Entries from April 2008 ↓

It is looking more and more like Nintendo may have no option to make the Wii cheaper at retail, despite what Satoru Iwata says. Here’s why:

• It has been at the same price for a long time now, during which it has become a lot cheaper to make. Especially with the volumes they are churning out. And they were making a profit in every unit from the beginning. So there is plenty of room to drop the price.
• They are ramping up production to 25 million units a year. Initially these will just meet the backlog of demand but once that is done they will need to use the price mechanism to shift them.
• Their release schedule is looking very weak. Right now we have Super Smash Bros, Brawl, Mario Kart and Wii Fit. Then nothing mega and lots of shovelware. Compare that with the PS3 and 360.
• GTA IV. This is going to transform the balance in the market strongly in favour of the HD consoles. The Wii is going to look increasingly last gen.
• To make the most money out of the Wii back catalogue of games Nintendo need as many platforms out there as possible. At a lower price they will sell more Wiis and milk it on the software.
• The Microsoft Xbox 360 price cuts now make the Wii look very expensive. You get a whole lot more for your money with the 360.

So when is this going to happen. Q3 08 is my best bet. But it could be a little later. It depends on what the market is telling them.

The Telegraph headline is Grand Theft Auto IV: Violence flares after launch and they know the cause:”A 23-year-old was repeatedly stabbed in Croydon, south London as he walked past 100 people queuing to buy the controversial game, in which players rob and murder their way through the criminal underworld.”

The Mail, as ever, don’t pull their punches with Teenager stabbed in queue at midnight launch of ultra violent video game Grand Theft Auto IV. They too know what happened: “A man was stabbed last night while queueing to buy one of the first copies of a controversial new video game.”

The BBC report the stabbing but make no mention of any game.

The Press association, which many journalists will use as their source, headline with Police hunt video game attacker and say “ Police are hunting a hooded man who stabbed a passer-by as he waited to buy a new edition of a notoriously violent computer game.”

So you can see already that they have different stories. Was the victim in the queue or walking past? Perhaps the local paper can clear this up for us.

So to the Croydon Guardian who have the best headline yet: Grand Theft slaughter. And they have a new slant on the victim “Queues of people waiting outside Gamestation in George Street saw the man staggering around covered in blood as they waited to get their hands on the latest copy of the game.”

But what is this we see at the bottom of the Croydon Guardian article, in the reader comments? Scroll down and we find: “I’d just like to clarify, that the incident and the four “blokes” involved had no connections with the people who were in the queue for Grand Theft Auto 4, nor did they have any intentions of purchasing the game. It just happened in the same place.
I was in the queue and saw the events unfold, but once again it seems instead of looking at the root of the problem it’s much more convenient to blame the games that we play.”

Yes that’s right, the stabbing in Croydon had nothing to do with GTA IV. Yet over the news media all day today and tomorrow morning the population of Britain will be fed a totally false message. The media should be deeply ashamed of themselves when they mislead like this.

In January 2008 Janice Turner wrote a column in the Times catchily headed “Xbox is crack for kids”. In a considerable display of ignorance she said: “I refuse to buy them (her children) portable gaming consoles, Xboxes, GameCubes, PS2s. These are Satan’s Sudoku, crack cocaine of the brain. Even the crappiest cartoon or lamest soap teaches a child about character, plot, drama, humour, life. Playing videogames, children are mentally imprisoned, wired into their evil creators’ brains. And they play them - beepety-beep - on journeys, over family meals, any minute in which they find themselves unamused.”

Then at the beginning of April Giles Whittell proved that Janice Turner wasn’t alone in her ignorance at the Times with an article entitled “Video games: I’ll never buy one”. He shows his prejudice with: “I hate video games, on or offline. I hate the way they suck real people into fake worlds and hold on to them for decades at a time.” And goes on, “Compared with everything else on offer in a kid’s life, video games and heroin and teenage pregnancy are a colossal waste of time.”

Obviously they haven’t read Grand Theft Childhood, a federally funded study of nearly 2,000 children in America. This found that: “boys who didn’t regularly play video games were more likely even than boys who played M-rated (adult) games to get into fights, steal from a store, or have problems at school”.

And now the Times has joined the GTA IV bandwagon with an article which is nearly diametrically opposed to the two above.  A remarkable switch in editorial stance in less than a month. Presumably they saw that the Guardian was better than them on the topic and they want to put some space between themselves and the abysmal Mail. In a lead article they say, “We are all console players now” and praise the cultural values of the game, “Opera-lovers may not know it, but the cultural event of the coming week is not the opening of The Merry Widow at the Coliseum on Monday. It is the launch, on Tuesday, in formats to suit all consoles, of a long-awaited video game that casts the player as a criminal fleeing from a violent past into an even more violent present. The game is Grand Theft Auto IV. The result of three years’ work by 150 “developers”, it will draw tens of millions of users into an urban dystopia modelled closely on New York and realised in such staggering detail that the protagonist can relax between sessions spent prowling the city’s virtual streets by walking into virtual cybercafés and logging on to the game’s own version of the internet.”.

But they still have their prejudices, “It may prove unsettling and even addictive, and controlling youngsters’ access to it raises vital questions for society and, above all, parents.” And, worst of all, “But individuals need to know the difference between digital games and real life. And they must ask themselves, now as much as ever, the essential question: how do you want to spend your time here, in the real world?”. The Times needs to learn that video gaming is just another popular entertainment media. Just like the opera. 

I found out about this on the rllmukforum. What we have is a guy with a website, called World of Stuart, who charges £2 a month membership. In exchange you can download from him a huge amount of other people’s copyright material, both games and music. So he is making money from other people’s work.

As you will see he is offering 125 Playstation games converted to run on the Sony PSP, no wonder proper PSP games don’t sell very well. Here is a pirate damaging the game industry.

Here is a cut and paste of what he is offering:

- several hours of live Glastonbury Festival recordings.

- the complete never-released-on-DVD 1972 TV movie La Cabina.

- the Cannon Fodder 2 Official Soundtrack, a 40-song double CD of the key songs that inspired the No.1 Amiga game.

- Visual Pinball 3D conversions for the PC of the 12 tables from classic pinball games Pinball Dreams, Pinball Dreams 2 and Pinball Illusions.

- audio recordings of several complete comedy sets from the 2005 Edinburgh Festival, featuring top-rated acts including Stewart Lee, Jerry Sadowitz, Richard Herring and Daniel Kitson.

- the WoS Christmas Album, a beautiful collection of melancholy-but-pretty tunes to help you through those cold, bleak winter months.

- the complete never-released-in-the-West PC game Typing Space Harrier, rescued for posterity from the world of Japanese abandonware.

- £50 in free cash (no strings, no deposit, no credit card details required, just plain old-fashioned free money) from the online gaming site poker770.com.

- over 125 Playstation 1 games, mostly never released in Europe, converted and compressed for use on the PSP by users with custom firmware installed.

- over 300 rare and unavailable Spectrum games collected, compiled and converted for use with the SpeccyDS emulator for the Nintendo DS.

• This blog is my bat and ball, and I get to decide who plays.
• Comments that bring something to the table are most welcome. Those that do not may be deleted.
• Personal attacks and insults will be deleted. You’re welcome to disagree with me or anyone else by presenting a counter argument, but don’t expect to see your post appear here if you’re overly sarcastic, rude or aggressive.

After all the fuss with Tanya Byron and Grand Theft Childhood recently I thought it might be an idea to write what I think about violence in games. Firstly it is very obvious that society doesn’t have any problem here. These games have been played for decades now, they are played by hundreds of millions of people and there are no social problems. None. If there were, then the sensationalist newspapers would be throwing it in our faces. So the debate is mainly self publicist politicians and journalists using video games as a punchbag so as to further their own self interests. Gordon Brown and Hillary Clinton have said some very stupid things on the subject.

It is the job of parents to bring up their children, it is not the job of government. Unfortunately anyone can have a child any time they want, if they are physically capable. There is no intelligence test, no aptitude test and no means test. So all sorts of unsuitable people become parents. And governments use this as an excuse to force stupid legislation on the rest of us. We have nanny states that poke their noses into areas where they have no business and where things would work a lot better without them.

When it comes to games the current age limits are self evidently stupid. Children develop emotionally at different speeds, they don’t magically take a jump in maturity on a given birthday. And they each have different attitudes and sensitivities. So it is fortunate that children are self censoring. They avoid that which they don’t like. Kids just aren’t interested in all the sexual material that surrounds us all in our daily lives. And when they do get old enough to be interested it is entirely natural. The same with violence. Below a certain development level kids just aren’t interested and walk away.

One things that the anti violent game lobby forget is that video gaming is mainly an adult hobby, this is a fact. Also they have this strange perception that all the nation’s children are cooped up in their bedrooms playing solitary video games. When in reality virtually every game these days is fundementally social in it’s game play and has the additional social benefit of being a conversation focus amongst peers. Games are far more social than books, film or music.

People try and compare violence in films and in games. They try and make out that games are worse because of their interactivity. This is very stupid. I have read pschologists who say that in reality films are worse because you are passive and can do nothing about events. You are subjugated by the violence. Whereas in games you are active and can sort out the baddies, which is psychologically a lot healthier. Then there is the fact that films are hugely more realistic allowing greater audience immersion and suspension of disbelief. Finally the actual violence content in films is horrendous compared to games. James Bond is subject to testicle bashing torture in the 12 rated Casino Royale and there are very many 18 rated films that are pure evil from beginning to end. The violence in games is far, far tamer. It tends to be stylised. And, in virtually all instances, it forms just one part of a coherent and balanced whole.

Another aspect of this whole debate is that it is demeaning of children. Children are sentient, intelligent human beings. They know that when they are playing a game they are playing a game. They know it is not real life. In the 1950s legislators in America made a lot of noise about superhero comic books. They thought that chidren would think that they could fly and so throw themselves off tall buildings. We know now that this is absurd. So too are most of the concerns about violence in games.

In fact there is a way in which violent video games are good for children. Very good. Quite simply they act as a catharsis, as a means to vent pent up anger and frustration. Children can interactively get all the negativity out of their system without hurting anyone or anything in the real world. I think that this is a very significant effect and has contributed to the huge drop in juvenile crime that we have seen in every country where video games are widely played.

It is useful to remember that age ratings are a relatively recent artifice. They were invented by the film industry when they found themselves under the same sort of scrutiny that the game industry is now under. Books are entirely comparable with films and video games as popular entertainment media. Yet books have no age rating despite frequent sex and violence. Just look at the Bible and the Iliad for instance.

So what is worse, a Mickey Mouse Tom and Jerry cartoon on television or Grand Theft Auto on a video game console? For me it has to be Mickey Mouse Tom and Jerry. As discussed earlier the viewer is passive and is subject to unremitting violence with no morality message whatsoever. Whereas Grand Theft Auto is an interactive game of near infinite possibilities of which violence forms but a small and integral part.

Yesterday, in Leamington, I walked past our local Woolworths store. And every window had a poster in it telling the world that they had Wii Fit in stock. So I thought I would have a look. Just inside the door there was a huge mountain of Wii Fit boxes. Next to it a Wii was set up with Wii Fit and someone demonstrating it. Presumably by the end of the day he will be very fit.

This was a truly remarkable event. Woolworths has to appeal to the masses and needs to get the maximum amount of revenue per square metre of floor space out of them. To give such a priority to a video gaming product tells you more about our market than a stack of analyst’s reports.

There is no way that Woolworths would do the same for Assassin’s Creed, or Bioshock, or even Halo 3. Because, no matter how big they are they are still just niche products. And Wii Fit isn’t. Wii Fit is mass market, which is where the game industry now is. Yet so many have failed to wake up and see the change.

So many have still to grasp the seismic changes of the last 12 months or so. We have made a step transformation into popular culture and we aren’t going back. The opportunities are simply enormous. For each developer it has the potential to be bigger than the Beatles in the 1960s. It is just a matter of understanding what is going on and grasping the opportunity.