Entries from December 2008 ↓

A merry Christmas and happy new year to everyone. That includes the fanboys of all ages who hurl abuse at me out of ignorance, let’s hope they become more educated and open minded in the new year.

I am taking a little rest from writing these articles. Normal service should resume around the middle of January.

Britain has produced some of the best game development talent in the world. Partly because of our creative, inventive and anarchic national psyche. And partly because of Clive Sinclair who made a whole generation of schoolboys understand assembly level programming. So you will find expatriate Brits in just about every game development studio in the world.

And Britain once owned some of the best development and publishing companies in the world. Much of the development of gaming as an entertainment medium happened in Britain because of these companies. At one stage it looked like we were gunning to become the number one nation in the global game industry.

So lets look at the reality today. Most of the British development and publishing industry is foreign owned. And the industry is not growing anything like it is growing in other countries. After many years of holding the number three slot behind America and Japan we have now been relegated to fourth by the Canadians. But we won’t be fourth for long, soon we will be sixth as the video game industry ramps up massively in Korea and China.

And you all know what caused this national disaster, firstly some abysmal management (many of whom I have met and some I have worked with) and apathetic government (which I dealt with for years). The brilliant development talent was badly let down. Lions led by donkeys. Which is why so many of them voted with their feet and emigrated to lands where their talents are better appreciated. When I go to Linkedin people search and put Codemasters (where I once worked) as the company and Canada as the country it brings up a list of people who I once worked with in Warwickshire who now add value to the Canadian economy.

But despite the awfulness of the current situation there is a time of opportunity coming up that could reverse our fortunes. The first is that most other industries are in a dire state. Only gaming and government bureaucracy are thriving. So lots and lots of really talented people are being made redundant and coming onto the job market. Which means that we can pick and choose the best. We have an opportunity to replace amateur marketing and management with top level proven professionals with the ability to dynamically propel our industry forward. An influx of talent could be the blood transfusion that the withering body of British gaming needs.

The second opportunity is that this loathsome, ordurous, abysmal, execrable, abhorrent, incompetent Labour government will soon be gone. And with them the reliance on the City to be the engine of the British economy. The incoming Conservatives cannot possibly be as bad. They only need to be reasonably competent to be unimaginably massively better. And with them should come a more balanced view of the British economy. Especially bringing much needed emphasis to manufacturing and to knowledge based industries. And gaming is a knowledge based industry.

The British are brilliant at knowledge based industries. In fact much of what the City did was a knowledge based industry. It was just misapplied to high stakes gambling instead of to goods and services that people really want and need. And there are a plethora of world class knowledge based companies that prosper in Britain despite the best efforts of the loathsome, ordurous, abysmal, execrable, abhorrent, incompetent Labour government. Companies like ARM, Ricardo, Atkins, WPP and so many more. We have a fantastic heritage and foundation on which to build and any government would be foolish not to.

So who could make sure that we take advantage of these two massive opportunities? Who will be the catalyst to be at the centre of things and make sure that UK gaming prospers as it could and should? The answer of course could well be the trade associations, ELSPA and TIGA. But do they have the clout and intellectual horsepower to do the job? Time will tell. Really, as I have said many times before, we need a Games Council just as all the other creative industries have their Councils to promote them and look after their interests.

And will this happen, will the British game publishing and development step out of the gloom into a bright sunny upland of opportunity, jobs, profit and contribution to the national economy? Despite the fact that they very well could I doubt that it will happen. Firstly the amateur management are well entrenched and know their limitations, so they see anyone with competence as a threat. They don’t realise that the key to success is to always employ people better than yourself. And I see no evidence that the incoming Conservative government realise the economic importance of the games industry. Everything their senior members say about games is negative, misinformed and plain ignorant.

So, as ever, we live in interesting times.

The video game industry tends to be pretty interweb literate so, with the popularity of social networking, there is bound to be a fair bit of this going on.

Facebook is the mother of all social networks with more members than the population of the planet. Because it is Balkanised geographically it is difficult to search thoroughly. However there are some interesting groups.

• PC and Video Game Industry Professionals. 5,339 members. It features:
  • Articles, white papers and research
  • Links to helpful websites/books/community resources
  • Websites and companies of note
  • Features and interviews
  • Job listings
  • Message boards
  • Career-building tips
  • Videos, podcasts and more
• The International Game Developers Association (IGDA). 6,141 members. “The IGDA is a non-profit professional society that is committed to advancing the careers and enhancing the lives of game developers by connecting members with their peers, promoting professional development, and advocating on issues that affect the developer community.”
• Game Development. 1,751 members. “This is a group dedicated to the art of video game development. We encourage discussion of views on the industry and we are aiming to provide support for any questions people may have.”
• Video Game Developers. 1,318 members. “A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual) that creates video games. A developer may specialize in a certain video game system, such as the Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, or the Sony PlayStation 3, or may develop for a variety of systems, including PCs.”
• UK Games Industry Massive. 1,239 members. “The folks of the very fine UK games industry.”
• GameDev and friends. 307 members. “A group for everyone who’s interested in developing video games and exploring the relevant technologies.”
• People who have had their souls broken working in the games industry. 515 members. “For people who have seen one too many sunrises, slept under one too many desks, eaten one too many takeout pizzas, been in one too many last-minute-design-change meetings, faced down one too many retarded publisher decisions, had their bonuses mysteriously vanish one too many times, had one too many WNF bugs bounced back to them… all in the name of a 6/10 review in Edge and bargain-bucket status two weeks after launch… this is for you.”
• Indie Game Developers. 361 members. “Independent Game Developers group for small companies and individuals designing and publishing their own games. Come join us and support and independent game community- get help creating and marketing.”
• Ex-Codies. 182 members. “A place for the haunted souls who were once a cog in the machine we know as Codemasters.”
• Bruceongames.19 members!. For industry professionals who read this blog. Please join.

Linkedin is social networking for professionals from all sorts of businesses. If you work in the games industry please link to me there. I am a member of four game industry groups on Linkedin.

• Electronic Entertainment Industry Network. 2,933 members.
• Game Developers. 11,696 members.
• Uk Games Developers. 516 members.
• Video Gaming Industry Executives. 2,925 members.

So there we have it. If you work in the industry and want to relate to other like minded souls there are plenty of options. And one obvious big daddy, Game Developers on Linkedin.

• Sony launch Home to much criticism, it has been hacked and features sexual harassment. Overall it is a disaster for Sony and needs much work before it begins to become a credible product. This debacle shows Sony’s weakness, they are a consumer electronics manufacturer. Microsoft, by comparison, are a software company, which is why Live is still the best gaming portal, with no competition in sight.
• Midway get rid of 25% of global workforce. This is the result of bad management in the past, as at so many game companies. I hope they are flattening their management structure and not just getting rid of developers, as seems to be the industry solution when cutting costs. Midway are far too small to prosper as a global publisher and need to do a bit of M&A quickly, merging with another, similar sized publisher would be a good start, but needs one half of the combined management to be sacked.
• Employers don’t want World of Warcraft players. And they do have a point. I have written about game addiction in the past and can see why you wouldn’t want to employ someone who puts a big chunk of their emotional commitment into an online existence. This applies not just to WoW, but to any MMORPG.
• Warner increases stake in EIDOS to 20%, we can all see where this is going. And it isn’t costing them much, at 17p per share each 10% of the company costs them less than £4.5 million. I can see why Warners are being so cautious, because of historic awful management EIDOS is a mess that is being sorted out. So it is best just to establish a position and a relationship at the moment without taking on the risk and problems that would come from a full takeover.
• Little big planet has terrible sales. And this was the platform exclusive that was going to put Sony back on top. It is a disaster, the Playstation 3 is losing position by the day. It is more expensive than an Xbox 360 and offers a far inferior ownership proposition. There is very little in the way of reasons for buying one. It is very sad that Sony have screwed up this generation so comprehensively and in so many ways. But they have.
• Scrabulous is coming back to Facebook. This is brilliant news, Hasbro seeing sense at last. Obviously they read the article on here about their actions.
• Rockstar to stick with Take Two and not go independent. Seems to make eminent sense, Take Two have done a brilliant job with the GTA franchise. To the point where it would be difficult to see anyone doing it better.
• Microsoft say that much less than 1% of Xbox 360s suffered from scratched disks. But in litigation crazy America they suffer another class action as a lawyer tries to get even richer and a bunch of people look for a windfall. People who lose actions like this should pay the person they sued an equivalent amount to what they were seeking to win.

It is a widely held belief that the video game industry will prosper during the recession. Much as the film industry prospered during the great recession depression. And there is much evidence to support that view with industry turnover well up on last year and the console platforms selling in record numbers. It all looks rosy. And I believe that the industry will do better than most over the coming months, however there are some massive caveats.

For a starter just now people are enjoying their last Christmas blow out before facing the inevitable. And unemployment is going to rise very sharply in the new year. So things will probably drop back a little from the current high, even allowing for seasonal factors.

Secondly retail will not do as well as the industry as a whole. This is because gaming is going online. Which includes content delivery, subscriptions, micropayments, advertising and other business models. All of which do not involve high street retail. So retail must, inevitably, fall away sharply from the peak that this Christmas will be.

Thirdly, whilst two of the platform holders are running with good profits, there is one, Sony, that is in deep trouble. They have gone from being the leading brand in the last generation to being third and last in this generation. And they are falling further behind with each passing day. Their stock price is in free fall and they are making 16,000 redundancies. This is not good for the industry because Sony bring a lot to it.

Fourthly there will be a different profile as to what sells well. Hyped up hits, often with licensed IP will not do so well. People will be more discerning with their spend, buying solid, quality titles with very many hours worth of play. We are already seeing this effect and the game sales charts are looking a lot different to what people were expecting.

Fifth, with less money around people are more likely to steal games. There will be a far higher incentive for piracy. So industry revenues could be severely hit, even though their products would be reaching more people.

Sixthly, the Wii bubble could very well burst, for a number of reasons that have already been explained on here. The occasional, very casual “toy” user will be more careful with their money. It is the regular, consistent gamer who will keep going most through the bad times.

Seventh, we are at the beginning of a netbook explosion. These things are going to sell in many tens and eventually hundreds of millions. People will move away from spending time with consoles to spending time with netbooks. So online PC is going to grow massively at the expense of the three big console platform holders. Home and mobile gaming consoles will be hit. This is where I would invest money in gaming right now.

So we are looking at interesting times over the next two years, but then this industry is never boring.

So I put my money where my mouth is and spent some of my own hard earned money buying a netbook. I put a lot of research into this, reading reviews, blogs, forums etc to work out which brand and which model best suited my needs. I chose the Acer Aspire One. In fact at the end of the day it looked like by far the best choice for me. So I bought it from Amazon at a good price and after a couple of working days it arrived, even at this busy time of year.

I had tried previously to use a notebook and bought myself a top end Dell. And it never got used. It is still gathering dust somewhere. It was just too big and unwieldy for the amount of utility it afforded me. The fact that I am writing this article on the Aspire means that it has already been used more than the Dell was. The size is absolutely perfect, any smaller and the keyboard would become a pain, any bigger and it would lose its fantastic portability.

When buying these things selecting Windows XP adds about £50 more to the price than using Linux. But for my needs XP is still the best operating system in the world, so I had to bite this bullet. And having specified XP it made sense to have a hard drive. So now I have this small 1Kg device that has similar power to my desktop machine and puts the sum of all human knowledge in my hand anywhere I go. Remarkable.

The Aspire came with minimum documentation, which is admirable. Looking for a wireless connection from my house it found a total of 8 of my neighbours’ setups, compared with a desktop PC with an aerial on the back which could only find 3. The first thing I did was to remove Exploder and replace it with Firefox 3. Next I will have to remove McAfee, which is a pain of pop up madness, and replace it with AVG Free.

Now I can travel the world and run my online empire exactly as if I was at home, so long as I can find a hotspot. So the next move will be a 3G telephone dongle to use anywhere in the UK, especially on trains. These are free with a 12 to 15 month account which costs £10 to £15 per month for all the capacity you are going to need. In fact some companies are giving the netbook itself away for free when you take out an airtime contract, just like they do with mobile phones. All I still need is the for the Logitech wireless optical mouse, on order from Amazon, to be delivered and I will be in clover.

For two years now analysts have been predicting the imminent demise of the Wii. They have become a bit quiet recently as it chalks up ever more amazing sales success. Yet there are a few reasons why what we are seeing now is the end of the boom.

• Any bubble bursts just as it reaches its biggest size. And the Wii is now selling in massively unsustainable numbers. It just cannot go on.
• The penetration of HDTVs has increased massively over the last two years. Thus cruelly exposing the Wii’s last generation graphics to far more people.
• The Xbox 360 is cheaper.
• The Xbox 360 is a huge amount better than the Wii. It has far more games and vastly more good games. And it has Live, by far the best online gaming portal. Gradually the public will come round to understanding these realities.
• The Wii has a very weak game library. The first party games, a few good third party games. Then lots of dross shovelware. And game consoles are for playing games.
• Nintendo have now rolled out all their great and famous properties on the Wii. So they have very few places left to go for the stream of AAA titles needed to sustain a platform.
• The Wii is not making much money for many publishers so they are voting with their feet and allocating their resources to platforms that will make them money.
• Most of the Wii customer base is the very casual “toy” market. They will be very fickle as they move onto the next “must have” trend. The Wii will become tired.
• Money is getting a lot tighter as the world tips into recession. Casual frippery, like most Wii purchases, will be an early casualty.
• Most people likely to buy a Wii already have. In terms of market penetration Nintendo are now going to suffer from the law of diminishing returns.

So there we have it. Plenty of reasons why the Wii must eventually face the inevitable. And because the boom has been so massive the collapse of sales will be equally dramatic. And when will this be? Let’s put it this way, we are experiencing the last big Christmas for the Wii.