Entries from September 2008 ↓

• Google launch their Chrome web browser, and pretty good it looks too. However the stand out feature of this and every other Google product launch is just how bad their marketing is. Knol should be setting the world on fire. Lively is mostly misunderstood by the few that know about it. Then there are Orkut, Picasa, Google Health and so many more that are grievously underachieving. Because Google grew organically off product excellence and word of mouth they have never learned to market. It is about time they did if they want their rapidly growing catalogue of products to succeed.
• Disney to double its game development spend to$350 million per annum and buy another developer. No surprises here then. Interactive entertainment will be bigger than film and TV combined. These big media companies have to invest in games to survive. The commercial shape of the industry is changing very rapidly, let’s hope it keeps a few of its little idiosyncrasies on the way to being totally corporate.
• Michael Pachter doubles his software sales growth predictions for the year. So he got it wrong again and is patching things up. You have to ask who would want to be an analyst with the market as crazy as it is now. So many things have come together at the same time with sweet serendipity that it is like the perfect storm. The synergies are just compounding each other to spiral the industry upwards. These are amazing times.
• Microsoft exec says that exclusives are becoming less important. This is one of the most improbable stories that I have ever read in this industry. Microsoft have spent many hundreds of million dollars buying studios, exclusive content, lead platform status and loads of other tactics in their platform war. It has often worked well for them, especially against such a strongly entrenched brand as Playstation. So I don’t see them giving it up any time soon. Perhaps he meant that in mid cycle all platforms have good catalogues so the price of the hardware becomes comparatively more important. That I can agree with.
• Xbox 360 30% price cut in Japan. This could be called “strike whilst the iron is hot” or “don’t mess with Microsoft”. They have been outselling the Sony PS3 some weeks to the point of totally selling out in Japan. So now they are dropping the price to cheaper than a Wii. When they know that Sony are in big financial poo and can’t follow. With some good exclusive Japanese tiles out and more to come Microsoft are in a position of some strength here. And who thought we would ever hear that about Xbox and Japan. And expect similar price drops in other markets as Microsoft tool up for the holiday season.
• Epic gives up on the PC for Gears of War 2. Serves the thieving pirates right. If they aren’t prepared to pay for their games then publishers aren’t prepared to pay to develop them. The PC is rapidly heading into being a casual gaming and MMO cul de sac.
• Sqare Enix bid to buy Tecmo. Industry consolidation can happen so fast that you can miss major events if you blink. Economies of scale are so great in global publishing that only the biggest will survive. And niche players.
• I had to be sitting down for this one. The Daily Mail has actually said something nice about a video game, in this case Braid. This is as epoch making as man’s first supersonic flight. Whatever next? Maybe Fox News will broadcast live coverage of two of their presenters having a gay wedding.

When any totally new gaming platform reaches developers for the first time they are at the bottom of a learning curve. Not only that, they are usually in a big hurry to get a game out as soon as possible after the platform launches. So early games on a new platform are usually little better than the best games on the previous generation platform.

As time passes the developer climbs up the learning curve. How fast this happens depends a lot on the complexity of the platform’s architecture and the availability of good engines, tools and libraries. The Microsoft Xbox 360 has a relatively straightforward system architecture and has had very good development tools from very early in the availability of dev kits. So we would expect developers to be getting close to optimum performance out of it fairly quickly. And this has been borne out by it delivering superior performance in virtually every cross platform game so far. But has the top of the learning curve been reached?

Rod Fergusson is franchise senior producer for Gears of War  at Epic games and has just given an in depth interview for Gamasutra. Interestingly he says: “……with the two to three more years of optimization that we’ve had, we’re much further along than I think, three years ago, we thought we were going to get. So I think we’re certainly approaching the upper end of it, as far as what developers are able to do with it, but just looking at all the demos we saw today — ours and others — it’s clear that all the games just keep improving, and keep pushing that bar.”

And that is the thing really, although they are near the top, games will continue to get better and better on the 360 over the next few years as developers learn new tricks and wrinkles that allow them to coax more out of it and as the engines and tools become further optimised and more powerful. Rod Fergusson says as much: “There will be games in development that won’t ship until 2010, and I’m sure they’ll look killer, just because, again, they’ll have more time with it, and learn from mistakes and optimizations of others. So, I don’t know; I think we’re getting up there, but I still think there’s room to grow.”

Just like previous generations the absolute limit of capabilities is never reached, these systems are very complex and there is only so much time that can be put into wringing that last ounce of capability out of them. However it must be true that now the developers are nearly getting the most out of the 360 and that further improvements will be slower to come. It is the same in every platform cycle.

It is very interesting that the marketing bosses of two different game publishers are using girls as marketing tools for upcoming games. The girls they have chosen, the marketing approaches and the press reactions make very interesting comparisons.

EIDOS/Sci  chose 23 year old Alison Carroll from Croydon to be the new “face” of Lara Croft to promote the latest upcoming version of Tomb Raiders. They make much of her attributes: “Sarah Hoeksma, Eidos Group Marketing Director says;“With her tremendous athletic ability, dance training and striking look we feel Alison embodies all the assets required to be the live model of Lara Croft, and we are really looking forward to working with her.” ” But this has absolutely zero to do with the game. And what is Alison actually going to do?: “Alison will be lining up a host of international modelling assignments, starring in TV commercials, appearing on chat shows and is set to travel the globe over the coming months.” So her body is the asset that Eidos marketing are using.

Alison was introduced to the press doing cartwheels wearing the iconic uniform. She said she had seen a sneak preview of the game and that it was “magical”. Then Alison was rolled out for prime time coverage in the main television channels who lapped it up hook line and sinker. At no stage has the issue of this being exploitative become an issue. Nobody is accusing Eidos of cynical marketing.

Then there is adult actress Tera Patrick who has been made a “special producer” on the THQ game Saint’s Row 2. She is is a bright, well educated lady who owns her own film production company, has a lot of experience directing and producing films and has been involved in two game development projects already, this is her third. She is a keen gamer, with a good knowledge of gaming and has a very high media profile globally. The core demographic of her fanbase is a close fit to the core demographic for the game and there are many opportunities for cross promotions between the two brands. She has been masthead publisher of Genesis magazine since 2003 so has a lot of experience of brand co-operation. She has considerable potential to add value to both the game development and the game publishing side of the project.

Yet, strangely, Tera’s appointment has been met with comment that it is exploitative and cynical when it seems to me that she has vastly more to contribute to a game than a golf club receptionist from Croydon. Certainly her first video was very good at getting the game features accross.

So I think that both marketing departments have done well here. They have succeeded in getting disproportionate global media coverage and their games will sell far better as a result. THQ are trying to build a little known brand up and are competing against the giant that is Grand Theft Auto. So they can afford to be more edgy, in fact it works strongly in their favour in building the brand image. Eidos, on the other hand, have an extremely well established brand, so need to play safe and conform to the existing brand identity. So they make a story about their girl doing cartwheels and going for SAS, firearms and archaeological training. Just enough bait to hook the press when combined with a camera friendly face and body.

In both cases the marketing use of the girls is very sophisticated and shows just how grown up and mainstream our industry is becoming. Which is the opposite of what some commentators say.

High street game retail has never had it so good as it is now, with three console manufacturers all succeeding and an ever widening demographic. But this next year or do are the peak of a wave and it will be rapidly downhill from then. Already high street retail sells a far smaller fraction of gaming than online provides.

Firstly far more games are stolen on peer to peer networks than are bought. So people are perfectly happy to accept delivery of games in this way. Admittedly without paying for them.

Then there is the legitimate online gaming. Habbo, Maple Story, Runescape, World of Warcraft etc with tens of millions of players. Downloadable games from all three platform holders, which is exceeding their wildest expectations. Steam and the other online content providers looking after the PC market. And the 800 pound gorilla that is casual gaming.

The main function of consoles is to act as an anti piracy dongle. And whilst this isn’t broken high street still has a role for this generation. However the world is very rapidly converting to 100Mbps broadband, which makes a console as a media hub based on the internet a practical reality. One which Sony and Microsoft are both working towards with ever bigger hard drives.

An alternative future is to have server based gaming with a fairly thin client in the home, perhaps built into the TV. This approach has the benefits of far lower hardware costs and zero piracy. Microsoft have invested heavily with a Chinese TV manufacturer, probably for this reason and Sony are already a major TV manufacturer.

Then there is the view of Alex St. John of WildTangent who thinks that consoles will die out to be replaced by PC gaming. I am inclined to disagree with this for a number of reasons: cost, lack of standardisation, piracy, lack of platform holder to market it, horrible architecture, poor entertainment hub capabilities etc etc

Download offers a lot of advantages over retail. A far wider range of product would be on offer with no stock problems, delivery is far more convenient with the game loaded direct on your game machine, there is no plastic and cardboard to clutter up your house, cutting out the costs of distribution and retail mean games can be cheaper to buy and publishers and developers have a better business model with a long tail so are far more likely to create niche games.

So the future will definitely be online and could be powerful entertainment hubs or server based gaming. Or both. Or maybe PCs. What is for sure is that none of these options need a high street.