Entries from May 2008 ↓

News Corporation, famously, were unique amongst the big Holywood studios/global media companies in having no game publishing presence. Despite the fact that gaming, inevitably, will grow to be bigger than film and TV combined. This anomaly has been put down to a number of causes including Rupert Murdoch’s advancing years and the possibility that he was waiting for the right target to swallow up.

In fact amongst it’s sprawling worldwide media interests the only things that are gaming related is IGN Entertainment which owns a whole cluster of gaming websites and a 51% stake in mobile phone content company Jamba!, hardly the vehicles to take on Viacom, Warners, Electronic Arts and the other global game publishers.

But a recent 180 degree turn in editorial stance at the Times newspaper, part of News Corporation, was perhaps an indication that things were about to change. And so it is. Although still modest for a $28.6 billion turnover company this is a move that would only happen with the approval of head office corporate strategists and probably Rupert himself.

They are dipping their toes into a rapidly growing sector of the market by starting a casual gaming portal under the aegis of TheLondonPaper, initially with 200 titles but with more being added every week. Obviously they could ramp this up very quickly with different skinned versions for all the News Corporation’s global newspapers. Which would make it a significant player in the casual gaming market almost overnight. A clever tactic.

Every trade or industry needs it’s own association. Around 1979/1980 I was involved in founding the Computer Retailer Association in the UK for an industry that had only just been invented. They are essential because they represent the common interest. To politicians, press, the public and many other interested parties. And the association provide the talking shop to sort out just what that common interest is.

Video games is in more need of a trade association than many other industries. Firstly because our products are very badly misunderstood by many (maybe most) politicians and and journalists. And the power that these people wield is such that their ignorance can be, and is, evidenced in actions that harm the gaming industry. We need a common voice to stand up to this ignorance and, hopefully, to educate these people not to act so stupidly.

The second reason we need trade associations so badly is that the gaming industry is immature, so it is always changing rapidly. Just look at the way game product delivery is currently moving from boxed product to digital download. These changes present huge challenges that are often better met jointly.

Thirdly we are an industry that has more than half it’s product stolen. And the governments and police don’t care. It is only by working together that we can build any sort of protection against this company breaking problem.

There are many other benefits but you can already see the importance.

In the USA the trade association is the ESA (Entertainment Software Association) and in addition to the above it also runs E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) and supports the ESRP (Entertainment Software Rating Board). It has done an excellent job and  most companies that can join have.

So it is immensely disturbing that it has suddenly started losing members. Activision, Vivendi Universal, LucasArts, and id Software have all suddenly departed. Losing one would be bad, two would be a nasty coincidence, three would be unfortunately clumsy. But to lose four is very serious. For the ESA, for the game industry and for the companies that have left and those that remain members. There is no smoke without fire so presumably one day we will find out what happened. In the meantime it is looking very bad.

• Wii Fit drops out of the UK top 40 from number two the previous week. Nobody saw this coming, an almost unprecedented sales collapse. Was this supply constrained or is it an indicator of what is to come when the Wii bubble bursts? Obviously the former and Nintendo are lucky that there is no serious alternative purchase so, at the end of the day, they won’t lose too many sales.
• Nielson Report: PEGI ratings work well for customers. This is stating the obvious but 93 per cent of respondents to Nielsen’s survey recognised the PEGI system, and nearly half of all parents questioned found it either ‘extremely useful’ or ‘very useful’. Is this a nail in the ridiculous, Byron inspired, idea to use BBFC in the UK? Let’s hope so.
• Haze “really is this year’s most significant gaming disappointment”. Two things here. Firstly the constant IP problem of hype Vs reality, it is immensely difficult to deliver great products that live up to what a good marketing department can do. Secondly are the continuing problems with PS3 games intractable? Is gaming mediocrity built into the hardware?
• TIGA and ELSPA in the UK team up to promote the country’s video game industry to the government, parliament, and the media. Hardly news really, this is what they exist for. It continues to elude me as to why we allow the industry to be weakened by having these two seperate organisations. One voice would be so much more effective in every way.
• In game advertising growing pains. We are learning as we go along here and certainly some people have been building castles in the sky. Anything that interrupts play is going to do the advertiser more harm than good and in game items are more likely to be ignored than to have a subliminal impact. This idea of advertisers sponsoring individual plays of a game is excellent, it gives the gamer all the right messages. We are making progress.
• European videogame market is bigger than the American videogame market and is growing fast. Obviously it is also a lot more fragmented, by language, by retailers and popular media and by physical distribution. So it takes a lot more knowledge and hard work. But it is worth it. The gap will open up further as Europe is less affected by the coming economic downturn.
• 90 minute cutscenes in MGS4. The good news is that you can skip them. Given that video games have the enormous advantages of interactivity, connectivity and non-linearity it is ridiculous to throw it all away and lower ourselves to the technical limitations of cinema.
• Japanese learning game market goes mad. In the short term this is amusing. In the long term it is speeding up the evolution of valid working edutainment. We will more quickly learn what do do in this potentially massive market and how to do it. This bears very close watching by every industry strategist, it will be a big part of our future.

Jack Thompson is a rabid, self publicist American lawyer who has made a reputation (and presumably money) for himself by a continued attack on video games, often using mistruths and deception to make his case. For instance here he is talking about the Virginia Tech shooting, misleading the public with a web of deceit. The Virginia Tech review panel report found no significant connection between gunman Seung Hui Cho’s video gaming and the April 2007 shootings at the Virginia Tech campus that resulted in 32 deaths. According to Cho’s roommate “Cho engaged in were studying, sleeping, and downloading music. He never saw him play a video game, which he thought strange since he and most other students play them.” Jack Thompson was telling the American public lies.

Then he appears on Fox News after the Illinois school shooting as a “Campus Shooting Expert” spouting complete and utter lies, blaming it all on video games once again. Any Campus Shooting expert would know that 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. 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. Once again Jack Thompson is clearly seen filling the public’s minds with total lies.

The truth of the matter is that violent video games reduce crime significantly because they act as a catharsis.

So it is fantastic to see hoaxer Jack Thompson get his well deserved come uppance. The Florida courts have found him guilty on 27 charges including:  

• Knowingly making a false statement of material fact or law to a tribunal
• Knowingly disobeying an obligation under the rules of a tribunal
• Communicating the merits of the case with a judge before whom the proceeding is pending
• Using means that have no purpose other than to embarrass, delay or burden a third person
• Engaging in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation
• Engaging in conduct in connection with the practice of law that is prejudicial to the administration of justice, including to knowingly or through callous indifference disparage or humiliate litigants or other lawyers
• Making statements that the lawyer knows to be false or with reckless disregard as to the truth or falsity concerning the qualifications or integrity of a judge

What we need to know now is how are the American news media going to undo the harm they have done over the years by using Jack Thompson to deceive and lie to the public with his self publicity hoaxing?

Victories are inevitable in the technology war between platform holder and hacker/pirate. No matter how clever the former are the latter will always catch up. This has always been so. Once a system is cracked the floodgates open as the word spreads on the interweb.

Now the Nintendo Wii is cracked, supposedly so it can become an open platform for homebrew. But what it means is that the pirates will exploit the same loophole so they can steal people’s work instead of paying for it. So the Wii will become even less worthwhile for third party publishers.

“The Twilight Hack is currently the only safe, public way to run homebrew on an unmodded Wii. The Twilight Hack is achieved by playing a hacked game save for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess which executes a homebrew elf file, boot.elf, on an external SD card. Examples of such homebrew elf files can be found on the Homebrew apps page.”

This is a sad event for every game professional because their work will now be stolen, if they work for the Wii. But even if they don’t there will be less revenue coming into the industry and so less money for development salaries, which will impact on everyone. With the Nintendo DS, the Sony PSP and the PC (for boxed games) already owned by the pirates there are less and less ways for developers and publishers to make a living.

Perhaps the only saving grace is that the more casual audience, courted by Nintendo for the Wii, are less likely to have the incentive to steal than the more hardcore demographics of the two HD consoles.

Large scale digital distribution of IP is a recent phenomenon so the people who are running the businesses that do this are learning on the job. A lot of the time they are getting it right, so we are seeing the amazing successes of iTunes, Xbox Live and Steam, for example.

However they don’t always get it right and this article is about one example of this. Basically it costs effectively zero to “stock” an item of IP on a download service. All it takes is a little bit of space on a server. So all content should be available for all eternity. That the public like and want this kind of thing can be seen in the remarkable popularity of old 8 bit home computer games that are over 20 years old and which are still very widely played on PC emulators.

Now XBLA is still very small indeed, just over 130 titles, so you would think that these would be secure. After all the service is expanding very rapidly (Xbox Live Marketplace is up to a million downloads per day) so even a poor seller will deliver something over time. Yet Microsoft have chosen to cull the “underperforming games”. “The title will need to be at least 6 months old and have a Metacritic score below 65 and a conversion rate below 6% on the service.  This way titles are not just considered if they are not selling well or not getting good reviews, but actually a combination of both.  We will also give a three-month notice before delisting any title.  Overall I think you will find this will focus the catalogue more on larger, more immersive games and make it much easier to find the games you are looking for.”

Now it is possible to see the merit in what Microsoft are doing here. Raising the quality of what they host, combined with recent increases in price limit and download size limit, takes the XBLA service to a new, higher level. I believe that a Metacritic of 80 should be the target of any credible publisher. So spring cleaning out the dross can be perceived to have it’s merits by some criteria.

However game quality is a subjective thing. As are the quality of books and films. So no matter how dire an IP offering it will still bring enjoyment to some. Online distribution is a business model that allows for this because you can stock an infinite number of product lines. Which makes the XBLA delisting a little puzzling. Much of what iTunes offers is pretty rubbish but this doesn’t stop Apple listing it. And there is the validity of an IP for it’s own sake, which makes the XBLA cull look like burning books.

The real issue here is probably the Xbox Live Dashboard which, quite frankly, finds itself doing a job it is not up to. Handling just 130 titles should be simple, the Amazon user interface handles millions of items with ease. But the Microsoft Xbox Live offering is pathetic and is struggling. Instead of delisting IP they should be concentrating on offering a user interface that allows more variety and more choice. An environment in which any delisting  would be an unnecessary travesty.

The Conservatives have just won the Crewe and Nantwich by-election from Gordon Brown’s Labour party with a huge 17.6% swing. This is massively good news as it presages our getting rid of the current hated, failed, incompetent Labour government. Which has to be a good thing for everyone in Britain except for all the Labour MPs who are going to lose their parliamentary seats.

But before you cheer too much or too loud it would be good to remember that the Conservative leader, David Cameron, has the typical mistaken Daily Mail attitude towards video games that so many of his generation share. He just doesn’t understand them and that lack of understanding comes out in what he says. Which might just end up being government policy when he wins the next general election.

In the Conservatives paper “It’s Time To Fight Back” they argue that depictions of “extreme, casual and callous violence” have a “coarsening effect on the ethical sensibility of young people”. An attempt to link in game violence with real life violence. An attempted link which is totally wrong and discredited. Surely the Conservatives are not looking for a scapegoat here.

In August last year David Cameron said: ”Yes, tough laws, strong action on the police, but also action to strengthen our society.  And that includes, I think, video games and things like that where we do need to think of the context in which people are growing up.” You can see where this is going, obviously banning GTA IV would strengthen our society. He also said: “the companies which make music videos, films and computer games have a social responsibility not to promote casual violence, the gang culture and the degradation of women.” Notice, no mention of books. Yet books are the worst popular medium for this sort of content. And books have no age rating.

He really needs to get a grip. He needs to learn that video games are just another form of popular entertainment media, like books and film. And that there is no problematic link between violence in entertainment media and violence in the real world. Then he needs to clearly tell the world that this is so. Until then his credibility is undermined.