You can now Download the Black Mesa Soundtrack, courtesy of our very own Joel Nielsen, at the very generous price of whatever you want! Enjoy and share!

In the near future you’ll see our Website, Wiki and Forums all taken down temporarily for renovations.

On September 14th you will see the first release of Black Mesa! This will include our re-envisioning of Half-Life all the way up to Lambda Core. We believe this is a great way to provide a complete-feeling 8-10 hour experience with a solid ending, make our fans happy and help us make the best overall game possible.

We are still working hard on Xen and BMDM, but instead of making you wait we are giving you Black Mesa as soon as it’s ready! We’re doing our best to help bring the immense vision of this project into reality, and we are very excited for what the future brings!

With highly acclaimed game franchises- Call of Duty, Assassins Creed, Grand Theft Auto, Gran Turismo, Max Payne, to name but a few- seemingly dominating the video gaming landscape, avid players should feel more than satisfied with the quality of games being churned out by the world’s biggest publishers, shouldn’t they?

After all, Call of Duty continues to smash records with each new addition released, so surely this proves fans are happily sated with helpings of what they know and love, right? Not so according to a small clique of frustrated gamers who question the dominance of publishers and their ruling franchises.

The counter-argument concerns consumer choice: are these giant, successful franchises inadvertently hindering the chances of smaller, independent publisher’s ever developing and releasing new titles in the near future and thus limiting the variety of games being displayed through the shop window? Are gamers happy to own say three or four games and keep purchase updated versions through lack of choice?

To answer such a contentious issue we need to think objectively: look at the current situation from both points of view- the consumers and the publishers- and pluck possible answers out along the way.

Firstly, let’s consider the game publishers themselves, those who stand accused of damaging the video game industry. We’ll use Activision as an example.

Activision is the world’s largest third-party developer by a mile. Since the 1980s they’ve successfully created and marketed franchise series’ such as Call of Duty, Tony Hawk, Crash Bandicoot and Sypro the Dragon, on all console platforms from the original Playstation to the Xbox 360. So why then are they so happy to stick with the winning formula and release updated versions of successful games?

No surprise money making comes into it. But past financial gain has always given publishers the impetus to develop new games, so what’s changed? Well ‘the business strategy’ that’s what.

Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision’s sister company Activision Blizzard- creators of World of Warcraft- brashly alluded to his businesses model when in 2008 he said Activision would focus solely on franchises that “have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million franchises.

“Whether he expected such a strategy to be implemented in the next five or twenty years becomes irrelevant when you consider that Activision has since targeted producing a new Call of Duty game every year from 2011 onwards.

The plan hence alludes to excluding the future development of new IP’s deemed too risky for a subsequent sequel release. But draining as much money as possible from a successful game franchise, by over saturating the market with constant releases, doesn’t always work – just look at Guitar Hero!

Despite their apparent unwillingness to develop and invest in new IP’s, you can’t blame the publishers for sticking with what they know. It sort of makes sense if you consider the economic constraints currently plaguing the industry.

After all the worlds in the midst of a financial woe; publishers are weary about investing in one-off successes for fear of unbalancing the books and gamers are looking twice before starting to purchase. It’s just a shame this has bred a kind of ‘make as much money as possible, while we can’ ethos.

For consumers the argument concerns choice: stroll into any game shop or click on any website and consumers will squint at the same banal rehashes as before, with little or no room made for original, new game titles to gain prominence.

The emergence of Downloadable Content (DLC) doesn’t seem to be helping the situation either, proving just as irksome an issue to gamers. Although it’s a relatively new concept game publishers have seemingly found another way to pry open a gamers’ wallet, by releasing ‘must have’ content which supposedly enhances something in some dazzling way?!

Unfortunately, with old Bobby Kotick signifying a more exploitive approach in the near future, gamers should not expect the market to change drastically any time soon- except maybe the actual price of titles.