In this episode we dissect some of the announcements and coverage around Blizzcon this year. Not much in the way of show notes for this one!

In this episode we discuss the emerging trend of adding massively multiplayer features to games that otherwise might be single player. Is this something we want to see more? Or is it just a way of extracting more 'value' from gamers?

• GTA 5 has sold-in over 85 million copies
• Frontier Games Hosts Massive Space Battles on AWS
• AWS re:Invent 2015 presentation from Frontier Games on their architecture
• Digital Trends: "Everyone is going to start playing MMOs again, whether they realize it or not"

Intro & outro music: JACKS – Runaway Fashion

Jalada and Sefran explain why community management is so important in the development and maintaining of video games, from the perspective of video gamers.

• 7 Days to Die developer blog
• Examples of less-than-ideal pre-launch management: Spore, Fable, No Man's Sky.
• "Deus Ex: Mankind Divided silly preorder scheme scrapped"
• Diablo 3's significant Loot overhaul patch, dubbed 'Loot 2.0'.
• "Final Fantasy 14 killed by Square Enix’s stubbornness, reborn by a new approach"
• Elite Dangerous Galnet News
• id Software's open-sourced game code on GitHub

Intro & outro music: JACKS - Runaway Fashion

Welcome to Octal FM! After introducing your hosts, we dissect the PS4/PC game No Man’s Sky. Related reading from the show:

• Freelancer
• Star Citizen
• Elite: Dangerous
• Journey
• Spore
• Procedural generation
• No Man’s Sky stats on SteamSpy
• Diablo 3
  • Diablo 3's loot 2.0 patch (sample of media coverage for context)

Please let us know what you thought by Tweeting @octalfm, or using the email address in the show. Intro & outro music: JACKS  - Runaway Fashion