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.
Friday, 26 September 2008
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.
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