We’ve been in radio silence for a while now, but we’re finally able to open up a bit and say that our next Closed Beta is coming in November 20, 2008. Since our last release, we’ve waded through the mountains of feedback and created a crazy amount of new content and tweaks. We hope you like it.

View our trailer and sign up for the closed beta here:

Sugar Rush Official Website

This one continues to baffle me. Why is it that none of the three consoles have user ratings on content? Why is it that things that take weeks in the Web 2.0 world take months or longer in the games industry? I suppose I can rattle off a few reasons that would come up in exec meetings:

• It’s too hard to manage the content
• By definition, it means some games are rated badly, and we want to position ourselves as having no bad games
• It’s not in our schedule
• We want to handle our own PR and portfolio
• It’ll piss off publishers
• We have no way of deleting offensive content (!!!?)

While some of these are real concerns, I don’t see this having stopped Amazon. Or Ebay. Or Facebook. I suppose XNA on the 360 addresses these issues, but I still think all content on the 360 should be rated, commented on, tagged, and searchable. And while I’m on my pipe dream I may as well wish for being able to write plug-ins for the dashboard, and that monetization for those plug-ins should be easy. Yes, these are hard legal issues, but I also think it would rock everyone’s world.

Gamesindusty.biz has an awesome article on treating consumers like pirates. I’ve had the unfortunate experience of working with many types of futile DRM my experience in game development, including SecuROM, StarForce, and TryMedia — they all amounted to one simple truth: it doesn’t work.

This is why I love the free-to-play model — it completely obliterates this problem, and blows down almost all barriers to entry. But secure online play isn’t the only option out there — in fact, as the article suggests, it still poses issues to singleplayer games.  The other day my internet connection died, and I wanted to play Portal, but because Steam couldn’t connect, I wasn’t able to.

I also like Stardock’s No DRM, update-by-secure-login method, and ad driven freeware is definitely a viable option. I’m particulary intrigued by the indie music model where bands give out music for free to drive consumers to merchandise and live performances, and I’m wondering if there’s a parallel we can draw in our industry.