Is this the big News Corporation gaming move?

When I first started this blog Rupert Murdoch, via his mouthpieces like Fox News and The Times newspaper, was anti gaming. Some of the stories they came up with were ridiculous. You can understand why he was doing this, gaming represented a threat to most of what he owns. Movies, TV channels, newspapers, magazines etc. There is a lot of old media in his portfolio at News Corporation.

Then his media did a quick 180 on gaming and started taking a sensible stance. At around the same time Rupert dipped his toe in the gaming market with a casual gaming portal. I’m not saying that the two events were connected.

Now he appears to be making a big move. MySpace was a Murdoch purchase in 2005, for $580 million. Since which it has gone steadily downhill compared with Facebook and the new upstart, Twitter. You wonder why he bought MySpace in the first place, social networking sites are not exactly cash cows. Now it looks like he has come up with a plan that will get him a massive presence in gaming and a return on his investment in MySpace.

On this blog I have constantly written about the convergence of gaming and social networking. They are headed towards being the same thing. Which is obviously something Rupert also believes in because he is turning MySpace into a gaming platform. A clever move if he pulls it off.

MySpace is still massive, 125 million unique users a month is substantial. If he can capture this audience for gaming we will have something a lot bigger than Xbox Live or Steam or anything else in gaming for that matter. We will have a half billion dollar gaming monster.

Of course Rupert was forced into this. Old media is dying at some speed world wide whilst gaming is growing rapidly. Gaming has the three technology advantages of interactivity, connectivity and non linearity. Old media stands no chance against this. And gaming isn’t just for recreation. Already it has massive uses in education, business and the military. These will grow to be many times bigger than the recreational uses.

Stupid German politicians feel public wrath

I have written on here many times about how stupidly repressive and anti gaming German politicians are. It is as if they are all Keith Vaz! They blame all the troubles of the world on video games, especially when there is any violence in the news. Even though they have no evidence to base their suppositions on.

In fact they are exactly 180 degrees wrong. The playing of violent video games and real violence in society are inversely proportional. This is proven, with real evidence. The games act as a catharsis to get the aggression out of people’s systems. So the German politicians are taking the opposite action necessary to solve their problems. They need to read Grand Theft Childhood.

Thus far you have heard before. Now here is a lovely twist. In Germany if a petition gets more than 50,000 signatures the government is forced into a review. The government there is trying to ban violent video games. And now they are facing a petition with 68,000 signatures against this ban. Nice one.

If you like petitions here is my Stop Shark Slaughter petition with over 2,000 signatures.

Thanks to the Guardian for the original story.

Are home game consoles in danger?

I remember back in the late 1990s at Codemasters when as a publisher we had just two platforms we could develop for. The PC and the Playstation. By then Sega and Nintendo had both pretty much screwed up.

Then Microsoft arrived with the Xbox, which added 50% to our available platforms. Then Nintendo got their act together with the DS and Wii and Sony gave us the PSP. And then the smartphones arrived, firstly Apple with iPhone and the App Store business model, now followed by Android and a small gaggle of other standards.

So now we have platform proliferation. Which means that the public can vote with their feet by deciding which platform to play on. And game developers have to choose where to direct their efforts. Initially the public were choosing between the Wii, the PS3 and the Xbox 360 and fanboyism became rife. But now people are making far wider choices.

At the same time the PC came back to ascendancy as a gaming platform but with completely different kinds of games. In the late 90s the PC market was mainly boxed, retail, plastic and cardboard. These are all but gone now, wiped out by piracy. Instead the PC has emerged as a platform for online casual games and for MMOs. These have proliferated so that there are now hundreds of MMOs running, many with “free” business models. And they are being played by many tens of millions of people.

Meanwhile the mobile gaming and App Store model has come from nowhere and in a year has made the iPhone the most successful new gaming platform in history.

So any fool can see what is happening here. People are playing PC online and smartphone games in preference to console games. The PS3 and the Xbox 360 are probably selling at about half the rate that they should be at this stage in the cycle. The Wii has reached the inevitable point where its sales have collapsed and by not bringing the price down sooner Nintendo have lost impetus. Just at the same time that DS game sales have fallen off a cliff.

The 12 year old Runescape player I mentioned the other day, for £3.50 subscription is currently getting 200 hours play a month. When you compare this with a cardboard and plastic console game at say £40 there is just no competition. These console titles have become too expensive to make and too expensive to buy. The same applies with mobile gaming where 99c App Store games are competing against £25 DS games.

And there are more big threats on the horizon with Rupert Murdoch converting MySpace into a gaming portal.

So you can see what is going to happen here. The home console platform holders, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, have a business model that is rapidly becoming obsolete. They are being completely outflanked. So they have no option but to change their business model to match. They have to go to server based games and also to the App Store business model. If they don’t their customers will leave them in ever bigger numbers.

Of course if I know this then the platform holders know it too, so it is not a matter of if they do it, it is a matter of when. And they are already making small moves in the right direction, Free Realms coming to the PS3 and full games being sold for download on Xbox Live, for instance. Another thing is very much for sure, high street game retailing is now going to die off far faster than anyone was expecting.