Entries from April 2008 ↓

It is a complete mystery to me how some articles have legs and are seen by tens of thousands of people whilst others, often more erudite (in my opinion!) and containing much more work and thought just disappear into oblivion. It is all down to aggregators like N4G and Reddit and also to which articles are picked up on by journalists elsewhere to comment on.

Obviously most articles get their most views when they are on the front page and I have no accurate measure of how this readership is split up. What is in this list is the article permalinks that have had the most views. So this is mainly people coming to this site specifically to read that one article. Which is a pity as they mostly never get to see all the other wonderful stuff on here.

1. Fanboys is about that army of gamers whose enthusiasm for one brand goes too far. To the point of emotional attachment. The article is tongue in cheek but does contain some home truths.
2. Is Blu-ray a Microsoft victory? Very unexpected that this brief piece did so well. At a time when people were trumpeting Blu-ray as a Sony victory over Microsoft I thought that a bit of perspective was in order.
3. A big Microsoft mistake?  From quite early in the life of this blog, this article looks at whether stopping production of the original Xbox so early was the best idea.
4. Piracy, Imagine Software and the Megagames. This was a sleeper for a month before it exploded on to the world’s radar screens. It is an anecdote of what actually happened at Imagine when I was on the board of directors. Schoolboy pirates from that time who never went near the company disagree with me.
5. The next console generation, #1 Home consoles. A bit of fun this, trying to second guess what the three big platform holders are going to do. And, perhaps more importantly, when.
6. Surfer Girl and Skater Boy. The game industry’s two most notorious rumour mongers. Sometimes they are right, sometimes they aren’t.
7. The Bible Vs video games. People complain about the sex and violence in video games. The bible is worse. And it doesn’t even have an age rating!
8. How big will Super Smash Bros. Brawl be? There was a lot of hysteria about this game so I wrote an article to put it into context.
9. PS3 is a waste of everyone’s time. Gabe Newell of Valve’s unique view on the current platform generation. It certainly is an attention getting headline.
10. Some great game development blogs. In a way I am very surprised that this is not more popular. These blogs are solid gold, their content gives an inside view of games that every enthusiast would surely rave over.

So, out of more than 250 articles, these have risen to the top in the popularity stakes. The challenge now is to write articles that become even more popular.

Here we go at last. Using Warner’s distribution gives Sci some advantages of scale. However they are still probably not beig enough for AAA console game risk. And who is going to do the global marketing? So this looks like an interim position prior to Warners taking full control. Maybe not this year, but one day.

Placing and Open Offer

RNS Number:1083T
SCI Entertainment Group PLC
25 April 2008

NOT FOR RELEASE, DISTRIBUTION OR PUBLICATION IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN OR INTO THE
UNITED STATES, CANADA, JAPAN, AUSTRALIA OR THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA

(for immediate release at 7 am)

25 April 2008

SCi Entertainment Group plc

PLACING AND OPEN OFFER OF 171,605,424 NEW SHARES AT 35 PENCE PER NEW SHARE,

STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP WITH WARNER BROS AND ARRANGEMENT OF NEW BANKING FACILITIES

INTERIM MANAGEMENT STATEMENT

Highlights:

* Raising £60m through a fully underwritten placing and open offer of
171,605,424 New Shares

* Strategic distribution agreement with Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Inc. for
the US, Canada and Mexico, to drive growth in the North American market,
additionally Warner Bros will subscribe for up to £15m New Shares

* Current trading is in line with expectations and the Company is on track to
deliver cost savings of £14m from its rationalisation programme at a cost of
£7m, as announced in February

* Following completion of the fund raising the company will have substantial
cash balances in addition to its new committed £25 million debt facility.

* Progress with Tomb Raider: Underworld remains encouraging and the game is
scheduled for worldwide release before Christmas 2008

Phil Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, SCI Entertainment Group said:

“Today we have significantly strengthened our relationship with Warner Bros. one
of the world’s largest media groups, to create an exciting strategic
partnership, giving us increased scale in the North American market, to the
benefit of all our major franchises.

“The new financing puts us in a clear position to deliver on the strategic
business plan which we announced in February with focus on cornerstone studios
and core franchises, delivering high-quality, world class games.”

Kevin Tsujihara, President, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group, added:

“This investment underscores Warner Bros’ commitment to becoming a major
presence in the video game business, With SCi’s new management team in place
along with their track record of rich franchises like Tomb Raider, Hitman and
Deus Ex we believe we have formed an exciting partnership and a powerful engine
for growth.”

Firstly, what will these games be played on? The answer is not a console as we now know them and not a PC. The main gaming device will be the humble high definition television, with the addition of a very powerful gesture interface. All the games, all the processing power and all the storage will reside in remote servers, it is the only way they can possibly work. They will be so vast and involve so much interaction that it would be impossible for them to reside in individual home platforms. Advances in the internet will make this work.

The game itself will be like entering the most amazing theme park with almost infinite possibilities. Here are some of the features:

• A number of racing circuits including the full F1 season circuits. Where you can race in any vehicle ever made (and some that won’t be made) any time you want against the same vehicle or a variety of vehicles. Driven by other humans or by bots. Race a Caterham R500 against a Ferrari 312T, against a Ducati 999 against a Porsche 917 around the Nordschleife in the wet.
• An airfield where you can go and fly any aeroplane ever made anywhere you want and in any way you want. Take an F22 to the Battle of Britain. 
• A cinema where you can watch any film ever made any time you want.
• Pitches and courts for every known ball game where any time you want you can play with whoever you want against whoever you want.
• Lots of shops where you can buy an immense variety of both in game and real world items.
• Your own apartment with amazing social networking tools a hundred times more powerful than FaceBook and MySpace combined. The apartment is uniquely furnished and decorated with items you have bought from the stores. There is a television on which you can watch any TV station in the world, or replay any television programme ever broadcast. And a radio that has the same level of abilities.
• A holodeck where you can play an immense variety of games from a development of what we now call FPS, through RTS to MMOs and many other genres, some of which have yet to be invented. Everything will be possible. Many players will write their own games, or part of them, either alone or (mainly) in teams. The level of immersion and the suspension of disbelief will surpass the best Holywood capabilities. Interaction, connectivity and non linearity will prove their enormous superiority.
• An amusement arcade with hundreds, maybe thousands of different arcade games for you to choose from. All the great classics from gaming history will be there. This will be casual gaming heaven where you can just drop by for a few moments fun, or an afternoon of classic arcade action.
• A casino where you can play games of skill for money. This will be a major money earner for the game publisher.
• An adult area, strictly for 18+. Where adult things happen.
• A religious area with churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and every other kind of worship possible. Tree huggers, Jedis and witches welcome.
• A self improvement area with schools and colleges. Enrol on a course to improve your language skills or get a world class tutor to explain to you the differences between the different schools of Greek philosophy. The Open University will be here as will hundreds of other learning institutions.
• Nightclubs and discos where you can go and interact with other players. Win friends and influence people. Maybe find someone to visit the 18+ area with.
• Internet and knowledge aggregators of every kind. You will have the sum of all human knowledge at your fingertips, ready to take and use elsewhere within the game, or even in the real world.
• Advertising will be everywhere, just as it is in the real world. The big difference is that adverts can and will be interactive.
• Police and courts. Where the laws of the game are upheld and justice is seen to be done.
• And so much more, I am limited by my imagination. When this game happens it will contain the creativity of thousands and will surpass our wildest expectations.

In this scheme of things what we now know as the TV industry and the Film industry will become just small, subservient parts of the game industry. The game industry will be by far the biggest entertainment industry on earth and will be as big as industries such as automobiles. Eventually it could be bigger than the oil industry.

A game will no longer be something you buy and own. Piracy will be impossible. Payment will be by a combination of (possibly) monthly subscription and (definitely) micro payments for the facilities and services used. Certain gaming celebrities will be allowed to use it for free or be paid for being there. They will be part of the attraction of playing the game.

You will be able to dip into the game for a few minutes or spend your life in there. And you won’t just be playing it at home. Your mobile device (to call it a phone any more is patently silly when it does so many things) will also connect to the game. So you will be able to play anywhere.

So when is this going to happen? The answer is now. We are already some way along a pathway that will lead us to this. As the months, the years pass more of this is coming to fruition. You can see the milestones along the route with your own eyes.

And what will this game be called? Xbox Live is a very good bet, as are Steam and Sony Home. Outside possibilities include Second Life and WoW. Of course it could come the other way and be MySpace and FaceBook. Or it might even be called Google.

• Just recently we have had a small spate of information about the effect that games have, the Byron Review and Grand Theft Childhood, which disprove the alarmist muck raking that we so often experience from ignorant journalists and politicians. Now we have another report. This time a book on gaming and addiction, entitled Video Game Play and Addiction. I happen to think that Addiction to gaming is a far bigger problem than sex and violence in games. But it is not the fault of games. It is just that some people have an addictive personality and can become addicted to anything. Well, that’s my theory, I’ll tell you more when I see the book.
• The internet gets whipped up into a GTA IV frenzy. This is going to be the new biggest thing ever in video gaming. Comparable with a big blockbuster film, it will probably gross even more because games are a lot more expensive than watching movies. One fly in the ointment is that, as always, the pirates got there first.
• Jack Thompson is mad. He just sent a letter to the mother of the chairman of Take Two. It starts: “Your son, as you may know (or maybe you don’t know), is Chairman of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., whose most popular video games are the Grand Theft Auto murder simulator games banned in some countries but sold to children here.” And goes on in a similar, ignorant vein. He really needs to read Grand Theft Childhood to realise just how very wrong he is.
• Electronic Arts isn’t evil.This is good news I am sure. It is also an indicator of how much Electronic Arts has changed, they needed to. This shakeout of opinion has come as a result of the takeover of Take Two soap opera. Now the most astute industry observers are fans of what EA is doing.
• Sci/Eidos not interested in being taken over.Instead they are to seek new capital from the markets. Good luck to them in this second great industry soap opera. If I were them I would take the best takeover bid and run. They are far too small to succeed as a global videogame publisher.
• The Daily Mail recycles old alarmist stories whilst ignoring the evidence of all the best experts. This is doubly shoddy journalism. It is repeated and it is inaccurate. The Daily Mail motto is obviously “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
• Analyst says growth in game industry has peaked (not that the game industry has peaked). Robert Higginbotham of Goldman Sachs downgraded game retailer GameStop Corp. “We see GameStop shares as poised for a pullback as industry growth remains on a path toward deceleration from its current peak.” Personally I would be far more worried about the accelerated decline of traditional retail cardboard and plastic video games. Soon retail video game shops will serve no purpose.
• The EU commision has been looking at the implementation of the PEGI age rating system across Europe and has recommended that the implementation be strengthened up. This flies completely contra to what the British government is currently proposing. They want to desert PEGI and go it alone with film based ratings.

Games are a form of intellectual property, like books and film, that, once they have been created, can be copied. Copying a game is a lot cheaper than buying it because the copier is making no contribution to the cost of making the game in the first place. But, obviously, if everybody copied there would be no revenue for games makers and there would be no games.

There are two main forms of game piracy. There is piracy by the individual game player, these days usually over the internet but in the past often by copying using physical media, this is what this article is about. And there is commercial counterfeiting where a professional criminal mass manufactures the game, which is a different matter.

The profile of pirating different platforms is always different because of the technology, the demographics of the users, the state of the market at a given time, relative costs and a number of other factors. What is for sure is that when piracy takes hold on a platform many hundreds of thousands (sometimes million) of copies of a game are made. The huge scale of this theft deprives the publisher of vast amounts of legitimate income and quite obviously harms the game development industry. To think otherwise is to be in self denial.

Of course it is very obvious that not every pirated game is a lost sale. This is because simple price elasticity of demand tells you that far more units will be consumed at a lower price than at a higher price. Yet apologists of piracy use this as an excuse for their behaviour. They try and make out that piracy is a victimless crime. But obviously they are wrong because potential sales are being lost. And the lesson of history is that when piracy on a given platform gets out of hand then it causes huge damage to the game market for that platform. This is common sense really.

The Old Days

The first mass market game machine in the UK was the Sinclair Spectrum. Software was loaded via a tape interface so games were sold on audio compact cassettes. These were very, very easy to copy from a technical point of view. Especially when dual cassette players proliferated and became cheaper. Schoolyard and club copying proliferated on a massive scale and badly hurt the game publishers. Look at a list of games and you can see the many publishers that went out of business or were forced into mergers. A whole range of technical anti piracy solutions were introduced including, for instance, Lenslok. The publishers would not have gone to the huge trouble of these technical solutions if copying had not been a great threat to their businesses. Another solution was budget games, initially at £1.99, then at £2.99, prices at which they were not worth copying. That these budget games proliferated and came to dominate the market is yet another measure of just how bad the piracy was.

I was a director of the game publisher Imagine software, which went bankrupt in 1984, largely because sales came to an abrupt halt when piracy took off. (Imagine had other problems that made it especially vulnerable to a large and sudden drop in revenue.) Another publisher that was badly affected was Ultimate Play The Game (which later morphed into Rare), one of the most highly regarded publishers of games for the 8 bit home computers. Their initial response to the huge rise in piracy and drop off in sales was to raise prices from £5.50 a game to £9.95. The idea being that if customers paid more for a game they would be less inclined to give away copies. However this didn’t work and they laboured on for just one more year after the demise of Imagine before switching their attention to the Nintendo Entertainment System, which did not suffer from piracy. Spectrum and other 8 bit computer owners lost out heavily as publishers put less and less resources into developing for their machine or quit entirely, as Ultimate did.

Then came the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. Once again copying was technically easy so it was rife. Once again it was up to the publishers to come up with technical solutions. So a technology war broke out between the software publishers and the pirates. Measures would include copying in random pieces of text from the manual. The led to a huge amount of photocopying by the pirates until the publishers started using photocopy proof manuals. Obviously all this piracy made revenue generation difficult so the game publishing industry did not blossom in the way we see now. In fact piracy has often been cited as part of the reason for the downfall of these machines.

Consoles Arrive

Then came the game consoles. From Sega and from Nintendo. They had their games held on chips inside cartridges so they were technically difficult and expensive to copy. So piracy didn’t happen anywhere near the massive extent that it had on the Spectrum, Amiga and ST. So the game industry blossomed into what we know today. This was the time when many of the great key franchises of our industry were established.

Cartridges were expensive to make so eventually the hardware manufacturers returned to recordable media. This way they could make vastly larger games with far lower production costs. The first to do this was the Sony Playstation (PSX, later PS1) in 1995 in Europe and America, which used a CD-ROM to load games. Sony had a whole pile of technical anti piracy measures which protected it from piracy for several years. However with the introduction of modchips and the development of PC CD-ROM burners that could burn data in the same modes that the PSX used it was game over. Chipping was nearly universal and game sales collapsed. Pirates were selling their copied games door to door in housing estates, at places of work, in car boot sales and anywhere else they could find a customer. This caused huge problems for game publishers. I was working at Codemasters at the time and we were forced to lay off about 60 people. This was terrible as there were no other industry jobs for them to go to, everyone was having the same trouble. The number of games published shrank dramatically. In 1999 there were 100, in 2000 there were 78 and in 2001 there were just 33. Yet the PSX remained in production till 2006, so software publishing for it collapsed just half way through it’s sales life.

The Dreamcast from Sega came out in 1998 and used a special unique disk format called GD-ROM. Once this was circumvented with things like the Utopia bootdisk it was game over. Piracy became rampant and the Dreamcast died after just a couple of years with over 10 million sold. This piracy is sometimes credited with not only seeing off the Dreamcast but also removing Sega from the console hardware market completely (as ever there were other factors that muddy the waters somewhat, what is for sure is that losing so much revenue did not help). It was a huge loss to the industry.

The PC

The IBM PC has been around since 1981 and was the first home machine to be connected to the internet in massive numbers. So it obviously has a long history of software piracy and has been at the forefront of anti piracy technology. Often this technology had nuisance value as it actually impeded the use of the computer. But the pirates did bring it upon themselves. At Codemasters we published an excellent PC game called Severance, Blade of Darkness which was well received with a Metacritic of 75 and a user score of 9.5. This game was popular, building an active community of mod makers. Yet Codemasters sold very few copies of the game, most people just downloaded it for free from the internet. So the developer, Rebel Act received very little royalties and went bust. Once again piracy damaging the industry.

Nowadays it is virtually impossible to viably publish boxed PC games, most appear on the internet as free bit torrents before they are even in the shops. In fact it is far quicker and easier to pirate a game than it is to buy it. So most publishers, even those with a decades long tradition in PC games, have given up. And the PC gamer suffers. One casual game publisher reported a piracy rate of 92%, which is probably typical. When they tightened up their protection it didn’t help much because people just moved on to some of the many other games that are available for free by bit torrent. Now Electronics arts have started releasing PC games for free, with their development cost supported by in game advertising and micro payments. But the real way to make PC games as a viable business is to make online games (MMOs), these are server based so impossible to pirate. One day virtually all games will be published in this way and piracy will be over.

Today’s Consoles

The PSP is a very popular mobile gaming machine and media player made by Sony. They have sold 33 million. Yet it is a graveyard for games publishers. It has been hacked since early in it’s life, it is simple to copy games onto and everything an owner can want is very easily available for free online. Here are some download figures for PSP games from just one torrent site:

God of War: Chains of Olympus - 94,154
Patapon - 112,183
Ratchet & Clank - Size Matters - 197,113
Crush - 48,959
LOCO ROCO - 163,904
Wipeout Pulse - 116,965
Castlevania X Chronicles - 102,354
Metal Gear Solid - Portable Ops (Not Including Plus) - 231,054
Burnout Dominator - 269,486

So most developers just don’t invest millions into AAA games for it, they would be wasting their money. This lack of quality games on the PSP (obviously along with some other factors) left the door open for the Nintendo DS to become a massive success with 70 million sold. But even this is being pirated now using flash memory cards in dummy cartridges. This will impact heavily on DS game sales and could lead to publishers becoming reluctant to develop for it, as they are with every heavily pirated platform.

The current generations of home consoles, the Microsoft Xbox 360, the Nintendo Wii and the Sony PS3, are all at that stage in the cycle where there is a phoney war. All three machines have good technical anti piracy. Nintendo went so far as to embed a secret second CPU (an ARM) in the graphics chip to run some of it’s system software (they lost $975 million to piracy in 2007). But all three have been cracked (not fully yet with the PS3), click their names for more details. Owners will be able to bypass the anti piracy and play free games. This hasn’t taken off yet but there are signs that it is just starting to. If previous generations of console are anything to go by then piracy on these three machines could soon snowball. And publishers will move their development resources away.

In the meantime Nintendo are making successive popular game releases that look to see if the machine has been modified before they will play. If it has the Wii becomes a “brick” for that game. Microsoft use Xbox Live to look for modified 360s and cancel the accounts of any that they find. And Sony have the advantage that Blu-ray media is expensive to buy and difficult to copy. All these are just current positions in an ongoing technology war. Very many people are putting so much time and effort into cracking these machines that, ultimately, they will find a way round everything and anything the manufacturers do.

 Conclusions

There is one thing that beats pirates on any platform. This is when a game is so big that it becomes a mass culture popular event. The current launch of GTA IV is a prime example. Then a far higher percentage of people just have to have the real thing. A pirated copy just isn’t cool enough. And with these sorts of games there is a massive gift market. All this explains how the rare, exceptional title can still sell well on a heavily pirated platform.

There are the excuses that pirates make that games are too expensive (they are), but then Ferraris are too expensive and I don’t go round stealing them. Then there is the game quality argument, that there is a lot of dross around, which is very true, especially on the Wii. Once again we live in the age of the internet and it is very easy to very rapidly find out everything about every game. Metacritic and Game Rankings will quickly tell you most of what you need to know. Perhaps, as an industry, we ought to publicise these two sites more, just to remove that excuse.

And the game industry continues to grow and prosper, despite the piracy. This is because the proliferation of platforms allows publishers to more easily abandon platforms that are pirated to the point of being uneconomic. Instead they concentrate on platforms where there are windows of opportunity to run a viable business. Either because the anti piracy technology is on top or because there is a sufficient number of honest customers to get a return, even sometimes with a heavily pirated platform. Games with an online element can often be made very pirate proof which has been a major incentive for developers to go down this route.

So for 25 years or so game players have been stealing games in truly massive numbers with zero chance of being caught and punished for their crime. Very often far more copies of a game title have been pirated than have been bought. This self evidently causes harm to the games industry, ultimately leading to less money being invested in games for the pirated platform. So, the game player suffers for his theft by having less games and lower quality games. All pretty obvious to anyone but the pirates who make all sorts of feeble excuses to justify their stealing.

Note: This is my blog, with articles I have written that are pertinent to the game industry. It is not a public forum. All comments have to be approved by me before they appear. And I will only be approving comments that add to the subject. Non worthwhile comments will be deleted and browbeating, heckling, pedantic comments  will be consigned to spam.

I have been in the home computer business for just getting on for 30 years and have seen the amazing transformations that even now continue to happen. Of course the change is driven by people (and the technology that some of them create) so I though I would write an article about one of the most pivotal people in British home computing. So readers who are newer to the industry can get some perspective.

In 1977/8 I was running a computerised book keeping company in Liverpool and I was reading the computer press. Computing and Computer Weekly. In these I read about the exciting new home computers that were being developed in America. And most of these articles were being written by Guy Kewney (and he was also writing for New Scientist). And it was his writing that inspired me to open a computer store. In July 1978 in Liverpool, it was called Microdigital.

There were two things that made Guy very special. The first was that he knew all the senior people in the industry personally and spoke to them regularly. Steve Jobs, Clive Sinclair, Bill Gates, Alan Sugar, he even invited little me to his home where I met his family. This meant not only that he got the story from the horses mouth but also that he could discuss important issues with the people right at the top. As a result his knowledge and understanding of the industry was unparalleled.

The second was his sheer intellectual horsepower. His brain was always working things out in a very incisive way that gave his reporting a disarming depth and breadth. Just reading his articles takes your mind on a journey of adventure and discovery as he reasons with the facts to come to conclusions that would elude most others.

So it was little surprise that as the home computer industry in the UK started to take off he became it’s most powerful and important journalist and advocate. When Personal Computer World started in 1978 he was there, driving and moulding the budding industry with his intellect and knowledge. Guy is certainly responsible for a huge amount of the initial enthusiasm for home computing in the UK. He founded and edited Microscope (which I had done the business plan for) and PC Dealer, then he presented the TV Database programme for 4 years.

All this time he used his huge power and influence for the good. He championed the Nascom homebuild computerin 1977 which resulted in it being a success well beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. He went on to put his muscle behind the creations of Clive Sinclair starting with the MK14 and continuing to the massively successful Spectrum. A huge amount of the early success and acceptance of home computing in this era was because of Guy.

The Sinclair Spectrum went on to become the basis of the British game industry. It is why Britain was, for decades, the number three developer of video games in the world. And it is why so many development teams throughout the world have Brits in them. Guy Kewney’s inspiration and influence lives on in the worldwide gaming industry we see today.

And he is still at it, writing about technology for The Register, where his daughter Lucy Sherriff is on the staff. His website Newswireless is a fascinating place to visit. He still sometimes reports for the BBC, has written for most of the serious newspapers in Britain, is a sought after post dinner speaker and writes columns for Personal Computer World, IT Week and eweek.com. His influence is still massive but now no longer bears directly on video gaming. A pity because we could do with the power, influence and inspiration of his writing.

This is quite amusing. Sony had a five year deal to produce the official F1 game. The license fee was $15 million per year and the deal ran out with the 2007 version. But it has not been renewed yet so there is no 2008 version and with game development lead times there is unlikely to be a 2009 version.

The reason is that Bernie Ecclestome wants more for the license. He feels that $15 million per year is not enough, whilst Sony think that it is quite sufficient. Now maybe Bernie thinks that he can play Sony off against Microsoft. But Microsoft is an American company and Americans don’t have F1 as part of their culture, they prefer the rather crude NASCAR racing. Whereas Sony is a Japanese company and F1 is massive in Japan.

The funny thing about this is that Bernie has now lost $30 million by not having the game for two years. Not a lot to him, maybe, but he will have to sign a new five year deal at $6 million more per year just to recoup this loss. So that means he has to get $21 million a year just to be back to where he was before. Good luck to him.

In the meantime F1 suffers. The F1 game was an impressive marketing tool for the sport. Every year it got the message of F1 over to many millions of people. Some of those will be children who may well become lifetime F1 followers as a result of playing this game.

When I worked at Codemasters, Jim Darling, the chairman, always resented paying license fees to use brands in our games. He always thought that they should be paying us for the advertising they were getting. Now with in game product placement and in game advertising this is starting to come true. But I doubt if Bernie is going to pay Sony to make a game any time soon.