Entries from March 2008 ↓
March 17th, 2008 — Anecdotal musing
One upon a time Codemasters had a great football management game called LMA manager. It was the best selling game of it’s type on console and annually a new version improved on what had gone before, sold well and made a profit. Guaranteed money in the bank every year. The head of the studio Simon Prytherch ran a tight team and had a clear vision of where the game was going long term. All was well with the world.
A part of LMA manager that made it more suited to consoles than the spreadsheet type management games on PC was the actual playing of games. You made all your decisions then watched the results play out. Every year this got better with features like touchline shouts etc introduced. Then someone senior had a very silly idea. They thought that they could use this as a cheap and cheerful engine for a football action game. That we could take on Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) and FIFA, both excellent and well established games, with this management game football engine.
Then it got worse, a lot worse. To give us a unique selling proposition (USP) over our competitors it was decided to make multiple versions of the game, each club specific. So at a cost of many millions we signed up Manchester United, Liverpool, Juventus, Bayern Munich, AC Milan, Arsenal, Ajax, Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, Chelsea, Inter Milan, Leeds, Glasgow Rangers, Celtic, Borussia Dortmund, Aston Villa and Hamburg. Each version had the identical mechanics with a pile of club specific window dressing to appeal to the fans, supposedly.
So we had a marketing problem. In fact a marketing impossibility. Each game was intended for a different fanbase so we needed to market each individually into that fanbase. It would have needed 17 marketing teams and 17 marketing budgets. And all the money had been spent on the licenses. And the game was rubbish, really rubbish because of it’s management game roots. And we had vastly better, stronger, well established competitors in PES and FIFA. It was doomed and many of us could see that it was doomed from the very beginning.
So it bombed at retail, nobody wanted to buy it. And there was the collateral damage, Codemasters had a brand identity built on many years of great product quality, this game did massive damage to that Codemasters brand, something it may never recover from. And many millions of pounds were poured down the grid. And, unfortunately, Simon Prytherch left the company, so we lost a great talent.
March 15th, 2008 — Anecdotal musing
Next week is Codemasters season here at Bruceongames. A series of articles look at some of the product disasters that cost the company fortunes and which, ultimately, led to it being owned by venture capitalists.
Codemasters has a unique place in the history of the gaming industry. Surviving 20 years as a family company through multiple platform transitions and economic cycles to become a business that innovated and published some outstanding entertainment.
I first joined in 1985, just after the start when they were in a small industrial unit in Banbury. The total workforce was Jim, David, Richard and Abigail Darling, Ann Pinkham on sales and me. This grew to a $100 million a year company with 400 employees and offices around the world. An incredible achievement.
In the beginning Codemasters published budget (£1.99) games on cassette for 8 bit home computers. We succeeded in getting in excess of a 27% total market share in the first year of trading, the foundation that all future success was built on. Then came the Amiga and ST. Then self manufactured console cartridges and the Game Genie. Before settling down to become a mainstream publisher.
Codemasters was built on a foundation of exceptional people. The entry IQ test ensured that you never had to deal with thickies (at least in development) and created an espirit de corps of like minded people achieving great things. There was never a lot of money thrown around (Jim Darling was far too good a businessman for that). So teams tended to be small, using their brains to come up with clever and elegant solutions. Some of the best product was when John Hemingway was development director and I think he did a fantastic job in the difficult balance between budget and creativity. Product wise it was largely downhill after he left, as the declining review scores (and chart successes) showed.
Very many people in the game industry throughout the world owe their careers to Codemasters. Certainly for a very long time having Codemasters in your CV opened a lot of doors. And with years of graduate recruitment and a willingness to promote people out of QA it was a great industry first stepping stone. At it’s peak Codemasters had a very low staff turnover, going to work anywhere else represented a step down.
But Codemasters is no longer a family company. This series of articles looks at some of the product disasters that made this inevitable. Mistakes that cost tens of millions of pounds in wasted money and lost opportunity. There were other disasters too, in employing the wrong people in senior positions and in setting up whole un-needed departments on the development side that were just ego trips. To go into these would involve apportioning blame. And though I, obviously, know where much of that lies, it is not something for here and now.
March 14th, 2008 — Housekeeping
Dreamhost is doing a big move around of hardware that will affect us. There’s a notice up about it:
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/03/12/central-services-and-spunky-cluster-move/
We’re on ‘pico’. The net effect (!) is that we will be down for up to 12 hours next weekend, starting at about 5am Saturday morning (March 22) and running through to 5pm Saturday afternoon.
March 14th, 2008 — News analysis and background
This is going to be very, very interesting. In 2004, Dr Lawrence Kutner and Dr Cheryl K. Olson (interview here), co-founders and directors of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media, began a $1.5 million study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice on the effects of video games on young teenagers. In contrast to previous research, they studied real children and families in real situations. And now they have written a book about their findings.
This book just talks about the same common sense attitude towards gaming that you have found on this forum. However it flies in the face of the hysteria that we keep hearing from a litany of ignorant self publicists.
Published by Simon & Shuster on April 15 this book will change our industry forever. Here are some of it’s findings:
Video game popularity and real-world youth violence have been moving in opposite directions. Violent juvenile crime in the United States reached a peak in 1993 and has been declining ever since. School violence has also gone down. Between 1994 and 2001, arrests for murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assaults fell 44 percent, resulting in the lowest juvenile arrest rate for violent crimes since 1983. Murder arrests, which reached a high of 3,800 in 1993, plummeted to 1400 by 2001.
Well that’s one in the eye for Gordon Brown (who has said that video games cause knife crime) and all the other idiots who don’t understand video games and so blame them for all the ills of the world.
The U. S. Secret Service intensely studied each of the 37 non-gang and non-drug-related school shootings and stabbings that were considered “targeted attacks” that took place nationally from 1974 through 2000. (Note how few premeditated school shootings there actually were during that 27-year time period, compared with the public perception of those shootings as relatively common events!) The incidents studied included the most notorious school shootings, such as Columbine, Santee and Paducah, in which the young perpetrators had been linked in the press to violent video games. The Secret Service found that that there was no accurate profile. Only 1 in 8 school shooters showed any interest in violent video games; only 1 in 4 liked violent movies.
That totally debunks “School Shooting Expert” and misinformed anti game campaigner Jack Thompson. Is he now going to apologise for misleading the American public?
Academic research on video games and kids has typically focused on games played in isolation. Yet for many young teens in our surveys and focus groups, friendship was a major factor in their video game play. Forty percent of middle-school boys and almost a third of girls agreed that one attraction of video games is that “my friends like to play.” Roughly one-third of both boys and girls said that they enjoyed teaching others how to play video games.
According to Bill, another parent, “Most of the interaction my son has with his buddies is about solving situations within a game. It’s all about how do you go from this place to that place, or collect the certain things that you need, and combine them in ways that are going to help you to succeed.”
Wendy saw a similar pattern with her son: “Jody and Alex talk constantly in the car and everywhere else about the games and the characters, so it’s part of their friendship, part of what they do and what they like to play…. And they give each other help sometimes when they get to different levels.”
Which disproves Prince Charles and all those who have portrayed gaming as an anti social solitary activity.
The book covers many other key issues such as sex in video games and the effect of games on children’s development. And it comes down repeatedly against the ignorant doom mongering politicians and journalists who use the public stage to spout their ignorance. People like Hillary Clinton and Keith Vaz.
Also you would assume that the Tanya Byron review has now totally had the rug pulled from under it. If ELSPA have any sense they will buy a copy of this book for every member of the House of Commons and for every newspaper editor (especially the Daily Mail) in the country. There really is no more excuse for people getting on a soapbox and spouting idiocy about Video Games. Because now, for the first time, we have a credible, properly researched academic study that explains what the realities are.
Pre order this book from Amazon. I have. If you are an industry professional it is the most important book on gaming. It will change gaming forever because the industry will henceforth be far less nervous about tackling difficult issues within games which up to now would have attracted ignorant hysteria from the obvious suspects. Gaming content will change to be far closer to that of books and films. This change will enormously enhance the emotional engagement that is possible within a game to allow a wider range of genres. And will bring about games that appeal to an even wider audience. Ultimately this book will add billions to the annual revenue of the video game industry.
March 13th, 2008 — News analysis and background
And this week we have a couple of bonus stories:
March 12th, 2008 — Housekeeping
It is Codemasters disasters season. A series of articles analysing some of the things that went wrong at Codemasters and why. Useful postmortems for anyone in the industry. It is a lot cheaper and less painful to learn from other people’s mistakes.
March 12th, 2008 — Practical information
Here I will list a whole pile of websites that are useful to the game industry professional. Some I have mentioned before, but putting them all in one place is pretty convenient. This is information overload.
There is enough information there for even the keenest budding game industry professional. Please add any great industry sites you may know using comments. Bloggers and journalists feel free to copy this anywhere you want.
