Entries from June 2008 ↓

Forbes magazine are now speculating that Take Two are going to avoid a predatory takeover from Electronic Arts by instead merging with Ubisoft. This makes a lot of sense.

• From a game culture point of view this is a much better fit. Both Take Two and Ubisoft are good at nurturing original IP to create brands and at giving studios a lot of creative independence.
• One problem with the proposed Electronics Arts deal is that it takes over $2 billion of equity finance out of the industry. Like the industry needs to increase it’s gearing when it is expanding at a phenomenal rate. The Ubisoft merger would retain the equity within the industry, a far better long term idea.
• Another problem with the proposed Electronic Arts deal is that it would give them a near monopoly in sports games. With the proposed Ubisoft merger we would still have two competing sports games publishers. And competition is good.
• Conventional video game publishing has massive economies of scale. A Ubisoft/Take Two merger would give the industry three big global publishers, the other two being Vivendi/Activision and Electronic Arts. These three would then be able to pick up second rung publishers like Sega, EIDOS and THQ.
• If Electronic Arts are to get the best value out of spending $2 billion they may well be better off spending it on quality game development than acquiring a competitor. They are still some way short of where they need to be on putting their own house in order game quality wise.

And of course Electronics Arts win with either outcome because since 2004 they have owned 19.9% of Ubisoft, one of the best investments they could have made.

GTA IV, quite famously, was delayed from being a 2007 release to being a 2008 release because of problems Rockstar were having with the Playstation 3 version of the game. And now Codemasters admit that whilst the Microsoft Xbox 360 version of Grid runs at a solid 30 fps the Playstation 3 version doesn’t. These are just two of the latest of a long stream of disappointments with the comparative performance of the PS3. What is happening here?

The enormous power of a modern game console comes from two processors working together. The CPU (Central Processing Unit) and the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). Console manufacturers have traditionally bought in CPUs from manufacturers such as Intel and IBM whilst GPUs have come from the likes of nVidia and ATI.

For the PS3 Sony wanted to have a technology advantage so they developed, in conjunction with Toshiba and IBM, the Cell processor. A clean sheet design with many innovations this took $400 million and four years to develop. The intention was to use two of these in the PS3, one as CPU and one as GPU. However at the last minute Sony realised that the Cell GPU wasn’t up to the job so they went to nVidia and bought their 7800GTX GPU. This gave them a number of disadvantages:

• It wasn’t designed or optimised as a console GPU. It was designed and optimised as a PC GPU.
• The whole architecture of the console was compromised by the last minute change.
• The 7800GTX has less raw processing power than the Microsoft Xbox 360 GPU.

Microsoft had their fingers burnt by not owning the chips in the original Xbox, so for the 360 they decided that they wanted to own the rights to both processors. They sat down and co designed their GPU with ATI. By doing this they were able to optimise it’s capabilities for video game playing and also they were able to design it into the elegant system architecture of the Xbox 360. They also gave it a lot of raw power.

So although the Platstation 3 has a more powerful CPU than the Xbox 360 it seems to be less powerful as a gaming machine. And real world results with real games have so far proved this. As Richard Huddy of ATI said in an Edge magazine interview: “I think Xbox 360 technology is likely to outperform PlayStation 3 technology by a pretty healthy margin in the long run.” It looks like the GPU is holding the PS3 back.

Any game industry marketeer is accustomed to thinking at least nationally and often globally. So it may seem strange to pay attention to the local press and politicians, yet it is essential to do so. Having the right local image can help in hundreds of ways and prevent harm in more hundreds of ways. Because it is the local community in which the company sits and does it’s business. And it is where many staff live.

Now that gaming is increasingly mainstream it is easy to work local perceptions to your advantage. And if you are part of a cluster of gaming companies in one locality you can work together for your mutual advantage.

Leamington Spa in Warwickshire is a town built on the Victorian belief in the medical properties of mineral spring water. After that it became a manufacturing centre in support of the vehicle manufacturing industry. And now it is a game industry centre with Blitz Games, bigBig Studios, FreeStyle Games, Supersonic Software, Slam Productions and Aqua Pacific. Very close to Leamington are Codemasters, CustomPlay Games and fishinabottle. This is a sizable presence and makes a major contribution to the local life and economy. A lot of highly paid gaming professionals live in Leamington.

When I worked at Codemasters I entertained both local MPs, James Plaskitt and John Maples and kept all the local press on our press release list. Now that gaming has become more mainstream and Leamington has become even more of a centre there is room for creating a far higher level of local awareness of the industry.

Yet most people who live in Leamington do not realise what is there. They are living in a world class cultural centre for gaming and they don’t know it. The town websites don’t mention gaming and neither does Wikipedia! This is a failure by all those gaming companies which would take very little to correct, to their mutual advantage.

What applies in Leamington applies to a huge number of localities world wide. The upside of bolting down your local image is great compared with the amount of effort involved.

S. Shyam Sundar, professor of film, video and media studies at Penn State has been doing some interesting original research on the effects of video games on an individual’s creativity. “Video games are not just for entertainment alone. We are trying to figure out how they can aid in education as well.”  “You need defocused attention for being creative. When you have low arousal and are negative, you tend to focus on detail and become more analytical.”

The subjects of the experiment, 98 undergraduate and graduate students, were asked to play a popular video game, Dance Dance Revolution, at various levels of complexity. The students took a standard creativity test after playing. When the researchers ran a statistical analysis of the emotional variables and the students’ creativity scores, they found two totally different groups with high scores.

Players with a high degree of arousal and positive mood were most likely to have new ideas for problem solving. The statistical tests also revealed that creativity scores were highest for players with low arousal and a negative mood. In real-life terms, the study appears to indicate that after playing the game, happy or sad people are most creative, while angry or relaxed people are not.

“We are not looking just at creative games, but what emotional elements of games can serve as an engine to spark creative thought and new problem solving skills,” said Sundar, who is also a founder of the Penn State Media Effects Research Laboratory.

• Phil Harrison makes interesting prediction. In Eurogamer he says: “Alone in the Dark is a beautifully crafted single-player adventure game. I don’t think the industry is going to make many more of those. I just don’t think consumers want to be playing games that don’t have some kind of network connectivity to them, or some kind of community embedded in them, or some kind of extension available through downloadable content.” I happen to think that he is wrong. Video gaming has the enormous advantages of interactivity, connectivity and non linearity. The first of these is compulsory, the other two are optional. Which leaves room for unconnected single player games. Like chess, Tetris and Sudoku. To give an analogy in a book a picture is worth a thousand words, this doesn`t mean that every book has to use pictures.
• ELSPA and BBFC in tussle. The Byron review of the game industry said that we should enter a consultancy period to consider her proposals. This is good as it is an opportunity to oppose her worst proposal, that the BBFC run game age ratings instead of PEGI. The existing system works so it is stupid to change it for an expensive, bureaucratic system that is UK only. The industry has said as much. But the BBFC is ignoring the consultancy period and implementing Byron as if they have already won. Presumably they expect their implementation to stifle debate. It is nice to see ELSPA standing up for the industry, we don´t need the BBFC. All the BBFC offer the industry is extra work and extra expense with no conceivable advantage to anyone except their own bureaucracy.
• TV show and MMO to be developed simultaneously and to evolve together. This is excellent and groundbreaking. If they play to the strengths of the two different media they could create an amazing gaming experience. Further proof of how rapidly gaming is evolving as mass entertainment.
• Netflix and Xbox to team up? This has been on the cards for a while and places movies as an integral, but junior, part of the gaming experience. Which is about right.
• Ubisoft has $1.2 billion war-chest and is going to use it. The competitive advantages of scale in traditional games publishing are such that they are forced to do this to keep up with EA/Take Two and Viacom/Activision. The industry is distilling down to a handful of giants.
• Valve announce Steam Cloud. It is amazing the pace at which Steam is being developed, Microsoft could learn a lot for their Xbox Live service here. These latest additions mean that saves and configuration options will become persistent across a user’s Steam account as they are held server side. Also coming are driver auto-updating and a per-game system requirements checker. Great features for the PC gamer.
• The ESA are in worse trouble than I thought. Now they have gone to war against the Gamepolitics website.This is not something that a trade body should be doing. Saying: “calling GamePolitics a news site is as laughable as saying there’s a Cuban free press”. Is not what they should be doing. Expect this whole ESA situation to get worse before it gets better.
• Sony stop work on two major first person titles. Eight Days was well into development whilst The Getaway was somewhat earlier in the production cycle. This is a major and surprising move. What are Sony up to?

Since the very beginning of video gaming there have been reviews and to go with those reviews there have been scores. These have been useful tools for the public when coming to a buying decision, especially when games are expensive to the point of being overpriced. And as a tool for the publisher to get an independent (supposedly) view on the merits or otherwise of their game.

Of course scores have been the subject of abuse. By publishers buying a drink, or even more, for the reviewer or their boss and maybe even using the blackmail of advertising spend. By journalists being deliberately controversial to court publicity for themselves or their journal. I experienced this at Codemasters when Edge gave Severance, Blade of Darkness two out of ten which was just pure sensationalism from them. Other examples are Amiga Power giving International Rugby Challenge 2% and Sega Zone giving Socket: Time Dominator 0%. These abuses from both sides reduced the credibility of an individual score for a game.

So it is especially useful if you can see a lot of different review scores for a game at the same time and so discount the obvious aberrations. This is what Game Rankings does and I have used this countless times as a tool to help in my work. Most notably to prove to the directors of Codemasters that their game quality was slipping in comparison to their direct competitors.

Then in 2001 Metacritic came along and changed the world. Firstly they convert all the review scores into percentages, then they average them to come up with one figure. (They also weight the average so more respected reviewers have more influence.) This single figure to represent a game is a very powerful thing and everybody in the industry is far more aware now of game Metacritics than they ever were of individual review scores, they have become the standard benchmark for the industry.

In 2004 Jason Hall of Warner Brothers started putting Metacritic scores into contracts with game publishers in order to protect his brands. Their royalty payments became higher if the game received a low score. Publishers seized on this idea with their contracts with developers, whose income therefore no longer depended purely on sales, it also depended on Metacritic and therefore review scores and therefore game quality. This practice has now become widespread throughout the industry with stories of a million selling game netting it’s developer zero income because it’s Metacritic was below the contractual minimum.

Investors too have caught up with the importance of Metacritic and now a company’s stock price will go down sharply when a new game gets a bad score (and vice versa). This can change the value of a company quite markedly on the basis of the magic number.

With all this it will come as no surprise that game developers now remunerate their staff partly on the Metacritic scores that their work produces. Bonuses are often  directly tied to the score.

The simple fact is that there is a very strong correlation between review scores and sales with only the occasional exception. “Activision Chief Executive Robert Kotick says the link was especially notable for games that score above 80%. For every five percentage points above 80%, Activision found sales of a game roughly doubled. Activision believes game scores, among other factors, can actually influence sales, not just reflect their quality.”

John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts, uses Metacritic as one of the most important measures of the performance of his company and is unhappy when they go down, telling Wall Street analysts “Our core game titles are accurately measured and summarized by these assessments, and that is a very big deal.” He is determined to get the company average score over 80, which is a good target for everyone in the industry to have.

And finally, for consumers spending $60 on a game, Metacritic is one of the best ways they can be sure to get value for money. 

So now it is fixed and none of the scans can find any more nasties. The computer is working better than it has for ages as the whole process fixed a lot more issues than just the Virtumonde. But I am not convinced, all these scanners are only as good as their databases, which inevitably lag behind the real world.

So why don’t you try it on your computer? Run all four scans and see what you find. You will quite possibly be in for a nasty surprise. And always update the scanner database before using it, without the latest definitions you are wasting your time.