forward to whatever horrors emerge from the Pickford Bros if they ever attempt to craft a loveable and sweet platform game.

I last month covered Atari’s spat with the people behind Vector Tanks. In short, an indie makes a Battlezone tribute, which, to be fair, was pretty damn close to Battlezone, and tries to licence the original property but Atari remains silent. The dev then devises a sequel, which is to Battlezone what Galaga is to Space Invaders: a superficially similar game but one that actually feels very different. Atari finally notices Vector Tanks and has both games removed from the App Store, citing IP infringement. At the same time, it rampages about the place, forcing devs to change the names of games with ‘pong’ in the title. The company had previously, during its first (and brief) foray into iOS, also attempted to get bat-and-ball games (i.e. Breakout derivatives) removed from the store, albeit with less success.

Sites all over the web are now saying that Atari’s being the good guy regarding indies, through its Pong Indie Developer Challenge¹. It’s a great opportunity for indies to rework a classic game, and get up to $100,000 for their efforts, they say! Well, right until you bother to read the terms and conditions, which were expertly covered by Brian Robbins on Gamasutra yesterday.

It’s spec work, pure and simple. This isn’t so much an opportunity for indie devs as exploitation—a way for Atari to potentially get dozens of game ideas and not have to pay for them (since all submissions become Atari’s property, regardless of whether the submitter wins the competition). Despite its aggressive stance on the App Store, Atari has supported indies in the past—the recent remakes of Breakout and Asteroids were both farmed out to small developers rather than being done in-house. Had that been the same here, great. It would have been a way for Atari to again say: “Look! We do care about indies.” However, spec work is something I cannot celebrate, and so I find it difficult to see the Pong Indie Developer Challenge as anything more than a cynical attempt by a major publisher to get videogame ideas on the cheap.

¹ And the choice of game also presumably explains Atari’s blitz of App Store games with ‘pong’ in their names. Although since Pong is an Atari trademark, that’s not something I consider bad form from Atari.