Entries from September 2008 ↓

It seems that just about every young person in the world these days wants to work in video games when they get older. Mostly they want to be “games designers” when they have no idea what the job entails. Some know that they want to be programmers or artists and have a better idea of the skills that they need. To develop a game from scratch and get it to market takes a wide range of skills. And nothing is more important than marketing. You will not sell a single copy of a game without some sort of marketing. And the better the marketing, the better the sales.

So if you are very bright and hard working here are some tips for becoming a game marketeer.

The first thing is to read game industry websites instead of game consumer websites. Then you will see the industry from a different perspective. Look at Gamasutra, Gamesindustry.biz and MCV. I read these all the time. Next you need to get some real world hands on experience. This will give your CV a competitive advantage.
Try the following:
1) Write to the HR departments of game companies asking if you can work an internship (probably unpaid)during your summer vacation.
2) Find home coders working on XNA and iPhone games. There are many thousands of them. Classifieds and forums will help you find them. Ask if you can join the team as unpaid marketing person.
3) Get to trade exhibitions like GDC and E3. You need a trade pass but that shouldn’t be beyond your imagination!
4) As soon as you have the slightest credibility as being a game industry person join Linkedin, then Link in to all your contacts and join the game industry groups there.

Here is an example of someone who wants a career in game marketing proactively enhancing his CV with a game marketing blog:  http://thomcult.blogspot.com/

Obviously you need to go to a good marketing school to get the relevant degree. Be sure to build your management skills. Marketing contains a lot of management. Managing projects, managing money and managing people. Once qualified and working it is very well worth doing an MBA. Marketing people have the skillset to run the industry. And if you are going to run anything it helps to have the training.

• Spore cracked by the “Reloaded” group. Presumably they think that they are clever and are proud of what they have done. Would they think it so clever if they shot themselves in their feet with shotguns? Because that is exactly what they have done here.
• Microsoft announce new Zune lineup, preloaded with two games, Hexic and Texas Hold ‘em. Which may show the direction they are going in. The top model boasts an impressive 120Gbyte hard drive, but still there is no leap in utility to leapfrog the iPod.
• Apple App Store users have downloaded more than 100 million games and applications in the last 60 days. No wonder that Steve Jobs says it is ”the best portable device for playing games on“. And the iPod planned obsolescence rolls on with further primped up models. A lot of people are taken in by this and purchase each successive iteration.
• Massive boost in Microsoft Xbox 360 sales at the new price points, with some models reported to be selling six times more than before the drop. And this is before Microsoft turn up the marketing wick for the holiday season. If they get it right the 360 could become the definitive gift this year.
• It looks like Microsoft are abandoning PC gaming. Giving up because the business model is palpably broken and because they would rather have gamers on the Xbox platform.
• People are beginning to notice the lack of new first part Nintendo Wii games this year and the abysmal shovelware that most third parties are producing. It is almost as if everyone doesn’t have enough faith in the future of the Wii to invest in proper AAA titles. Which makes it look increasingly likely that the SuperWii is just around the corner.
• Google to become a game publisher. This speculative article in Forbes looks at this possibility and the routes Google may use. When you look at the online power of Google and their need to enter new business areas this makes eminent sense. Time will tell.
• Internal development teams are more expensive than external teams. This is pretty obvious stuff and I can recommend a good book by Adam Smith that explains why it should be so.

Since 1981 the PC has been a fantastic platform for video games. We have seen the likes of Quake, Diablo, Half Life, Unreal Tournament and Civilisation. But the business model that brought you these classic, high street retail, boxed games is broken beyond fixing. All PC gamers are going to be far worse off, but they brought it on themselves, by stealing.

Just look at this. Spore is out today, one of the most eagerly awaited titles in ages. And one that could change gaming forever with its intelligent take on user generated content. Yet over 1,200 people have already given it a one star review on Amazon. And none of them have played it. The reason is quite simple, they don’t like DRM.

The fact is that DRM is essential to the industry. Without it you have no sales. Consoles are just DRM dongles that force you (when it works) to only play legitimate games. And often only games sold in your territory. Steam is a DRM service. It forces gamers to have legitimate copies of games. Yet nobody complains about these forms of DRM.

When the DRM is broken people just steal the games and with peer to peer networking and broadband this is actually easier than not being a thief and going to a shop and buying it. So game publishers put ever more powerful DRM software on their PC games. And it interferes too much with people’s PCs. To the point that some honest people buy the game from the shop (so they are not thieves) yet download it using torrents.

The simple fact now is that every single boxed PC game is thieved many more times than it is bought. To the point where it is not worth spending money developing PC games. So only a trickle now come to market compared with the massive previous popularity of the PC amongst developers. And even this trickle will dry up. If people won’t pay for the work to be done then it won’t be done.

So the future of PC gaming is not nice. There will be the MMOs and casual gaming. But beyond that new business models will be the only way forwards. New business models that are far more intrusive to the gaming experience. Like advertising and micro payments. But that is the way it is going to be. The boxed, high street retail PC game is dead. Killed by thieves.

In the past Electronic Arts developed a reputation of buying up smaller but very highly talented development companies and assimilating them into corporate EA, whereupon the spark of inspiration would be lost. This was bad business because time after time the investment was wasted. And the underlying problem is that this is a creative industry so you have to foster that creativity and let it flower.

Obviously EA want to bring a flow of superior product to market so they have cleverly worked out how to get the best out of developers. Basically they use a mix and match bespoke policy with each developer, which contrasts strongly with the one size fits all policy they used before. Each developer gets what they need from EA, no more and no less. If they want to be owned by EA then OK, if they don’t want to be owned by EA that is also OK. If they just want money, fine. If they just want marketing that is also fine. What matters is nurturing the creativity to create great games.

David DeMartini runs their partners programme with a staff of sixty. He says: “EA looks at the top 20 developers in the world and we try to sign anything those guys are working on.” Speaking to developers of all nationalities will bring a global feel to EAs catalogue. Most recently, for instance, he has recruited Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami working with developer Suda 51, which has to be a feather in his cap.

This whole operation is vastly more sophisticated than anything any other publisher is doing. It promises to bring the very best talent under the EA umbrella (in one way or another) and so bring EA the very best games being made. The payoff won’t be quick and they will have failures as well as successes, but over time this policy must work to consolidate and enhance EAs position as one of the top global publishers, even in the face of the global entertainment media giants muscling into the market.

Firstly let’s look at how the numbers stack up. According to the best guesses there are about 30 million Nintendo Wiis in the world, 20 million Microsoft Xbox 360s and 15 million Sony Playstation PS3s. So the Wii has currently sold 50% more than the 360. And 10 million is a lot of units to make up. Here is how it will happen:

• As this site has been predicting for a long time the Xbox 360 is now $199. This is the price point at which historically 75% of consoles sell. However the 360 has got to this point very early in its life, so far, far more than 75% of 360 sales are yet to happen. Currently the Wii is above the magic $199 price point, expect it to come down as predicted here. But even at a new, low, price point the Wii will have difficulty in perceived value against the Xbox 360.
• Sony are making massive losses on the PS3 so cannot bring the price down. All they have been able to do recently is pass on lower hard drive prices by giving customers bigger drives at the same price. As the PS3 and the Xbox 360 are very similar in their capabilities Sony will now lose a huge number of potential sales to the Xbox 360.
• The Wii is for many people little more than a glorified toy. It is just a box for playing Wii Sports or Wii Fit. If these people want proper gaming they will buy a 360.
• The 360 has by far the best catalogue of games in this generation. This is because they launched first, because it is far easier to develop for than the PS3, because Microsoft have invested a lot in exclusives and because 360 owners buy more games than owners of the other consoles. The Wii has some brilliant first party exclusives, but these are relatively few and most third party games are little more than shovelware.
• The Wii is very stunted in capabilites being largely just an uprated gamecube. It’s capabilities are far behind those of the Xbox 360. This is especially damaging in the lack of HDTV support and a hard drive. Comparing the two machines side by side is like looking ar a Ferrari next to a bicycle.
• The Wii is going to have a very short production life, perhaps four years, before it is replaced by a SuperWii that will correct its weaknesses. The Xbox 360 is going to be in production for at least eight years, the last half of that life as the low cost partner to the Xbox 720 (Phoenix) in a two model range. So the 360 has a long time to catch up and overtake the Wii for total sales.
• The 360 is being engineered into a single chip (+memory) combining the GPU and CPU. The effects of Moore’s Law are such that this will become cheap enough to incorporate into televisions, which Microsoft seem to be gearing up to do. Nintendo have no chance here with the Wii, who would want a non HD console built into their HDTV?
• The Xbox 360 has Xbox live which is by far the best online gaming portal there is. Microsoft have built a formidable USP here and are not about to lose it anytime soon. They will invest what it takes to keep their online offering well ahead of those of its competitors. So great will the power of live become that every keen gamer will be forced to buy the hardware necessary to access it, just so as to remain a viable member of the gaming community.
• Microsoft have now made the Xbox 360 commercially viable in Japan by creating the games that the Japanese want. This is a huge turnaround and adds a lot to the potential total sales of the console.

The success of the 360 goes against Microsoft’s traditions, normally they wait for the third iteration of a product to become the market leader. And of course if you add the sales of the Wii to the sales of the SuperWii then Nintendo have the potential to still end up ahead.

Anyone who reads this will know that I hate marketing by rote. One of the prime skills of a marketeer is to use creativity and innovation to leverage competitive advantage. Great Marketeers like Sir Richard Branson do it all the time. And it is conspicuous by its comparative absence from video game marketing.

So it is great to see Electronic Arts pulling this stunt. It has taken over the Last Stop garage in Finsbury Park, north London, to promote the game Mercenaries 2: World in Flames by giving away £20,000 worth of fuel fee of charge. This has hit the national media. And caused gridlock round the filling station.

If it succeed in locking the story of the stunt to the game title it will have succeeded in garnering publicity worth a huge amount more than £20,000. Brilliant stuff.

Last year the global growth in video gaming was vastly more than even the most optimistic analyst predicted. So they upped their estimates for this year. And again the growth is vastly outstripping any one’s wildest dreams. So what has happened to cause this?

• Nintendo have been brave enough to create a succession of games intended for non traditional (or sometimes broader) demographics. Far more than this, they have been even braver and put big marketing spend behind these games so as to reach these demographics. This has been a massive unleashing of the potential that is interactive entertainment.
• We have escaped from the Sony monopoly. By dominating the market for the PS1 and PS2 generations they had no need to compete or take risks. So they held the market back for over eight years, which is several lifetimes in this industry. Capitalism and competition is great. But when it is hogtied, as happened during the Sony monopoly, everyone loses.
• We have three platform holders going for it. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are now each investing billions and using the best brains that they can find both in product and in marketing so as to fight a three cornered console war. The stakes are enormous, this industry is still at its very beginning. Interactive entertainment will grow to be bigger than film and television combined. As in any war we see great advancement. World war two started with biplanes and finished with jets, in just six years. The same leap is happening in gaming right now.
• MMOs mature. This has been an incredible phenomenon. MMOs have gone from text to 2D graphics to 3D graphics to immensely complex alternative existences with hugely powerful social networking. At the same time with games like Habbo, Runescape and Maple Story they have sought out new demographics. There is now a range of MMOs for everyone. But still it is just the beginning. The genre is held back by its dependence on sword and sorcery themes. And commercially by the supposed $1 billion price tag that would be needed to take on World of Warcraft.
• Casual gaming. This is the 800 pound gorilla that has come from nowhere to become a multi billion industry in just a few short years. Traditional gaming was too obtuse and too demanding of the player. The industry was committing self harm in a big way with its dependence on the niche that is hard core gaming. Now we have escaped from that and are reaping the rewards.
• New business models. The industry was stuck for years in depending on high street sales of cardboard and plastic. But gradually subscriptions and then in-game advertising came along. Then premier membership levels on free games and micro payments for in-game items. So now there are lots of ways to make money. And that money gets invested back into the industry. So great has been this impact in such a short time that the once near monopolistic cardboard and plastic business model is in danger of dieing out.
• The interweb and more specifically broadband. Virtually every gaming platform is now connected. This is a huge change, not only in product delivery but, more importantly, in allowing a step change in the level of interaction. And as this is interactive entertainment, this step change has shaken the industry to its roots. At the same time it has magnified the immense advantages we have over older, non interactive, entertainment media. The interweb is also democratising publishing which encourages niche products, which further expands the market.
• Globalisation and consolidation. This is a good thing. It has brought massive outside investment into the industry. It has allowed managers to paint with a broad brush and to take risks. It has attracted the best brains and the best talent. Not only to development, but more importantly, increasingly to management.
• Platform proliferation. I remember, quite recently, when there were just two viable platforms to publish on, PC and Playstation One. Now we have the big three home consoles and in addition their online portals. There are two massively successful dedicated handheld consoles. There is traditional phone gaming, iPod/iPhone, Zune and nGage. The PC has proliferated into a multi faceted platform that is different things to different people. And there are many more. Dedicated handheld games, aircraft seat back gaming and so on. There is even video gaming on SCUBA diving wrist computers! And this proliferation will only increase as the industry becomes massive and as interactive entertainment enters new niches.

The thing about each of these elements (and there are more) is that they don’t work in isolation. They work synergistically together which magnifies and leverages the effect that each of them has. So we are in a virtuous upward spiral of serendipity. Where at long last interactive entertainment is coming out of the shadows and is beginning to give us a glimpse of its true potential. Things may be starting to look big now, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. We are still at the beginning of what we are going to achieve.

It would be unfair (so as to have some balance) not to mention the three biggest problems in the industry:

• Gaming is still badly misunderstood and mistrusted by the majority of the world’s broadcast media. Entrenched ignorant dinosaurs in positions of power make this so. This is slowly changing as the gaming literate generation rises through the ranks. But it is a slow process. The same also applies to the world’s politicians.
• Game industry management is very often poor. This is a legacy from when the industry was very small and there were low barriers of entry for managers. So people’s careers have just grown with the industry without them needing to compete in the area of management skills. I have been derided by senior people in the industry for having some professional management training, this gives you an idea how pathetic and insecure some of these people are. This situation is changing, but it will take time.
• Piracy. We are engaged in an ongoing technical war against the vast majority of people who would rather not pay for their games. Game consoles, effectively, are DRM machines that serve as anti piracy dongles. Once protection is bypassed the business model is broken. This has happened many times in this industry and is happening right now with PSP and retail PC games.

On balance we are still well ahead despite these problems. The fundamental advantages of interactivity, connectivity and non linearity are so great that they overcome all obstacles.