Entries from December 2007 ↓

 A very slow news week. Or, more accurately, a one story week. Yet the Vivendi move was inevitable. Or something like it was. And there will be plenty more of the same coming up. 

• Analysts state the obvious again. They think that the Blizzard/Activision deal could spur more industry consolidation. And you will get wet if you stand out in the rain. The forces behind consolidation have been dealt with repeatedly on here. All the latest news does is to accelerate the race for survival amongst the big global media companies.
• Microsoft survey finds the obvious. 75% of parents are concerned about video game content. This is hardly surprising when they are fed a diet of ignorant Fox News/Daily Mail invective. 43% don’t realise there is an age rating system. Well I am surprised that 57% do. Parents should take their own responsibility for what their child reads, watches and plays. I bet that a far higher percentage of parents are unaware of the parental controls built into the 360.
• Need for Speed does it-just. Number one in the UK all formats chart in the run up to Christmas is an EA tradition. So it must be disturbing for them to see Assasin’s Creed still top of the PS3 and 360 charts. Remarkable for the first iteration of a new, original IP. And a lesson, perhaps, to many.
• Game acquisition of Gamestation cleared by UK competition authorities. You’d wonder why they bothered. There are plenty of alternative places on the high street to buy your games in cardboard and plastic format, never mind the interweb. But ultimately high street game retail is a doomed business model as digital distribution replaces physical distribution.
• Wii tops internet searches on shopping sites in November. Beating iPod, iPhone and everything else. Regular readers here will not be surprised. It will be interesting to see how much momentum this has in the new year (Wii Fit will help). And what the real long term consequences will be for video gaming.
• Lawyer Drums Up Fear Of Game Violence. Kym Worthy jumps on the bandwagon. It probably pays better than ambulance chasing. This story is a classic piece of misleading rubbish. Here is her list of games that create criminals out of children (notice that none of them are age rated for children!!):
   1.    Grand Theft Auto
   2.    Manhunt
   3.    Scarface
   4.    50 Cent Bulletproof
   5.    300 The Videogame
   6.    The Godfather
   7.    Killer-7
   8.    Resident Evil 4
   9.    God of War
  10.   Hitman Blood Money
• Repressive US regime interferes in game tournament. They won’t give visas to a Chinese team to come to the Championship Gaming Series world final. It is a good job the Americans aren’t running the next Olympics.
• The Sun newspaper says video games are responsible for illiteracy. It is amazing that this low rent Murdoch tabloid have discovered irony. Will any of their readers understand it? Seriously, do these journalists realise that the future of News Corporation lies in gaming and that they are shooting their great leader in the foot?

Following on from Sex in video games #1 lets take a further look at why gaming is mainly so boringly puritanical whilst anything goes in films and books.

Some say that the nature of video gaming, the interactivity and connectivity, is a justification for the much higher levels of censorship we suffer from. If this is the case then surely books should be the most censored of all because it is inside our brain that all those little black squiggles are converted into images and emotions. Even film deserves more censorship as it has a level of graphic reality that consoles are still a few generations away from.

But all is not lost because on PC there is no censorship other than age ratings. And with downloads there is no censorship at all. So we can see what could come to consoles once the platform holders grow up. Games like Virtual Hottie 2, Virtual Sex Games, Dream Stripper and Red Light Centre show what can be done when adult content is created for an adult audience. With a current generation console development team and budget you could create something quite spectacular.

And it is not as if console games are totally 100% puritanical. A little bit of naughtiness has slipped through the system with hot coffee for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and to a lesser extent with Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude and BloodRayne 2 all on the PS2. And even with Bubble Bath Babes on the original NES. But it is still a very long way from catering for an adult audience. In fact it is pathetic that console games have so much violence and so little sex.

For those who want to research more here is an adult games website, adult games blog and an article on the history of sex in video games.

From a console gaming point of view there are a couple of lessons of history. The first is that books and films were once a lot more censored that they are today. But with the passage of time people realised just how stupid the censorship was and gradually removed it. Till we arrived at the sensible position today where in most civilised countries it is up to adults what they read and watch. The second lesson is the old Betamax v VHS video wars. One of the reasons Sony lost this is because they tried to resist adult content being published for their machine whilst the VHS consortium had no such qualms. History could repeat itself here. If Microsoft (say) were to grow up and accept adult content then Sony (say) would be at a massive competitive disadvantage.

There is no doubt that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are far worse than the government of any civilised country in their suppression of freedom of expression. Their iron control and limitations put on content are, quite frankly, an insult to any adult. And it should be illegal. Not only is it morally wrong, it is commercially wrong. The whole industry is held back to the tune of many billions of pounds a year by this misguided prudery.

You also have to think about the big global media companies who are currently piling into gaming. Will they tolerate the hardware manufacturers forcing them to water down the game versions of their blockbuster films, which would damage the IP and cost them billions in sales? I cannot see people like Rupert Murdoch putting up with it. They will want console games to have the same content rules as their movies. It is stupid for it to currently be otherwise.

And to finish, here is a gratuitous game image:

Currently our model for video games consists of very powerful consoles playing games that are distributed as cardboard and plastic. Actually this is a very wasteful model because most of the processing power spends most of the time doing nothing. And in the days of the interweb using physical distribution of a digital product is just plain silly.

Already the PC industry is moving to another model. Microsoft Office is a very expensive ($499 for a one off copy of the professional edition), heavyweight package of software. Yet probably 99% of it’s features are not accessed by most users. Google is now offering pretty much the same features in it’s Google Apps, the big difference is that they sit in a remote server and your PC is just a terminal. Oh yes, and they only cost $50 per year for the top Premier Edition.

This is a model we could go to in gaming with the game once again sitting on a remote server and the console just being a terminal. In fact it is something we already do with MMO games and online casual gaming. This approach offers a lot of advantages over the current console business model:

• The gamer can choose from hundreds, maybe even thousands, of games to play. Physical product at retail is self evidently limited in range and shelf life. A server has no such problems and can carry an almost infinite “stock” of games. Once a game was written it would have an almost infinite life.
• No retail, taking their massive percentage. It is really silly for the game industry to effectively pay for the high street rents and staffing costs of conventional retailers. They are not needed if you go to either digital distribution or server based games. Which allows for lower cost gaming and/or bigger development budgets. Either way the customer wins.
• Much cheaper consoles. Because the game runs on the server you don’t need much horsepower in the console. It is mainly there just for the interface. In fact you could cheaply build the interface into the television and do away with the console completely.
• Zero piracy. This is an exceptionally good point. If everyone who played games paid as they should then games would be cheaper. If the game is sitting on a remote server then it cannot be stolen. This is one reason why MMOs are such good business.
• Latest version of the game always available to play. To fix bugs or add content you just need to update the game on the server and it is instantly updated for every player in the world. Retail games are inevitably buggy because of their sheer size and complexity. Server games could instantly fix bugs as they were found.
• Web 2.0 benefits. If everyone playing a game is playing the same version on a server it is much easier to incorporate user generated content (as MMOs now do) and social networking. Together these make gaming more immersive and more rewarding.
• No need for publishers. It is true, they would be redundant. The game developer can deliver the game directly to the server owner. There is no need for a global sales and distribution network because there are no retailers to sell to! I can see two new sorts of companies setting up. Mini merchant banks to finance individual games and distribute the risk and reward. And marketing companies to raise public awareness of games on the server. Presumably existing publishers would morph into doing one or both of these jobs.

As you can see, it is an alluring model with a lot of benefits. Taking publishers and retailers out of the loop and having a very long product life all put more money into game development. And playing games is what this whole industry is about.

I am sure that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are looking at this very seriously as a future option. Of the three Microsoft, with their five year lead on Live, are by far the best positioned to take advantage.

Regular readers here will be totally unsurprised at this news. Let’s look at the background. There are three fundamental factors at work here.

Firstly the big global media companies like Vivendi, Warners and News Corporation are investing very heavily in gaming, which you can read about in this article. They have no option, it is a matter of survival, because gaming (due to fundamental and innate advantages) will grow to be the biggest media business and in doing so will supplant older media to a significant degree.

The second reason is that gaming is set to grow 40% in two years, which is covered in this article. Maybe even more with the Nintendo effect and iPod joining the market as a platform. This makes companies a lot more valuable when the city/street look at their future earnings.

Thirdly game publishing works with massive competitive advantages of scale. A publisher who can guarantee over a million sales, due to global distribution and quality marketing, before they even start work on a game, has an immense advantage over a publisher that struggles to get to half a million sales with a game of similar quality. Industry insiders will be able to point at lots of examples of this. This scale advantage means that when the dust settles there will only be a handful of global publishers, just as in the music and film industries. Survival, just now, is best served by takeover and merger. Especially cross border.

As ever there are a couple of caveats to the above. Firstly there could always be a role for niche publishers who cater for genres and platforms that the big boys cannot be bothered with. Secondly digital distribution could upset the whole applecart by removing publisher advantages of scale. In fact it could make publishers redundant. Just look at Valve and their Steam system for a glimpse of where this is going.

Now let´s look at the fallout this has brought to another area, developer consolidation. Here we are seeing three things happening.

Firstly the big global media companies are buying up development capacity. They own the IP but they need the bodies to convert that IP into games. They could do it the hard way by setting up studios from scratch, but they realise that this is a race for survival so speed is of the essence. Hence good, ready made teams are now very, very attractive. As in the Warners takeover of Traveller’s Tales.

Secondly you have the existing specialist game publishers realising that they are going to be starved of IP as the big media companies keep it for themselves. So developers with their own IP have become extremely valuable. We saw this with the EA acquisition of Bioware and Pandemic.

Thirdly Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are always looking for AAA platform exclusive content. If that means they have to buy studios, then they have many times before and presumably will continue to do.

As I say continually, we live in very interesting times.

Since the beginning of cinema it has borrowed it’s ideas from another media, books. And, to a lesser extent, there is traffic the other way with films becoming books. And you can see why this should be so. Both media tell a story in a linear way with no interactivity from the viewer/reader. So they have a lot in common.

When video games came along they initially used their own ideas for content. But after a while the temptation was too much and publishers strayed over to the dark side of borrowing from film, book and even TV. By doing this they had an instant brand that the public could identify with. But from a creative and artistic view it is totally unsatisfactory.

The thing about gaming, the reason it will grow to be bigger than any other media, is it’s innate superiority. Gaming is interactive, it is connected and it has non linearity. These advantages mean that compromises are inevitable when you take any idea from another media to a game or vice versa. Gaming is at it’s best when it is based on original ideas.

And this is proven just now with some really fantastic blockbuster games. Assasin’s Creed, Super Mario Galaxy, Halo 3, Phantom Hourglass and Bio Shock to name just a few. All of these owe nothing to books or films, so they are unconstrained and better able to take advantage of the superiority of the media. This is the way it should be.

However there is a role that books and film can fill. They can chronicle the making of a game and they can fill in the back story behind the game, making it more relevant and raising the level of emotional involvement. So it is nice to see the Halo book Halo: Contact Harvest enter the New York Times book chart at number three. In addition to being nice it is another indicator of just how mainstream gaming is becoming.