So yesterday I signed up to two things that are hot at the moment.Twitter is microblogging. 140 character messages from mobile phone or computer. Full on it looks like this: http://twitter.com/public_timeline And here is my little beginning: http://twitter.com/Bruciebabe
Naymz is yet another form of social networking. But this time it serves as a central point for everything you do on the internet. Here is mine: http://www.naymz.com/search/bruce/everiss/2335582 It has good tools for importing your address book so it is easy to get going. If you can be found at multiple places on the web this makes good sense, as you can see from my entry.
Wednesday 12 November 2008
Friday 26 September 2008
Chris Hyman and Shawn Guse, software thieves
Some game thieves pay for their crime
September 23rd, 2008 — News analysis and background
Over the last year Activision have been taking peer to peer torrent game thieves to court. Here are the results:
Shawn Guse of Federal Way, Washington agreed to pay Activision $100,000.
Chris Hyman of Abbeville, South Carolina agreed to pay Activision $25,000.
George Laflin of New Jersey agreed to pay Activision $100,000.
Maryanne Leach of Northome, Minnesota agreed to pay Activision $1,000.
Kenneth Madden of York, South Carolina agreed to pay Activision $100,000.
James R. Strickland of New York State; case is still active.
This is brilliant news. It is nice to see a game publisher with the gumption to act against people stealing from them. Let’s hope they nail a lot more of these thieves.
September 23rd, 2008 — News analysis and background
Over the last year Activision have been taking peer to peer torrent game thieves to court. Here are the results:
Shawn Guse of Federal Way, Washington agreed to pay Activision $100,000.
Chris Hyman of Abbeville, South Carolina agreed to pay Activision $25,000.
George Laflin of New Jersey agreed to pay Activision $100,000.
Maryanne Leach of Northome, Minnesota agreed to pay Activision $1,000.
Kenneth Madden of York, South Carolina agreed to pay Activision $100,000.
James R. Strickland of New York State; case is still active.
This is brilliant news. It is nice to see a game publisher with the gumption to act against people stealing from them. Let’s hope they nail a lot more of these thieves.
Thursday 25 September 2008
Shawn Guse, software thief
Shawn Guse, software thief
September 25th, 2008 Opinion
In the article “Some game thieves pay for their crime” I reported how Activision was taking people who stole their games to court. One of these people was Shawn Guse of Federal Way, Washington who agreed to pay Activision $100,000. As a result of the article he has now contacted me. Here is his email:
My name is Shawn Guse and you have my name posted on your web site without my permission and I want it removed or changed to “A Washington man”, and I also want the link to the settlement removed if you have one. Please don’t contribute to the crucifixion of my name. If you are so kind as to remove the whole article that would be great. I have contacted many other web sites that are posting this and they are gladly removing it due to my request.
And here is my reply to him:
Surely the publicity is part of society’s punishment of you for being a thief?
Just a few years ago I was working at a game publisher towards the end of the PS1 generation. When people like you started copying games on a massive scale we had a huge drop in the income we needed to the pay the people who made the games. About 60 people lost their jobs with massive personal trauma. The whole company suffered and we all went through terrible times. It was awful to see my friends and colleagues suffering in such a way.
So it was a great delight for me that I was able to publish the names of the thieves caught by Activision.In your email to me you show no contrition for your actions and the effect that they had on the people who work in the industry. All you are concerned about is yourself.The “I want” tone of your letter is, frankly, despicable.Perhaps you should have considered the consequences of your actions more thoroughly before you started stealing games.
September 25th, 2008 Opinion
In the article “Some game thieves pay for their crime” I reported how Activision was taking people who stole their games to court. One of these people was Shawn Guse of Federal Way, Washington who agreed to pay Activision $100,000. As a result of the article he has now contacted me. Here is his email:
My name is Shawn Guse and you have my name posted on your web site without my permission and I want it removed or changed to “A Washington man”, and I also want the link to the settlement removed if you have one. Please don’t contribute to the crucifixion of my name. If you are so kind as to remove the whole article that would be great. I have contacted many other web sites that are posting this and they are gladly removing it due to my request.
And here is my reply to him:
Surely the publicity is part of society’s punishment of you for being a thief?
Just a few years ago I was working at a game publisher towards the end of the PS1 generation. When people like you started copying games on a massive scale we had a huge drop in the income we needed to the pay the people who made the games. About 60 people lost their jobs with massive personal trauma. The whole company suffered and we all went through terrible times. It was awful to see my friends and colleagues suffering in such a way.
So it was a great delight for me that I was able to publish the names of the thieves caught by Activision.In your email to me you show no contrition for your actions and the effect that they had on the people who work in the industry. All you are concerned about is yourself.The “I want” tone of your letter is, frankly, despicable.Perhaps you should have considered the consequences of your actions more thoroughly before you started stealing games.
Friday 19 September 2008
It is time to publish PC games as Steam exclusives
From: http://www.bruceongames.com/2008/09/16/it-is-time-to-publish-pc-games-as-steam-exclusives/
For over 25 years now PC games have been available on disks and in boxes at retail stores around the world. This business model is now well and truly broken because most people would rather steal games over the internet than pay for them. Game publishers have tried a number of protection strategies (DRM or Digital Rights Management) but none of them work and they cause a great deal of resentment amongst legitimate users. Why alienate your customers?
However there is a form of DRM that consumers like, and that is Steam. They like Steam because it adds value in lots of ways so they don’t even realise that it is mainly there for DRM, they just see it as a download service and as a community. The problem is that publishers tend to release a game in boxed retail format and on Steam. This is silly because the boxed version is the one that is going to end up being copied over the torrent network. It is obvious that the time has now come to release PC games only on Steam. This has many advantages:
If your security (and Valve’s) is good then there will be no piracy. If software thieves want to play your game they will have to pay for it. Which is as it should be, but isn’t at the moment.
No need to design and manufacture all that packaging and all those disks.
No need to distribute physical stock around the world.
No need to give sale or return.
Higher gross profit percentage.
Simultaneous global launch into every country on earth.
Lots of added value services for the consumer.
Quite simply we have reached the point where making the boxed version actually reduces sales and costs money. The piracy that it allows costs far more than the income it provides. Publishing a game as a Steam exclusive will make you more money and involve far less work. In fact using Steam as the exclusive distribution fixes the broken business model. So it makes it worthwhile to develop PC games once more.
All this depends on the Steam DRM not being cracked. So Valve need to keep one step ahead of the thieves. Also publishers don’t have to use Steam. They can make their own Steam-alike. For the biggest publishers this may be viable but for most the existing Steam community is a very powerful reason to give this service the sole rights.
And now I am going to back my thesis up with this market research. 85% of these PC gamers are software thieves, 55% have avoided buying a game because of DRM and 58% have had issues arising on their computer from the DRM on legitimate games. Yet, and this is the big one, 51% would have paid for a game they have pirated if it had been available on Steam.
So, if publishers have any sense, boxed retail PC games are dead. It is a pity EA didn’t realise this with Spore.
For over 25 years now PC games have been available on disks and in boxes at retail stores around the world. This business model is now well and truly broken because most people would rather steal games over the internet than pay for them. Game publishers have tried a number of protection strategies (DRM or Digital Rights Management) but none of them work and they cause a great deal of resentment amongst legitimate users. Why alienate your customers?
However there is a form of DRM that consumers like, and that is Steam. They like Steam because it adds value in lots of ways so they don’t even realise that it is mainly there for DRM, they just see it as a download service and as a community. The problem is that publishers tend to release a game in boxed retail format and on Steam. This is silly because the boxed version is the one that is going to end up being copied over the torrent network. It is obvious that the time has now come to release PC games only on Steam. This has many advantages:
If your security (and Valve’s) is good then there will be no piracy. If software thieves want to play your game they will have to pay for it. Which is as it should be, but isn’t at the moment.
No need to design and manufacture all that packaging and all those disks.
No need to distribute physical stock around the world.
No need to give sale or return.
Higher gross profit percentage.
Simultaneous global launch into every country on earth.
Lots of added value services for the consumer.
Quite simply we have reached the point where making the boxed version actually reduces sales and costs money. The piracy that it allows costs far more than the income it provides. Publishing a game as a Steam exclusive will make you more money and involve far less work. In fact using Steam as the exclusive distribution fixes the broken business model. So it makes it worthwhile to develop PC games once more.
All this depends on the Steam DRM not being cracked. So Valve need to keep one step ahead of the thieves. Also publishers don’t have to use Steam. They can make their own Steam-alike. For the biggest publishers this may be viable but for most the existing Steam community is a very powerful reason to give this service the sole rights.
And now I am going to back my thesis up with this market research. 85% of these PC gamers are software thieves, 55% have avoided buying a game because of DRM and 58% have had issues arising on their computer from the DRM on legitimate games. Yet, and this is the big one, 51% would have paid for a game they have pirated if it had been available on Steam.
So, if publishers have any sense, boxed retail PC games are dead. It is a pity EA didn’t realise this with Spore.
Friday 1 August 2008
Bruceongames on Knol
http://knol.google.com/k/bruce-everiss/bruceongamescom/2l81m4yln1pbt/33#
It wasn't even my idea. One day I was explaining to my friend Mike Clark that my first blog, Scubabrucie, was going nowhere because of the limits of the subject matter, my limits to dive regularly enough and the limited size of the potential readership. Mike suggested doing a video games blog instead, to capitalise on my experience in the industry. It also, obviously, raises my profile in the industry which may do my career prospects either harm or good, depending on who reads it. I thought that I would run out of steam after a few weeks but Mike thought not, so we shopped for a suitable url and, quite frankly, Bruceongames.com does the job.
Actually writing the articles is a lot easier than I thought that it would be. The industry is still in it's infancy so there is always a lot of change as it slowly matures into something that will be a lot different to what it is today. Also I have a passion for marketing so write many of the aricles from this perspective. This often makes what I have to say unique when most gaming content on the web is written from the perspective of the gamer.
The bandwidth and sheer volume of gaming content on the internet is immense. Unfortunately it has a very high signal to noise ratio. There are a few good blogs written by professional developers but very little written by anyone from the publishing side of the industry. This means that Bruceongames has little competition for the space it occupies.
So that I reach the maximum audience with my articles I allow them to be copied by Seeking Alpha and iStockAnalyst so it is impossible to know the total audience size, except that it is in the thousands every day. This has helped the blog up to thirty three thousand and something on Technorati which is not too bad considering it only started in August 2007. I am often surprised by the people who do read it. Many a time senior industry executives and journalists have mentioned it to me.
Overall the idea is to make people think about the issues and as a result the blog attracts some excellent, thoughtful comments which contribute enormously to understanding the issues. Every Thursday is news roundup day, often with a left field slant put on an eclectic choice of current industry stories.
Here are some of the most popular articles:
Fanboys is about an interesting and important modern social phenomenon which is highly relevant to anyone working in the games industry.
Piracy, Imagine Software and the Megagames. This article cause some controversy because some people who were schoolboys at the time think they know more about the subject than the director of Imagine in charge of sales and marketing, which was myself.
Is the GPU holding the PS3 back? This article voiced what every developer for the machine knows. That the overall performance of the Sony Playstation PS3 as a system is limited by it's graphics processor. And that the Microsoft Xbox 360 has a more powerful graphics processor. The Sony fanboys certainly did not like seeing the facts.
Is Blu-ray a Microsoft victory At the time this was written the HD DVD format had just died. The very valid point here was that by not committing themselves to any new media format Microsoft were able to see their Xbox 360 console at a lower price whilst the Sony PS3, with Blu-ray, was languishing in third place in this console generation.
A big Microsoft mistake This is about Microsoft abandoning the original Xbox for business reasons when from a marketing point of view they would have been far better off keeping it as the cheaper console in a two model range. The business model the Sony successfully follow.
Did Sony screw up the video game market is about Sony marketing to a narrow demographic with their consoles which prevented the market growing as much as it could have. Something Nintendo have now proven.
The upcoming free Microsoft console is about the potential for games to run on big central servers which would then only require minimal electronics in the home. Thus enabling Microsoft to give home boxes away with service subscriptions.
It wasn't even my idea. One day I was explaining to my friend Mike Clark that my first blog, Scubabrucie, was going nowhere because of the limits of the subject matter, my limits to dive regularly enough and the limited size of the potential readership. Mike suggested doing a video games blog instead, to capitalise on my experience in the industry. It also, obviously, raises my profile in the industry which may do my career prospects either harm or good, depending on who reads it. I thought that I would run out of steam after a few weeks but Mike thought not, so we shopped for a suitable url and, quite frankly, Bruceongames.com does the job.
Actually writing the articles is a lot easier than I thought that it would be. The industry is still in it's infancy so there is always a lot of change as it slowly matures into something that will be a lot different to what it is today. Also I have a passion for marketing so write many of the aricles from this perspective. This often makes what I have to say unique when most gaming content on the web is written from the perspective of the gamer.
The bandwidth and sheer volume of gaming content on the internet is immense. Unfortunately it has a very high signal to noise ratio. There are a few good blogs written by professional developers but very little written by anyone from the publishing side of the industry. This means that Bruceongames has little competition for the space it occupies.
So that I reach the maximum audience with my articles I allow them to be copied by Seeking Alpha and iStockAnalyst so it is impossible to know the total audience size, except that it is in the thousands every day. This has helped the blog up to thirty three thousand and something on Technorati which is not too bad considering it only started in August 2007. I am often surprised by the people who do read it. Many a time senior industry executives and journalists have mentioned it to me.
Overall the idea is to make people think about the issues and as a result the blog attracts some excellent, thoughtful comments which contribute enormously to understanding the issues. Every Thursday is news roundup day, often with a left field slant put on an eclectic choice of current industry stories.
Here are some of the most popular articles:
Fanboys is about an interesting and important modern social phenomenon which is highly relevant to anyone working in the games industry.
Piracy, Imagine Software and the Megagames. This article cause some controversy because some people who were schoolboys at the time think they know more about the subject than the director of Imagine in charge of sales and marketing, which was myself.
Is the GPU holding the PS3 back? This article voiced what every developer for the machine knows. That the overall performance of the Sony Playstation PS3 as a system is limited by it's graphics processor. And that the Microsoft Xbox 360 has a more powerful graphics processor. The Sony fanboys certainly did not like seeing the facts.
Is Blu-ray a Microsoft victory At the time this was written the HD DVD format had just died. The very valid point here was that by not committing themselves to any new media format Microsoft were able to see their Xbox 360 console at a lower price whilst the Sony PS3, with Blu-ray, was languishing in third place in this console generation.
A big Microsoft mistake This is about Microsoft abandoning the original Xbox for business reasons when from a marketing point of view they would have been far better off keeping it as the cheaper console in a two model range. The business model the Sony successfully follow.
Did Sony screw up the video game market is about Sony marketing to a narrow demographic with their consoles which prevented the market growing as much as it could have. Something Nintendo have now proven.
The upcoming free Microsoft console is about the potential for games to run on big central servers which would then only require minimal electronics in the home. Thus enabling Microsoft to give home boxes away with service subscriptions.
Wednesday 23 July 2008
The problem with Sony
Because of what I have written on here about Sony I have been accused many times of being a Nintendo or a Microsoft fanboy. Nothing could be further from the truth. I only report what I see. And what I see is a Sony that has lost its way.
The facts are very, very simple. In the Playstation one generation Sony had massive global domination, nobody came anywhere near them. In the Playstation two generation Sony were hugely dominant again. Nintendo and Microsoft were minnows in comparison. Then we come to the Playstation three (PS3) generation and suddenly the wheels fall off. Sony are running third and it very much looks like it is going to stay that way. Analysts and fanboys continually promise or hope that a revival in fortunes is just around the corner, but it never comes. So what went wrong:
The cell processor, this was a huge mistake in many ways. Firstly it cost a fortune in development and putting into production, which is money that needs to be recovered. Secondly it delayed getting the PS3 to market, giving away huge competitive advantage. Thirdly, whilst very powerful, it is a very long way from being optimised for the job of running a console. Overall they would have been better buying an off the shelf generalised processor as they did for previous models and as their competitors did.
The graphics processor is a lot less powerful than the one in it’s main competitor’s machine. This effectively limits what the PS3 can do, no matter what the CPU and memory are doing. Fanboys blame the developers for being lazy and not putting enough work into PS3 games when the reality is that it is the machine itself that is holding the games back.
BluRay. The Playstation 3 was used as a Trojan horse to get this technology standard accepted by the world. And at this it has succeeded. But at a terrible cost. It forced the price of the PS3 up sufficiently to stifle consumer demand whilst forcing Sony to absorb massive losses. It is strange that Sony nearly bet the company on this at a time when physical delivery of content is in steep decline. A phyrric victory indeed. If this were not enough, difficulties in putting BluRay into production contributed to the delays in getting PS3 to market.
The complex architecture of the PS3 makes it very difficult to develop content for. A lot more difficult than for it’s main competitors. This wasn’t helped by Sony releasing development tools that were also greatly weaker than those from its competitors. A double whammy that caused huge problems for games developers worldwide. Many games were delayed because the problems were so great, costing the game developers a fortune and depriving the marketplace of product.
Sony totally misread the way the market was going. They have clung to their hardcore gamer base and squandered the lead in casual gaming that they had with EyeToy and SingStar. Nintendo have come along with a simpler machine that has massively outsold the Sony PS3 with the simple tactic of providing entertainment that is accessible to a lot more people. With hindsight it looks so obvious, but Sony missed it completely. As a result Nintendo made a fortune and Sony lost a fortune.
Sony have been stretched for cash. They have made losses. The technology in the PS3 has cost a fortune and they are almost certainly still making a loss on every machine sold. They have been forced to raise new capital and to sell off bits of the company. So they have little room to manoeuvre. They cannot throw money at the PS3 problem. This whilst their two main competitors are rolling in money which they are both using to reinforce their positions.
Lack of exclusive content. Both competing machines have a lot more exclusive AAA content. This is a massive USP when the reason for buying these machines is to play content on them. Microsoft have invested heavily into a very impressive catalogue of exclusives and have managed to seduce some former major Sony exclusives into becoming cross platform. This alone has caused an immense shift in competitive advantage.
Sony have messed up very badly with online. This is a real killer and comes from them being a hardware company whilst Microsoft is a software company. So Microsoft understood the importance of online and invested massively in Live. And that investment is paying them back enormously. So they continue to invest and Live is becoming one of the biggest phenomenons ever in gaming. Giving customers a massive USP whilst generating a lot of revenue for Microsoft. And it is growing with almost unbelievable impetus, both in content and in users. The Sony competitor, Home, is still not released after multiple delays and is now several years behind. It will be nearly impossible for Sony to pull back such a huge lead.
Sony have huge, world class, divisions in many areas. Telephones, Film making, Portable Music (they invented this) and Console Gaming. Yet these divisions appear not to talk to each other. So a potential huge strength has become a weakness. The film division isn’t used to place all their unique IP on the consoles for instance. And outsiders who are less constrained can enter Sony’s markets and win. Hence the iPhone which could and should have been a Sony product yet instead has come from a company, Apple, that just a few years earlier had no stake whatsoever in consumer electronics.
With all that against them it is amazing that Sony have sold as many PS3s as they have. The reason they have done so is because of the impetus of the brand and the loyalty of a large section of their user base. The majority of console users have yet to upgrade to this generation, there is still a huge untapped market of non console households and we have yet to reach the $199 sweet spot when the bulk of sales occur. So there is still hope for Sony, which is what the analysts are grasping for. The problem for Sony now is that the sheer weight of USPs is against them. A gulf that further widened this E3 where Nintendo and Microsoft forged ahead whilst Sony were distinctly lacklustre.
The facts are very, very simple. In the Playstation one generation Sony had massive global domination, nobody came anywhere near them. In the Playstation two generation Sony were hugely dominant again. Nintendo and Microsoft were minnows in comparison. Then we come to the Playstation three (PS3) generation and suddenly the wheels fall off. Sony are running third and it very much looks like it is going to stay that way. Analysts and fanboys continually promise or hope that a revival in fortunes is just around the corner, but it never comes. So what went wrong:
The cell processor, this was a huge mistake in many ways. Firstly it cost a fortune in development and putting into production, which is money that needs to be recovered. Secondly it delayed getting the PS3 to market, giving away huge competitive advantage. Thirdly, whilst very powerful, it is a very long way from being optimised for the job of running a console. Overall they would have been better buying an off the shelf generalised processor as they did for previous models and as their competitors did.
The graphics processor is a lot less powerful than the one in it’s main competitor’s machine. This effectively limits what the PS3 can do, no matter what the CPU and memory are doing. Fanboys blame the developers for being lazy and not putting enough work into PS3 games when the reality is that it is the machine itself that is holding the games back.
BluRay. The Playstation 3 was used as a Trojan horse to get this technology standard accepted by the world. And at this it has succeeded. But at a terrible cost. It forced the price of the PS3 up sufficiently to stifle consumer demand whilst forcing Sony to absorb massive losses. It is strange that Sony nearly bet the company on this at a time when physical delivery of content is in steep decline. A phyrric victory indeed. If this were not enough, difficulties in putting BluRay into production contributed to the delays in getting PS3 to market.
The complex architecture of the PS3 makes it very difficult to develop content for. A lot more difficult than for it’s main competitors. This wasn’t helped by Sony releasing development tools that were also greatly weaker than those from its competitors. A double whammy that caused huge problems for games developers worldwide. Many games were delayed because the problems were so great, costing the game developers a fortune and depriving the marketplace of product.
Sony totally misread the way the market was going. They have clung to their hardcore gamer base and squandered the lead in casual gaming that they had with EyeToy and SingStar. Nintendo have come along with a simpler machine that has massively outsold the Sony PS3 with the simple tactic of providing entertainment that is accessible to a lot more people. With hindsight it looks so obvious, but Sony missed it completely. As a result Nintendo made a fortune and Sony lost a fortune.
Sony have been stretched for cash. They have made losses. The technology in the PS3 has cost a fortune and they are almost certainly still making a loss on every machine sold. They have been forced to raise new capital and to sell off bits of the company. So they have little room to manoeuvre. They cannot throw money at the PS3 problem. This whilst their two main competitors are rolling in money which they are both using to reinforce their positions.
Lack of exclusive content. Both competing machines have a lot more exclusive AAA content. This is a massive USP when the reason for buying these machines is to play content on them. Microsoft have invested heavily into a very impressive catalogue of exclusives and have managed to seduce some former major Sony exclusives into becoming cross platform. This alone has caused an immense shift in competitive advantage.
Sony have messed up very badly with online. This is a real killer and comes from them being a hardware company whilst Microsoft is a software company. So Microsoft understood the importance of online and invested massively in Live. And that investment is paying them back enormously. So they continue to invest and Live is becoming one of the biggest phenomenons ever in gaming. Giving customers a massive USP whilst generating a lot of revenue for Microsoft. And it is growing with almost unbelievable impetus, both in content and in users. The Sony competitor, Home, is still not released after multiple delays and is now several years behind. It will be nearly impossible for Sony to pull back such a huge lead.
Sony have huge, world class, divisions in many areas. Telephones, Film making, Portable Music (they invented this) and Console Gaming. Yet these divisions appear not to talk to each other. So a potential huge strength has become a weakness. The film division isn’t used to place all their unique IP on the consoles for instance. And outsiders who are less constrained can enter Sony’s markets and win. Hence the iPhone which could and should have been a Sony product yet instead has come from a company, Apple, that just a few years earlier had no stake whatsoever in consumer electronics.
With all that against them it is amazing that Sony have sold as many PS3s as they have. The reason they have done so is because of the impetus of the brand and the loyalty of a large section of their user base. The majority of console users have yet to upgrade to this generation, there is still a huge untapped market of non console households and we have yet to reach the $199 sweet spot when the bulk of sales occur. So there is still hope for Sony, which is what the analysts are grasping for. The problem for Sony now is that the sheer weight of USPs is against them. A gulf that further widened this E3 where Nintendo and Microsoft forged ahead whilst Sony were distinctly lacklustre.
Wednesday 16 July 2008
£25 ($50) logo
Logos are great, a small piece of visual shorthand that represents something much bigger. A brand, a product, a service. Our lives are full of them and we each have hundreds, maybe thousands that we instantly recognise and which have complex meanings for us. Ferrari’s prancing horse, Coca Cola, Apple, Google, Intel, Marlboro, McDonald’s, Dell, Kellogg’s, MTV, Shell and so many more are recognised by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
You can pay a lot of money for a logo. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of pounds in branding exercises that sometimes end in failure. At a more normal, everyday, level an artist or marketing agency will basically charge what they can get away with. Sometimes, when you are buying print, web design or advertising, the logo comes for “free”.
But it is not the price that matters. It is the image. There are so many logos around that many now look like each other which destroys the whole point. Even very major organisations can end up with nondescript images to represent themselves. For this reason I have always preferred text based logos that spell out the brand name. You need to be a very big brand indeed, like say Mercedes Benz with their three pointed star, to get away with anything else.
And now, just like everything else, branding has met the internet. And like everything else it has driven down price and driven up convenience. So now we have services like 25 Pound Logo who I have just used to create a logo for the Harbury Villagebuzz website. There are similar services in America, but the geographical location is irrelevant.
Although these prices are cheap the service certainly isn’t. You create a brief and they very rapidly send you a selection of rough ideas. You can pick from these and/or revise an unlimited number of times. The logos are unique and original created by real artists and are not just clipart or templates. The service is just as good, or possibly better, as going to a fancy expensive branding company. For Villagebuzz I went through two sets of submissions to get what I wanted which was then made into finished artwork, all in just a few days.
At this price you can create useful logos for all sorts of things that you maybe wouldn’t have bothered with before: for a company department or studio, within a game, to represent a concept or idea, for a building or even a room within a building and so on. The possibilities are endless. You can certainly go and have some fun with this!
You can pay a lot of money for a logo. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of pounds in branding exercises that sometimes end in failure. At a more normal, everyday, level an artist or marketing agency will basically charge what they can get away with. Sometimes, when you are buying print, web design or advertising, the logo comes for “free”.
But it is not the price that matters. It is the image. There are so many logos around that many now look like each other which destroys the whole point. Even very major organisations can end up with nondescript images to represent themselves. For this reason I have always preferred text based logos that spell out the brand name. You need to be a very big brand indeed, like say Mercedes Benz with their three pointed star, to get away with anything else.
And now, just like everything else, branding has met the internet. And like everything else it has driven down price and driven up convenience. So now we have services like 25 Pound Logo who I have just used to create a logo for the Harbury Villagebuzz website. There are similar services in America, but the geographical location is irrelevant.
Although these prices are cheap the service certainly isn’t. You create a brief and they very rapidly send you a selection of rough ideas. You can pick from these and/or revise an unlimited number of times. The logos are unique and original created by real artists and are not just clipart or templates. The service is just as good, or possibly better, as going to a fancy expensive branding company. For Villagebuzz I went through two sets of submissions to get what I wanted which was then made into finished artwork, all in just a few days.
At this price you can create useful logos for all sorts of things that you maybe wouldn’t have bothered with before: for a company department or studio, within a game, to represent a concept or idea, for a building or even a room within a building and so on. The possibilities are endless. You can certainly go and have some fun with this!
Wednesday 21 May 2008
The Byron Review
So, the long awaited report is out and it is stupid.
Why commission the report at all when there is no known problem that needs addressing? This is just another waste of taxpayers money and an example of blame culture running amok. The nanny state out of control. There are far more pressing social issues that the government continually fails to address.
The real problem is ignorant politicians and journalists like Hillary Clinton and Keith Vaz who don’t understand video games and who lash out in their ignorance. These self publicists do a lot more harm than good.
Why choose a populist TV celebrity psychologist for this report? Why not Jade Goody? Seriously, this is a political matter of state control over children. There are many far better qualified people who could have written it.
Why does the report not include books (which have no age rating), pop music, films, television, radio, videos etc? Different popular culture is treated differently in a wholly illogical manner. This ruins any vestige of credibility that the report may otherwise have had. Games have far milder content, in general, than the more established media.
Using the BBFC film censorship to prejudge every game is just plain stupid, as I explained in this article. This is going to be a major, completely unnecessary, burden on the games industry.
The report Grand Theft Childhood is about to be published which is based on vastly more research and which totally refutes the basis for the British government’s worries and therefore the Byron report. Every politician or journalist should read Grand Theft Childhood before commenting or voting on this subject.
Why don’t we just stick with the PEGI system, like the rest of Europe? This would give us trade harmony and not put us at the trading disadvantage that the Byron report would bring if implemented.
At the end of the day those kids who want to play Grand Theft Auto will. You cannot wrap children in cotton wool then lock them in a safe.
So there we have it. A sad day for politics and another sad day for the British gaming industry.
Why commission the report at all when there is no known problem that needs addressing? This is just another waste of taxpayers money and an example of blame culture running amok. The nanny state out of control. There are far more pressing social issues that the government continually fails to address.
The real problem is ignorant politicians and journalists like Hillary Clinton and Keith Vaz who don’t understand video games and who lash out in their ignorance. These self publicists do a lot more harm than good.
Why choose a populist TV celebrity psychologist for this report? Why not Jade Goody? Seriously, this is a political matter of state control over children. There are many far better qualified people who could have written it.
Why does the report not include books (which have no age rating), pop music, films, television, radio, videos etc? Different popular culture is treated differently in a wholly illogical manner. This ruins any vestige of credibility that the report may otherwise have had. Games have far milder content, in general, than the more established media.
Using the BBFC film censorship to prejudge every game is just plain stupid, as I explained in this article. This is going to be a major, completely unnecessary, burden on the games industry.
The report Grand Theft Childhood is about to be published which is based on vastly more research and which totally refutes the basis for the British government’s worries and therefore the Byron report. Every politician or journalist should read Grand Theft Childhood before commenting or voting on this subject.
Why don’t we just stick with the PEGI system, like the rest of Europe? This would give us trade harmony and not put us at the trading disadvantage that the Byron report would bring if implemented.
At the end of the day those kids who want to play Grand Theft Auto will. You cannot wrap children in cotton wool then lock them in a safe.
So there we have it. A sad day for politics and another sad day for the British gaming industry.
The PC is the top gaming platform part 1
Just recently Electronic Arts has announced that they are cutting back on their boxed PC releases, including Madden NFL ‘09. Some have interpreted this with doom and gloom as being a sign of the demise of the PC as a gaming platform. In fact nothing could be further from the truth, the Electronic Arts announcement is just symptomatic that people find that it is cheaper to steal boxed PC games using bit torrent instead of buying them. There is far more to gaming than boxed product and it is in these wider areas that the PC is king.
The PC is ubiquitous in a way that consoles can only dream of. They are in every office and most home in the west and many people use two or even three different PCs every day. Most of these PCs come with Microsoft Windows and that means they come with a bunch of games, including solitaire, probably the most played video game in the world. So many times in offices I have seen bored secretaries playing this. And so many times on aeroplanes I have seen bored executives get out their laptops, to play solitaire. Amazing for a game which was originally written as a mouse usage trainer.
Then there are the 200+ million people who play online casual games every month. Both downloadable and browser games. Services such as Pogo.com, Sandlot Games, Big Fish Games, Boonty, PlayFirst, Reflexive, RealArcade, and Trymedia Systems. These are growing at a huge rate and as Flash becomes more powerful, so casual games become more sophisticated.
MMOs have huge audiences. World of Warcraft has over 10 million subscribers. And there are a whole pile of games with millions of players: RuneScape (6 million), Habbo (86 million avatars created, 8 million monthly unique users), Maple Story (nearly 60 million), Dofus (4 million), Ragnarok Online (25 million), Guild Wars (3 million), Club Penguin (4 million) and Webkinz (over 3 million).
As gaming and social networking slowly converge we are seeing more games played more often on the big social networking sites. The 69 million users of Facebook have a wide range of games including the famous Scrabulous. This is a massive growth area of gaming and we have a lot of innovation to come.
I have written about Steam on here many times before. A digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications platform with 15 million accounts. This could very well become the replacement for boxed product when it comes to traditional PC game releases. Certainly there is no reason for every publisher not to put every PC title they publish onto this platform.
There is more, but just looking at the above you can see that consoles pale in comparison. The PC is truly the gaming king.
The PC is ubiquitous in a way that consoles can only dream of. They are in every office and most home in the west and many people use two or even three different PCs every day. Most of these PCs come with Microsoft Windows and that means they come with a bunch of games, including solitaire, probably the most played video game in the world. So many times in offices I have seen bored secretaries playing this. And so many times on aeroplanes I have seen bored executives get out their laptops, to play solitaire. Amazing for a game which was originally written as a mouse usage trainer.
Then there are the 200+ million people who play online casual games every month. Both downloadable and browser games. Services such as Pogo.com, Sandlot Games, Big Fish Games, Boonty, PlayFirst, Reflexive, RealArcade, and Trymedia Systems. These are growing at a huge rate and as Flash becomes more powerful, so casual games become more sophisticated.
MMOs have huge audiences. World of Warcraft has over 10 million subscribers. And there are a whole pile of games with millions of players: RuneScape (6 million), Habbo (86 million avatars created, 8 million monthly unique users), Maple Story (nearly 60 million), Dofus (4 million), Ragnarok Online (25 million), Guild Wars (3 million), Club Penguin (4 million) and Webkinz (over 3 million).
As gaming and social networking slowly converge we are seeing more games played more often on the big social networking sites. The 69 million users of Facebook have a wide range of games including the famous Scrabulous. This is a massive growth area of gaming and we have a lot of innovation to come.
I have written about Steam on here many times before. A digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications platform with 15 million accounts. This could very well become the replacement for boxed product when it comes to traditional PC game releases. Certainly there is no reason for every publisher not to put every PC title they publish onto this platform.
There is more, but just looking at the above you can see that consoles pale in comparison. The PC is truly the gaming king.
Some correct predictions
If I don’t blow my own trumpet nobody is going to blow it for me, so here are some of the articles on here that predicted real world events.
Everybody knows now that the iPod/iPhone is going to be a huge gaming success. Apple are putting massive resources into making it so and there are lots of developers working on bringing games to it. There were a couple of articles on here at the end of last summer that predicted this months before any announcements.
There has been a lot of publisher consolidation activity in recent months, this was predicted in advance. Also the role of the film industry in this was explained long before a whole raft of events.
The game industry is riddled with bad management and this article was timed to explain this well before the clean out of the board of directors at SCI/EIDOS.
Then in December, at the height of the Christmas rush there was this article explaining that Microsoft were going to reduce the price of the Xbox 360 and why they were going to do this.
And finally there were a couple of articles about the subsidies that game companies receive in Canada, how these were probably illegal under WTO rules and how the British government should do something about it. Which now, belatedly, they have.
So if you want to know what is going to happen in the game industry there is no need for expensive analysts when you can read the articles here for free!
Everybody knows now that the iPod/iPhone is going to be a huge gaming success. Apple are putting massive resources into making it so and there are lots of developers working on bringing games to it. There were a couple of articles on here at the end of last summer that predicted this months before any announcements.
There has been a lot of publisher consolidation activity in recent months, this was predicted in advance. Also the role of the film industry in this was explained long before a whole raft of events.
The game industry is riddled with bad management and this article was timed to explain this well before the clean out of the board of directors at SCI/EIDOS.
Then in December, at the height of the Christmas rush there was this article explaining that Microsoft were going to reduce the price of the Xbox 360 and why they were going to do this.
And finally there were a couple of articles about the subsidies that game companies receive in Canada, how these were probably illegal under WTO rules and how the British government should do something about it. Which now, belatedly, they have.
So if you want to know what is going to happen in the game industry there is no need for expensive analysts when you can read the articles here for free!
Friday 16 May 2008
Piracy, Imagine and the Megagames
Browsing the internet I came across this interview of me in Your Spectrum from June 1984. It brings up several issues that were very pertinent at the time and which still have resonance today. They have never adequately been explained with the benefit of hindsight so I thought that I would do that now because things were not as they seemed. As a director of Imagine I was involved in all the discussions and decision making that went on behind the scenes. This is the definitive story of what happened.
Imagine software was an amazing success. We doubled turnover pretty much every month until by December 1983 2003 it was a million pounds a month. A massive figure in those days. In January 1984 2004 sales collapsed and we were initially at a loss as to what had happened. We employed a lot of young people on the government Youth Opportunity Programme, which kept us in touch with our customer base. They pretty soon told us that nobody was buying games anymore. Tape to tape copying had been discovered and stealing games was a lot cheaper than buying them.
We reacted by sending a letter to all the magazines explaining the damage this would do to the industry. Some magazines published the letter in full and some took a stronger line in not carrying adverts related to piracy. But overall their reaction was pretty muted. Which is surprising really because they relied on advertising revenue from the game publishers for income. Game piracy ended up hitting them too with one magazine publisher, Newsfield in Ludlow, eventually going out of business.
Our next tactic was to reduce our prices. To become cheap enough that customers wouldn’t want to copy because they could have the real thing at a low price. This tactic would have worked and eventually did with budget software pretty much taking over the 8 bit cassette game market. However we were ahead of our time and the retailers and trade threw a complete and utter fit at our price reduction. Mostly they said they wouldn’t buy our games off us anymore at the lower pricepoint. We were forced to keep prices up.
Because the games were being professionally as well home copied we started printing our inlay cards using a metallic fifth colour. This made it much more difficult to reproduce counterfeit inlay cards.
So next we came up with the idea of a hardware add on or dongle to plug into the game computer without which the game would not run. Initially we looked at putting the Z80 maths co-processor in the dongle which would allow our programmers to write more powerful code. But in the end we settled for putting a ROM in which would allow us to write a much bigger game. Combined with several development breakthroughs we had made this would have allowed us to make some very special games. The megames, Psyclapse and Bandersnatch were born.
But is was not to be. Piracy knocked our income so badly that we could not afford to run the company. There was no money to pay the bills and we went out of business. All filmed by the BBC for their Commercial Breaks programme, which you can still see on YouTube.
You can find a full article on game piracy here.
Imagine software was an amazing success. We doubled turnover pretty much every month until by December 1983 2003 it was a million pounds a month. A massive figure in those days. In January 1984 2004 sales collapsed and we were initially at a loss as to what had happened. We employed a lot of young people on the government Youth Opportunity Programme, which kept us in touch with our customer base. They pretty soon told us that nobody was buying games anymore. Tape to tape copying had been discovered and stealing games was a lot cheaper than buying them.
We reacted by sending a letter to all the magazines explaining the damage this would do to the industry. Some magazines published the letter in full and some took a stronger line in not carrying adverts related to piracy. But overall their reaction was pretty muted. Which is surprising really because they relied on advertising revenue from the game publishers for income. Game piracy ended up hitting them too with one magazine publisher, Newsfield in Ludlow, eventually going out of business.
Our next tactic was to reduce our prices. To become cheap enough that customers wouldn’t want to copy because they could have the real thing at a low price. This tactic would have worked and eventually did with budget software pretty much taking over the 8 bit cassette game market. However we were ahead of our time and the retailers and trade threw a complete and utter fit at our price reduction. Mostly they said they wouldn’t buy our games off us anymore at the lower pricepoint. We were forced to keep prices up.
Because the games were being professionally as well home copied we started printing our inlay cards using a metallic fifth colour. This made it much more difficult to reproduce counterfeit inlay cards.
So next we came up with the idea of a hardware add on or dongle to plug into the game computer without which the game would not run. Initially we looked at putting the Z80 maths co-processor in the dongle which would allow our programmers to write more powerful code. But in the end we settled for putting a ROM in which would allow us to write a much bigger game. Combined with several development breakthroughs we had made this would have allowed us to make some very special games. The megames, Psyclapse and Bandersnatch were born.
But is was not to be. Piracy knocked our income so badly that we could not afford to run the company. There was no money to pay the bills and we went out of business. All filmed by the BBC for their Commercial Breaks programme, which you can still see on YouTube.
You can find a full article on game piracy here.
Popular Articles
It is a complete mystery to me how some articles have legs and are seen by tens of thousands of people whilst others, often more erudite (in my opinion!) and containing much more work and thought just disappear into oblivion. It is all down to aggregators like N4G and Reddit and also to which articles are picked up on by journalists elsewhere to comment on.
Obviously most articles get their most views when they are on the front page and I have no accurate measure of how this readership is split up. What is in this list is the article permalinks that have had the most views. So this is mainly people coming specifically to read that one article. Which is a pity as they mostly never get to see all the other wonderful stuff.
Fanboys is about that army of gamers whose enthusiasm for one brand goes too far. To the point of emotional attachment. The article is tongue in cheek but does contain some home truths.
Is Blu-ray a Microsoft victory? Very unexpected that this brief piece did so well. At a time when people were trumpeting Blu-ray as a Sony victory over Microsoft I thought that a bit of perspective was in order.
A big Microsoft mistake? From quite early in the life of this blog, this article looks at whether stopping production of the original Xbox so early was the best idea.
Piracy, Imagine Software and the Megagames. This was a sleeper for a month before it exploded on to the world’s radar screens. It is an anecdote of what actually happened at Imagine when I was on the board of directors. Schoolboy pirates from that time who never went near the company disagree with me.
The next console generation, #1 Home consoles. A bit of fun this, trying to second guess what the three big platform holders are going to do. And, perhaps more importantly, when.
Surfer Girl and Skater Boy. The game industry’s two most notorious rumour mongers. Sometimes they are right, sometimes they aren’t.
The Bible Vs video games. People complain about the sex and violence in video games. The bible is worse. And it doesn’t even have an age rating!
How big will Super Smash Bros. Brawl be? There was a lot of hysteria about this game so I wrote an article to put it into context.
PS3 is a waste of everyone’s time. Gabe Newell of Valve’s unique view on the current platform generation. It certainly is an attention getting headline.
Some great game development blogs. In a way I am very surprised that this is not more popular. These blogs are solid gold, their content gives an inside view of games that every enthusiast would surely rave over.
So, out of more than 250 articles, these have risen to the top in the popularity stakes. The challenge now is to write articles that become even more popular.
Obviously most articles get their most views when they are on the front page and I have no accurate measure of how this readership is split up. What is in this list is the article permalinks that have had the most views. So this is mainly people coming specifically to read that one article. Which is a pity as they mostly never get to see all the other wonderful stuff.
Fanboys is about that army of gamers whose enthusiasm for one brand goes too far. To the point of emotional attachment. The article is tongue in cheek but does contain some home truths.
Is Blu-ray a Microsoft victory? Very unexpected that this brief piece did so well. At a time when people were trumpeting Blu-ray as a Sony victory over Microsoft I thought that a bit of perspective was in order.
A big Microsoft mistake? From quite early in the life of this blog, this article looks at whether stopping production of the original Xbox so early was the best idea.
Piracy, Imagine Software and the Megagames. This was a sleeper for a month before it exploded on to the world’s radar screens. It is an anecdote of what actually happened at Imagine when I was on the board of directors. Schoolboy pirates from that time who never went near the company disagree with me.
The next console generation, #1 Home consoles. A bit of fun this, trying to second guess what the three big platform holders are going to do. And, perhaps more importantly, when.
Surfer Girl and Skater Boy. The game industry’s two most notorious rumour mongers. Sometimes they are right, sometimes they aren’t.
The Bible Vs video games. People complain about the sex and violence in video games. The bible is worse. And it doesn’t even have an age rating!
How big will Super Smash Bros. Brawl be? There was a lot of hysteria about this game so I wrote an article to put it into context.
PS3 is a waste of everyone’s time. Gabe Newell of Valve’s unique view on the current platform generation. It certainly is an attention getting headline.
Some great game development blogs. In a way I am very surprised that this is not more popular. These blogs are solid gold, their content gives an inside view of games that every enthusiast would surely rave over.
So, out of more than 250 articles, these have risen to the top in the popularity stakes. The challenge now is to write articles that become even more popular.
Popular Media U Turn
I don’t want this blog to become some sort of media watch, but we are at a very critical point in the development of the video gaming industry and it’s relationship with the press. We are in the middle of a transition of gaming from being a hardcore niche hobby to it being a mainstream activity enjoyed by most people. Eventually it will be bigger than film and TV combined. And the popular press are having problems getting a grip on this. Especially Fox News in America and the Daily Mail in the UK.
The issue here is ignorance of journalists and the problems are age and perception.
The age problem is that the senior people (with all the power) in the media are too old to understand. They went through their formative years before video gaming became popular. So they have no concept of the art form that gaming is or of it’s social resonance. They can understand the Beatles but GTA IV is beyond them.
The perception problem is that a lot of the media persist in the notion that gaming is a solitary activity for adolescent boys. Which is completely wrong. Gaming is most prevelant for people in their late 20s and early 30s. Unlike all previous popular entertainment media gaming is immensely social with multi player on a single platform or via online connection. It has bought about a quiet (and largely unreported) revolution in human relationships. And gaming is relatively non violent compared with films and books.
So we have a situation where a lot of media are at odds with many of their readers. The press are generating a plethora of anti gaming articles that bear no relationship whatsoever to reality. And most readers of these articles can see just how stupid they are. Which reflects very badly on the journalist writing them and on the media who publish them. Basically the Daily Mail, Fox News etc are just shooting themselves in the foot.
However some of their readers and viewers don’t understand gaming and so may believe these stupid articles. Which is leading to a polarisation. On the one hand there is now a majority who understand gaming and who are bemused by the ignorance of the media. And there is a minority who have taken the lies on board and who believe that gaming is some sort of great social evil. I have had discussions with some of these people and they have been totally brainwashed.
However there is a glimmer of hope. Earlier this year Janice Turner and Giles Whittell wrote articles for the Times that were litanies of ignorance and prejudice. They were text book examples of how badly wrong the media can be about gaming. Then the Times made a massive U turn in an article about GTA IV. The writer of the article was obviously not a gamer but at least the sentiment was headed in the right direction at last.
The Mail, though, is a different matter. They are the bastion of indignation and fear, displaying an unheathy obsession with immigration and house prices. And a long running war against video games. Recently two rent-an-article journalists have put substantial blots on their career records by writing very silly anti gaming articles in the Mail. Anne Diamond went first with a totally crass sensationalist piece about adult games having adult content. But this was bettered in the stupidity stakes by Rosie Millard writing an article that said more about her parenting skills and intellectual grasp than it did about gaming.
The Rosie Millard article was so bad that the Mail website did not receive one positive comment that they could publish. Instead it was inundated with negative comments that they refused to publish. Many people wrote letters to the editor. And there was a uniform negative response across the online media. I hope the fee that Rosie Millard received for this article was worth the massive damage to her reputation.
Which brings us to GTA IV. The Mail’s attitude was that it is ”a squalid game that steals young minds”. Which flies in the face of academic research such as the book Grand Theft Chidhood. In other words they were wrong, as usual. So it is amazing that they have now done a complete about turn. A 180 of enormous ramification for the popular reporting of gaming. If we can win the Mail over then we have a chance at defeating ignorant prejudice everywhere.
The volte-face comes in a TV &showbiz review of GTA IV by James O’Brien. He obviouly realises that this is one of the greatest games ever, but more than that it is a major global cultural event. At last the Mail reports gaming as it really is: “There’s no denying, however, that this latest version of the Grand Theft franchise is a phenomenal technological and creative achievement that is set to generate more money for its British designers than any Hollywood release in years.” and “The action is as epic as it is violent, with graphics and cinematic “motion capture” technology delivering a degree of verisimilitude so great that it frequently feels more like participating in a movie than playing a game. Stunts are better than ever, but the driving itself is a revelation.” and “Killing is occasionally optional, dialogue and cut scenes are devoted to Nikos’s inner turmoil and while criminality and violence are certainly glorified, its perpetrators are somehow not. Even Nikos has sufficient soul to see his employers for the scum they are.”
Intelligent and informed stuff. And almost unbelievable that it was in the Mail. Let’s hope they can maintain these new, high, journalistic standards. And not fall back to the ignorance and prejudice that was their former hallmark on the subject.
Game Piracy
Games are a form of intellectual property, like books and film, that, once they have been created, can be copied. Copying a game is a lot cheaper than buying it because the copier is making no contribution to the cost of making the game in the first place. But, obviously, if everybody copied there would be no revenue for games makers and there would be no games.
There are two main forms of game piracy. There is piracy by the individual game player, these days usually over the internet but in the past often by copying using physical media, this is what this article is about. And there is commercial counterfeiting where a professional criminal mass manufactures the game, which is a different matter.
The profile of pirating different platforms is always different because of the technology, the demographics of the users, the state of the market at a given time, relative costs and a number of other factors. What is for sure is that when piracy takes hold on a platform many hundreds of thousands (sometimes million) of copies of a game are made. The huge scale of this theft deprives the publisher of vast amounts of legitimate income and quite obviously harms the game development industry. To think otherwise is to be in self denial.
Of course it is very obvious that not every pirated game is a lost sale. This is because simple price elasticity of demand tells you that far more units will be consumed at a lower price than at a higher price. Yet apologists of piracy use this as an excuse for their behaviour. They try and make out that piracy is a victimless crime. But obviously they are wrong because potential sales are being lost. And the lesson of history is that when piracy on a given platform gets out of hand then it causes huge damage to the game market for that platform. This is common sense really.
The Old Days
The first mass market game machine in the UK was the Sinclair Spectrum. Software was loaded via a tape interface so games were sold on audio compact cassettes. These were very, very easy to copy from a technical point of view. Especially when dual cassette players proliferated and became cheaper. Schoolyard and club copying proliferated on a massive scale and badly hurt the game publishers. Look at a list of games and you can see the many publishers that went out of business or were forced into mergers. A whole range of technical anti piracy solutions were introduced including, for instance, Lenslok. The publishers would not have gone to the huge trouble of these technical solutions if copying had not been a great threat to their businesses. Another solution was budget games, initially at £1.99, then at £2.99, prices at which they were not worth copying. That these budget games proliferated and came to dominate the market is yet another measure of just how bad the piracy was.
I was a director of the game publisher Imagine software, which went bankrupt in 1984, largely because sales came to an abrupt halt when piracy took off. (Imagine had other problems that made it especially vulnerable to a large and sudden drop in revenue.) Another publisher that was badly affected was Ultimate Play The Game (which later morphed into Rare), one of the most highly regarded publishers of games for the 8 bit home computers. Their initial response to the huge rise in piracy and drop off in sales was to raise prices from £5.50 a game to £9.95. The idea being that if customers paid more for a game they would be less inclined to give away copies. However this didn’t work and they laboured on for just one more year after the demise of Imagine before switching their attention to the Nintendo Entertainment System, which did not suffer from piracy. Spectrum and other 8 bit computer owners lost out heavily as publishers put less and less resources into developing for their machine or quit entirely, as Ultimate did.
Then came the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. Once again copying was technically easy so it was rife. Once again it was up to the publishers to come up with technical solutions. So a technology war broke out between the software publishers and the pirates. Measures would include copying in random pieces of text from the manual. The led to a huge amount of photocopying by the pirates until the publishers started using photocopy proof manuals. Obviously all this piracy made revenue generation difficult so the game publishing industry did not blossom in the way we see now. In fact piracy has often been cited as part of the reason for the downfall of these machines.
Consoles Arrive
Then came the game consoles. From Sega and from Nintendo. They had their games held on chips inside cartridges so they were technically difficult and expensive to copy. So piracy didn’t happen anywhere near the massive extent that it had on the Spectrum, Amiga and ST. So the game industry blossomed into what we know today. This was the time when many of the great key franchises of our industry were established.
Cartridges were expensive to make so eventually the hardware manufacturers returned to recordable media. This way they could make vastly larger games with far lower production costs. The first to do this was the Sony Playstation (PSX, later PS1) in 1995 in Europe and America, which used a CD-ROM to load games. Sony had a whole pile of technical anti piracy measures which protected it from piracy for several years. However with the introduction of modchips and the development of PC CD-ROM burners that could burn data in the same modes that the PSX used it was game over. Chipping was nearly universal and game sales collapsed. Pirates were selling their copied games door to door in housing estates, at places of work, in car boot sales and anywhere else they could find a customer. This caused huge problems for game publishers. I was working at Codemasters at the time and we were forced to lay off about 60 people. This was terrible as there were no other industry jobs for them to go to, everyone was having the same trouble. The number of games published shrank dramatically. In 1999 there were 100, in 2000 there were 78 and in 2001 there were just 33. Yet the PSX remained in production till 2006, so software publishing for it collapsed just half way through it’s sales life.
The Dreamcast from Sega came out in 1998 and used a special unique disk format called GD-ROM. Once this was circumvented with things like the Utopia bootdisk it was game over. Piracy became rampant and the Dreamcast died after just a couple of years with over 10 million sold. This piracy is sometimes credited with not only seeing off the Dreamcast but also removing Sega from the console hardware market completely (as ever there were other factors that muddy the waters somewhat, what is for sure is that losing so much revenue did not help). It was a huge loss to the industry.
The PC
The IBM PC has been around since 1981 and was the first home machine to be connected to the internet in massive numbers. So it obviously has a long history of software piracy and has been at the forefront of anti piracy technology. Often this technology had nuisance value as it actually impeded the use of the computer. But the pirates did bring it upon themselves. At Codemasters we published an excellent PC game called Severance, Blade of Darkness which was well received with a Metacritic of 75 and a user score of 9.5. This game was popular, building an active community of mod makers. Yet Codemasters sold very few copies of the game, most people just downloaded it for free from the internet. So the developer, Rebel Act received very little royalties and went bust. Once again piracy damaging the industry.
Nowadays it is virtually impossible to viably publish boxed PC games, most appear on the internet as free bit torrents before they are even in the shops. In fact it is far quicker and easier to pirate a game than it is to buy it. So most publishers, even those with a decades long tradition in PC games, have given up. And the PC gamer suffers. One casual game publisher reported a piracy rate of 92%, which is probably typical. When they tightened up their protection it didn’t help much because people just moved on to some of the many other games that are available for free by bit torrent. Now Electronics arts have started releasing PC games for free, with their development cost supported by in game advertising and micro payments. But the real way to make PC games as a viable business is to make online games (MMOs), these are server based so impossible to pirate. One day virtually all games will be published in this way and piracy will be over.
Today’s Consoles
The PSP is a very popular mobile gaming machine and media player made by Sony. They have sold 33 million. Yet it is a graveyard for games publishers. It has been hacked since early in it’s life, it is simple to copy games onto and everything an owner can want is very easily available for free online. Here are some download figures for PSP games from just one torrent site:
God of War: Chains of Olympus - 94,154Patapon - 112,183Ratchet & Clank - Size Matters - 197,113Crush - 48,959LOCO ROCO - 163,904Wipeout Pulse - 116,965Castlevania X Chronicles - 102,354Metal Gear Solid - Portable Ops (Not Including Plus) - 231,054Burnout Dominator - 269,486
So most developers just don’t invest millions into AAA games for it, they would be wasting their money. This lack of quality games on the PSP (obviously along with some other factors) left the door open for the Nintendo DS to become a massive success with 70 million sold. But even this is being pirated now using flash memory cards in dummy cartridges. This will impact heavily on DS game sales and could lead to publishers becoming reluctant to develop for it, as they are with every heavily pirated platform.
The current generations of home consoles, the Microsoft Xbox 360, the Nintendo Wii and the Sony PS3, are all at that stage in the cycle where there is a phoney war. All three machines have good technical anti piracy. Nintendo went so far as to embed a secret second CPU (an ARM) in the graphics chip to run some of it’s system software (they lost $975 million to piracy in 2007). But all three have been cracked (not fully yet with the PS3), click their names for more details. Owners will be able to bypass the anti piracy and play free games. This hasn’t taken off yet but there are signs that it is just starting to. If previous generations of console are anything to go by then piracy on these three machines could soon snowball. And publishers will move their development resources away.
In the meantime Nintendo are making successive popular game releases that look to see if the machine has been modified before they will play. If it has the Wii becomes a “brick” for that game. Microsoft use Xbox Live to look for modified 360s and cancel the accounts of any that they find. And Sony have the advantage that Blu-ray media is expensive to buy and difficult to copy. All these are just current positions in an ongoing technology war. Very many people are putting so much time and effort into cracking these machines that, ultimately, they will find a way round everything and anything the manufacturers do.
Conclusions
There is one thing that beats pirates on any platform. This is when a game is so big that it becomes a mass culture popular event. The current launch of GTA IV is a prime example. Then a far higher percentage of people just have to have the real thing. A pirated copy just isn’t cool enough. And with these sorts of games there is a massive gift market. All this explains how the rare, exceptional title can still sell well on a heavily pirated platform.
There are the excuses that pirates make that games are too expensive (they are), but then Ferraris are too expensive and I don’t go round stealing them. Then there is the game quality argument, that there is a lot of dross around, which is very true, especially on the Wii. Once again we live in the age of the internet and it is very easy to very rapidly find out everything about every game. Metacritic and Game Rankings will quickly tell you most of what you need to know. Perhaps, as an industry, we ought to publicise these two sites more, just to remove that excuse.
And the game industry continues to grow and prosper, despite the piracy. This is because the proliferation of platforms allows publishers to more easily abandon platforms that are pirated to the point of being uneconomic. Instead they concentrate on platforms where there are windows of opportunity to run a viable business. Either because the anti piracy technology is on top or because there is a sufficient number of honest customers to get a return, even sometimes with a heavily pirated platform. Games with an online element can often be made very pirate proof which has been a major incentive for developers to go down this route.
So for 25 years or so game players have been stealing games in truly massive numbers with zero chance of being caught and punished for their crime. Very often far more copies of a game title have been pirated than have been bought. This self evidently causes harm to the games industry, ultimately leading to less money being invested in games for the pirated platform. So, the game player suffers for his theft by having less games and lower quality games. All pretty obvious to anyone but the pirates who make all sorts of feeble excuses to justify their stealing
There are two main forms of game piracy. There is piracy by the individual game player, these days usually over the internet but in the past often by copying using physical media, this is what this article is about. And there is commercial counterfeiting where a professional criminal mass manufactures the game, which is a different matter.
The profile of pirating different platforms is always different because of the technology, the demographics of the users, the state of the market at a given time, relative costs and a number of other factors. What is for sure is that when piracy takes hold on a platform many hundreds of thousands (sometimes million) of copies of a game are made. The huge scale of this theft deprives the publisher of vast amounts of legitimate income and quite obviously harms the game development industry. To think otherwise is to be in self denial.
Of course it is very obvious that not every pirated game is a lost sale. This is because simple price elasticity of demand tells you that far more units will be consumed at a lower price than at a higher price. Yet apologists of piracy use this as an excuse for their behaviour. They try and make out that piracy is a victimless crime. But obviously they are wrong because potential sales are being lost. And the lesson of history is that when piracy on a given platform gets out of hand then it causes huge damage to the game market for that platform. This is common sense really.
The Old Days
The first mass market game machine in the UK was the Sinclair Spectrum. Software was loaded via a tape interface so games were sold on audio compact cassettes. These were very, very easy to copy from a technical point of view. Especially when dual cassette players proliferated and became cheaper. Schoolyard and club copying proliferated on a massive scale and badly hurt the game publishers. Look at a list of games and you can see the many publishers that went out of business or were forced into mergers. A whole range of technical anti piracy solutions were introduced including, for instance, Lenslok. The publishers would not have gone to the huge trouble of these technical solutions if copying had not been a great threat to their businesses. Another solution was budget games, initially at £1.99, then at £2.99, prices at which they were not worth copying. That these budget games proliferated and came to dominate the market is yet another measure of just how bad the piracy was.
I was a director of the game publisher Imagine software, which went bankrupt in 1984, largely because sales came to an abrupt halt when piracy took off. (Imagine had other problems that made it especially vulnerable to a large and sudden drop in revenue.) Another publisher that was badly affected was Ultimate Play The Game (which later morphed into Rare), one of the most highly regarded publishers of games for the 8 bit home computers. Their initial response to the huge rise in piracy and drop off in sales was to raise prices from £5.50 a game to £9.95. The idea being that if customers paid more for a game they would be less inclined to give away copies. However this didn’t work and they laboured on for just one more year after the demise of Imagine before switching their attention to the Nintendo Entertainment System, which did not suffer from piracy. Spectrum and other 8 bit computer owners lost out heavily as publishers put less and less resources into developing for their machine or quit entirely, as Ultimate did.
Then came the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. Once again copying was technically easy so it was rife. Once again it was up to the publishers to come up with technical solutions. So a technology war broke out between the software publishers and the pirates. Measures would include copying in random pieces of text from the manual. The led to a huge amount of photocopying by the pirates until the publishers started using photocopy proof manuals. Obviously all this piracy made revenue generation difficult so the game publishing industry did not blossom in the way we see now. In fact piracy has often been cited as part of the reason for the downfall of these machines.
Consoles Arrive
Then came the game consoles. From Sega and from Nintendo. They had their games held on chips inside cartridges so they were technically difficult and expensive to copy. So piracy didn’t happen anywhere near the massive extent that it had on the Spectrum, Amiga and ST. So the game industry blossomed into what we know today. This was the time when many of the great key franchises of our industry were established.
Cartridges were expensive to make so eventually the hardware manufacturers returned to recordable media. This way they could make vastly larger games with far lower production costs. The first to do this was the Sony Playstation (PSX, later PS1) in 1995 in Europe and America, which used a CD-ROM to load games. Sony had a whole pile of technical anti piracy measures which protected it from piracy for several years. However with the introduction of modchips and the development of PC CD-ROM burners that could burn data in the same modes that the PSX used it was game over. Chipping was nearly universal and game sales collapsed. Pirates were selling their copied games door to door in housing estates, at places of work, in car boot sales and anywhere else they could find a customer. This caused huge problems for game publishers. I was working at Codemasters at the time and we were forced to lay off about 60 people. This was terrible as there were no other industry jobs for them to go to, everyone was having the same trouble. The number of games published shrank dramatically. In 1999 there were 100, in 2000 there were 78 and in 2001 there were just 33. Yet the PSX remained in production till 2006, so software publishing for it collapsed just half way through it’s sales life.
The Dreamcast from Sega came out in 1998 and used a special unique disk format called GD-ROM. Once this was circumvented with things like the Utopia bootdisk it was game over. Piracy became rampant and the Dreamcast died after just a couple of years with over 10 million sold. This piracy is sometimes credited with not only seeing off the Dreamcast but also removing Sega from the console hardware market completely (as ever there were other factors that muddy the waters somewhat, what is for sure is that losing so much revenue did not help). It was a huge loss to the industry.
The PC
The IBM PC has been around since 1981 and was the first home machine to be connected to the internet in massive numbers. So it obviously has a long history of software piracy and has been at the forefront of anti piracy technology. Often this technology had nuisance value as it actually impeded the use of the computer. But the pirates did bring it upon themselves. At Codemasters we published an excellent PC game called Severance, Blade of Darkness which was well received with a Metacritic of 75 and a user score of 9.5. This game was popular, building an active community of mod makers. Yet Codemasters sold very few copies of the game, most people just downloaded it for free from the internet. So the developer, Rebel Act received very little royalties and went bust. Once again piracy damaging the industry.
Nowadays it is virtually impossible to viably publish boxed PC games, most appear on the internet as free bit torrents before they are even in the shops. In fact it is far quicker and easier to pirate a game than it is to buy it. So most publishers, even those with a decades long tradition in PC games, have given up. And the PC gamer suffers. One casual game publisher reported a piracy rate of 92%, which is probably typical. When they tightened up their protection it didn’t help much because people just moved on to some of the many other games that are available for free by bit torrent. Now Electronics arts have started releasing PC games for free, with their development cost supported by in game advertising and micro payments. But the real way to make PC games as a viable business is to make online games (MMOs), these are server based so impossible to pirate. One day virtually all games will be published in this way and piracy will be over.
Today’s Consoles
The PSP is a very popular mobile gaming machine and media player made by Sony. They have sold 33 million. Yet it is a graveyard for games publishers. It has been hacked since early in it’s life, it is simple to copy games onto and everything an owner can want is very easily available for free online. Here are some download figures for PSP games from just one torrent site:
God of War: Chains of Olympus - 94,154Patapon - 112,183Ratchet & Clank - Size Matters - 197,113Crush - 48,959LOCO ROCO - 163,904Wipeout Pulse - 116,965Castlevania X Chronicles - 102,354Metal Gear Solid - Portable Ops (Not Including Plus) - 231,054Burnout Dominator - 269,486
So most developers just don’t invest millions into AAA games for it, they would be wasting their money. This lack of quality games on the PSP (obviously along with some other factors) left the door open for the Nintendo DS to become a massive success with 70 million sold. But even this is being pirated now using flash memory cards in dummy cartridges. This will impact heavily on DS game sales and could lead to publishers becoming reluctant to develop for it, as they are with every heavily pirated platform.
The current generations of home consoles, the Microsoft Xbox 360, the Nintendo Wii and the Sony PS3, are all at that stage in the cycle where there is a phoney war. All three machines have good technical anti piracy. Nintendo went so far as to embed a secret second CPU (an ARM) in the graphics chip to run some of it’s system software (they lost $975 million to piracy in 2007). But all three have been cracked (not fully yet with the PS3), click their names for more details. Owners will be able to bypass the anti piracy and play free games. This hasn’t taken off yet but there are signs that it is just starting to. If previous generations of console are anything to go by then piracy on these three machines could soon snowball. And publishers will move their development resources away.
In the meantime Nintendo are making successive popular game releases that look to see if the machine has been modified before they will play. If it has the Wii becomes a “brick” for that game. Microsoft use Xbox Live to look for modified 360s and cancel the accounts of any that they find. And Sony have the advantage that Blu-ray media is expensive to buy and difficult to copy. All these are just current positions in an ongoing technology war. Very many people are putting so much time and effort into cracking these machines that, ultimately, they will find a way round everything and anything the manufacturers do.
Conclusions
There is one thing that beats pirates on any platform. This is when a game is so big that it becomes a mass culture popular event. The current launch of GTA IV is a prime example. Then a far higher percentage of people just have to have the real thing. A pirated copy just isn’t cool enough. And with these sorts of games there is a massive gift market. All this explains how the rare, exceptional title can still sell well on a heavily pirated platform.
There are the excuses that pirates make that games are too expensive (they are), but then Ferraris are too expensive and I don’t go round stealing them. Then there is the game quality argument, that there is a lot of dross around, which is very true, especially on the Wii. Once again we live in the age of the internet and it is very easy to very rapidly find out everything about every game. Metacritic and Game Rankings will quickly tell you most of what you need to know. Perhaps, as an industry, we ought to publicise these two sites more, just to remove that excuse.
And the game industry continues to grow and prosper, despite the piracy. This is because the proliferation of platforms allows publishers to more easily abandon platforms that are pirated to the point of being uneconomic. Instead they concentrate on platforms where there are windows of opportunity to run a viable business. Either because the anti piracy technology is on top or because there is a sufficient number of honest customers to get a return, even sometimes with a heavily pirated platform. Games with an online element can often be made very pirate proof which has been a major incentive for developers to go down this route.
So for 25 years or so game players have been stealing games in truly massive numbers with zero chance of being caught and punished for their crime. Very often far more copies of a game title have been pirated than have been bought. This self evidently causes harm to the games industry, ultimately leading to less money being invested in games for the pirated platform. So, the game player suffers for his theft by having less games and lower quality games. All pretty obvious to anyone but the pirates who make all sorts of feeble excuses to justify their stealing
Investing in games
Investing in games
May 13th, 2008 Opinion
The video game industry must be one of the most attractive areas to invest in right now. The business is booming, growing far faster than anyone predicted, as it makes the transition to being popular entertainment for the masses. And the industry is still at it’s very beginning, it will grow to be bigger than movies and TV combined as it leverages it’s key advantages of interactivity, connectivity and non linearity.
In recent years the industry has fragmented into many genres on many platforms, this trend will continue for some time. Also technology has changed the marketing, sales and distribution model, significantly reducing the entry cost into many areas of game publishing. And there is the constant spectre of piracy, with over half the video games in the world being stolen it is important to invest in areas where at least a majority of customers actually pay for playing the game.
The king of the market, the gold standard, is the subscription MMO. When these work they become massive cash cows generating tens of millions in monthly revenue. But they cost many tens of millions to make, need constant ongoing investment and have a very high probability of failure. The current leader is World of Warcraft which took the market over from Ultima Online and Everquest. One day it’s position will be challenged but it doesn’t look like happening any day soon.
Next comes the free to play MMO, often aimed at younger players. These are even bigger in player numbers than the subscription MMOs and seem to be less risky as businesses. Revenue comes from advertising, premium membership levels and micro payments for in game items. Some of the big players are RuneScape (6 million),Habbo (86 million avatars created, 8 million monthly unique users), Maple Story (nearly 60 million), Dofus (4 million), Ragnarok Online (25 million), Guild Wars (3 million), Club Penguin (4 million) and Webkinz (over 3 million).
Console gaming is easier to understand. Hit driven boxed retail products just like music CDs and film DVDs. The main opportunities are with the Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Sony Playstation PS3 which are both a fair way from peaking in their product cycles. Product quality has now become immensely critical as knowledge travels instantly via the internet. To Metacritic below 8 is increasingly uncommercial, which is a good thing for everyone. Get it right and you too can gross half a billion dollars in one week as GTA IV just has. The total cost of developing and globally marketing a cross platform AAA game can now be in the tens of millions of dollars area. You need big resources so your hits can finance your inevitable misses, one reason the industry is consolidating into a small number of big players.
The console acts as an anti piracy dongle and is the main reason for the success of these platforms. The downside is that the platform holders take a fee out of every game published. These two factors together mean that console games are ridiculously expensive. Something that could eventually come to damage the business model.
The Nintendo Wii is not worth developing for. It is nearer the end of it’s life cycle than the other two consoles and it is mainly first party games published by Nintendo themselves that sell. Third party titles from other publishers are mainly low quality shovelware that have now frightened the consumer off.
The two handheld consoles, the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP are also not worth developing for despite the immense numbers of these that have been sold. Quite simply piracy has ripped the market up. Vastly more people will steal your game than will pay for it.
Casual gaming is huge and probably growing faster than any other area of gaming. The ability to just drop in and spend a little time having fun then log out and get on with the rest of your life is very convenient. Far more appealing to many people than the commitment needed by hardcore games. There are 200+ million people who play online casual games every month. Both downloadable and browser games. Services such as Pogo.com, Sandlot Games, Big Fish Games, Boonty, PlayFirst, Reflexive, RealArcade, and Trymedia Systems. Games are cheap to develop using Flash but the average quality is still very low, something that will change as the market matures. Revenue can come from advertising, premier membership and micropayments.
Traditional boxed PC retail games that have been with us for decades are just about dead, with most publishers giving up, killed by rampant piracy. Instead there is a new breed of PC game centring on online play and sometimes episodic content. With unique user keys and services like Steam these can be made largely pirate proof. The PC game reinvented.
Mobile phone gaming has been declining in popularity. Largely because the market is doubly fragmented. Too many different platforms and too many different air time providers make it almost impossible as a business model. All this is changing immensely rapidly with gaming on the Apple iPhone and the reinvention of Nokia nGage as a software based gaming platform. These two will certainly overtake casual gaming to become the fastest growing sector of the business and have the potential to grow to become one of the major forms of gaming. This is the most exciting place to be just now.
There are still more valid business areas in gaming. All three platform holders now sell games online. These are smaller and so easier to make then their full price boxed equivalent and the revenue stream is steady over a long period rather than spectacular over a short life. This business can only grow and grow and is well worth investing in, just make sure that you put marketing effort behind your games on these services, you can’t expect good sales otherwise.
Finally there is gaming on the social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. This is still small but has massive potential and we have seen the first cult hit with Scrabulous.
So there you have a quick sketch plan of the market. It is a dynamic and exciting place and you can be sure that it won’t be the same twelve months from now.
May 13th, 2008 Opinion
The video game industry must be one of the most attractive areas to invest in right now. The business is booming, growing far faster than anyone predicted, as it makes the transition to being popular entertainment for the masses. And the industry is still at it’s very beginning, it will grow to be bigger than movies and TV combined as it leverages it’s key advantages of interactivity, connectivity and non linearity.
In recent years the industry has fragmented into many genres on many platforms, this trend will continue for some time. Also technology has changed the marketing, sales and distribution model, significantly reducing the entry cost into many areas of game publishing. And there is the constant spectre of piracy, with over half the video games in the world being stolen it is important to invest in areas where at least a majority of customers actually pay for playing the game.
The king of the market, the gold standard, is the subscription MMO. When these work they become massive cash cows generating tens of millions in monthly revenue. But they cost many tens of millions to make, need constant ongoing investment and have a very high probability of failure. The current leader is World of Warcraft which took the market over from Ultima Online and Everquest. One day it’s position will be challenged but it doesn’t look like happening any day soon.
Next comes the free to play MMO, often aimed at younger players. These are even bigger in player numbers than the subscription MMOs and seem to be less risky as businesses. Revenue comes from advertising, premium membership levels and micro payments for in game items. Some of the big players are RuneScape (6 million),Habbo (86 million avatars created, 8 million monthly unique users), Maple Story (nearly 60 million), Dofus (4 million), Ragnarok Online (25 million), Guild Wars (3 million), Club Penguin (4 million) and Webkinz (over 3 million).
Console gaming is easier to understand. Hit driven boxed retail products just like music CDs and film DVDs. The main opportunities are with the Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Sony Playstation PS3 which are both a fair way from peaking in their product cycles. Product quality has now become immensely critical as knowledge travels instantly via the internet. To Metacritic below 8 is increasingly uncommercial, which is a good thing for everyone. Get it right and you too can gross half a billion dollars in one week as GTA IV just has. The total cost of developing and globally marketing a cross platform AAA game can now be in the tens of millions of dollars area. You need big resources so your hits can finance your inevitable misses, one reason the industry is consolidating into a small number of big players.
The console acts as an anti piracy dongle and is the main reason for the success of these platforms. The downside is that the platform holders take a fee out of every game published. These two factors together mean that console games are ridiculously expensive. Something that could eventually come to damage the business model.
The Nintendo Wii is not worth developing for. It is nearer the end of it’s life cycle than the other two consoles and it is mainly first party games published by Nintendo themselves that sell. Third party titles from other publishers are mainly low quality shovelware that have now frightened the consumer off.
The two handheld consoles, the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP are also not worth developing for despite the immense numbers of these that have been sold. Quite simply piracy has ripped the market up. Vastly more people will steal your game than will pay for it.
Casual gaming is huge and probably growing faster than any other area of gaming. The ability to just drop in and spend a little time having fun then log out and get on with the rest of your life is very convenient. Far more appealing to many people than the commitment needed by hardcore games. There are 200+ million people who play online casual games every month. Both downloadable and browser games. Services such as Pogo.com, Sandlot Games, Big Fish Games, Boonty, PlayFirst, Reflexive, RealArcade, and Trymedia Systems. Games are cheap to develop using Flash but the average quality is still very low, something that will change as the market matures. Revenue can come from advertising, premier membership and micropayments.
Traditional boxed PC retail games that have been with us for decades are just about dead, with most publishers giving up, killed by rampant piracy. Instead there is a new breed of PC game centring on online play and sometimes episodic content. With unique user keys and services like Steam these can be made largely pirate proof. The PC game reinvented.
Mobile phone gaming has been declining in popularity. Largely because the market is doubly fragmented. Too many different platforms and too many different air time providers make it almost impossible as a business model. All this is changing immensely rapidly with gaming on the Apple iPhone and the reinvention of Nokia nGage as a software based gaming platform. These two will certainly overtake casual gaming to become the fastest growing sector of the business and have the potential to grow to become one of the major forms of gaming. This is the most exciting place to be just now.
There are still more valid business areas in gaming. All three platform holders now sell games online. These are smaller and so easier to make then their full price boxed equivalent and the revenue stream is steady over a long period rather than spectacular over a short life. This business can only grow and grow and is well worth investing in, just make sure that you put marketing effort behind your games on these services, you can’t expect good sales otherwise.
Finally there is gaming on the social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. This is still small but has massive potential and we have seen the first cult hit with Scrabulous.
So there you have a quick sketch plan of the market. It is a dynamic and exciting place and you can be sure that it won’t be the same twelve months from now.
Monday 12 May 2008
New Website
There is a new community forum for the area around where Codemasters is.
http://harbury.villagebuzz.co.uk/
http://harbury.villagebuzz.co.uk/
Wednesday 19 March 2008
Some great game industry links
March 12th, 2008 Practical information
Here I will list a whole pile of websites that are useful to the game industry professional. Some I have mentioned before, but putting them all in one place is pretty convenient. This is information overload.
N4G is a game news aggregator. The stories can be submitted by anyone but are vetted for relevance, commented on and scored for popularity. This gives an excellent news snapshot with the added advantage of measuring the level of public interest.
MCV is the website of the British video game trade newspaper. Lots of information relevant to everyone in the trade. They will send you a daily digest.
Gameindustry.biz is the online only competitor to MCV. They will send you a daily newsletter.
Gamasutra is the American game industry website.
Gamerankings, like the title says, is an amazing compendium of game information centred around their reviews. An essential tool.
Metacritic is a more sophisticated game ranking with the individual scores weighted according to their credibility.
VG Chartz, lots of useful guestimated facts and figures. The site is dragged down by a puerile fanboy forum.
Some great development blogs. Find out what the people who actually make the games have to say. This is the gold standard for informed industry comment.
ELSPA is the main UK trade industry organisation. Their main concern is political lobbying which is why the UK government is so good towards the game industry.
How to get lots of money given to you for moving your video game business to Quebec. This site is much visited by European companies!!
Popurls is a metasite of metasites so gives you a breathtaking overview of the internet on one page. So informative that it is addictive.
Geekipedia is Wired magazines’ brilliant guide to our technology age. Essential education for many.
Develop, the online site for the game development community magazine.
Improving Game Marketing: The Game Purchase Process From A Consumer’s Point Of View. An interesting paper.
Fascinating article on game marketing and the press.
Some incredibly incisive commentary on game marketing and game quality.
David Perry’s game industry map gives a geographical perspective to the whole industry.
MMOGCHART is the standard industry reference for what is happening in the MMO world.
The Chaos Engine, the private forum for game industry development professionals. Absolutely essential reading if you want to know what is going on.
Videogame journos network. Does exactly what the name says.
SoftPressRelease.com. Blast your press release out to the waiting press at low cost.
Games Press, the resource for games journalists.
A good list of game developers and publishers with links to their websites and product lists.
Bruceongames. The game industry blog from a marketing and publishing perspective.
There is enough information there for even the keenest budding game industry professional. Please add any great industry sites you may know using comments. Bloggers and journalists feel free to copy this anywhere you want.
March 12th, 2008 Practical information
Here I will list a whole pile of websites that are useful to the game industry professional. Some I have mentioned before, but putting them all in one place is pretty convenient. This is information overload.
N4G is a game news aggregator. The stories can be submitted by anyone but are vetted for relevance, commented on and scored for popularity. This gives an excellent news snapshot with the added advantage of measuring the level of public interest.
MCV is the website of the British video game trade newspaper. Lots of information relevant to everyone in the trade. They will send you a daily digest.
Gameindustry.biz is the online only competitor to MCV. They will send you a daily newsletter.
Gamasutra is the American game industry website.
Gamerankings, like the title says, is an amazing compendium of game information centred around their reviews. An essential tool.
Metacritic is a more sophisticated game ranking with the individual scores weighted according to their credibility.
VG Chartz, lots of useful guestimated facts and figures. The site is dragged down by a puerile fanboy forum.
Some great development blogs. Find out what the people who actually make the games have to say. This is the gold standard for informed industry comment.
ELSPA is the main UK trade industry organisation. Their main concern is political lobbying which is why the UK government is so good towards the game industry.
How to get lots of money given to you for moving your video game business to Quebec. This site is much visited by European companies!!
Popurls is a metasite of metasites so gives you a breathtaking overview of the internet on one page. So informative that it is addictive.
Geekipedia is Wired magazines’ brilliant guide to our technology age. Essential education for many.
Develop, the online site for the game development community magazine.
Improving Game Marketing: The Game Purchase Process From A Consumer’s Point Of View. An interesting paper.
Fascinating article on game marketing and the press.
Some incredibly incisive commentary on game marketing and game quality.
David Perry’s game industry map gives a geographical perspective to the whole industry.
MMOGCHART is the standard industry reference for what is happening in the MMO world.
The Chaos Engine, the private forum for game industry development professionals. Absolutely essential reading if you want to know what is going on.
Videogame journos network. Does exactly what the name says.
SoftPressRelease.com. Blast your press release out to the waiting press at low cost.
Games Press, the resource for games journalists.
A good list of game developers and publishers with links to their websites and product lists.
Bruceongames. The game industry blog from a marketing and publishing perspective.
There is enough information there for even the keenest budding game industry professional. Please add any great industry sites you may know using comments. Bloggers and journalists feel free to copy this anywhere you want.
Some great game development blogs
February 27th, 2008 Practical information
Most of the knowledge available to keen gamers about the gaming industry can be of a pretty low quality. This is because that knowledge is third or fourth hand. As a very minimum it has been “spun” by a marketing department (I have done loads of this) and then “interpreted” by a journalist. But there is a way round this, keen enthusiasts can get their knowledge directly from the horses mouth, if they read the right blogs.
Whilst there aren’t many blogs from the publishing side of the video game industry there a quite a few from the development side. And they are excellent. These are the guys who actually make the games that everyone plays, so they know what they are talking about. And when they analyse a game they do so with an authority no magazine could match. These guys are the complete opposite of the fanboy, they are intelligent, informed and incisive. There are quite a few in my blogroll but here are a random selection:
Mainly About Games. Informative and well written it has a nice personal feel to it.
Dopass.com. Short entries not just about gaming. Funny at times.
A path through possibility. Irregular updating but well worth a read for some incisive commentary.
Japanmanship. An incredibly good read of a Western developer’s life in Japan.
Magical Wasteland. Refreshingly irreverant.
Survival Horror. Does what it says on the tin.
Gamedev.net. A big and serious site with a lot of good content.
Seven Degrees of Freedom. Very nice diary style blog.
Random Encounters in Imaginary Realms. Just cherry picks the good stuff.
Cheeky. Sparse and interesting development diary.
Peter Mackay’s projects and development diary. Quake on Gamecube.
Life In The Rain. Often long interesting personal articles.
T=Machine. Wide ranging blog with much that is happening at the sharp end online.
Black Company Studios. Semi diary semi event driven articles. Nice.
.mischief.mayhem.soap. A serious game developer’s blog.
JakeWorld Blog. The life of a game developer.
Gamefeil. Games, comics, diary.
Scientific Ninja. Technical stuff here.
Devbump. Aggregation of gaming articles.
Nimblebit. Game development diary. Lots of technical stuff.
It’s Bezness time. Bedroom developer diary.
I love it, I feel like Sisyphus. On start-ups, game development and programming.
Bruceongames. Game industry from the publishing perspective.
For anyone with any interest in games the above blogs are just pure gold. Japanmanship, for instance is written by a game developer who works for a Japenese games company, lives in Japan and speaks Japanese. If you want to understand the game industry in Japan there is no finer source of knowledge. It amazes me when fanboys with a millionth of his knowledge and experience argue with him on forums.
Note to bloggers, journalists etc, feel free to copy and paste the above list or even the whole article to anywhere you want.
February 27th, 2008 Practical information
Most of the knowledge available to keen gamers about the gaming industry can be of a pretty low quality. This is because that knowledge is third or fourth hand. As a very minimum it has been “spun” by a marketing department (I have done loads of this) and then “interpreted” by a journalist. But there is a way round this, keen enthusiasts can get their knowledge directly from the horses mouth, if they read the right blogs.
Whilst there aren’t many blogs from the publishing side of the video game industry there a quite a few from the development side. And they are excellent. These are the guys who actually make the games that everyone plays, so they know what they are talking about. And when they analyse a game they do so with an authority no magazine could match. These guys are the complete opposite of the fanboy, they are intelligent, informed and incisive. There are quite a few in my blogroll but here are a random selection:
Mainly About Games. Informative and well written it has a nice personal feel to it.
Dopass.com. Short entries not just about gaming. Funny at times.
A path through possibility. Irregular updating but well worth a read for some incisive commentary.
Japanmanship. An incredibly good read of a Western developer’s life in Japan.
Magical Wasteland. Refreshingly irreverant.
Survival Horror. Does what it says on the tin.
Gamedev.net. A big and serious site with a lot of good content.
Seven Degrees of Freedom. Very nice diary style blog.
Random Encounters in Imaginary Realms. Just cherry picks the good stuff.
Cheeky. Sparse and interesting development diary.
Peter Mackay’s projects and development diary. Quake on Gamecube.
Life In The Rain. Often long interesting personal articles.
T=Machine. Wide ranging blog with much that is happening at the sharp end online.
Black Company Studios. Semi diary semi event driven articles. Nice.
.mischief.mayhem.soap. A serious game developer’s blog.
JakeWorld Blog. The life of a game developer.
Gamefeil. Games, comics, diary.
Scientific Ninja. Technical stuff here.
Devbump. Aggregation of gaming articles.
Nimblebit. Game development diary. Lots of technical stuff.
It’s Bezness time. Bedroom developer diary.
I love it, I feel like Sisyphus. On start-ups, game development and programming.
Bruceongames. Game industry from the publishing perspective.
For anyone with any interest in games the above blogs are just pure gold. Japanmanship, for instance is written by a game developer who works for a Japenese games company, lives in Japan and speaks Japanese. If you want to understand the game industry in Japan there is no finer source of knowledge. It amazes me when fanboys with a millionth of his knowledge and experience argue with him on forums.
Note to bloggers, journalists etc, feel free to copy and paste the above list or even the whole article to anywhere you want.
Monday 21 January 2008
The HD tipping point
From: http://www.bruceongames.com/
This has to be the biggest event in this generation of consoles. The point when 130 million (150 million if you include Wii) owners of old generation consoles decide to walk into a shop and buy an HD console. A Microsoft Xbox 360 or a Sony PS3. There seem to be three factors that, coming together, will decide when this event happens.
The first is the gaming. There are still far more AAA titles on the old consoles than there is on the new, HD platforms. Microsoft have released a lot of AAA games for the 360 but it has not been enough to tip the balance. Sony are way behind and there is still no compelling reason to buy a PS3 for the games. All that changes in 2008 with a whole raft of Sony AAA system seller releases. A lot of commentators think that GTA IV will tip the whole market on it’s own. That the power of this franchise is so great as to make the HD consoles become compelling purchases overnight. Maybe they are right, but Halo 3 didn’t have this power for the 360.
The second factor is public awareness of what HD is. Currently most people seem to be buying HD LCD and plasma televisions for their bigger size and slim form factor. Not for the HD capabilities. This is largely down to the scarcity of broadcast and recorded HD content. The format war between HD-DVD and BluRay is only confusing matters. As more and more HD content becomes available people will gradually switch over to it. Then they will no longer be prepared to watch non HD content. It will be just like the transition from black and white television to colour television. And if they only watch HD broadcast and recorded content then they will only be happy with HD game content. Watching four times as many pixels on screen makes a big difference in a game.
The third factor is price, as it has been for every previous generation of console. The early adopters are willing to pay a premium for the kudos of their position. But the real meat of a console’s sales curve only comes with radical price reductions. Both of the HD consoles are still too expensive to have reached the mass consumer, casual purchase price point. But they will get there and they may well get there this year. Both Sony and Microsoft have been working furiously hard behind the scenes to reduce the manufacturing costs of their consoles. When you are making tens of millions of something every fraction of a penny counts. They have been girding their loins for a price war and a price war is what we are going to get.
So as you can see these three factors will inevitably come together to create a massive demand for the HD consoles. But how sudden will it be, will 150 million people walk into the stores on the same day? Probably not, but it will be one event, probably a price drop, that is the trigger. So there will be an overnight surge in demand. The manufacturers can control this by rolling the price cut out, country by country, over a few months. But it will still be pretty spectacular.
Then we have to ask if the tipping point will come at the same moment for both manufacturers. Possibly if it comes at a certain point in the calendar, like say Christmas. But possibly not if Microsoft take advantage of their lower manufacturing costs and early adopter benefits. If they brought out a $199 Halo 3 bundle for the 360 in the same week that GTA IV is released it would be the biggest sales week in the whole history of gaming.
So when will it happen? Probably this year. Definitely by the end of next year. And how big will it be? When the market tips each HD console will start outselling the Wii by a significant margin. And over lifetime they will possibly each go on to sell a multiple of what the Wii sells. The 360 and PS3 will go on to become the biggest selling consoles ever, until the next generation. And who will win? Microsoft if they capitalise on their early adopter and low manufacturing advantages, the exclusive content for GTA IV is a marketing masterstroke that could win the generation for them. Sony if they can rediscover their core strengths and bring them to the marketplace.
This has to be the biggest event in this generation of consoles. The point when 130 million (150 million if you include Wii) owners of old generation consoles decide to walk into a shop and buy an HD console. A Microsoft Xbox 360 or a Sony PS3. There seem to be three factors that, coming together, will decide when this event happens.
The first is the gaming. There are still far more AAA titles on the old consoles than there is on the new, HD platforms. Microsoft have released a lot of AAA games for the 360 but it has not been enough to tip the balance. Sony are way behind and there is still no compelling reason to buy a PS3 for the games. All that changes in 2008 with a whole raft of Sony AAA system seller releases. A lot of commentators think that GTA IV will tip the whole market on it’s own. That the power of this franchise is so great as to make the HD consoles become compelling purchases overnight. Maybe they are right, but Halo 3 didn’t have this power for the 360.
The second factor is public awareness of what HD is. Currently most people seem to be buying HD LCD and plasma televisions for their bigger size and slim form factor. Not for the HD capabilities. This is largely down to the scarcity of broadcast and recorded HD content. The format war between HD-DVD and BluRay is only confusing matters. As more and more HD content becomes available people will gradually switch over to it. Then they will no longer be prepared to watch non HD content. It will be just like the transition from black and white television to colour television. And if they only watch HD broadcast and recorded content then they will only be happy with HD game content. Watching four times as many pixels on screen makes a big difference in a game.
The third factor is price, as it has been for every previous generation of console. The early adopters are willing to pay a premium for the kudos of their position. But the real meat of a console’s sales curve only comes with radical price reductions. Both of the HD consoles are still too expensive to have reached the mass consumer, casual purchase price point. But they will get there and they may well get there this year. Both Sony and Microsoft have been working furiously hard behind the scenes to reduce the manufacturing costs of their consoles. When you are making tens of millions of something every fraction of a penny counts. They have been girding their loins for a price war and a price war is what we are going to get.
So as you can see these three factors will inevitably come together to create a massive demand for the HD consoles. But how sudden will it be, will 150 million people walk into the stores on the same day? Probably not, but it will be one event, probably a price drop, that is the trigger. So there will be an overnight surge in demand. The manufacturers can control this by rolling the price cut out, country by country, over a few months. But it will still be pretty spectacular.
Then we have to ask if the tipping point will come at the same moment for both manufacturers. Possibly if it comes at a certain point in the calendar, like say Christmas. But possibly not if Microsoft take advantage of their lower manufacturing costs and early adopter benefits. If they brought out a $199 Halo 3 bundle for the 360 in the same week that GTA IV is released it would be the biggest sales week in the whole history of gaming.
So when will it happen? Probably this year. Definitely by the end of next year. And how big will it be? When the market tips each HD console will start outselling the Wii by a significant margin. And over lifetime they will possibly each go on to sell a multiple of what the Wii sells. The 360 and PS3 will go on to become the biggest selling consoles ever, until the next generation. And who will win? Microsoft if they capitalise on their early adopter and low manufacturing advantages, the exclusive content for GTA IV is a marketing masterstroke that could win the generation for them. Sony if they can rediscover their core strengths and bring them to the marketplace.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
