Entries from April 2008 ↓

In Britain we have a mechanism whereby you can petition the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street online. Citizen activism in action. Only it isn’t, I have signed a few of these and at the end you just get a pathetic apologist message and nothing is done. Just as you would expect.

This one is about the video game industry in the UK. Sign it if you want, I have. Here is the wording:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Provide tax or other incentives to support the UK computer and video games industry.”

“We are looking on in horror as flagship UK company Eidos who created the iconic Lara Croft, is facing problems of competing in a global environment.

The UK games industry requires tax incentives or some other assistance to maintain a competitive market for global publishers. According to Tiga, the trade association for UK developers, the number of independent studios has shrunk from about 400 in 2001 to 150 today. Much of this is because publishers such as Ubisoft of France, Sony of Japan and EA of the US have purchased the high performing studios.

It is evident that studios based elsewhere are making efforts to extract what grassroots talent the UK has. The FT wrote in 2007 Montreal is offering to pay about 40 per cent of the salaries of the SCi developers and to give them a tax holiday. Such grants have enticed global publishers, such as EA and Ubisoft, to set up in the city.

We need the same to support UK talent in this industry that is expected to grow phenomenally in the next 3 years, but with rising costs in development more staff are required and it is increasingly less attractive to fund these larger projects here, and almost impossible for independent studios to start production.”

I thought the EIDOS problem was bad management. But other than that our industry is exporting itself to Canada, for a lot of reasons. In fact anyone in our industry would be a fool not to go. Gordon Brown is not going to change that, he thinks that video games cause knife crime.

In Britain we have become accustomed to a popular daily press that is ignorant and misinformed about games. Yet they still feel free to expose their ignorance in regular articles knocking video games. It is annoying and tedious. The Daily Mail is especially vexing with incredibly stupid articles such as this one by Anne Diamond. Janice Turner of the Times thinks that games are “crack cocaine for kids” and won’t let her children play them. Giles Whittell, also of the Times is equally ignorant and also deprives his children of games. And Jenny McCartney had a mindless rant in the Telegraph.

Against this backdrop of gross stupidity it was amazingly refreshing to find an article in a British daily paper that talked sense. The Guardian is not something I read regularly. Incredibly intelligent and well written articles are counterbalanced by an editorial attitude that treats socialist theory, totally discredited by Margaret Thatcher, as if it still has some validity in the modern world. It is the sort of paper that is read by teachers and social workers.

The article is written by Naomi Alderman and is titled “If we deny children access to all computer games, we deprive them of a rich and magical experience” which is an excellent start. But it gets better, she really knows what she is talking about: “As a child in the 1980s I had both a television and a computer in my bedroom. The computer was a ZX Spectrum 48K.” So she writes sensible stuff: “The world of Grand Theft Auto does contain violence and misogyny; but then, so does The Godfather, or Goodfellas. So, for that matter, does The Iliad.” and “ But just as a responsible parent wouldn’t hand their child a copy of American Psycho or sit them down in front of Marathon Man without any further discussion or comment, games can and should be part of the ongoing conversation between parents and children about the world.” and so much more good sense.

She concludes with this eminently sensible and informed paragraph: “Computer games can be works of art and literature – they’re still developing. The stories they can tell, and the experiences they provide, are increasingly sophisticated and glorious. And that, of course, is the point. The world that today’s 10-year-olds grow into will offer so many rich experiences via video games: the real neglect would be to deny our children the opportunity to understand and enjoy them.”

So, when it comes to British popular journalism, this article is a revelation. Please read it. The contrast between this enlightened piece and the bitter ignorance of the Mail, Times and Telegraph is stark. Of course 20 years from now when the dinosaurs of fleet street have died off we won’t have this gaming ignorance problem, but in the meantime it is refreshing that at least one columnist knows what they are talking about. Even if it is in the Guardian. 

It looks like what it takes to be a successful blogger can be bad for your health, according to this New York Times article.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

My attitude to this blog is a lot more laid back. It is more fun than anything else.

Just recently Electronic Arts has announced that they are cutting back on their boxed PC releases, including Madden NFL ’09. Some have interpreted this with doom and gloom as being a sign of the demise of the PC as a gaming platform. In fact nothing could be further from the truth, the Electronic Arts announcement is just symptomatic that people find that it is cheaper to steal boxed PC games using bit torrent instead of buying them. There is far more to gaming than boxed product and it is in these wider areas that the PC is king.

The PC is ubiquitous in a way that consoles can only dream of. They are in every office and most home in the west and many people use two or even three different PCs every day. Most of these PCs come with Microsoft Windows and that means they come with a bunch of games, including solitaire, probably the most played video game in the world. So many times in offices I have seen bored secretaries playing this. And so many times on aeroplanes I have seen bored executives get out their laptops, to play solitaire. Amazing for a game which was originally written as a mouse usage trainer.

Then there are the 200+ million people who play online casual games every month. Both downloadable and browser games. Services such as Pogo.com,  Sandlot Games, Big Fish Games, Boonty, PlayFirst, Reflexive, RealArcade, and Trymedia Systems. These are growing at a huge rate and as Flash becomes more powerful, so casual games become more sophisticated.

MMOs have huge audiences. World of Warcraft has over 10 million subscribers. And there are a whole pile of games with millions of players: RuneScape (6 million), Habbo (86 million avatars created, 8 million monthly unique users), Maple Story (nearly 60 million), Dofus (4 million), Ragnarok Online (25 million), Guild Wars (3 million), Club Penguin (4 million) and Webkinz (over 3 million).

As gaming and social networking slowly converge we are seeing more games played more often on the big social networking sites. The 69 million users of Facebook have a wide range of games including the famous Scrabulous. This is a massive growth area of gaming and we have a lot of innovation to come. 

I have written about Steam on here many times before. A digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications platform with 15 million accounts. This could very well become the replacement for boxed product when it comes to traditional PC game releases. Certainly there is no reason for every publisher not to put every PC title they publish onto this platform.

There is more, but just looking at the above you can see that consoles pale in comparison. The PC is truly the gaming king.

• Sega problems unfold, as mentioned on here before.  Since then it has shut down its Korean (one of the largest markets in Asia) office, as well as discontinuing the development of its entertainment complex in Japan’s second biggest city, Yokohama. Now they have closed their UK racing studio which developed Sega Rally. It wasn’t too bad a game with a Metacritic in the mid seventies. Presumably launching on the same day as Halo 3 didn’t help sales, but that is hardly the fault of the (now redundant) development staff. Sega must be seriously up for acquisition now, good management could really do amazing things with their storehouse of gaming brands.
• Toothbrush video game. This is brilliant and further proof that we are still only at the beginning of gaming possibilities. Interactivity can be used for so many things and in so many ways.
• It has been common knowledge for some time that Microsoft are developing a gesture controller for the Xbox 360. Now some details have leaked out including a sketch and the news that Rare were entrusted with the software side and have run into problems. As ever Microsoft want to get a USP by having better software than their competitors, an admirable policy that will give them huge competetive advantage in the long haul.
• “Ruthless” EIDOS/SCI taking the scalpel to it’s business. So lots of redundancies, fortunately at a time when there is an industry wide shortage of development staff. That EIDOS/SCI was allowed to become so bloated and inefficient, making many sub standard games, is down to the huge incompetence of the former management. Fortunately as time goes by the less competent management are getting cleared out of our industry. Many publishers have had clear outs at the top. However I could still name quite a few that are in positions well beyond their ability.
• Molyneux talks rubbish in Gamasutra interview. He says: “Because I wouldn’t say there were exponentially more people playing computer games today than there were when Game Developers Conference first started. Fifteen years ago? Twenty years ago?” Which bears no relationship to reality, with 72% of American now playing games. It is people like Molyneux, developing games for a narrow “hardcore” niche, that have held the industry back. They have failed to capitalise on the mass market possibilities of interactive entertainment. Now Nintendo, MMOs, casual gaming. flash etc are beginning to prove the huge potential that is out there. There may not have been so much growth in the kind of games Molyneux makes, but that is what happens when you develop for a niche.
• Stephen King talks sense on video games violence. “It was too easy for critics to claim — falsely, it turned out — that Cho Seung-Hui (the Virginia Tech killer) was a fan of Counter-Strike; I just wish to God that legislators were as eager to point out that this nutball had no problem obtaining a 9mm semiautomatic handgun. Cho used it in a rampage that resulted in the murder of 32 people. If he’d been stuck with nothing but a plastic videogame gun, he wouldn’t even have been able to kill himself.”
• Sony PS3 the best selling console in Europe. Beating Wii, PSP, DS and 360 for one week. (Well, according to VG Chartz). The reason is simple Gran Turismo 5 Prologue (a PS3 exclusive title). So you can imagine what is going to happen to Xbox 360 and Sony PS3 sales when GTA IV comes out. I just hope that there are massive warehouses of stock of these consoles. The demand for them will be far bigger than it was at Christmas.
• The Grid, 10.000 times faster than broadband. Created to handle the immense quantity of data created by the large hadron collider this technology is trickling down to massively boost the existing internet. Even large games will download in just a few seconds. Cardboard and plastic content distribution will be dead.

The United States of America is nearing the end of the second term of probably their worst president ever. Globally the subject of derision, his policies, both domestic and international, have been a litany of incompetent disaster. His replacement will have a massive job of repairing all the harm and getting America back on the rails. Barack Obama is the man for the job and if I were American he would get my vote.

As this is a game industry blog I will explain a little more from our perspective. When it comes to gaming Hillary is a disaster. Probably because of her age she just doesn’t understand games. They are just another form of popular media. So she wrongly attacks games from a position of ignorance thinking that this will get her votes. It won’t because 72% of Americans are gamers now and can see right through her misplaced anti gaming zeal. She needs to read the Byron Review and Grand Theft Childhood if she want’s to get a grip on reality.

Obama is no where near as nakedly populist. Or as ignorant about games. Maybe because he is younger, or maybe because he seeks out expert advisors and listens to them. It is almost as if he is trying to come up with policies that are right. This will be a shock to an America accustomed to the Bush/Clinton dynasties.

In February Obama said: “We’re going to have to parent better, and turn off the television set, and put the video games away, and instill a sense of excellence in our children, and that’s going to take some time.” And now he has reinforced this: “Government can’t do everything’ when it comes to raising a good society……….turn off the television, turn off the video games.” Some people have interpreted this as being anti video games. But it isn’t, it is pro good parenting. And he is right, children should have balance in their upbringing.

Finally, whatever you do, don’t vote Republican. It’s them that got America into this mess.

Cut scenes are mini videos put into games as a way of presenting information to the player of that game. To me they look like lazy short cuts to doing the job right. The advantages of a video game are interactivity, connectivity and non linearity. When you have a cut scene you throw all of this away. It is far better to do the job properly and get the information over in the game play. Why should we be dropping our standards down to those of an inferior media? It is interesting that Valve, one of the most highly rated game developers, don’t use cut scenes.

The QA department is a key component to the development of a video game. They graft through all the complexity to make sure that everything works as it should. Frequently they are looked on within the company as being lower down the food chain than the artists and programmers. This is something I never understood because it is QA that ensure the quality of the game. What I would like to see is a very greatly upgraded QA department. Renamed Polish, Focus and QA. Their job would be to polish the gameplay to get it to Super Mario Galaxy like level and to work continually with a whole range of focus groups to ensure that the game is what the public want. Obviously to do this would require a few more staff to work on some of the extra job functions. But the result should be commercially more successful games.

Outsource all your art to low cost countries. It is a long, long slog to create all that content, so why pay Western prices for it when it can be done just as well for a lot less money? Hollywood learned this lesson many years ago and so now 90+% of their animation is done this way. All that needs doing in the West is the storyboard, the characters, the set and key frames. The long graft of converting this into a finished film is done in the Philippines, India, Vietnam and other places with their low labour costs. There are companies you can sub contract to, but the ultimate savings come with setting up your own art studio in one of these locations. Choose a place where there is already plenty of film animation and you will have a ready trained work force.

Design multiple languages into the game from the very beginning. Some languages take up more space to say things, some languages need different character sets and you can make life easier for your lip sync talent. If you take these into account then language conversion will be a lot easier and cheaper. As the installed base of platforms rises so quickly in so many markets it is essential to keep on top of the cost/benefits of language conversions. Very many more must be viable now than they were just a couple of years ago.

Frame-rate is more important than content. I have seen this so many times, overambitious game designers trying to put too much on the screen and do too much with it. So the frame rate drops to embarrassing levels. Our job is to entertain and that means suspending disbelief. Nothing brings that disbelief back quicker than a stuttering frame-rate.

Development crunch is just bad management. That is all there is to it. Mankind has developed management systems to control far bigger and far more complex projects than game development. Aircraft carrier and fighter aircraft design and manufacture for instance. In fact games are still pretty small in management terms. The tools, techniques and training are out there to run game development projects properly. It is not rocket science.