Entries from April 2008 ↓
April 20th, 2008 — News analysis and background
There is a lot going on just now, so here are some snippets:
April 19th, 2008 — Housekeeping
If I don’t blow my own trumpet nobody is going to blow it for me, so here are some of the articles on here that predicted real world events.
Everybody knows now that the iPod/iPhone is going to be a huge gaming success. Apple are putting massive resources into making it so and there are lots of developers working on bringing games to it. There were a couple of articles on here at the end of last summer that predicted this months before any announcements.
There has been a lot of publisher consolidation activity in recent months, this was predicted in advance. Also the role of the film industry in this was explained long before a whole raft of events.
The game industry is riddled with bad management and this article was timed to explain this well before the clean out of the board of directors at SCI/EIDOS.
Then in December, at the height of the Christmas rush there was this article explaining that Microsoft were going to reduce the price of the Xbox 360 and why they were going to do this.
And finally there were a couple of articles about the subsidies that game companies receive in Canada, how these were probably illegal under WTO rules and how the British government should do something about it. Which now, belatedly, they have.
So if you want to know what is going to happen in the game industry there is no need for expensive analysts when you can read the articles here for free!
April 18th, 2008 — Opinion
There have been articles on here before about the sometimes abysmal quality of the game industry management. We have seen evidence of this recently with the senior management clearouts at Take Two, Infogramme and EIDOS. But it pervades at all levels with people being promoted with no training for the management responsibility of their new roles. This is a great pity because the whole industry would work so much better with the application of a higher level of management skills. Development, were most money is spent, is often woefully inefficient with team sizes well beyond what is really necessary and with stretched development timetables.
There are solutions and one is in the postgraduate MBA (Master of Business Administration) training and certification. These courses cover a wide range of skills required for the science of management and prepare graduates to advance up the management structure of an organisation with competence. They are so effective that many organisations have glass ceilings beyond which managers will not be promoted without an MBA.
The business schools that offer MBAs realise that their students usually have jobs and so most offer courses that can be done alongside regular employment. In fact some people think that these courses are better than full time courses because what is learned can be applied in the real world as the course progresses. These part time courses are called executive MBAs and there are also distance learning MBAs. The cost is several thousand pounds a year, but employers will very often meet all or part of this.
The benefit of your MBA isn’t just the training and qualification. There is also the social networking which can be even more important. By the end of your course you will know a lot of senior managers in lots of industries throughout the world. These connections are incredibly powerful and most business schools put a lot of work into fostering them. Not just during the course, but afterwards with all manner of alumni services. As a manager this is immensely useful. You can do things that would otherwise be impossible.
One problem with business schools is that they are not all equal. Some are world class institutions turning out fantastic managers and others are just qualification mills. Because of this there are lots of independently produced league tables. Be very careful about doing your research before selecting your business school, they have different strengths in different areas and choosing the right one can make an enormous difference to your career.
To give you an idea of the realities, my wife is currently in the middle of a distance learning MBA at Warwick Business School, which is rated third in the world for distance MBAs by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The course is over three years, costs in excess of five thousand pounds a year and involves between ten and twenty hours study every week. The more study you put in the more you get out of the course, this isn’t such hardship as the course content is mostly extremely interesting.
In terms of career advancement some people get promotions just on the strength of being on an MBA course. Certainly upon qualifying you should expect a substantial promotion to reflect your enormously enhanced value to your employer. Your career will then advance far more quickly than it would have without the MBA. Quite simply you will be doing a better job and will have the skills and competence to continue delivering after each promotion. Exactly what the games industry needs more of.
April 17th, 2008 — News analysis and background
- John Riccittielo says we have the movie industry worried, in an interview for the Financial Times. He says: “Our industry is passing through a phase where I believe the greatest games will be viewed by almost everybody as being as important as Best Picture at the Academy Awards.” To me he is stating the obvious and is doing so to educate an audience that may not realise what is happening in the real world. Gaming will grow to be bigger than movies and TV combined, this is why the companies behind the movie industry are now investing so much in the games industry.
- Tesco, the huge British general retailer, is launching a digital download service catchily called Tesco Digital. “Tesco Digital will launch next month, offering 3.3m songs with plans to add TV shows and computer games.” There is going to be a lot more of this to come as major companies try to claim a stake in the carve up of the digital downloads market. Anyone who isn’t in is going to lose out big time as digital distribution becomes the main way we receive our entertainment. Cardboard and plastic distribution is a dinosaur.
- BBC iPlayer coming to a “broad range of devices.” Already on the Wii, they mention the PS3, so presumably the Xbox 360 must be on the cards. This looks like a guerrilla campaign by the BBC to bring the internet to a grinding halt and so force people back to watching broadcast TV.
- Tanya Byron compares games to heroin and cocaine on BBC television. You can complain to the BBC here http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/make_complaint_step1.shtml many already have. Add your voice to the common sense we need.
- Sony are doing market research in to why so many PSP owners hack their machines. The answer is simple, if you can steal all your content for free, with no danger of being caught, then why bother paying for it? This is why most publishers don’t develop for it and when they do they don’t invest too much into making a game. Sony need to tighten up a lot on their next generation PSP or it will all happen again.
- Sony say Microsoft are right. Downloadable content will take over from cardboard and plastic distribution. Makes blu ray look like a waste of time then.
- Mario Kart Wii won’t work on a chipped Wii. This is excellent, turning these thieves’ consoles into useless bricks. Nintendo take this very seriously, it is a pity about the DS but I am sure that it’s successor will be a lot more secure.
- Analyst expects GTA IV sales in the USA to be 60/40 in favour of Microsoft Xbox 360. As this will be a massive system seller we are talking about a huge potential blow to Sony here. Winning this battle could decide who wins this HD console war.
And finally a bit of humour. The console war is over.
April 16th, 2008 — Opinion
The book slipped through my letterbox on Monday and I am trying to find time to absorb it all. I have written about it on here before and it deserves further coverage. This is because after several years research and with a $1.5 million federal budget the directors of the Harvard Medical School Centre for Mental Health and the Media have written the definitive (for now) report on children and gaming. And Grand Theft Childhood proves that the ignorant self publicist critics of video gaming have been wrong all along. Hillary Clinton, Keith Vaz, Jack Thompson, Anne Diamond and all the others. Wrong, the lot of them.
Chapter one, The Big Fear, deals with the false preconception about gaming that many have. My favourite quote from this chapter is “The strong link between video game violence and real world violence, and the conclusion that video games lead to social isolation and poor interpersonal skills, are drawn from bad or irrelevant research, muddleheaded thinking and unfounded, simplistic news reports.”
Chapter two, Deja Vu All Over Again, looks at the development of popular culture over history and how every change has been greeted with the same sort of nonsense that games now attract. “Today we view dime novels, gangster films and comic books as fanciful and harmless period pieces. Yet in the years following their introduction, they were each labeled by politicians, religious leaders, social activists and even some health professionals as bringing down the imminent destruction of moral values, culture, the rule of law_even of civilisation itself.”
Chapter three, Science, Nonsense and Common Sense, analyses previous so called research and why it has often been wrong: “Our point is simply this: be skeptical of claims about violent video games.”
Chapter four, Grand Theft Chilhood, looks at the actual results of research with 1,254 middle school students in Pennsylvania and South Carolina. It completely rebuffs the views of the scaremongers and comes down firmly on the side of common sense. They came up with a surprise: “Boys who don’t regularly play video games were more likely than even the boys who played M-rated (adult) games to get into fights, steal from a store, or have problems at school.” There is much to this chapter and it does find that in some children there can be some behavioural correlation with violent gaming.
Chapter five, Why Kids Play Violent Games, contains what it says. Interestingly they found that violent games were often a catharsis and allowed the child to vent emotions. “In our surveys and focus groups, we did something that surprisingly few researchers have done before: we asked the children why they play video games-especially violent games.”
Chapter six, Sex, Hate, Game Addiction and Other Worries, looks at issues beyond violence. Once again the view is common sense and debunks much of what the doom mongers say.
Chapter seven, I’m from the Video Game Industry and I’m Here to Help, looks at the ESRB rating system, and others. It analyses their faults and suggests improvements. Overall “Given the constraints, we think that the ESRB has done a good job.”
Chapter eight All Politics Is Local analyses the hypocrisy of politicians and journalists who have attacked video games with no evidence to support their claims. This is classic: “On October 7, 2005, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill to prohibit the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. This is, of course, the same Arnold Schwarzenegger who made his financial fortune and launched his political career by starring in such violent movies as the Terminator series, Collateral Damage, End of Days, Predator and countless others of this genre. In fact, Schwarzenegger has recorded voice-overs for two Terminator video games. His years of profiting from media violence specifically aimed at teenage audiences belie his new-found political concerns about exposing children to violent media.”
Chapter 9 Practical Advice for Parents has a big go at the real problems created by handguns and (for games) concludes: “For most kids and most parents, the bottom line results of our research can be summed up in a single word: relax.”
Overall a very highly significant book in the development and acceptance of video gaming as just another (superior) form of popular media. Anyone involved in game design, marketing or senior management in the game industry should read Grand Theft Childhood. Obviously we need to protect our children, we also need to have a realistic view based on factual research. Not the emotive lies of a self publicist politician or journalist.
April 15th, 2008 — News analysis and background
The awful government we have in Britain (with a Scottish prime minister) has seen us slide down the video game industry ratings from a long held third (behind Japan and America) to fourth behind Canada. All evidence points to this slide continuing.
However the Scottish government are enlightened, shaming their Westminster counterparts. Schoolchildren there are to be taught how to design and develop electronic games and to create computer animations and feature films. Maureen Watt, Minister for Schools and Skills, said: “There is huge confidence that Scotland will continue to play an important part in the future of video games and interactive entertainment and we are focusing on establishing firm foundations for lifelong learning and, for some, specialised study and careers. A key aim of Curriculum for Excellence is to produce informed, skilled, adaptable and enterprising citizens of the future. The pace of change in the world means that we should be equipping young people with the skills to embrace and use all the tools of modern life.”
Some people take a narrow and misinformed view of what gaming is. Gaming has the advantages of interactivity, connectivity and non linearity. These advantages will see gaming grow over the next few years to be bigger than television and film combined. Gaming will become all pervasive in areas well outside entertainment: education, medicine and management for instance. An example is that all American personnel going to Baghdad now play an MMO based on the city. This gives them not only an understanding of the physical layout but also of the everyday realities of living and working there before they ever leave America.
The opportunities that this ubiquity presents will be enormous. Children educated in gaming will be able to take advantage of a myriad of opportunities. And if this scheme works then Scottish children will grow to outperform their English equivalents.
An added advantage of Scottish independence is that Gordon Brown could no longer be Prime Minister for the English.
April 15th, 2008 — Opinion
Firstly it is important to say that MCV is an excellent magazine staffed by good people that does an important job. There is even an article on this blog praising it and there are a lot of links from this blog to their website. Having a regular, quality trade newspaper is an essential for any industry. People need the news, the background, the knowledge and the advertising that MCV provides. It does a lot for video gaming.
Awards, in any industry, are often thought up by the marketing staff of magazines. They are a cheap and powerful way to get the magazine’s brand over to a wide audience in a way that implies that they are authoritative and at the hub of their industry. The NME awards are a prime example of this at work. Because they are so easy to do and have such a powerful upside potential these awards have proliferated. There are a huge number of them in the film, music and, of course, the video game industry.
I don’t like them and never have. They tend to be clique ridden self congratulation mired in politics and hypocrisy. And an expensive, company paid for, booze up. We won a lot of them at Codemasters. We gave the team responsible for winning the award the silverware till they got fed up with it, then we put it in a cabinet in reception.
In former days I vented my opinion about awards by, for a while, creating alternative, satirical, Bruce Everiss awards that were published in CTW every year (it is very tempting to restart these on here). So my opinion is nothing new.
The MCV awards are a bit different in that they are trade awards from a trade newspaper. So the potential marketing upside is far less than for a consumer title creating consumer awards. But then they do have the benefit of less potential competition for this particular niche. Everyone involved in the awards will have put a huge amount of work into them and the mechanics of them are very professional and well done.
The big problem is that the MCV awards are sponsored. Not only that, they are sponsored by some of the very companies that could win them. This really is a bit Robert Mugabe. No matter how transparent the award selection procedure, and I am sure that at MCV it was, there is still that lingering possibilty of lack of credibility for the awards. Lets take a look at some of the sponsors for the recent awards and what they won.
- Nintendo. Won 4 awards. PR Team, Marketing Team, Games Publisher and Grand Prix.
- Codemasters. Won UK development team. Yet in the same week MCVs sister magazine, Develop, published their list of the world’s most successful studios. Codemasters were 31st, down from 27th the previous year. With five British studios above them in the ratings.
- Gem. Paul Donnelly, their boss, won a Special Recognition Award.
Now obviously this is all coincidence. But I have spoken to quite a few people in the industry about it and there is an underlying sense of cynicism. Mainly about the sponsorship but with that cynicism then transferring itself to the whole awards process and to MCV itself. This is extremely unfortunate. Can’t MCV find sponsors who are not in the running for awards? Or sponsors willing to preclude themselves from awards? It would help perceptions a lot.
Now, to lighten things up, here is the dire promotional video for the awards.
