Entries from November 2008 ↓

It is very important to understand that for Microsoft the Live service is the main event. All the Xbox consoles serve as are nominally pirate proof dongles to access Live with. In fact the original iteration of Live cost more to develop than the Xbox that used it did. And it has given Microsoft by far the best video gaming portal. Which has also served as a significant USP in the console wars as well as being a revenue stream for Microsoft and many publishers and developers. It is one of the most important entities in the whole of gaming.

With, quite literally, billions of dollars riding on it, the Live service needs to be excellent. And it need to be all things to all people. Microsoft have tweaked the service endlessly for six years, this was evolution.  But NXE today is different. Today is Revolution.

So why are they doing this:

• The Live service had grown like topsy and was starting to creak and groan in places under the strain. It needed a major rejig to become more elegant and handle the massive upcoming further growth.
• We are at the cusp of content delivery moving away from boxed product at retail towards it being delivered online.
• The Xbox is evolving from being a gaming machine to being an entertainment hub. This puts a whole pile of new demands on how it works.
• The centre of gravity of gaming has moved away from hardcore towards casual. And the player demographic is evolving to become everyone. Live needs to be a suitable tool for this new audience.
• The Xbox is shortly going to acquire a gesture interface. Live needed to be adapted to be suitable for this shift in control philosophy.
• The competition are catching up. And in a few areas are ahead. Microsoft needed to leapfrog this to ensure that their superiority is cast iron.
• The huge investment of people and money by Microsoft into Live means that there are always lots of great new things they want to do.

The thing that has caught most people’s attention is the move to Avatars, which change the whole look and feel of the service. More important for me is that they have fixed two problems I have discussed on here in the past.

The first of these was the lousy database front end. Live was designed to host 200ish pieces of content but now has over 20,000. No wonder it wasn’t working very well. Amazon have no problem handling hundreds of thousands of items in an elegant and user friendly way. So it can be done. And this is a major part of the revisions. It will be great to see how this pans out.

The second problem was the weak social networking. Gaming and social networking are converging but one person doesn’t have time to maintain lots of different social networks. So social networking needs to be in the portal, not in the individual games. This is what Steam has done. Microsoft have now moved a long way with NXE to enhancing the community experience on Live with their Party system. But there is still a lot more to be done if they are going to compete with Facebook.

Overall NXE launch is the most significant event in gaming this year. It changes forever the nature of what gaming is and what a game machine does in the home. A lot of people at Microsoft will be watching nervously to see how well it works now they have released it on the world.

We have all done it. Played a game right through the night. The first time for me was Game Boy Tetris. Which was probably a good thing in that this game was proven to increase brain activity. Like Brian Age, but 20 years earlier. Of course Tetris was a linear game and the Game Boy was a stadalone device. These days, with connectivity and non linearity, games are vastly more addictive.

We all also know someone who has dropped out of education to some degree because their gaming took up too much time. In fact many people have dropped out of life because of it. And you have to argue whether or not this is a good thing. People have freedom of action and if they prefer an online world to the real one then that is their business. The danger is that they are not contributing to society and if everyone did it we would be in a fine mess.

So perhaps the game developers and publishers have a duty of care to prevent game addictiveness becoming too much of a social problem. World of Warcraft (by far the biggest culprit) now has a rest system that rewards you for taking a break. And it has powerful parental controls, as also do most gaming platforms.

But is this enough? The simple fact is that gaming is fantastic entertainment. Better than anything that has ever been done before. So of course it is addictive. When you play your brain is flooded with dopamine and orexin. Which is a very nice to experience. Stop playing and you have to withdraw from the effects of these neurotransmitters. Which is not nice.

So our society has to learn and to adapt to the addictive effects of gaming. It is necessary to accept the reality. We live in a society with many worse forms of addiction: gambling, alcohol, nicotine and hard drugs for starters. And there are far more sociopathic behaviours than addictions. So in the overall scheme of things game addiction isn’t the end of the world.

Gaming is growing massively and will soon be bigger than television and film combined. This is because gaming has the technical advantages of interactivity, connectivity and non linearity. No other entertainment medium can compete with these. These 3 technical advantages have the added benefit of making anti piracy measures relatively easy to implement. In fact a game console’s main role in life is to act as an anti piracy dongle.

This anti piracy advantage is a great bonus for the games industry. The music and film industries are suffering horribly from thieves precisely because their products are impossible to protect. However the game industry is extremely complacent precisely because of these technical advantages. So everybody does far less than they should and could to prevent piracy. And with our guard down it is very easy to have a disaster. This happened with home computer gaming and PS1 gaming. It is happening right now with PC, PSP and DS gaming.

And now the Microsoft Xbox 360 could be heading for this same disaster. Basically it has become very easy and very common to chip the console to bypass the copy protection. And most customers would rather steal games than help to pay for their development. Microsoft’s only recourse is to close the Xbox Live accounts when they detect a chipped deck playing a pirated game. This is circumvented to a large degree by having two decks. One chipped for playing stolen games and one not chipped for using Live. An extra deck only costs as much as three games.

But how bothered are Microsoft? Free, stolen games will make the Xbox even more desirable over its competitors and so will give Microsoft a great USP in the console war. Also Microsoft are almost certainly making a profit on every console sold, even at the new low price points. It is such an elegant hardware design. And then they have all that regular monthly income from Live.

The real losers are the publishers. And via them the developers. If a game platform is pirated excessively then publishers can vote with their feet. There are plenty of other platforms they can spend their time and money working on. This is what they have done with the PC and PSP. And the stupid game thieves end up with no games being made for them to steal.

So the danger for Microsoft is that publishers abandon their platform. It no longer works as an anti piracy dongle. This was part of the downfall of the Dreamcast. In fact the bigger problem is publishers deserting the whole console business model. There are areas of gaming that are growing much faster and which are pirate proof, offering far better prospects. In fact a lot of the console game business looks like people doing it just because they are in the habit of doing it. You can all name publishers doing this.

One thing is for sure, Microsoft must really get their whole anti piracy strategy a lot better for the upcoming Xbox 720. It would be sad if the billions they have invested in console gaming became a dead end.

This is the biggest UK new game launch week in the history of the universe. LittleBigPlanet, Mirror’s Edge, Call of Duty, Gears of War 2, WoW The Lich King, Guitar Hero World Tour, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Shaun White Snowboarding, Wii Music etc etc. More good stuff than we once got in a year. 

Can the buying public digest such a huge glut in one weekend? Obviously not, there will be big winners and big losers here. What is for sure is that games will massively outsell recorded music and video combined over the next few months. We are the biggest entertainment industry on earth. All down to our technical advantages of interactivity, connectivity and non linearity.

The game consoles will also sell in massive quantities, even the PS3. In fact the three platform holders will find it impossible to keep up with the demand for machines, especially as tens of millions of PS2 owners will now upgrade. The chasm between the platform generations has now become so wide that the PS2 is hardly a viable gaming option any more

It is a pity that our industry has become so seasonal. It is a self fulfilling prophecy resulting from the lemming behaviour of the publishers. The industry would be more successful and they would make more money if they were more reponsible and looked after consumers throughout the year. Many games released now will fall on their faces when an October or a February launch would see them as chart hits. Bad game industry management rears its ugly head once again.

• Beyonce Knowles refused to fly without her Xbox 360 and PSP. This is just brilliant. People relate to other people far more strongly than they relate to mere objects, hence the enormous power of celebrity. This story has hit the global media which just adds to our mainstream credibility. Stories like this are priceless and do gaming more good than even the Electronic Arts marketing budget.
• Microsoft come down hard on game thieves, cutting them off from Xbox Live. This is also just brilliant, they cannot do enough of this. If people are not prepared to contribute towards the cost of making a game then they should not be allowed ownership. Xbox Live is a fantastic mechanism for catching and punishing these thieves and there is no reason for Microsoft not to zap every single one of them. It is great to see how these thieves squeal when caught: “ooh well, dammit! this sux ass! was sittin’ here catchin’ up on some hulu stuff… and low and behold i get a message, disconnected from xbl. didn’t think much of it. then i’m imin’ with a friend of mine, and he asks, can you get on xbl… test connection… YOU’VE BEEN BANNED!!! argh. owell”
• Greg Joswiak is Vice President of iPod and iPhone Product Marketing for Apple and thinks that the iPod is a better gaming device than Nintendo’s DS or Sony’s PSP. “Whereas a lot of these devices [picks up Nintendo DS and Sony PSP] are more in the past. And a big part of that is not just the device itself, which is easier to carry, and has the touch display and accelerometer which is great for gameplay, but it’s the electronic distribution of the apps as well.” These days he isn’t the only one being so bullish about the iPod as a gaming machine. And Apple are spending a marketing fortune to help make it so. Of course regular readers here knew in August 2007 that this was going to happen!
• Super Obama World. Free to play, casual, satirical PC game. Just shows how all pervading gaming has become. The switch to ubiquity has been so sudden over the last 12 months. We live in amazing times.
• Harmonix founders Alex Rigopulos, and Eran Egozy, received USD 150 million last quarter from Viacom for beating targets and will get a final payment in 2009 which will exceed USD 150 million. All part of the acquisition of their company and far more than the parties on either side were expecting. All down to the phenomenon that is Rock Band.
• Shari Redstone resigns her post of chairperson of Midway Games. You have to wonder what is going on here. Massive losses, going nowhere, too small to be a global player, not keeping up with the market boom. They are just so ripe for being M&Aed.
• Keeping on the M&A theme, Ubisoft has acquired Massive Entertainment and with it the World in Conflict franchise. This fits in with what Ubisoft said that they would be doing and just adds to the fantastic organic growth that they are achieving. They really are superstar publishers and show everyone how to get it right. A very sharp contrast indeed to Midway.
• More analysts think that the game industry is recession proof. And there is more evidence to back them up. People are extremely reluctant to give up entertainment and video games are brilliant fun as well as being supremely cost effective. Most gaming is done for free. All of which I was saying a year ago.

So yesterday I signed up to two things that are hot at the moment. Twitter is microblogging. 140 character messages from mobile phone or computer. Full on it looks like this: http://twitter.com/public_timeline 
And here is my little beginning: http://twitter.com/Bruciebabe

Naymz is yet another form of social networking. But this time it serves as a central point for everything you do on the internet. Here is mine: http://www.naymz.com/search/bruce/everiss/2335582
It has good tools for importing your address book so it is easy to get going. If you can be found at multiple places on the web this makes good sense, as you can see from my entry.

I read in the Independent newspaper on Sunday that the sale of Volvo heavy trucks was 115 units when for the same period last year they sold 41,970 trucks. A drop of 99.7%. But in these difficult times stuff still needs to be moved around and old trucks are still wearing out. In the same newspaper it is reported that Bob Diamond, president of Barclay’s Bank had a £20 million bonus last year and Roger Jenkins, their Middle Eastern chairman, probably had double this. Perhaps they will now buy some Volvo trucks to help get us out of the trouble they have contributed towards getting us into.

So, as you can see, the world is nuts. And so it is with game retailers. I have already written about how their business model often now depends on selling the same game repeatedly in the secondhand market. But with the game publisher only getting paid once per game. Thus depriving the people who actually make the game of the income needed to pay for development. The retailers are shooting themselves in the foot by forcing the publishers to adopt other business models such as online distribution.

And now the retailers are at it again. Despite the game retail business being the biggest it has ever been they are worried about the economic downturn. So the UK game trade press is reporting that retailers are concentrating on stocking the big AAA hits and are cutting back on everything else. Thus depriving their customers of a rich diversity of choice. You can see exactly where this is going. The publishers are going to be even further hacked off by high street retail. Non plastic and cardboard business models will become more popular sooner. And then the high street will have less and less games to sell. They are like turkeys looking forward to Christmas.