More than 25 years ago a new sort of electronic device appeared on the scene: The home computer. And the demographic that owned these was the adolescent and immediately post-adolescent male.

So when the games industry started it made games that would appeal to this demographic. Fighting, driving and flying, sports. Now it’s 25 years later and the industry is still, largely, making the same things. It has never grown up.

But there is worse to come.

At the beginning of the industry we created our own intellectual property. It was gaming, pure and simple. But then some people decided to piggyback IP from other industries, books and films, in order to get instant brand recognition.

The problem with this is that you are not building your own brands, so you own nothing.

Not only that, you are copying from inferior media so stunting the possibilities in what you make. This has been a disaster for computer gaming. Short term profit instead of building a great industry.

It is so bad that to many people computer games now just look like a bit of merchandising frippery for the main event, which is the book or film. Doing a Harry Potter or a James Bond game harms the whole games industry.

Then the platform holders haven’t helped. They have done a huge amount to build this industry but now they are doing even more to harm it and hold it back. The problem is publisher approval. This censorship is worse than book burning, really. By deciding what they will allow on their platforms they are holding back creativity at every level.

I remember when one platform holder announced that they would allow no more 2D games! The stupidity of this sort of pronouncement knows no bounds and I am very surprised that it is legal. Surely the competition authorities are there to jump on this sort of abuse?

What we need is for platform holder approval to be only about technical standards, and for publishers to be able to release anything they want. The national censorship authorities in each country can decide what can and cannot be sold. This is what works for books and what works for films.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. Nintendo has always been a champion of doing it properly. It has created fantastic IP like Mario and Zelda and gone on to manage these properties with skill over many years so as to maximise profit.

Nintendo doesn’t hang on the coat-tails of technically inferior media like books and film; instead it makes the most of the technology and makes great entertainment without being restrained by genre.

In general Nintendo pitched at being family-friendly and thus suitable for younger audiences. But now it has created what may well be the most significant computer game ever: Brain Age.

The fact is that if you had taken this for approval to one of the other platform holders they would probably have turned it down! Yet it is a global mega best-seller.

Brain Age proves that you can do more with computer gaming. More in terms of escaping from adolescent themes. More in terms of escaping from film and book licenses. More in proving that there are undiscovered genres out there. And more in attracting a far wider demographic to our industry.

We should have been doing this years ago and were only held back by our lack of vision and our short-termism.

So Brain Age has made the whole of the rest of the games industry green with envy. It was obviously not expensive to develop and it has made absolute mountains of money. So now everyone should realise that sticking to their narrow genres is bad business.

Obviously the ‘me too’ brigade will do their own bigger, better take on Brain Age. But they are missing the point and they are missing the opportunity. The lesson of Brain Age is that anything will work when done well and taking advantage of the capabilities of the platform. You couldn’t do Brain Age even one hundredth as well with a book or a film.

Brain Age has at last forced the industry to sit up, to take notice, and to look at what is really possible.

So do you think that there is now light at the end of the tunnel, that the game industry can at last realise its potential? Just add you thoughts by clicking the comments link below…

Towards the end of the original Playstation cycle we at Codemasters released what we knew to be a hit game and so we were not unduly surprised when it went to number one in the week of release.

This is what we expected at Codemasters in those days.

However, come week two it had dropped right down the chart. So to rescue the situation they (notice, not ‘we’ — I was not in favour) spent a big lot of money on a TV campaign (they already had the advert prepared).

The next week the game dropped completely out of the chart.

The problem wasn’t awareness, which the TV campaign was supposed to fix. The problem was piracy and the higher profile a game attained the more it was pirated, hence the unstoppable descent down the charts, and hence the complete waste of a lot of money. Maybe the TV advertising actually reduced sales by making the game more of a target for pirates!

I have always hated TV advertising, and especially for computer games. The main problem is that you don’t get what you pay for because the viewers don’t watch the adverts.

These days you can record the programmes with the adverts deleted, but in the past people have always gone to the loo, made a cup of coffee or changed the baby’s nappy in the commercial break. Just look at what you do yourself.

Then there is the targeting; work out the people who are possibly going to make a buying decision then look at the people you are paying to reach. Yes, it is woefully inefficient because you are mostly paying to reach people who are of no use to you.

So combine the people doing other things during the advert with the awful targeting and you can see that you really are just tearing up high denomination notes.

Now in America things are different. The big buyers traditionally base their day one orders on how big the TV spend is, so the publishers are forced to spend big on TV to get sell in.

When they come to the UK they just follow the same recipe and it doesn’t matter that they are wasting money because they are just following orders.

The only thing that TV is (possibly) any good for is mass consumer brands where the products are all the same and brand is the only differentiator &mdash detergent and cola, for instance.

Now radio is a different matter.

It runs constantly in the background whilst you are doing other tasks, so listeners don’t change their behaviour when the adverts come on, so when you advertise you reach the number of people you are paying for.

Also radio has a far higher number of channels offering different things and with demographics that change during the 24 hours, so you can buy a pretty good audience for your game advert.

And best of all, radio advertising is cheap. Obviously you need to do a lot of buying work to get a good national campaign, but it is worth it.

I have always thought that a three day campaign of 20-second adverts is the way to go. On the Thursday you do the “launching tomorrow” advert, on Friday the “today we release” and on Saturday you do “in the shops this weekend”. Sorted.

So now all you buyers and sellers of TV advertising can tell me how wrong I am: that is what the comments function is for!

This is such a powerful tool. Some organisations have the company tour formalised to a fine art whilst some don’t bother at all.

At Codemasters I started doing these myself. Gradually I polished them, with anecdotes and content built in, so that each was achieving a number of objectives: Giving an idea about the heritage and ethos of the company, the quality of the staff, the scale and complexity of work going into a game, our key brands, the future of the company and so on.

Basically the tour became an opportunity for a grade-A brainwashing without the victim realising! Having been on many company tours myself, mainly in Scottish distilleries, I had a good understanding of how powerful they can be.

Once I had it just how I wanted it I brought my staff along to observe, eventually letting them take over the reins. Then I opened it up as a service which we offered to other departments.

We did a lot of these tours. The obvious tourists were journalists, because it gave them an overview before they saw what they had specifically visted for. The tour alone got us many pages of coverage in game magazines from all over the world, which was fantastic coverage to get.

We also showed round local politicians, city people, suppliers, customers, developers and anyone else the company had a relationship with.

So do you give company tours? Have you worked out your objectives and how to achieve them during the tour? Are senior people involved in ensuring the quality of the tour? Have your say by making a comment.

Julian Eggebrecht, president of Factor 5, has really laid into censorship and the ESRB in his keynote speech at GCDC . And of course he is right. Games are far more highly censored than books and films and a lot of people don’t see them as an artform. We have already covered some of this on here with Games are art  and Fu**ing censorship .

But really this is a self inflicted wound by the industry. And these days wounded especially by the limitations imposed by the platform holders. So much of what we produce is just one dimensional “me too” shelf fodder. So, as a favour to the industry, here is a (partial) list of human emotions. For starters please put more of them into your games:

• ANGER
• ANXIETY
• APATHY
• AWE
• BOREDOM
• COMPASSION
• CONFUSION
• CONTEMPT
• DISGUST
• ELATION
• EMBARRASSMENT 
• EMPATHY
• ENVY
• EXCITEMENT
• FEAR
• GRATITUDE
• GREED
• GRIEVING
• JEALOUSLY
• JOY
• GRANDIOSITY
• GUILT
• HOMESICKNESS
• HOPE
• HUBRIS
• INDIGNATION
• INTEREST
• LONELINESS
• LUST
• LOVE — romantic, family love (familial) puppy, patriotic, etc.
• NARCISSISM
• PLEASURE
• PRIDE 
• PLAYFULNESS
• PREDATORINESS
• REMORSE
• REVENGE
• SCHADENFREUDE (German word for feeling pleasure in someone’s misfortune) 
• SHAME 
• SUPRISE
• SYMPATHY

So what do you think of the grown up emotional content of games? Am I expecting too much or is the industry just showing it’s immaturity? Feel free to comment.

So Denis Dyack of Silicon Knights thinks that a unified standard for gaming consoles could be with us for the next generation. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=27858 Then a game will play on any manfacturer’s console. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, but also Dell, Samsung, Philips and so on. Just like a CD player.

He makes some good points. Getting rid of first party approval is the biggest and best of these, it would lead to a flowering of diversity in IP. He also says the platforms would be cheaper because of competition between manufacturers. And for game developers life would be so much easier with just one platform standard to service.

However there are a few hurdles that this model must overcome. Firstly the established platform holder technique of subsidising hardware sales with the vast profit from (overpriced) software would have to go. They would have to make all their profit on the hardware and I can’t see that working unless the consoles are at least doubled in price. Also I cannot see the existing platform holders putting their heads on the block with competition from every third world electronics factory.

But most of all it is missing what the platform holders are trying to achieve. Microsoft are trying to create a near monopoly in the home for their Xbox live platform What is Microsoft? and Sony use their consoles as Trojan horses for new, proprietory, media standards What is Sony? , so neither of these are likely to want to play. Microsoft have tried licensing a common standard in the past with MSX and got their fingers burnt. They have also seen what happened when Apple tried to license out their Mac standard.

A further disadvantage with a unified standard is that it would stunt development and hold the industry back. Currently the competition brings us new, bleeding edge platforms every few years that drive the market forward. With a unified standard there would be no impetus to move the technology on, even when it is looking decidedly geriatric. This is exactly what had happened with the audio CD.

So maybe this is just a pipe dream of an ideal world. Just like communism would work if it weren’t for the reality of human nature, so a unified platform won’t work because of the realities of technology and of the marketplace. What do you think?

Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens are famous authors of novels in the English language. But they have more than that in common because all three wrote episodically for periodicals such as newspapers and magazines. They created a fantastic “buzz” with this. These episodes would then, later, be put together in one volume to make the novel. There is nothing to stop us doing something similar with games.

Having been involved with episodic content I can tell you that it is brilliant for marketing. You get several bites of the cherry, there is a high level of anticipation and interest in the community and with journalists for each episode. This extends the life of the game in everybody’s conciousness keeping it selling for much longer. Then when all the episodes are completed you can release a special gold edition containing every episode. You end up making more money.

But there are advantages other than marketing. You can release the game much earlier, before it is completed, or even when most of the content hasn’t been written. For instance you could introduce an F1 game at the beginning of the season with just the first circuit on it. Then as each of the other 20ish races comes up on the calendar you can release the appropriate circuit. So at launch you only need to have completed a twentieth of the circuits. A great advantage of this approach is that the game is in smaller chunks making it easier to sell and distribute online, cutting out the cost and bother of all that plastic and carboard. Even nicer is that you can use it as an anti piracy tool. You can make each download so it only works with a genuine, paid for game. More than that you can bury additional anti piracy into each episode. We did this with Operation Flashpoint and experienced a sales spike after each new episode was released as people with conterfeit copies were forced to go out and buy the legitimate product. We are talking about many tens of thousands of extra sales gained this way.

Best of all is the involvement of the community. They can vote for what they want to see in future content, you can send them perfectly valid newsletters with the latest news and there will be a high level of input on the game forum. And of course episodic content dovetails nicely with user generated content which I have already written about here: Web 2.0 and the games industry ostriches

Of course the ultimate is when you have a valid, working email address for every, serial numbered, copy of the game. Then you have enormous community power and enormous marketing power. You also have zero piracy. Customers will download free content promised as part of the game. But you can also come up with extra, paid for, content which will sell like crazy with no marketing costs. This is a powerful position to be in and after a few games you will have massive email lists running to millions of gamers worldwide that you can market directly to at the press of a button.

So have you tried episodic content, or would you like to give it a try? Maybe you think it is over rated and not worth all the work. Whatever you think, stick your comments below. Other, diverse, views really enrich the quality of these articles.

With these tips I am not setting out a marketing course. Just little tips I have learned over the years that work. Some of these tips a lot of you will already know but they may still worth posting for those that don’t.

So the first tip is very simple. Always embed at least one url in your press release, complete with the http:// bit so that it is a clickable link. You can put the url of the microsite for the product in the press release in the body text and the main site in the boilerplate which gives you two links. With creativity you can get even more in.

Now for an anecdote. At Codemasters, quite a few years ago, we wanted the website to become a central marketing plank. The problem is that we had zero marketing budget for the website itself. We followed a policy of issuing 2 press releases a week and we embedded urls in every one of those press releases which were released simultaneously, globally, in the local language. The website grew in popularity till it became one of the busiest gaming websites in Europe. Obviously we then did good things with the content to make people come back, but that is a different story.

The mechanism is very simple. A properly organised global press release goes out to many thousands of journalists, blog writers, fansites etc. Now the paid, full time, professional journalists will use the press release as the basis of a story (if you are lucky) but the vast majority will just copy and paste it, complete with your urls. When they do this on the web you then get nice live links to your site. As the web is a voracious consumer of content your release will be copied and published in places you never dreamed of, always with your urls.

You can see where this is going. If one press release can generate many thousands of links to your website then a consistent press release strategy will very quickly create millions of links. It is inevitable that a good percentage of these links will be clicked and, voila, you have a very busy website. Then Google and the other search engines send their bots out and see this huge number of links and you shoot up the search engine ratings. Then you start getting lots of organic traffic. All for zero budget.

So it won’t suprise you that I embedded the urls for this site in the press release announcing it. As I did this myself, at home, it didn’t have massive distribution. And it was only a little story. But I still got the links. Not as many as an established company would get, but enough to bring this site a bit of traffic.

Now please don’t let these tips become a one way process! Use the comment link below to add your knowledge and experience.