Entries from August 2007 ↓

Social networking is a massive and amazing phenomenon of our times. The statistics are staggering with about 100 major services. Friendster has 47 million members, hi5 has 50 million, MySpace a massive 192 million and even the upmarket Facebook has 34 million. And for business folks there is Linkedin. I was told about this at the beginning of this year (a lifetime ago in the social networking world) by a new media consultant friend and so eventually joined. Since then it has pretty much doubled in size, currently to over 13 million members.

For business networking it is like a golfclub, multiplied by several thousand. You can put your CV up on your profile, or not, it is up to you (I have). You very quickly build a series of links to people you know, people they know (2nd degree) and people they know (3rd degree). You can then use these links to find jobs, people and business opportunities. You can use the search tools to re connect with former business associates and schoolmates which is very useful. Most of the members are senior executives, MBA graduates etc as per the intentions of the site. But the games industry seems to have hijacked it and everybody has joined, from QA to CEO. Just type your company into the People search and you will be suprised who is in.

Linkedin members seem to either be very conservative and gradually build a group of people they know well or they are totally promiscuous and just link like crazy on the basis of that is what it is there for. Some say that it is Pokemon for grownups. Being a contrarian I went for a mixed approach. I could have ticked the box of every Codemasters person current or past, but didn’t. On the other hand I did connect to some super linkers to get the maximum connections. So my current statistics are 1st degree 204, 2nd degree over quarter of a million and third degree over 4 million. So I am connected to about a third of everyone on Linkedin, you can find my page here and if you want to link to me please do.

Some people are amazingly promiscuous, Ron Bates has over 34,000 first degree links!! So if you link to him it gives you a massive network in one go. A list of the most promiscuous can be found here and just linking to a few will quickly get you past 3 million total links. However after that you get diminishing returns as they are all circle linked to each other. There is a feature you can use when you become a paid up member of Linkedin called OpenLink Network which allows for a much higher level of promiscuity. People who are in this will link to anyone and usually have their email address in their profile (I have) so you can link to them as an “other” . Once you have this you can use the people search intelligently to find and link to people you don’t know. Tick the OpenLink only box in the search, ask for the results to be in number of connections order and put Computer Games as the industry. This will give you a list of the most promiscuous linkers in our industry. Link to a few of these and a few other similar searches and you will very quickly be linked to pretty much the whole industry!! Obviously if you are linked to me you can link to the OpenLink members on my list without having to become a paid up member!

 Something like this is very useful for the recruiters but the way it is structured keeps them pretty much out of your hair and, lets face it, if they are any good at their job they already have your phone number!

So if you have any views on Linked in why not share them by replying here?

Let’s start with an executive (ie simplified) summary for those at the back who haven’t kept up. Web 1.0 ended in the dotcom bust because it was difficult to monetise all those big ideas. After a while a new web appeared driven by new applications that embraced user content and monetised in new ways such as Google AdSense. These applications include wikis, the biggest of which is Wikipedia, which now has over 7 million entries, social networking such as Facebook and Linkedin which are about to replace porn as the biggest application on the internet, the many hundreds of thousands of forums (quick plug for artforums ) where anything and everything is discussed, picture and video libraries such as Youtube and also the blogsphere as exemplified by this article. These applications interact and overlap seamlessly. You will find Youtube videos in blogs and forums on social networking sites. This is a veritable online and social revolution.

So how has gaming reacted to and incorporated the huge impetus of Web 2.0 into it’s products? Well, by and large it hasn’t. This is the fault of the platform holders and their business model of shipping plastic and carboard around the world as one release follows another.

Now I will tell you a story which, putting modesty to one side, involves myself. A few years ago, before this Web 2.0 stuff, Codemasters had a new military action PC game called Operation Flashpoint, also at that time we had very little money to market it. So we concentrated on pr and online, especially nurturing the community. We couldn’t afford much in the way of advertising. Anyway our efforts and an excellent product got us to number one in every country with a chart, including America, Codemasters’ only American number 1 in over 20 years. As part of the close community involvement with the game we released tools that allowed users to make their own missions. And many did. Some of these were terrible and some were as good as the published game. We also gave the tools to our QA department who created a mission that we sold as a download. This mission must be one of the most profitable pieces of games software ever, minimal development costs and no marketing and distribution costs. It sold well and brought in a nice pile of money. Overall our community involvement with this game meant that it sold a lot more units over a longer life.

So what could you do with Web 2.0 today? Starting a year before release you would need a community officer, or even team, dedicated to the game. With the development team they would run a blog and a forum with monthly newsletters to an opt in database. A webcam in the development studio is a nice touch that the team can have fun with. Competitions would see game merchandise shipped to winners and the most vociferous fanboys can be invited to come and meet the development team and have a curry and beers with them. Youtube would see a string of viral and teaser videos. After shipping the game you would release development tools as a (paid for?) download and set up social networking to make it easier for customers to form development teams and generate content. You can use the community to beta test and vote on the results so you only make the best available for distribution. You can even monetise the whole process. Paying a team £10K for a mod and then charging £5 for a download of it is good business. All this may seem like a lot of work, but it is incredibly cost effective marketing and will prolong the life of the game in the market as well as selling more on day one. There is much more that can be done in the same vein, this is just a quick brain dump.

Now I am not saying that Web 2.0 methods and practices are never used in the games industry today, just that we are lagging a long, long way behind and that most of that is down to the platform holders and their outdated business models.

So is this a load of rubbish or do you detect a germ of truth? Post your thoughts as this is an interesting topic to debate.

So EA now owns 25% of Ubisoft. This purchase really should come as no shock and I am suprised there isn’t more of it yet. There soon will be. The simple fact is that there are far too many games publishers in the world and they have no option but to consolidate. And the reason for this is simple economics.

As a game becomes more expensive to make you need to sell more in order to break even. So you need to have marketing and distribution in every country possible. To keep this global machine going you need a steady stream of games that sell well. The publisher with the best distribution generates more money and so can spend more making their games. They can buy the best licenses and employ the best talent. Anyone without total global sales and marketing gets left behind because they are not generating enough money to make the best games. We are seeing this now.

So harsh economic reality is that there will only be a very small number of publishers and they will be global. This is exactly what has happened in the film and music industries. If you want to sign Robbie Williams for an album or make the next Harry Potter film then it is going to cost you a lot of money. You can only compete against others wanting to do the same thing if you have as much or more money than them. Global sales and marketing reach is essential. Each of these industries now has less than a handful of mainstream players.

So how many mainstream publishers can the games industry support in the world? Well looking at other industries I would guess three or four. So that is a massive amount of consolidation to come. And my guess is that they will all be American, the Europeans just do not have their act together. If you think three or four is bad look at the civil aircraft market. These things are so expensive to develop that the global market has distilled down to just two manufacturers. One in Europe and one in America.

So if you are a publisher what do you do? Well basically you need to see if you are able to buy other companies, sell yourself to a competitor or amalgamate. EA, big though they are, are still buying. The reason being that it would only take a couple of amalgamations for them to be number two. And they don’t want that, so they are just trying to stay one jump ahead.

Of course computer games are complicated because all three platform holders are also publishers. Because they each only publish on their own platforms, combined they are the equivalent of one big global publisher. This will reduce the rest of the available market in the world to just two or three independent publishers. This is getting worse by the paragraph! The only escape for a publisher is to become a niche player. This happens in film, in music, in books and even in aircraft making. By avoiding competition in the mainstream markets you can carve out a position were you can compete and make money. This is already happening in games.

One final consideration is that in the age of the internet it should be possible to do your sales and marketing online so you don’t need the global infrastructure and anyone can publish. This is starting to happen in the music industry. The problem with games is that the business model of the platform holders precludes it. They can (currently) only run their business if they ship lots of plastic and carboard round the world. So there is no easy escape from the inevitable.

So am I wrong again or is this a useful insight? If you have any thought put them down for others to see. This is important stuff that will reshape the industry.

This is something that is either taken for granted as in “Microsoft are bringing out the 720 we will put our games on it” or treated from a fanboy perspective “Microsoft suck”. There is not a great deal of strategic thought about whether what they do is good or bad for the development of the industry overall or where they are taking us.

So who are these people? Well there are the 3 entrenched console manufacturers who once built the industry but now often harm it. I will deal with them individually in later articles because they are very different from each other. To a degree that many people don’t understand. They are coming from completely different places with completely different corporate mindsets which makes them behave in completely different ways. Once this is taken on board it is a lot easier to understand and predict them.

Then there is the “open” platform of the PC which constantly evolves and has been with us forever. This is where we see the most innovation, much of which then trickles over into consoles. We don’t see as much innovation as we could and should however, because most publishers work with a console mindset. They develop mainly for the consoles and convert to PC as an afterthought. However, the lack of a platform holder is a very good thing indeed. The PC has been written off as a gaming platform many times by many pundits, yet they are always wrong and they always will be. This is because the PC has the flexibility to boldly go where consoles aren’t allowed. Often this leads to blind alleys, but sometimes it takes the industry as a whole into new places. With Web 2 the PC has massive advantages, some of which are being realised.

Nokia is often forgotten as a gaming platform. Mainly because they screwed up what should have been the most popular gaming platform of all, nGage. I went and visited them in Helsinki before the n Gage was announced and was fascinated by their ambition and very dubious about their execution of it. They made the platform too cheaply and the games too expensively. For the platform they just took odd parts that were already lying around, mainly from their series 60 range of phones. Then they made some fundemental hardware mistakes, no shoulder buttons, a horrendous screen aspect ratio and you had to take the thing apart to change games. They sent me a pre production prototype and it is just as awful now as it was then. A big pity because a gaming phone has the great advantages that you always have it on you and it is connected. It would be brilliant if Nokia could get round to digging themselves out of their hole, but on past form don’t hold your breath.

Then there is Apple. The video iPod looks like a gaming machine, it has the componentry to be a gaming machine. And yet Apple cannot be bothered with all that money they would make from putting games on it. So far. Within 6 months we have version 6 coming out. It is inevitable that sooner or later they will start to milk the gaming potential. This is actually bigger than you may think because virtually every iPod is connected regularly to a PC. This gives the potential of hybrid games, played partially on the PC when at home and partially on the iPod when on the move. Which brings us to the iPhone. Already the functionally stunted version 1 looks more like a gaming machine than the nGage. But I don’t see where Apple are going. Surely after a few more generations the iPod and iPhone will converge into one device? Many of the components are the same and people don’t want to carry too many toys.

So this is just an introduction really to the forthcoming pieces about the 3 console platform holders. You can still reply and let everyone know what you think. Completely disagree with me if you like, I don’t mind.

Someone I have never heard of before, Roger Ebert, has been making a big splash saying that games are not art. In my opinion he is wrong. What is or isn’t art is an oft discussed subject, especially amongst artists, here is a typical discussion . 

Nowadays a game production will involve many artists, who often have an art life outside of games. I was at Imagine when we first borrowed an artist from an advertising agency to get the clouds right in the Spectrum game, Zoom. But the use of artists in making something does not necessarily mean that what they produce is art.

My take, fwiw, is that anything is art if it’s creator (as per Marcel Duchamp) says it is. So if I float a shaving cream island across my bathroom sink and say that it is art then it is art. Another take is to say that art is anything that can engender an emotional response. By this measure games are definitely art. More so than some other media because of their interactive nature.

I am sure that when the moving picure industry started it was not considered to be art, just entertainment for the masses. Now it is universally regarded and referred to as art. The big change is just one of maturity. Exactly the same has happened with television. And exactly the same will happen with games.

One of the things that really annoys me is that the BBC (and many other media) report about computer games under the heading of technology. Yet go to their arts section and you have cinema and television. This is just so illogical, why are games judged by the medium and television by the content?

So, as ever, what do you think? Are games art? Is the BBC right? Discuss!

Computer gaming is, obviously, the most recent of the popular entertainment media. It is also the least understood by non users. Unfortunately it is these non users who run the world and it is they who have made computer gaming so restricted and controlled, far more than the older media are. They see our industry from a Daily Mail/Fox News perspective and do so much harm with their consequent ignorance.

Gaming is over censored, this leads to bland genres and content and holds the industry back. Meanwhile books can and do contain absolutely anything. Even the holiday blockbusters you buy at the airport are far, far naughtier than any mainstream console game. The cinema and television also allow just about anything and support a multi billion porn industry, whilst in games a nipple is too much, even in an 18+ game. It is truly pathetic, the customers who buy these games and provide us all with a living are largely grown ups, why can’t they be treated as such?

Now we have the Rockstar/Manhunt appeal. I don’t understand what this is about. There are a huge number of books and films that are far, far worse. In fact many horrendously violent films are highly acclaimed. This game is also only available to adults. Yet the state and the ignorant people who run it say that we can’t handle the content of this game. This is just patently absurd.

It is about time the computer games industry grew up. It’s customers have. We should demand the same censorship laws as film. Then we should demand of the platform owners (Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft) that they allow us to publish adult content within these laws. If this happened you would see an unleashing of talent, there would be a massive growth in the industry as it made products that appealed to whole new audiences and we would be taken a lot more seriously in the world. Obviously, one day, the industry will grow up and it will happen, the sooner the better for everyone.

So what do you think about this whole game censorship issue. Am I wrong, or only a bit right? Reply with your thoughts on this important issue.

The computer games industry, as we now know it, started in the early 1980s. I was there at Imagine Software in Liverpool. Now at over 20 years old it has matured into a multi-billion-pound global industry. But, in my opinion, the truth of the matter is that you ain’t seen nothing yet.

It will grow to be bigger than television or the film industry.

In fact it will grow to be the biggest entertainment industry on earth, and here are some reasons why:

1. Computer gaming is capable of doing hugely more than the limited range of genres we see now. In fact the industry has been held back by lack of vision in both hardware and software. Something I will come back to in a later article.
2. It is interactive and the TV, cinema etc are not. This leads to vastly more capabilities and potentials. Traditional entertainment media also are forced to be linear by their very nature. Games are not and can follow flights of the imagination in unpredicted directions.
3. It is connected. Potentially to every other person on earth. You can interact and play with and against others on a global scale. We are just beginning to see this with Xbox live and MMORPGs but these are only scratching the surface of the possibilities.
4. It is still technologically immature. Think of the development in books, cinema and TV over the last decade (not much) then look at the development in games (huge). We have Moore’s Law on our side, but we have many other technical advances to come. Position sensors that see where you are and what you are doing and input it into the game, displays that look like moving colour photographs and which use a fraction of the power of LCDs, databases of the whole surface of the earth, and so on. In fact in the long term the reality will outperform predictions, it nearly always has with computers.
5. Portability. You will have a gaming device with you wherever you go, in fact most of us already do with our phone, but that is primitive with what can and will be done in the future. Just wait till Apple decide to jack up revenues on successive generations of iPods and iPhones, for instance. In fact the future big hardware players are most likely to be Apple, Nokia (if they ever get their act together) and Nintendo. Mobile gaming will be bigger than home gaming, in fact the two will merge from a software point of view.

There are others, but these are the main drivers that I see. So what do you think? Post your thoughts about where the industry is going!