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.
Friday, 1 August 2008
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.
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