Entries from October 2007 ↓

According to The Sun, the UK print equivalent of Fox News.

Hamilton will, obviously, be the “face” of a new game. It cannot be F1, as that is a very tightly held IP licensed to Sony. And it would, with the current state of play, be pretty stupid for EA to limit a title to Sony platforms.

This is very interesting relative to sporting performance. The current world champion is a Finn, Kimi Räikkönen and for the previous two years it was a Spaniard Fernando Alonso. But they don’t have £5 million game contracts. Lewis Hamilton was just one of several exciting rookies this season. He was the person most prepared ever for an F1 drive and he had the best car on the grid, which is much more important in F1 than the driver. So he achieved good results and led the championship for the bulk of the season. Helped by other top drivers having difficulty with the transition to Bridgestone tyres.

The media in Britain went mad over him. The F1 programme on TV became a hysterical Hamilton event at every race. If they interviewed another F1 driver their questions would mainly be about Hamilton. It was pathetic. And the downmarket newspapers followed suit. To make things worse they did everything they could to stir bad feeling against Hamilton’s opponents. F1 in Britain suffered the worst side of populist, nationalistic fervour.

However Hamilton failed to become world champion because he bottled it in the last two races, proving he really was just a rookie. And Kimi, in an inferior car, beat him. Because he is the better driver.

But the massive preparation for F1 that Hamilton has had makes him the marketeers dream. He is urbane, corporate, self confident, lucid and eloquent. He is also, obviously, very bright. This gets him the £5 million, even with his lesser driving credentials.

At Codemasters we had a similar thing with Colin McRae who we worked with for many great years. He only won the WDC once but his driving style made him a cult hero. However it ended up in many markets that Colin was more famous for being in the game than he was for his driving. In fact I have seen threads on American forums where they didn’t realise that he was a real person! This effect used to annoy Jim Darling who always said that we shouldn’t pay people to be in our games. They should pay us.

So it is with EA and Lewis Hamilton. Despite F1 being a global phenomenon, there are markets were EA is bigger. How many people play EA games in America, for instance, compared with the number that watch F1? So, if this deal is true, then it is a very clever move by Hamilton’s advisors. It means that his global brand will be built by two activities. And he will be paid massively for both!

Personally I think that our industry is big enough these days not to throw money away for other people’s IP. Nintendo wouldn’t do it. If EA gave me £5 million I would deliver them far more profit than Lewis Hamilton will and in a far more sustained way!! If Hamilton doesn’t get a top car next season he will be mid table. And there is nothing he can do about it.

So are you an F1 fan? What do you think of paying sports jocks to endorse games?

Improving Game Marketing: The Game Purchase Process From A Consumer’s Point Of View

Frank N. Magid Associates, Inc.  MI6 conference,  June 28, 2006, still recent enough to contain much that is valid.

2008 MI6 conference details.

When I was at Codemasters I was a member of the Games Industry Forum, a pan industry talking shop that met regularly under the aegis of the DTI in London. It always seemed strange to me that the government department responsible for games was the department of trade and industry (DTI) whilst film and music were dealt with by the department of culture, media and sport (DCMS). I suppose it is just as silly as the BBC handling games in their technology department, not their entertainment department.

At one of the forum meetings I put forward the idea of setting up a Games Council, just like there are a Film Council and a Music Council. What I was seeking was a broader public cultural role for our industry. Obviously my idea was talked down by the civil servants. It would have cost public money. If film and music get public money then why shouldn’t games? But the real killer was ELSPA, they totally rubbished the idea, obviously worried about retaining their pre eminent position representing the UK industry. So it didn’t happen. Not because it wouldn’t have been a good thing, but because of petty entrenched  narrow interests. 

Fast forward to today and we find that the industry is after money from the government again. Like the UK film industry gets. Or like the illegal (WTO rules) subsidies the games industry gets in Canada and (possibly illegal) France. All trade subsidies are silly, especially the ones given to farmers, so I have no sympathy with what our industry is seeking. I think we would be far better off using the law to stop subsidies elsewhere.

Meanwhile the industry still doesn’t have what it really needs. An organisation to broaden the cultural appeal of games. Luckily Nintendo is now doing the job for them.

So does your job rely on taxpayers money being spent on you?

I suspect that many reading this will not know of Habbo, and why should they? It is something for teenagers, you can’t buy it in the shops and the only people making money out of it are Sulake, the Finnish developers. Yet it has 80 million members, 400 million page impressions a month and 75,000 people join every day.

Best of all it has an array of features that will be seen more and more widely in the coming years. See Habbo and you see our future. Here’s why:

• Nothing to buy. Yep, that is right. You can be playing Habbo in a handful of minutes, starting now. It is that easy. There are the lowest possible barriers to entry. Everything is designed to make it as easy as possible to get in.
• Rock solid revenue model. You can use Habbo without paying a penny. However there are strong incentives to buy credits which can be used in many ways. And of course there is advertising revenue.
• What is it? Is it an MMO or is it a social networking site? It is both, and it works fantastically. You can be chatting to someone and then suggest going and playing a game. Just like real life. I have said many times that MMOs will have more social networking and social networking sites more gaming. Habbo is in that sweet spot where it is already both.
• Non-hardcore audience. Why limit themselves? Habbo is as much fun as possible for as many people as possible. It is entertainment for everyone (well, teens anyhow).
• User generated content. As a member you create your guest room and can build and modify it endlessly.
• Global audience. Habbo has servers in over 30 countries and is continually adding new ones.
• It doesn’t need a $3,000 PC to play on. In fact it will play on just about any old PC.
• Simple graphics. It is always the gameplay that matters most. Just because you can go photorealistic doesn’t mean that you have to.

Some or all of these elements will feature in more and more games. Habbo itself is just crying out for a more grown up version (not Second Life!), which would be brilliant on say an iPod Touch or iPhone.

The possibilities out there are endless, there are many hundreds of millions of gaming platforms in the world just waiting for the fruits of our imagination.

What do you think of Habbo? And the elements listed above. Please add your comments below.

This makes perfect sense. Toshiba own the HD DVD patents and they are at war with Sony, as are Microsoft. They can see the Trojan horse effect that Sony are getting with Blu-Ray on the PS3 (or, at least, will get when the PS3 starts selling) and they want some. So forming a closer alliance with Microsoft is the perfect mechanism to do that. This could take many forms with new models and lower prices for the HD DVD mechanism.

Microsoft, on the other hand, have struggled with Xbox in Japan since day one. It is proving to be a tougher nut to crack than their worst nightmares. So an alliance with a Japanese company makes exceptionally good sense. Even going so far as letting Toshiba produce their own brand of 360. Then it would be a Japanese machine and so it would get all the Japanese industry support that it needs. Whilst Microsoft still make money from the software.

360 could end up being a standard built into a wide range of consumer electronics such as set top HD DVD players and the TVs themselves. This would further benefit both Microsoft and Toshiba. The potential synergies are massive.

And supposedly all this has been revealed by a senior Toshiba executive in an unguarded moment.

So do you think this is likely? And if it is, just how big will it be?

Nolan Bushnell is a revered creator of some of the elements that make up our industry today. Pong and Atari for starters . But he also, famously, turned down Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak when they brought the design of the first Apple computer to him.

After Atari he concentrated on fast food with the Chuck E. Cheese chain which was gobbled up by a competitor after it went bankrupt in 1984. For the last seven years he has been trying to get his uWink fast food chain working, through several failed iterations and $24 million in investor funding.

Now he has taken to biting the hand that fed him in this article. The comments he makes are outrageous and, as anyone in the industry today can tell you, they are just plain wrong.

He says: “Video games today are a race to the bottom. They are pure, unadulterated trash and I’m sad for that.” And he goes on: “Social games represent something that has been missing. Most of the board games are purchased by women for families. It is this gaming world that can be re-energized. We used to have families sit down and play a game together. A lot of video games today are very isolated. You don’t see mom and dad, sister and brother, sitting down like they used to play, say, Monopoly. That represented good mentoring time for families that just isn’t happening now.”

Presumably he is saying these outrageous things to publicise his business. Or he is completely and utterly out of touch with reality. Or both. He needs to see if he can get hold of a Wii just to see how wrong he is. And maybe a DS with Brain Age.

So what are your thoughts? Please add your comments below.

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There are a few background articles on just how well we are doing and how much better this industry will get. We are still at the beginning of the industry, This is the golden time and $47 billion .

Then there is analysis of the platform holders. What is Sony? What is Microsoft? and What is Nintendo?

Press release tips #0, #1, #2 and #3.

Anecdotes: Increasing market share by putting prices UP, Death of a brand , The Megagames and Platform generation transition .

There are articles on contentious issues. Fu**ing censorship, Computer games are better than books, Games are art , The big problem, Paper games magazines are dead, Games will be education, Those silly Germans and The Church of England .

Platforms: Sony are wasting their time with the PSP, The future portable device, iPod=gaming platform, PS3 is a waste of everyone’s time and Is Wii a bubble?

And my personal favourites: Web 2.0 and the games industry ostriches, Are games funny enough? When the gaming generation come to power, Will the major film studios own the games industry? Are social networking and MMORPGs the same thing? and The future, it is all a gesture .

This is about a third of the articles so if you wander back through the archives you will find much more. Please enjoy.