Tom Cox (Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire), DDOS attackers charged & high profile eSports investments

Tom Cox, co-founder and lead programmer of Canberra’s Whalehammer Games joins us to talk about his new game Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire. Tom shared his thoughts on the challenges of making games, designing a game for a genre that he grew up with, and designing a science fiction/medieval game world, As gamers we are no strangers to the feeling of powering on our machines only to find that the network is offline, but sometimes this is because of a deliberate assault on the servers of those games. Back in 2014 a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack took out the Playstation Network and Xbox Live right in the middle of the holidays.. For the longest time it seemed like the perpetrators of these attacks were untouchable, using the anonymity of the internet to fade into obscurity after the deed has been done. But now the law has caught up to small collection of disruptors. It wouldn’t be an episode of Pixel Sift without touching on the topic of eSports. Notable sporting figures such as Magic Johnson Shaquille O’Neil are now dropping some serious cash on eSports teams. With many other big names joining the ranks of owners and team affiliates we thought it would be a good idea to dive into the world of high profile eSports competition. The tournaments we love could now be moving closer to the traditional sporting organisations. You can find us on social media, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, YouTube and Steam. Just search for "pixelsift"!Support the show: https://sifter.store