Entries from October 2007 ↓

“PS3 is a waste of everyone’s time”, so says Gabe Newell (co-founder of Valve) in an interview for the Edge blog. He goes on to say “I don’t think they’re going to make money off their box. I don’t think it’s a good solution”. Which ties in nicely with an earlier article on here: Will Sony ever make the Playstation 4?

This is not the first time Gabe has taken his gloves off over the PS3. In January this year he told Game Informer: ”The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels. I think it’s really clear that Sony lost track of what customers wanted”.  And here is this blog’s explanation as to what is going on.

The analysts say that PS3 will do well this generation, many in the industry don’t think so. And they are voting with their feet, switching development resources onto the 360 and even more on to the Wii. Commercial decisions made because the industry has to get the best commercial returns from it’s human assets. Capcom switching Monster Hunter from the PS3 to the Wii is just one example of what is going on.

It is looking more and more like PS3 is the GameCube (or even Dreamcast) all over again. I have used this graph before and it doesn’t look good:

So do you agree with Gabe or do you think the analysts are right and that the PS3 will win out?

The Church of England is a business that is in terminal decline. People prefer other brands of superstition and now the government has mass media it no longer needs the church to keep the populace under control.

So when Sony used the interior of Manchester Cathedral in their game Resistance: Fall of Man you would have thought that the Church of England would be happy. For once the inside of one of their buildings would be seen by a large audience. But no, they showed their complete detachment from the realities of society by having a big whinge.

And now they are at it again. The Very Rev. Rogers Govender, dean of the cathedral, is whingeing that the game has been nominated for a BAFTA (not that a gaming BAFTA has much credibility). He should be rejoicing. The decline of the Church of England is such that one day his cathedral will find a better use. As a car park, a shopping mall or maybe as a mosque. So the game will be an historic religious relic to remind of the days when such an important city centre site could be wasted on the irrelevant frippery of a Church of England cathedral.

He really should get out more.

So are you a fan of cucumber sandwiches and tea at the vicarage or do you follow the eminently sensible view that religion is the root of all evil (well, most of it)?

Here is some site information for anyone who is interested.

Currently there are 74 articles and 180 comments.

Up to now we have received 11,009 visits from 9,426 unique visitors. But 5,016 of these came on one day, 25 September, because of a mention in N4G of the article A big Microsoft mistake. Our visitors have come from 121 countries, about half (5,286) from the USA. We have had 15 from Columbia and 33 from Poland. 8 from Brunei and 7 from Barbados.

Traffic has come from 161 sources and mediums, a web presence that is reflected in a Google search for Bruceongames giving 3,120 results. However on Technorati we still rank just 383,299th with an authority of 17. Other than Bruceongames the most popular search term that brought traffic was Colin McRae Helmet, which related to this article.

Our nicest critic is The Weekend Gamer who said “One of my absolute favorite sites for gaming has got to be Bruceongames” and “Bruceongames.com is so appealing to me.  The conversation has, so far in the short life of the site, maintained a high degree of intelligence that is refreshing.”

So after 2 months we are still a little baby but there are signs of life. If you like what you see here and think a friend would like it too then please tell them. Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool. If you have a blog then obviously a mention would be highly appreciated. There are links from here to a lot of other blogs. And if you are a journalist I hope that there is something here that you can tell your public about.

As always, if you would like to comment, please do.

At the moment there are an array of portable electronic devices that people carry round with them. Most people carry a mobile phone, many carry an MP3 player, lots carry a gaming machine and quite a few carry a camera. Nowadays many of these devices are multifunction, for instance most phones incorporate a camera and play games. The problem is that they don’t do the subsidiary tasks as well as a dedicated device. But this is changing with devices like the iPhone and Sony Ericsson K850i which are as good as a dedicated devices at more than one task.

So there is a change in philosophy as manufacturers try and make genuine multi function devices. They are going to be helped by some very important technology changes that are happening right now.

• The weakness of all portable devices is that they have to carry their own power with them. Over the years battery life has become a lot better by controlling device power usage and by improving battery energy density. We have gone from NiCad to Nicked Metal Hydride to Lithium. And the standby time on my phone has gone from one day to ten. But now we are about to have a jump in battery energy density with the use of nanotechnology. These new generation batteries will have the added advantage of charging very quickly indeed.
• There is an imminent jump in display technology. Current colour LED displays are very power inefficient. They achieve their colour by using filters so they require strong backlighting to work, which eats energy. Their complexity makes them expensive to manufacture. New polymer displays look just like a colour photograph. That moves. The colour is in the surface. They use far less power, are cheap to manufacture and, very interestingly, can be curved to follow a surface.
• Low power RISC computers were intended to do simple tasks using little power. Your car airbags use them. However ARM have made them progressively more powerful whilst continuously introducing technologies to reduce their power consumption. Now different parts of a processor run at different changing speeds (from zero) depending upon the demands placed on them. ARM processors are used in many phones and in the Nintendo DS. But they are continually evolving to be far more powerful with minimum power consumption.
• WiFi. As this rolls out around the world and as more devices incorporate it there will be a profound effect. Your pocket device, and therefore you, will be connected to the internet. The sum of all human knowledge will be in your pocket.
• Cheap memory. We are used to Moores law delivering this. The big change for portable devices is Flash memory. This has become so cheap that Apple, with their iPods, have been gradually switching from using miniature hard drives to using Flash. Future generation mobile devices will be able to put massive amounts of this memory into your pocket for very little cost and very little power usage. This really does make the UMD drive in the Sony PSP look like agricultural engineering.
• Gesture interface. We have covered this in an earlier article. Already we are seeing it in the iPhone. Basically the only conventional switch you need will be an on/off switch. The interface will be by an infinitely re-configerable touch screen(s) and an accelerometer. So your device will look completely different depending on what you are using it for and you will control it by moving, stroking and touching it.

In this device war Sony have a massive advantage because they already make phones, cameras, MP3 players and a mobile games machine. All they have to do is overcome the internal politics to get these different divisions working together. (Something they have largely failed to do with their film and games divisions). Apple have a lot further to go in taking on board photography and gaming at a higher level. Nokia have a longer journey if one looks at their clumsy attempts at gaming thus far. It will be very interesting to see what Nintendo do with all this technology. As for Microsoft, who know where they are going with portable devices. Is Zune their first move towards another area of global domination?

One thing that should be very obvious here is that mobile gaming has the potential to be far bigger than home gaming. Because everyone will be carrying a powerful gaming machine around with them all the time. A gaming machine that is connected to the internet.

So what do you think these devices will look like and who do you think will come out on top?

My guess is that one side of the device will look a bit like like this.

And the other side will look a bit like this.

Many years ago, when I was young, we had a pop/rock music revolution. And it belonged to us, the young generation. And all the old people, like 25 and over, didn’t understand what was going on. So they blamed our music for all the ills of society. Mick Jagger was single handedly responsible for the nationwide rise in teenage pregnancy and unmarried cohabitation. The press painted him as the devil incarnate. Yet now he is a pillar of society. If, back then, you had suggested that the Queen would give him a knighthood you would have been laughed at.

Now history is repeating itself. The Daily Mail and everything else that is bad in the media have been on an anti games crusade. The main reason for this is because they are ignorant and don’t have the faintest idea what they are talking about. I have written about this before.

So the government have set up a review to “study of the effect of violent computer games on children”. I can save them the taxpayers money and tell them in advance what the answer to this is. It keeps them entertained. The funny thing here is that when it comes to censorship the British are obsessed with violence and have historically banned a lot of films that the rest of the world were allowed to see, whilst the Americans are obsessed with censoring sex. They would have another revolution if the best selling newspaper there started putting topless girls on page 3.

Age related content in games is a lot more controlled than it is in film, music, books, TV and art. These media could learn a lot from us (if this control were a good thing). So the government are at best misguided here. If they want to know the effects of portrayed violence then they should be looking at all media, not just games. Why aren’t they? If they did it might get rid of those nasty violent cartoons on children’s television. Or not. And why is there no age rating at all on books?

I have said it before here, hundreds of millions of people in the world are going to play video games today. They don’t then go out and start mugging old women in the street. There is no causal link between video game content and the behaviour of society. We can see this with our own eyes. And lots of academic studies have proved it.

If there is anyone to blame for anything round here then it is stupid parents. Little 12 year old Johnny walks into the game shop with mummy in tow, points at GTA and says “I want”. Mummy goes to till and pays. Does the stupid woman notice the huge 18+ emblazoned over the packaging? Of course not. Because, like the Daily Mail, she is ignorant. This scene has been repeated many millions of times around the world. And it has had no harmful effect whatsoever on all the little Johnnys. Mainly because they are already far nastier than GTA.

So good luck Tanya Byron, Ed Balls and James Purnell. I know what you are doing. You are trying to create good publicity for the government out there in middle England. This is the only thing you are interested in. It is all spin. And the idea is that it will get you votes. And the taxpayer pays for your “work”. This is government at it’s very worst and I hope it backfires. I hope that thousands of people see the stupidity and the attempted manipulation and as a result refuse to vote for Labour ever again. Now that would be a sensible result.

So is this episode increasing your disgust for politicians? Or do you think we should be wrapping children in cotton wool?

Our industry is currently in the middle of a seismic shift. Largely due to the influence of Nintendo we are changing from an industry that targeted adolescent boys to an industry that provides interactive entertainment for everyone. Inevitable, and despite the censorship imposed by the platform holders, many of us will be involved in products with adult content. We will see more and more products like Red Light Centre, an adult virtual world.

Our problem as marketeers is marketing such products. The web is divided into two with very little overlap. There is the normal web of Google, ebay, social networking, blogs and so on. Then there is the $7 billion online porn industry. The split between the two parts is reinforced by the prudery of people like Goggle who do not allow Adwords/Adsense for adult content. And online PR services such as PRWeb refusing to handle anything adult.

So I have a couple of tips for reaching adult audiences. Adbrite is an online advertising service not too unlike to that offered by Google. If you browse the web you will be familiar with their service. I use their text ads on Artforums. Unlike Google Adbrite have an adult advertising service AVN Ads which is an identical service but for the other half of the internet.

The second tip is to advertise on the huge adult site Stile Project which has 9 million visitors a month and very reasonable advertising rates. I know of a recent $1250 test campaign there that generated 11,000 visitors. Quality too, they stayed for an average of over 5 minutes and visited over 7 pages.

So do you know any cost effective ways to reach adult content audiences?

Everyone knows that game sales are biggest in Q4 because of the gift market through the holiday season. So game publishers concentrate their big releases for this time. This has two effects. Firstly it acts as a self fulfilling prophecy and Q4 becomes bigger precisely because there are so many new games. Secondly it reduces the size of the overall market. This is because people earn money and play games all year round. So publishers shoot themselves in the foot by not catering for this.

Fortunately this year we have technology forcing a more sensible release policy on many. Basically the 360 and especially the PS3 are more difficult to create games for than previous platforms. So lots of games are missing deadlines and moving into next year. Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway, Unreal Tournament 3, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, World in Conflict, The Club, Grand Theft Auto IV and Splinter Cell are just some of the titles effected.

This is excellent news. Game releases will be better spread out and fewer AAA titles will be going head to head against each other. So more games will be sold. Which is good for the industry.

When I was at Codemasters I lobbied hard for the principle of launching one product a month, every month. Other than the above this has the added great advantage that everyone in sales and marketing can move smoothly from one product to the next. Giving each game full and proper attention whilst not having any slack times.

So do you think the Q4 rush is good or bad?