Heavy Rain Message Board

Spoiler alert: The video preview above contains a smattering of story scenes from Beyond: Two Souls, an upcoming PlayStation 3 game anchored by exquisite recreations of Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. One of them drops an F-bomb too, so watch out for that.

Director David Cage describes it as spiritual successor to Heavy Rain, polished to a Hollywood sheen and driven more by the events in the protagonist's life than a barrage of repeatable video game mechanisms. The primary source of intrigue in Beyond, and its most liberal form of interaction, is a disembodied character named Aiden. This supernatural entity is attached to Jodi, the protagonist played by Page, and allows the player to pass through walls, manipulate objects and temporarily possess unwitting bystanders.

Beyond: Two Souls hits the big screen (in your house) on October 8, 2013.

PS3 thriller Heavy Rain could've been on Xbox 360, but "long talks" between Microsoft and developer Quantic Dream ended in disagreement and the French studio eventually turning to Sony, according to Quantic CEO David Cage. Speaking at a BAFTA UK event that Joystiq attended, Cage told the audience Microsoft had issues with the game's content, specifically child kidnapping. The 2010 game is based heavily around a father searching for his kidnapped son, taken away by a serial killer.

When asked what he'd say to publishers who turned him down, Cage said Microsoft was the last to do so: "We were pitching Heavy Rain to different publishers, including Sony, and we went to Microsoft. We had a very long talk and they loved Fahrenheit, and they really wanted to do something with us. And they got scared by the fact Heavy Rain was about kids being kidnapped, and this is why they said, 'This is an issue, we want to change it."

"Well, we could have kidnapped cats, it would be a different experience!" Cage joked.

I love a game with a cool, interesting main character. But you know what I think I might love even more? A game with multiple cool, interesting main characters. Why not, right? Modern video games are huge! They've got room to spare. I love a hero as much as the next red-blooded American, but it's time to keep expanding. Spoilers: I spoil some plot twists from Red Dead Redemption, L.A. Noire and Max Payne 2 in this article. Fair warning. Video games have, by and large, traditionally told the story of one character. That hasn't been true of all games, of course; plenty of games over the years have had more than one protagonist. Red Dead Revolver, Eternal Darkness, adventure games like Maniac Mansion and Space Quest IV, and of course, Resident Evil, all had more than one protagonist. Why not, right? Modern video games are huge! They've got room to spare. The Call of Duty games may not feature the most memorable playable characters, but they've been having fun experimenting with the concept for years. Quantic Dream auteur David Cage has been in the multiple-protagonist game (so to speak) for a while now. While his most recent game Heavy Rain had its share of flaws, its phalanx of dramatic lead actors was certainly one of its most interesting aspects, and allowed for many interesting, uncommon twists and turns. His upcoming Beyond: Two Souls seems to focus on just two characters, but the title alone suggests that their relationship will be central to the story. That said, the default paradigm for most story-based video games is to put players in command of a single character and leave them there for the game's entire run, which can go on for dozens of hours. It's no wonder people don't finish most games they start; it seems there's only so much of one character's story most people can handle. Fortunately, mainstream games appear to be catching on to the many opportunities provided by multiple playable characters in increasing numbers. Recent big-budget games like Assassin's Creed III and The Last of Us have done cool things with the idea, while The Walking Dead's recent 400 Days episode starred not just one but five protagonists. Indie games are getting in on the action as well, with Monaco telling a Rashomon-style multiple flashback tale and the upcoming Hotline Miami 2 diverging from its single-protagonist narrative to tell a story from multiple angles. And of course, Rockstar Games has been in the thick of it. (That excellent top image, by the way, is of every major Grand Theft Auto protagonist. It's by Patrick Brown, who I'd imagine will be updating it at some point now that we know about the other two GTA V characters.) I still remember when, in the Rockstar-published Max Payne 2, I was suddenly tossed into the boots of the deadly Mona Sax and proceeded to play through a mission twice, from both Mona's and Max's perspectives. That decision may have been made by developer Remedy, but clearly someone at Rockstar was paying attention. Rockstar's own first high-profile dip into multiple plotlines came with the Grand Theft Auto IV expansion episodes, both of which introduced two new protagonists to Liberty City and smartly wove them into the main narrative. Taken as a whole, GTA IV painted an indelible portrait of a massive city through the eyes of three different characters. Both Rockstar's L.A. Noire and Red Dead Redemption introduced surprise character flips right in the main narrative. In L.A. Noire (written by Team Bondi's Brendan McNamara but once again published by Rockstar) it turned out that your protagonist Cole Phelps wasn't really such a great guy, and in taking on the role of private investigator Jack Kelso near the end of the story, we were able to see the narrative through to its conclusion from a second perspective. Ditto the smashing ending to Red Dead Redemption, which had protagonist John Marston dying in a hail of U.S. Government gunfire, only to flash forward and put players into the spurs of his son Jake for one last vengeance-fueled pistol duel. Bearing the studio's history in mind, it's not a huge surprise to see that GTA V will tell a many-pronged story. But it's a welcome development nonetheless. Furthermore, while the multi-character stuff in past Rockstar games was always treated as a big twist—surprise! It's a switcheroo!—here, it's being sold as a core part of the story and the game. Here's the three-character stuff in action: While the heist parts of that demonstration look really neat—more or less the same kind of stuff explored by tactics/strategy games including the upcoming The Bureau: XCOM Declassified—I'm even happier to see how the multi-character stuff works while goofing around in the game's open world. The idea of quickly flipping between three different characters, each doing his own thing at different places in this vast world, is tantalizing. We've become so used to the old open-world formula: You are one character, a single point of entry in a vast space. It's fine, for what it is, but it's begun to feel so, well, ordinary. Finally, here's a game that might approach telling an open-world story in a genuinely new way! I thought I'd break down some of the reasons I think games with more than one playable character are exciting. Games can maintain an interesting story for a longer period of time. Mainstream games have something of a pacing problem at the moment. A big-budget single-player game is about as long as a TV season, but it's constructed and paced like a blockbuster action movie. Movies, obviously, have to maintain interest for a much shorter period of time than games or TV shows. If game writers want to look to one form of media to learn how to keep their stories interesting for the duration of their games (and in so doing head off the huge numbers of people who never finish single-player games), they'd be wise to look to TV for answers. (See: The episodic structure of Mass Effect 2 or the actual episodic release schedule of The Walking Dead.) Almost every successful TV show gets a ton of mileage out of its supporting cast, often through some mixture of design and necessity. It varies by show, but look at, say, David Simon's great ensemble dramas Treme and The Wire. Simon's shows manage to tell the sweeping stories of two cities—New Orleans and Baltimore, respectively—and they do so by constantly hopping from character to character. (Amazingly enough, Grand Theft Auto lead writer Dan Houser told The New York Times that he's never watched either Treme or The Wire. Unbelievable!) Think of it this way: A character is like a course in a meal. If you play a 20-hour game as a single character, you're going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and getting nothing but salisbury steak. Salisbury steak is great, but why not add some variety? It'll take you a lot longer to get sick of any one thing, and you'll get waaaay more bang for your buck. Games can explore relationships in interesting new ways. You know what games are great at? Illustrating and exploring systems. What I mean by that is that games aren't just good at telling interactive stories, they're good at "describing" the way interlocking, complicated organisms work. In Civilization you don't just watch a nation try to curry favor with the U.N., you do so yourself over a span of generations. In Company of Heroes you don't just command a soldier on the battlefield, you take control of the entire Normandy invasion force and in so doing, learn to understand how real historical events unfolded and why. There may be no more complex interlocking system than a relationship between two people. And with more than one playable character, games can do so, so much to explore that system. What a thrill it is when games let you see a situation from more than one perspective! I got such a kick out of playing GTA IV: The Lost and Damned and seeing the sequences I'd played in the main game from a different perspective. Or, to get more artsy about it, let's say a game has you play both sides of an argument. As you do so, you'll come to understand how both characters think they're in the right. The possibilities, as they say, are endless. With multiple playable characters, games can (and some do) leverage systemic interactivity—one of the things video games do better than any other media—to tell stories in a really interesting way. It opens up new gameplay possibilities. As we saw most recently in that GTA V trailer but have seen in plenty of other games before that, multiple playable characters can make basic video-game stuff like "gunfight" or "chase sequence" much more interesting. Taking turns controlling the guy on the ground, the sniper across the way, and the dude in the helicopter doubtless gives you a much broader, more interesting view of a heist. Or take what Driver: San Francisco did, ingeniously allowing you to push your character's consciousness from his car into the drivers around him, taking control of multiple drivers across a single chase sequence. Again, possibilities: Endless. It's ripe for multiplayer. We play games together these days, and games with multiple main characters are far more open for interesting multiplayer and co-op. When playing two-player co-op, no longer do we need to have two Master Chiefs in the game but one Master Chief in combat (as we did in Halo but not, notably, in Halo 3). Why not write the game around two characters controlled by two people doing two things at the same time in different places in a mostly singleplayer world? When we talk about "Next-Gen" video game ideas, that one sure seems a cut above better graphics and lighting effects. Games can have a more diverse cast. Apparently video games need to star a white dude in order to get made. Or something. But if you've got more than one main character, that changes. You can have a white dude and a black dude! And a hispanic dude! Or even… gasp… a woman! And yeah, okay, from what we've seen, GTA V didn't get all that exciting with its cast. But other games have, and in the future, more games will. And that allows for more diverse storytelling. Related to that last one, if you've got a more diverse cast, you can experiment with a ton of different kinds of stories. In Heavy Rain, we got to play as a bereaved father but also as a high-tech detective, and as an investigative photojournalist and a private eye. In GTA V, we'll get to be a beleaguered ex-criminal dad but we'll also get to be an ambitious gang member and a crazy-ass hill person. In games like those, it's possible to tell a variety of different stories with a variety of different tones without jarring the player by cramming too much variety into one character. Take GTA IV, where one minute Niko was a humble immigrant fresh off the boat and the next, a high-flying secret agent. And the next, a real estate mogul, and the next, and the next… Spreading that out among multiple characters significantly lightens the load and lets each story be much more focused. Games can take risks they wouldn't otherwise take. This one's maybe the biggest: With multiple characters, you can do things that you wouldn't be able to do in a one-character game. (Paging Call of Duty.) Want to kill one of the characters off halfway through the story? Go for it! Want to throw one character in prison and have him or her be unplayable for a while? Cool! Want to have one character turn out to be an undercover cop, or an enemy mole? Sweet! So many things that would be impossible or at least difficult in a single-character game become possible with more than one main character. As I said at the outset, I don't mean to suggest that multi-character video games are an entirely new thing. I'm also not saying that games with a single character are bad or anything—it can be really cool to forge a bond with a single character over a long period of time. But the increasing adoption of the multi-pronged approach in big-budget games feels like a trend, and as far as I'm concerned, it's a trend in the right direction. It's a writer's paradise, really. The restrictive single-character conventions to which games normally adhere vanish, replaced with door after open door. I'm happy to see that mainstream games are fully embracing the notion of true ensemble drama, and I'm looking forward to seeing where they go from here. To contact the author of this post, write to kirk@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @kirkhamilton.

Heavy Rain got some criticism. There are whole train of thoughts that either praise or slam Quantic Dream’s experimental PS3 game. Some people love what it tried to do in terms of how play mechanics and plot continuation when certain characters died. Other players hated the way it tried to tell its story. When Beyond: Two Souls showed at the Tribeca Film Festival recently, I asked designer David Cage what he took from those critiques and try to address in the next game from the French game development studio. His answer? “You never design in reaction to critiques otherwise you create a product.” “I’m not creating products,” Cage followed up. “I’m trying to create experiences. I try to be sincere in what I’m doing. Yeah, we heard a lot of good things. We heard a couple of bad things. Good, let’s move on. Let’s try to do something better next time and maybe something else totally different.” “The only thing I didn’t want to do was a sequel to Heavy Rain,” Cage continued, echoing sentiments he had voiced before. “Like, ‘Oh let’s just do the same thing. Fix a couple of things here and there and just release the same game pretty much.’ We started from a blank page [with Beyond: Two Souls] and we tried to create an experience that would be different, that would play differently.” Whether it’s correct or not, people see film and games as being similar. I asked Cage if how he would tell story of Beyond’s heroine Jodie without the interactivity of video games. “I wouldn’t have written the same story knowing it would be a film,” he answered. “First of all, my story is more than 10 hours long, so it would have had to be shorter. Honestly, you really write for a specific medium. If you write a TV series, it’s totally different than if you write a game. It’s different than if you write a film or a stage play. I don’t really know how to answer because I don’t think I would have written Beyond as a film. I would have written probably something different.” Let’s say some production studio wants to option Beyond: Two Souls, “We love this! We want to make it a 10-hour mini-series.” What does he tell them? “Good luck,” Cage quipped. When I joked that he’d gladly take production studio money, he said that “it’s not a matter of money.” “It’s challenging to adapt,” he elaborated. “When [a story is told in] a game, people see how close it is to films. But, actually it’s very different from films by essence in nature. It’s not like an easy transition to say, ‘Oh, just take Heavy Rain and here, I got the movie.’ No. You need to rewrite it pretty much from scratch, which, in essence, means it’s truly a game. It’s written like an interactive experience and not like a film.” The stories that Cage and his co-workers have told have always been very grounded, avoiding the more fantastical elements a lot of video games thrive off of. But what if he were trying to tackle a science fiction game or a super hero game? What could he bring to those genres that he hasn’t seen so far? “The more it goes, the more I’m interested in people and their emotions, and less in powers, and that kind of stuff,” he demurred. “I’m interested in people. I’m interested also in people getting games back into society in a way. I would like games to talk more about real people rather than living in this fancy world where we can imagine whatever but there is no real relationship with the life we lead.” “Sometimes you just want to be somewhere else and live something else. You can do it with sci-fi. There have been some fantastic films or TV series talking about our world, although sci-fi was in the background,” he said. “But I think games have something to say about the real world. This is what I want to continue to explore: real conflicts, real emotions, real relationships. That’s what I’m interested in.” To contact the author of this post, write to evan@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @EvNarc

Heavy Rain cost developer Quantic Dream $21.8 million to make, and with Sony's marketing budget added in, production costs topped out at $52.2 million (based on a mid-range euro-dollar exchange rate of $1.31), Quantic CEO Guillaume de Fondaumiere tells Eurogamer. It was worth it in the end - Heavy Rain made Sony more than $130.6 million.

"It's very profitable," Fondaumiere says. Since there seems to be a wide discrepancy between the definition of "successful" in AAA and smaller games, it's always good to know that yes, more than $100 million is still "profitable" to some developers.

#davidcage Yesterday at DICE, Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls creator David Cage gave a provocative talk titled "The Peter Pan Syndrome: The Industry That Refused to Grow Up." More »

#fineart These awesome robots and moody rooms? They're by Benoit Godde, a French concept artist at Quantic Dream who's worked on games such as Heavy Rain, Beyond and the cancelled Eight Days. More »

#fineart French artist Morgan Yon has worked for big clients such as Ubisoft and Quantic Dream, on games such as Heavy Rain, Zombi U and movies like Prince of Persia and GI Joe. More »

#beyondtwosouls After seeing a lengthy demo of a level from David Cage's new game Beyond: Two Souls, that headline is more or less the best way I can describe it: The somber, occasionally stilted tone and QTE-style controls of Heavy Rain coupled with the non-corporeal hijinks of Ghost Trick. Starring Ellen Page. More »

#rumor Sources tell website MCVUK that developer Quantic Dream's next game is called Beyond. Quantic Dream boss David Cage is expected to debut the game this week in Los Angeles at a Sony press event. More »

#nextgen We're at a weird place in terms of expectations for the near-future of video games. Yesterday saw Epic Games unveiling the next iteration of their Unreal Engine and that— combined with a stream of leaks about the successors to the PS3 and Xbox 360—have people thinking about the possibilities of what's next. But David Cage doesn't care about any of that. More »

The creators of Heavy Rain didn’t come empty handed to this year’s Game Developers Conference. The celebrated studio debuted a “powerful new video called Kara” to show off their new animation and performance-capture technology; If you’ve seen Kara, then you know that the results speak for themselves. Rendered in real time on PS3 hardware, Kara chronicled the activation of a self-aware synthetic organism, but this making-of feature is impressive in its own right as it shows how Quantic Dream assembled several different performances to create a seamless, believable virtual character. The future is now, you guys.

Once you’ve watched the video feature, let us know what you think in the comments! And as a reminder: Kara is absolutely, positively not Quantic Dream’s next game.

Head-turning videogame tech demos are a dime a dozen at Game Developers’ Conference, but developer Quantic Dream might have this year’s crop beat. Watch the full tech demo video for “Kara” below to see how the creators of Heavy Rain are looking to expand virtual performances in video games.

And just to be extra clear: No, “Kara” is not Quantic Dream’s next game.

Director David Cage was on-hand at GDC to debut the new video to the press, and his presentation touched on the origins of “Kara” — we’ve selected a few choice quotes below. Check back tomorrow to hear our full interview with Cage on the Official PlayStation Blogcast. It’s one interview you won’t want to miss!

After Heavy Rain, we wanted to push the envelope in terms of quality, starting with the visuals. We wanted to improve many things — things that were not possible with the Heavy Rain engine. So we had to develop a new engine from scratch.

We also wanted to improve the quality of the acting. With Heavy Rain, we did what many games do — split performances, recording a voice on one side and a body animation on the other, putting everything together and crossing your fingers that you get a consistent performance. It worked okay for Heavy Rain, but you lose a lot of a performance by splitting into two and rebuilding it artificially.

We wanted to do what Avatar did by having one full performance where we capture everything at the same time. And we wanted to demonstrate these new performance capture techniques and the new engine before going into production, so we developed a short showcase that would allow us to test these ideas and technologies. This is how “Kara” was created.

“Kara” is not our next game. It’s not the character, it’s not the world, it’s not the story. …We do things in a very strange way here, things that have nothing to do with the games we make. But I think that’s a part of the DNA of the studio, and hopefully something that people like about us – they never know what they’re going to get!

Heavy Rain – The Casting

#heavyrain If you haven't yet played PS3 adventure Heavy Rain, and want to, don't watch this. It contains a pretty big spoiler. More »

#heavyrain Yes, the jokes about the weird deconstructed gameplay in Heavy Rain get laughs, even from people in the audience who may not have played it. But, the best thing about Kumail Nanjiani's stand-up bit on the PS3 psychological thriller is how he notes the changes in the gaming medium and the difference in the kinds of experience that are available now. He's acknowledging maturation while getting some yuks in. More »

Heavy Rain developer Quantic Dream recently shared some player statistics with IGN about its 2010 interactive drama. Of the 3 million players who reportedly played the game, 74 percent completed the game. Of those, 33 percent of people must have gotten the "four heroes" trophy, surviving home invasions, sinister scenarios and angry junkyard mechanics to keep the game's quartet of protagonists alive and kicking.

Here's a good takeaway for game developers seeking to implement multiple endings for their games: only four percent of players have seen all Heavy Rain's endings and only three percent earned the game's platinum trophy.

However, 100 percent of future developers should "press X to Jason."

Heavy Rain, IGN PS3's Game of the Year in 2010, is still one of the most talked about exclusives on the console nearly two years out from its initial release. Interest in the game is still high. Equally high is interest in what Quantic Dream is working on next...

#fineart François Baranger is an artist who works not just on video games, but on some of the biggest Hollywood franchises in recent years, like Harry Potter and GI Joe. More »

I'm still pissed the game never explained what was happening during those weird blackouts.

If you missed out on Heavy Rain last year, Sony’s prepped a special edition that’s arriving next week, complete with Move support, the one and only episodic add-on (future installments were ditched in favor of adding Move), and some other bonus features to round things out.

The whole package will only set you back $29.99.

Say what you will about what Heavy Rain did wrong--and it did plenty wrong--but I’m still encouraged to see designers like David Cage trying to do something different. Games can’t get it right until they get it wrong, and maybe Cage isn’t the guy to make that kind of storytelling click, but it felt like a step in the right direction. I’ll play whatever he does next.

#heavyrain Sony has announced today that a director's cut of the popular Heavy Rain is due out Nov. 8 for $29.99, and will include past downloadable content, a soundtrack, Move support and bonus features. More »

Heavy Rain, one of the most talked-about titles ever to be released exclusively for PS3, will be re-released next week, but this time with lots of extras making it the perfect gift for the holidays. In addition to the original game, Heavy Rain: Director’s Cut will include DLC, the original soundtrack, bonus videos, and more. One loaded release for the great price of $29.99!

Heavy Rain: Director’s Cut starts shipping on November 8th in the US. Here is a list of all the great content fans can look forward to:

• Complete, original game, Heavy Rain
• Heavy Rain Chronicles: Episode 1 – The Taxidermist DLC
• Heavy Rain Original Videogame Score by award-winning film and television composer, Normand Corbeil (16 tracks)
• New front-end menu and interface with built-in Move support
• A series of 8 “Making of” Bonus Videos
• Three Dynamic Themes (Heavy Rain, Heavy Rain ARI Forest, Heavy Rain ARI Mars)
• 15 additional pieces of new concept art
• 2 bonus Trailers (Thank You Trailer, Love Trailer)

As a thank you to all current (and future) Heavy Rain fans, SCEA is making the Heavy Rain Crime Scene Dynamic Theme available FREE through the PlayStation Network (PSN) to commemorate the release of the Heavy Rain: Director’s Cut. Starting November 8th, PSN members can download this visually stunning dynamic theme, depicting one of the game’s most chilling crime scenes visited by FBI profiler, Norman Jayden, in his frantic search for the Origami Killer.

We hope you enjoy the new Director’s Cut!

#heavyrain You're right, David Cage, creator of games like Heavy Rain and Indigo Prophecy. You do sound stupid. But just the kind of stupid this industry needs more of. More »

The entomology of the idiomatic phrase "to have one's cake, and eat it too" can be traced all the way back to 1546 and English writer John Heywood, who, in his multi-volume work A dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of All the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue, wrote, "wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?" The meaning, of course, pertains to the notion of one wishing to consume one's cake, while hoping to maintain the steady ownership of the aforementioned cake, post-consumption, a scolding question posed to those who, when faced with a one-or-the-other choice, demand to have things both ways.

Quantic Dream developer Guillaume de Fondaumiere, declaring that the price of games is "too damn high!"

A number of variations on this phrase have appeared over the years, from the Italian expression "vuoi la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca" ("you want your bottle full of wine and your wife drunk"), to the famous YouTube philosopher Debbie whose love of felines spawned the phrase "You can't hug every cat," and now Quantic Dream developer Guillaume de Fondaumiere, with his own spin on the old idiom that goes, "Video games are too expensive, but I want people to buy my expensive video games new."

I'm paraphrasing, of course. Specifically, I'm paraphrasing de Fondaumiere's comments to GameIndustry.biz (quoted accordingly in non-registered form by Eurogamer), in which he laments the fact that out of the roughly three million players who registered online trophies in his company's PS3-exclusive mystery thriller Heavy Rain, only two million of them actually bought the game new.

"We basically sold to date approximately two million units. We know from the Trophy system that probably more than three million people bought this game and played it.

On my small level it's a million people playing my game without giving me one cent. And my calculation is, as Quantic Dream, I lost between €5 and €10 million worth of royalties because of second-hand gaming."

While de Fondaumiere's math seems a bit...fuzzy, he is probably not incorrect in assuming that a number of players did opt to pick up used copies of Heavy Rain, or borrow copies from friends. Story-based games unfocused on multiplayer have traditionally been the biggest sellers in the used market, given most players' reluctance to hold onto games that don't contain traditional methods of replay value.

Ultimately, de Fondaumiere believes the issue is that games are simply too expensive, thus driving players to the used market, like poverty stricken peasants desperate to attain the luxuries afforded the upper class.

"I've always said that games are probably too expensive, so there's probably a right level here to find, and we need to discuss this all together and try to find a way to reconcile consumer expectations, retail expectations and also the expectations of the publisher and the developers to make this business a worthwhile business."

But, at the moment, "we're basically all shooting ourselves in the foot", he declared.

"Because when developers and publishers alike are going to see that they can't make a living out of producing games that are sold through retail channels, because of second-hand gaming, they will simply stop making these games," he said, or move exclusively online.

The basic idea of what de Fondaumiere is suggesting is not balls-out ludicrous or anything. Yes, games being overly expensive is probably what is driving players to pick up used titles, and perhaps an open discussion among publishers and console-makers to figure that situation out is a good idea. That said, the notion that developers will simply stop making games sold at retail because they aren't making enough money strikes as slightly insane, given the fact that games are still selling, including Heavy Rain, which apparently sold over two million copies new. That's a huge number for any game, a number that any studio would kill for.

Also, talking about the move to online sales over retail as though it were some kind of coming apocalypse seems more than a bit Chicken Little-ian, given that plenty of developers have been thriving via the various downloadable channels on consoles and the PC, and many publishers have found reasonable success pushing both retail and downloadable games.

Furthermore, de Fondaumiere is essentially complaining that two million copies of a game sold is somehow detrimental to his studio's health. Using his own math, that means that Quantic Dream earned between €10 and €20 million in royalty profits alone. Of course every company's goal is to make more money, to devour every remaining penny it could possibly squeeze out of its consumer base for the sake of continued success. But still, complaining in this fashion doesn't engender much sympathy.

In effect, de Fondaumiere has declared his annoyance with the fact that games are too expensive, and simultaneously complained about a million players not paying retail price for his game. When he figures out how to reconcile that one, maybe he can then work on the formula for self-replenishing cake.

Quantic Dream co-founder Guillaume de Fondaumiere estimate the studio lost between €5 and €10 million ($6.8 and $13.7 million) worth of royalties on Heavy Rain because of used sales.

"We basically sold to date approximately two million units, we know from the trophy system that probably more than three million people bought this game and played it," de Fondaumiere told GI.biz. "On my small level it's a million people playing my game without giving me one cent."

The three million "bought" math sounds a little fuzzy, especially if one were to consider the rental market and friends borrowing games, but he seems to be on the right path.

"Now are games too expensive?" de Fondaumiere continued, "I've always said that games are probably too expensive so there's probably a right level here to find, and we need to discuss this altogether and try to find a way to I would say reconcile consumer expectations, retail expectations, but also the expectations of the publisher and the developers to make this business a worthwhile business."

We bet that's especially true when your game does better than your publisher ever expected.

#heavyrain Over a year since it was first released, a revised edition of Heavy Rain is being cobbled together in Europe that reduces some of the game's content in order to get it a less adult rating. More »

PEGI, the European video games rating board, recently published an evaluation for Heavy Rain Edition Modifiée, an apparently toned-down version of Quantic Dream's interactive drama which will carry a PEGI 16 rating (marked down from the original's PEGI 18 rating). Little is known about the content or reasoning behind the new, minor-friendly version of the game, but as the PEGI rating mentions an August 3 release date, it'll probably start showing up on European store shelves soon.

So, what's getting cut in the Edition Modifiée? According to the PEGI ratings, the original's "extreme violence" and "violence towards defenceless people" have been downgraded to "realistic-looking violence." We can't wait to see how this changes the game's more intense sequences. For instance, there's that one scene, during which you have five minutes to improvise a tool which you can use to cut your fingernails.

Earlier this year, gaming industry sleuth Superannuation uncovered the possible monikers of two projects from Heavy Rain developer Quantic Dream. The first was Fiv5, which showed up in a domain and European trademark registered by the developer. The second was Infraworld, a project the studio canceled in 2006 which later showed up in a Heavy Rain Easter egg, as well as a Quantic Dream new hire's LinkedIn profile. Today, the latter name showed even more signs of life when it surfaced in a U.S. trademark filed by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe this past May.

If Infraworld has indeed been saved from the Quantic Dream cutting room floor, it's likely that it follows the same style of Heavy Rain -- in March, David Cage explained that he wanted to build on his treasured "Interactive Drama" genre. That's still a pretty broad set of expectations, though one thing's for sure: Bizarre and unplaceable accents are pretty much a lock.

#fineart French artist François Baranger has been doing concept work for years now, and has experience in the worlds of both film and video games. More »

Speaking to The Guardian about storytelling in games, Heavy Rain director Cage singled out the FPS genre -- its use of WWII and sci-fi settings in general -- as an example where that aspect of the medium is stagnating. His advice for other game writers: " Don't write about being a rookie soldier in WWII, because you don't have a clue what that's like."

Heavy Rain has drawn accolades, Cage says, because the inspiration for its story is personal and relatable. "Talk about yourself, your life, your emotions, the people around you, what you like, what you hate," he advised. "This is how the industry will make a huge step forward. I'm fed up with space marines."

In his case, inspiration came from something much more down to earth. "It was not about space marines fighting aliens, it was about my relationship with my first son and how he changed my life -- and also about how loving someone without expecting anything in return was something totally new."

So, Modern Warfare 3 writers: instead of "how many people can you shoot?," why not try asking players "how many people would you shoot to save someone you love?"

David Cage, director of the soggy serial killer interactive drama Heavy Rain, has already said there won't be a sequel to that game, telling the PlayStation Blog, "We're going to be exploring a different direction, which will still be very dark and still for adults, but completely different to Heavy Rain" for Quantic Dreams' next project. That game's specifics may be a secret, but it may have a title: "Fiv5" ... yes, in the style of David Fincher's film Se7en.

Gaming trademark sleuth superannuation has turned up several clues supporting this theory, including a trademark filing with Europe's Office of Harmonization for the International Market. There's also a domain name registration by Quantic Dream, and a new hire at the developer has listed themselves as "Concept Artist: Video Game "FIVE" & "INFRAWORLD" on LinkedIn. Infraworld? Where'd we put our deerstalker hat and magnifying glass?