Entries from June 2008 ↓

You will remember this recent story where I pointed out the necessity of local marketing  giving the example of Leamington and the eight video game development companies there and how invisible they are. An immediate reaction was that a reader of this blog modified the Wikipedia entry for Leamington Spa to more accurately reflect reality.

I decided to follow my own advice and sent the article to all the local games companies, all the local journalists and to all relevant politicians both local and national. As always with such things this largely fell on deaf ears. The press just ignored it (so far). Three game companies replied, Paul Ranson from Slam Productions, Peter Williamson from Supersonic Software and both Philip and Andrew Oliver at Blitz Games. A few of the politicians replied but only one, Bill Gifford, proposed any action.

Bill Gifford is both a Leamington Town Councillor and a Warwick District Councillor and has been in local government since 1995. He wrote to me asking if we could put some sort of event together that could promote Leamington and the Games Industry. Action! So I proposed an initial meeting which Blitz Games were kind enough to host.

In the meeting we were able to get a lot over about the nature of the industry, it’s role and contributions to the local community, it’s future and it’s problems. Councillor Gifford said he would work to get the Leamington town website updated to reflect the presence of the gaming industry. But more than that we now have a politician of some power and influence who knows what he is talking about when it comes to games. Philip Oliver gave us a tour of Blitz which was very impressive for Councillor Gifford, as seeing a development team at work for the first time always is. Even to me, having seen a lot of this over the years, the Blitz set up is massively impressive and they obviously have a lot of good staff there.

This is not the end of it. We now have a relationship. There will be further meetings, hopefully bringing in some of the other developers and interested parties in the area. And hopefully finding ways that the industry and the politicians can help each other with their respective agendas.

So, marketeers out there, reach out to your local community. It is not difficult and you may be surprised just how much everyone can benefit.

• Very bad news for any gaming enthusiast. The British appeals court say that modchips don’t circumvent copyright protection. It is only by protecting copyright that game developers can be paid for their work. And if they aren’t paid for their work then they won’t make games as we have seen so many times before.
• Now the federal police are taking an interest in Jack Thompson with a visit from two federal marshalls. He brings this on himself so it is impossible to be sympathetic. He has harmed people’s attitudes towards gaming with his lies so we can only hope his credibility is now zero.
• TIGA, the game developers trade organisation in the UK, has asked the government to fund research into the videogames industry to come up with standardised information. And they do have a point, when you are engaging in debate it does help if you know what you are talking about. One thing that does seem to be missing from their list of items is growth rate. Because if you extrapolate to get the coming potential of this industry for the national wealth the figures would be staggering. Which is why Canada is so clever in investing so much in gaming.
• How a computer game is made. I like this a lot. The BBC have made a short video that gives a glimpse of the scale and complexity of modern game development. Seeing this would blow away a lot of people’s false preconceptions about our industry. Well worth spreading knowledge of this video, every bit of understanding of what we do helps.
• It only takes £12,000 to develop a casual game. According to the people that know. This is just like the 8 bit days all over again, where the game mechanic is the most important thing. One thing that will come out of this is a lot of innovation.
• ELSPA are spot on with their battle against the BBFC. The current system works, why bring in an expensive and un-needed bureaucracy which would have the added disadvantage of being parochially British? So it is good that ELSPA are using the well proven marketing tool of a bit of consumer research to help make their point. It seems that a good majority of adults in the UK would prefer a pan European game rating system. Personally I would have expected most UK adults not to care what happened to the game age rating system, they are more concerned with house prices and paying for car fuel.
• The more I read about what John Riccitiello is doing at Electronic Arts the more I like it. The Need For Speed team were working to a 12 month cycle which was hammering product quality. Now there are two Need For Speed teams working on overlapping 24 month cycles, a tactic that nVidia used to overtake it’s competitors in the GPU market. Let’s hope it works because product quality is paramount when games are so very expensive.
• David Braben of Frontier Developments says: “95 per cent of videogaming degrees are simply not fit for purpose” and “these degrees are a waste of time for all concerned. We are facing a serious decline in the quality of graduates looking to enter the industry – the death of maths, physics and computer science graduates is hitting us hard”.  With 80 videogames degree courses available at UK universities only 4 are accredited by Skillset. We can see what’s happening here, just about every kid wants to be a game designer and the universities are happy to take their money off them with academics traditional disregard for the real world and the needs of industry. What is needed here is a professional association for people who work in the game industry. Just like accountants, doctors and lawyers have. Which lays down standards and sets professional exams. So the university course would be a foundation, followed by a couple of years apprentiship in industry, followed by professional exams, after which the person would actually be qualified. That would raise standards.

Robbie Bach is the president of the Entertainment & Devices Group at Microsoft and recently he had what turned out to be a very frank and interesting interview with a small group of reporters in San Francisco.

He said that with Zune the investment was in software and services, it wasn’t just a device and he gave the example of Zune social, which to me seems to be a trojan horse for all sorts of things. This comes out when he says “But the entire Zune effort is also part of a broader effort in connected entertainment.” He also made the point that Zune is a multipurpose entertainment player so it would not surprise me to see a Zune phone very soon. When it comes to games they are being very careful not to repeat the failings of the PSP. But he admits that when it comes to getting emotional response to a brand they fall behind Apple, Sony and Nintendo. Something that is very evident when you read fanboy rantings on the internet.

About Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death (RRoD) failures he was surprisingly open, presumably in the belief that they now have it sorted. “It’s one of those things that nobody is proud of. On the other hand, we are in a complex technology space. You learn from it. You do the right things to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The best thing you can do is tell your customers you want them to keep enjoying the product and here is what we will do on replacing it for free.”

Most interestingly he said that Microsoft did not plan to go first in the current console generation. They planned to launch about the same time as Playstation PS3, but Sony had problems and slipped from their launch date. But he is happy with the result ”It has given us a leg up in a number of places that are super important. It has given us a leg up with game developers. It has given us a leg up from an economics perspective. It helped us expand Xbox Live quickly.” So it looks like they are planning to go first with the next generation “At a strategy level, if you asked if we wanted to be first again, I would say yes.”

He admits that Japan is not good “Mathematically, our share is up a lot in Japan but it’s still small. We are still in single-digit share.” But is optimistic for their future there “We’re very persistent. When I was in the Office business, Ishitaro was the No. 1 word processor in Japan. Now the No. 1 word processor in Japan is Microsoft Word. That took seven years.” Doing the Japan marketing task for Xbox will certainly be an interesting job for someone.

There is loads more and it is fascinating stuff. Here is the full interview. Part 1. Part 2. Part3.

We are beginning to see some unintended consequences of the Wii Fit craze. First there is the craze of videoing nubile young ladies using it and then posting those videos to the net. Like this and this and this and this and this. 

But there are more serious consequences, a women only insurance company has done some research and discovered that  £20 million worth of damage a year has been done to homes by women exercising. With an average of just 21 square feet of free space in today’s living rooms it is hardly surprising that furniture, ornaments and anything else nearby goes flying. And with 86 per cent of the respondents already owning a Wii – or planning to buy one things are going to get a lot worse.

Other news is that Wiii Fit is being used for injured  athlete rehabilitation, experimentation says that thoretically 2 year olds can use it, it has been telling thin people that they are fat and an employee has managed to blag one on expenses. 

I can see a lot more milage in this. It is a new human experience and millions of people are using it so all sorts of strange things are bound to happen. And this will only increase as more games use the balance board.

In Britain we have an honours system which goes back for many centuries. The most conspicuous honour is a knighthood as in Sir Richard Branson, Sir Clive Sinclair and Sir Alan Sugar. But there are a whole pile of other awards The Order of the British Empire, for instance has the following levels (in descending order) Knight Grand Cross, Knight Commander, Commander, Officer and Member.

The British video games industry has been recognised with honours a few times. Jez San became an Officer in the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2002, Peter Molyneux in 2004, Ian Livingstone in 2006 and Jane Cavanagh in 2007.

Some people disagree with the honours system. I have a good friend who is an extremely senior British diplomat who should have a string of honours by now. But at the very beginning of his career he told the FCO that he didn’t want to receive any such things. So he remains a plain Mr.

However I think that they are a good thing as they bring deserved reward and recognition to people who have made significant contributions to national life. Even if they were just trying to make money at the time. These awards have the added virtue of bringing publicity to people and to what they have done.

So it is with David Darling now being made a Commander in The Order of the British Empire (one level higher than the previous gaming recipients). In terms of his contribution to the gaming industry in Britain this is very well earned. It also adds enormously to the credibility of the whole industry and it is a huge pity that the current British government does not take the business of gaming as seriously as the honours committees do.

David’s brother Richard has also received the same award but their father Jim, strangely, has not. In my opinion Jim has contributed just as much to the British games industry over many years as his sons have. Let’s hope this omission is rectified soon.

According to Wikipedia a Pikey is a pejorative slang term used primarily in England, originally referring to travellers, sometimes known as gypsies. In recent years, the definition has become even looser and is sometimes used to refer to a wide section of the (generally urban) underclass of the country, or merely a person of any social class who “lives on the cheap”. This seems to be the meaning intended by Stephen Fry in an episode of QI, grouping together “hoodies, pikeys and chavs”, and intimating that these people are of a sort who “go out on the town, beating people up and drinking Bacardi Breezers”.

So it is hardly any surprise that when Martin Brundle, the ex F1 driver, used the term on live television whilst reporting the Canadian Grand Prix he got into trouble. His exact words were ”There are some pikeys out there putting down new tarmac at Turn 10. Are they out of the way yet?” and seven people reported him to Ofcom, the broadcast regulator. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, the racial equality watchdog, condemned the phrasing, saying ”This word has been used on television in the past and is highly derogatory. They have caused much offence in the past.” Last December, a Sussex gardener, Lee Coleman, is believed to have made legal history when he was convicted of racially aggravated harassment for using the word.

Against this background you may be suprised to find out that one of the Colin McRae video games, played by many millions of people, contained the pejorative word Pikey. The license plate of one of the in game cars was P 1 KEY. And nobody reported it to anyone.

• Apple announce the revised iPhone. The camera is still a load of rubbish. Other than that they seem to be going for world domination with greatly uprated capabilities and a much lower price and an easy route to lots of applications. What Apple are doing isn’t rocket science which is why they are acting so quickly along so many fronts. They want to keep clear blue water between themselves and the following herd.
• The Sony PSP continues to sell massively. But it is wrong to think of this device as a games console any more. In real world usage it has become a cheap media player that just happens to also have the capability to play (usually pirated) games. Meanwhile Ready at Dawn, developer of God Of War: Chains Of Olympus, are yet another game company to quit the Sony PSP.
• nVidia say that on the PC “The pirates are just killing the developers - and I think it’s really unfair what they’re doing.” How this once mighty gaming platform has fallen. They go on to say “No-one is going to make a PC-exclusive game in the future.” And the pirates lame excuses include that they think their actions cause no harm. Just how stupid are they? 
• UK government wants it’s game industry to go to Canada. This is the only logical conclusion you can come to at their refusal even to give gaming the support that film gets. Gordon Brown and his ministers are totally detached from reality. They are throwing away billions in national wealth for Britain due to their complete ignorance. ELSPA are still obviously failing in their duty to educate politicians.
• Jack Thompson throws his toys out of the pram. You have to worry that this guy is actually deranged. His actions bear no relationship to the real world, facts and logical thought patterns. It is almost as if he will do absolutely anything just to draw further publicity to himself. I hope that Fox News and other who have hosted his lieing rants over the years are ashamed of themselves now he is banned.
• Xbox 360 Sales Pass Xbox Sales in the UK in half the time according to the latest guess from VGCHARTZ. With the bulk of this generation HDTV console sales yet to come this is a great achievement. But given their price, game catalogue and graphics power advantages they could, perhaps, have done better.
• Xbox 360 is doomed according to a whole load of analysts. But before you give them any credence ask them what their predictions were for the Wii in 2007. Analyst predictions for this generation of consoles have been mostly wrong, I don’t know anything that is going to get them to change this habit.
• Porn Addiction isn’t as Embarrassing as Gaming Addiction according to an American psychiatrist. I think that the critics of video gaming (The Daily Mail, Fox News, Hillary Clinton, Gordon Brown and other ignorant self publicists) concentrate, wrongly, on sex and violence which are irrelevant non issues and they miss out totally on the real problem of gaming addiction. There are many worse forms of addiction such as gambling and tobacco but still we should be looking at gaming addiction so we can better understand it.