Hawken (PC/PS4/XB1)

[Chrian]

got my callsign/gamertag

[6souls]

Meteor Entertainment has raised $10 million in a bid to launch a downloadable online game called Hawken. Aimed at hardcore gamers who battle each other online, Hawken is a fast-action shooting game where players can equip themselves with giant armored mech robotic suits and pummel each other in the ruined cities of a toxic planet.

The large amount of funding for a studio that has only one unpublished game in the works is a big bet, but one that the backers are making with a great deal of confidence. The investors include Benchmark Capital and FirstMark Capital, the same investors who backed the highly successful Riot Games, maker of League of Legends, a downloadable web game that was so popular that China’s Tencent bought Riot for more than $400 million last year. At the time, Riot had just a million users, but the company was valuable because of its fast growth — it has more than 35 million downloads now and four million to five million daily active users — and the hardcore gamers were willing to spend real money for virtual goods in the free-to-play title. The investors call the sector the “core free-to-play market.”

“We were tremendously thankful to be associated with Riot, but we viewed the market as much bigger than a single title,” Mitch Lasky, a partner at Benchmark, said in an exclusive interview. “We think that $8 billion to $10 billion will migrate away from packaged goods games and free-to-play will be a lightning rod for those dollars.”

Hawken is being developed by Adhesive Games, a small team in Alhambra, Calif., and it will be published by its parent company, Meteor Entertainment, which is headed by chief executive Mark Long and has staff in Seattle. Long hopes to accomplish something similar to Riot by targeting Hawken at hardcore gamers. On top of high quality, the team hopes it can disrupt traditional hardcore game companies via digital distribution on the web and the free-to-play business model. And Meteor is building a hybrid cloud publishing infrastructure that will be able to host other games too.

“We are seeing the rise of the direct-to-consumer model, where all is downloadable and free-to-play,” Rick Heitzmann, founder and managing director of FirstMark Capital, told VentureBeat. “You can disrupt the business with a free-to-play title. Gamers are willing to pay via virtual goods to do that. League of Legends is a fantastic title, but it is just one game and one genre that has blown up. We think it’s possible to produce very high quality games that have huge audiences that are willing to pay.”

Lasky added, “It’s a phenomenon akin to other incumbent areas like music, TV, film, and newspapers, where the internet is disrupting both
business models and consumption patterns. We have seen it happen again and again. The internet levels the playing field.”

Hawken is scheduled to launch on Dec. 12, or 12/12/12. The title drew a lot of attention last year because the team posted cool game play videos on YouTube that collectively garnered more than 1.9 million views. Khang Le, chief executive of Adhesive Games, told us in an interview that the game is akin to Call of Duty multiplayer combat, but for mechs.

Among the comments on YouTube are:

“Just shut up and take my money.”
“I was thinking badass the whole time!”
“F***ing sick! Open beta immediately!”
“FAWKEN AWESOME!”

The developers are now enlisting gamers for the closed beta test; more than 200,000 have signed up already. The money will support Meteor’s expansion over the next year and make it possible to publish Hawken as a free-to-play game.

The title is Adhesive’s first. The studio was formed in 2010 and has 11 employees in Alhambra and 12 in Seattle. CEO Khang Le co-founded the company with K. Jonathan Kreuzer (technical lead), Dave Nguyen (designer/artist) and Christopher Lalli (animator).

Le previously worked on a game development team called Offset Software that was working on a fantasy action game known as Project Offset. Intel acquired the company because it needed a team of game makers to create software to run on its Larrabee multi-core graphics chip, which was intended to be the heart of a video game console. Intel had a deal in place to make the chip, but the project ran off schedule and Intel ultimately canceled it. After that, Le left and recruited former team members to begin work on Hawken, starting in 2010. They continued the work without funding as a labor of love.

“They were an incredibly passionate and competent team,” Lasky said. “Lots of things suggested to us it would be a big hit.”

Heitzmann added, “They were scrappy. The fact that they did their demo with 10 people is remarkable. “

The action takes place on a post-apocalyptic human-colonized planet that has been industrialized to the point of collapse. This crumbling world is the setting for a hunt for vital resources and a brutal battle for survival. While many mech-based games, such as the aging Mech Warrior series, have relatively slow action, Le said the action of Hawken is fast-paced and relatively short.

Le said the game is designed to run on a wide variety of computers. Those with good PCs and decent broadband connections will be able to play the game at 60 frames per second. But those with older PCs and slower connections may experience the game at around 30 frames per second.

The content was so good that Lasky was sure the right route was to raise funding so that Adhesive and Meteor could remain independent. Now the company plans to create new assets such as graphic novels, videos, and even a feature film.

The key to monetizing the game is the virtual goods model, where users play it for free and then pay real money for virtual goods such as better weapons, armor, and defenses. The game looks cool in part because Adhesive has licensed the Unreal Engine 3 from Epic Games to power the PC version. Le said the company intends to operate Hawken like a service over a number of years. But it won’t be a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game.

So far there are no direct competitors, although a title called MechWarrior Online project is under development. Piranha Games is creating that title as a free-to-play game for the PC. In digital publishing, rivals include Valve, Electronic Arts (with its Origin service), and Nexon. Meteor has 34 employees, including 11 in Alhambra and 23 in Seattle.

Lasky said he started looking for the Hawken team at the suggestion of his brother, who saw the game play video. But the team didn’t have a web site at the time and Lasky had to track them down via a job posting in Alhambra, where “I camped out on their doorstep.” At the time, Le was looking for publishers and “we talked him out of that,” Lasky said.

Then Lasky and Heitzmann helped recruit Long, who was previously chief executive of Zombie Games in Seattle. Long pulled together a publishing team to host the game, handle the marketing, and undertake merchandising.

As for the state of gaming, Lasky said, “This is the most chaotic period in the game industry I can remember, and chaos is good for investors and startups. This year, I don’t think there will be a galvanizing event like Zynga’s initial public offering. But there will be a series of small events that will look significant in retrospect. Social and mobile games are clearly lower risks. But if you find an extraordinary game like Hawken, you can build a defensible competitive position.”

http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/27/me...ame-exclusive/

[Insanecyclone]

[Syntex]

Man watching that trailer makes me feel like I'm in an actual anime/sci-fi thriller. The landscape is absolutely beautiful and very very well done to put the right theme out there. I feel like I could get lost in the game very easily with how engrossing the art style and music is. Going to check this out for sure later on this year.

[Omniyoji]

Surely now the world must halt it's apocalypse for robo-action fapness!

[Greatguardian]

That footage was giving me flashbacks to Phantom Crash.

Hell of a game.

[Gwynplaine]

I only clicked on this thread because I imagined someone made a game about Weehawken New Jersey. Oh well.

[ChairmanMeow]

Game still looks shiny and nice but

pay real money for virtual goods such as better weapons, armor, and defenses.

[Brill Weave]

Yeah that kind of puts a damper on things. I don't wanna pay for a new rail gun!

[6souls]

[Insanecyclone]

[6souls]

[6souls]

A post over on Eurogamer reveals that Hawken—a game that makes me want a gaming PC so bad that I have, indeed, started saving up for one just so I can play it without my computer melting—is going to be adapted into a series of live-action movies.

Jerry O’Flaherty, who was the art director on Gears of War 2, is going to be writing and directing the films, says the post, which will debut in June at E3.

“It’s been a long time since a game has intrigued me and inspired me the way Hawken has and it made me eager to be a part of that world,” O’Flaherty is quoted as saying.

He elaborated on how and why he got connected with the game to make the films:

“I connected with [production company] DJ2 with a desire to participate in bringing another aspect of the Hawken world to life, specifically putting names and faces to several of the pilots driving the deadly war machines in Hawken.

“Through these characters I wanted to begin to speak to the fiction behind the game, to introduce people to a mythology that is just as interesting and intriguing as the first view of Hawken made me feel.”

http://www.insidegamingdaily.com/201...-movie-shorts/
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...s-in-the-works

[6souls]

A press release that may as well just contained a giant smug picture of Dave Perry just announced that Internet darling Hawken will be playable through the cloud gaming service Gaikai before its official release on December 12.

I’m sure you have a lot of questions about what that actually means. I do too, because the press release doesn’t go a whole lot further than that.

The game will be playable on the game’s website, and if you want a piece of that action, you’d better sign up for the beta test. Does that mean that Gaikai will be providing the beta test? Will your progress in the Gaikai version carry over into the official release? So many questions.

The reality is that these details probably haven’t even been hammered out yet, so we’ll probably hear about them as soon as the logistics are worked out.

Regardless, this is a pretty cool get for Gaikai, and a very interesting move. To date, they’ve been mostly concerned with game marketing — giving players a demo and funneling them to buy the full game. From the sounds of this, they’re moving into being a full game provider, more like OnLive. While that fit is a little awkward for full retail games, I can’t imagine a better fit than free-to-play games. They often rely on grind and short, in-and-out experiences. That’s perfect for logging on for a quick game at work or on a tablet.

http://www.insidegamingdaily.com/201...efore-release/
http://www.playhawken.com/

[6souls]

If you’re looking forward to playing Hawken, you’ll be able to play the game on just about any computer you can imagine. In an interview with Meteor Entertainment CEO Mark Long (Meteor is Hawken’s publisher), we learned that not only will the game be available before release on Gaikai, but it will also support the Mac when it releases on December 12.

Unfortunately, exact details of the pre-release Gaikai event are a little fuzzy right now.

“This thing came at us in really short order, and we kinda made it up as we went along,” Long said. “We’re figuring it out now.”

Though Long doesn’t know exactly when the game will be available through Gaikai, he does know what it will look like. Essentially, Meteor pays Gaikai a flat rate for every hour of gameplay streamed over the service. To cover that cost, Hawken will run unobtrusive banner ads in game lobbies during matches to recoup that cost.

Banner ads will only appear when playing through Gaikai though; those running on local clients won’t see the ads.

“Because free to play works with a small number of players buying virtual items, we don’t need to bombard you with ads. We just need to cover that cost,” Long said. “We’re not going to turn players off by ruining your experience with a bunch of ads. We’re going to run the minimum number of ads that will pay for the service and then after that we’re working off the virtual item sales model.”

Interestingly, when streamed through Gaikai before December 12, Hawken won’t run any banner ads at all. During this phase, Meteor will eat the cost of the stream. In a business sense, this is similar to a free weekend that’s becoming more and more common on Steam.

“I think what we want to do is use it as an opportunity to give players a chance to play the game who didn’t make the closed or open beta. I’m pretty sure we’re going to do it in the closed an open beta phase. What we’ll probably do is turn it on for a long weekend holiday so everyone can check it out and give us feedback,” Long said.

If the mention of banner ads has you worried, Long repeatedly assured me that he wanted to protect the free to play experience.

“There’s no way I’m going to ask players to pay to play the game. That’s the antithesis of free to play. As soon as you cross that threshold, it’s a completely different value proposition,” Long said. “We have to keep Hawken free. As soon as we start charging for it, it’s not what we want it to be. ”

They’re even working on technology that will allow you to download the game’s client while you play the game through Gaikai, meaning you can start playing the game instantly, then switch over to your local client after you’ve played a few training missions. Given that the game is coming to PC and Mac, Hawken will not only set new standards for platform compatibility, but manage to be completely free in the process.

http://www.insidegamingdaily.com/201...mac-at-launch/

[6souls]

[Insanecyclone]

[Insanecyclone]

[Insanecyclone]

[6souls]

Hawken, the upcoming free-to-play Mech-shooter from Meteor Entertainment, will support the newly announced virtual reality headset, Oculus Rift. The developers announced the news this morning. Hawken will be the second game, behind Doom 3: BFG, to support the upcoming tech.

The Oculus developers will get the first shot at playing Hawken in virtual reality when the dev kits for the game ship out this December. The game itself is set to launch on December 12 and will be “a great showcase of what developers can create with the Oculus SDK and the Engine.”

Gamers will have the chance to put the vr-support in Hawken to test themselves when the headsets eventually ship.

For more news on shooting mechs with other mechs, check out the Hawken site and sign up for the beta.

Now that we’ve covered the nitty-gritty news…how freaking cool will it be to experience the inside of a mech-suit? Hopefully Hawken will achieve what Steel Batallion could not.

http://www.insidegamingdaily.com/201...-rift-headset/