Entries from December 2008 ↓

I have written about Metacritic on here before. It has become the standard industry measure of game quality. So in this article I am comparing the overall game quality (according to Metacritic) of the Playstation PS3, The Microsoft 360 and the Nintendo Wii.

Firstly lets look at the total number of games for each platform covered by Metacritic. The Xbox 360 leads the way with 532 games followed by the Wii with 324 and finally the Playstation 360 PS3 with 264. This is pretty much the order you would expect as Microsoft was first to market, the Wii is exceptionally easy to develop for and the PS3 was late to market and difficult to develop for. What you wouldn’t expect is for the difference to be so great. Over twice as many Xbox 360 games as PS3 games. This just shows how much effort Microsoft have put into supporting development on their platform and also how the commercial realities have made it the preferred platform for publishers.

For game quality I first looked at the score of the 20th highest scoring game for each platform. For the 360 this is a 89 (for Portal: Still Alive) for the PS3 87 (WipEout HD) and for the Wii 83 (WarioWare: Smooth Moves). So the quality of Wii games falls away very sharply compared with the others, even in the top 20.

So lets look at how many games on each platform scored over 75. It is 211 for the 360, 125 for the PS3 and only 66 for the Wii. So if you compare with the total number of games reviewed you can see that the PS3 is doing proportionately better even though the 360 has far more games over 75. The disaster is the Wii where the quality has fallen away massively. That there are over three times as many games for the 360 scoring over 75 as there are for the Wii is, quite frankly, shocking. As, perhaps, is the fact that the 360 has more games with a score of over 75 than the PS3 and Wii put together.

So, to look deeper into this lets look at the number of games scoring over 50 on Metacritic. For the Xbox 360 this is 447 (out of a total of 532 games). The PS3 does proportionately better with 247 (out of 264). The Wii is proportionately worst of all with 259 games (out of 324) scoring over 50.

To put this more starkly the number of games scoring 50 or less are 85 for the Xbox 360, 65 for the Wii and just 17 for the Playstation 3.

So lets look at this platform by platform. The PS3 has the smallest total quantity of games with 264 but has the highest overall quality with very little rubbish published on the platform. The Wii is very weak overall with a massive 193 games (out of 324) scoring between 50 and 75 and a fifth of all games scoring less than 50. This is the shovelware problem of the Wii platform. The Xbox 360 has by far the most games with a big scattering of quality. However the sheer volume of games published for it mean that at every quality level it has far more games than the other two platforms.

Well that was interesting. The two shockers for me are that there are over twice as many reviewed 360 games as there are PS3 games. And that the Wii only managed to score over 75 with just 66 games out of 324.

So I think I will revisit Metacritic for another look sometime, thus the #1 in the article title.

I have praised Valve on here before and now figures have been released by Game Informer that show exactly how good Gabe and his company are. These figures are for sales of boxed games at retail and do not include the substantial sales on Steam.

Half Life: 9.3 million
Opposing Force: 1.1 million
Blue Shift: 800,000
Half Life 2: 6.5 million
Half Life 2 Episode One: 1.4 million
The Orange Box: 3 million
Counter Strike series: 10.7 million

Impressive stuff. Valve failures sell as many as some company’s hits. There is a lesson here. Quality matters above all else. You are taking people’s money from them an you have a duty to give them the best possible value. All you have to look at are the companies struggling to churn out masses of shovelware for the Wii and the iPod/iPhone to see the contrast.

Valve are in an incredible position. Everything they produce is guaranteed to be a hit with massive sales. And they own the best PC gaming portal in Steam. So where do they go from here?

One thing they could do is to offer a gaming portal for console owners, in competition with the platform holders, that would give us some fireworks. Another route would be to offer sever based PC gaming to the huge massses who are going to buy netbooks over the next few years. The world is their oyster and anything they do will almost certainly work. Just look at what they have done in the last ten years.

• Microsoft have been shipping internally updated Xbox 360s since September. Now with the 65nM Jasper chipset and 256K of RAM so no external memory unit is necessary. The revised machines are recognisable by their smaller (150W) power supplies. It was the cheaper manufacturing costs of this revision that gave Microsoft the headroom to reduce prices going into Q4. The elegant design of the 360 paying dividends of competitive advantage.
• The Black Friday thanksgiving weekend is one of the biggest in US retail. And this year for every Playstation PS3 that was bought there were three Xbox 360s sold. If ever you needed evidence that Microsoft have won the HD console war then this is it. The combination of a lower price, a far better game lineup and Xbox Live inevitably make the 360 more attractive to customers.
• Nintendo make a profit on every Wii sold and make a higher percentage of profit on their software than Microsoft or Sony. And demand for the Wii is still so great that they were selling for greater than retail price on eBay for Black Friday. In fact I am surprised that the $6 figure for profit on every Wii is so low. Moore’s law, the comparative simplicity of the machine and the enormous manufacturing scale should have conspired together to deliver far more unit profit.
• Half a million Nintendo DSis sell in one month in Japan. It looks like Nintendo have learned from what Apple do with the iPod. Planned obsolescence with users upgrading every time a new model comes out.
• Atari speak out about the damage that secondhand games do to the industry. As has been pointed out on here before the effect is the same as piracy, people playing games without contributing to the development cost. And the retailers who do it are shooting themselves in the foot as they are forcing publishers to move away from the high street to other business models.
• Electronic Arts has bought Korean free to play developer J2MSoft. A clever move here by EA, they are buying three things here. Firstly the proven IP, secondly the expertise in the Asian market and finally a headstart in using different business models. Let’s hope they get value from all three.
• Square Enix say that they will help the Xbox 360 in Japan. “There is a growing interest in Xbox 360 among Japanese users, due to the release of familiar titles, the increasing appeal of overseas titles, and the excellent reputation of the Xbox 360’s network services.” Another part of the worldwide tide turning in favour of the Xbox.
• Nintendo DSi flash cartridge released. So it will be open season for the pirates, again. It really looks like Nintendo don’t care about piracy on this machine. Presumably they make a big profit on the hardware and sell more machines when the games are free. And with such huge numbers sold there are enough honest people to still make publishing worthwhile.

All over the world right now tens of thousands of bankers and other financial services workers are being given a bin bag to put their personal possessions in as their employer dispenses with their services. Many would say they brought it on themselves with reckless excesses when regulation was light and money was easy. Never mind the cause, what is for certain is that the banking industry is expecting a lean time in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) business.

But the bankers are going to find that one industry is still going to be M&A crazy. And it is the video game industry. Here’s why:

• Unlike every other industry gaming is booming. And will continue to boom through the recession. Just as the movie industry did during the great depression. This is because gaming is brilliant entertainment and is very good value for money. Also the industry emerged from serving a niche to being truly mass market only recently, so has a massively expanded demographic to serve.
• In traditional, cardboard and plastic, game publishing there are massive competitive advantages of size. Small and medium sized publishers are not competing on the same playing field. So there is a strong economic and commercial imperative to upsize.
• Traditional publishing, books, newspapers, magazines, videos, television, music etc is in big trouble for a variety of reasons, all of which revolve around the interweb. The massive global companies that run much of this publishing need to be in games just to survive. So there is a goldrush of the big global publishing brands to buy gaming assets.
• The gaming industry grew from zero only recently so the quality of the legacy management is often very patchy. Many companies badly underperform and there are storehouses of fantastic intellectual property (IP) that are being under utilised. These are valuable assets being wasted that would, in the right hands, generate turnover and profit.
• Finance. Many game companies are woefully under financed. And this (like film) is a risk business where many products fail. The situation has been made worse by the current growth in the market, which can lead to overtrading and also by the banking malaise.
• With the current stock market panic the publicly quoted game companies are now very cheap to buy.

So lets look at what is happening out there in the real world.

Sumner Redstone has sold Midway for just $100, 000. Huge losses and accumulated debt has made this inevitable. And the reasons it got into this situation are in the list above. The new owner is taking on $70 million of debt, which for me is too high a price to pay. With that much money they would have been better starting from scratch. All they are buying is a workforce and some IP, both of which have historically failed to deliver. And for boxed retail games the company is too small. My only guess is that he intends to do some more M&A pretty quickly to get up to critical mass.

EIDOS is for sale, yet again. This could be a good buy for their veritable storehouse of legacy IP. But their commercial performance has been dire because of management ineptitude after the merger of EIDOS and Sci. This time the suitors are rumoured to be Electronic Arts and Ubisoft. Both of these should be able to make better use of the IP, Ubisoft especially have shown great skill at garnering profits from legacy IP. The situation is complicated because Warner (who have massive gaming ambitions themselves) are a major (16.1%?) shareholder in EIDOS. And finally, for me, the perfect marriage would be Atari and EIDOS. Together they would be approaching the right size to survive.

Meanwhile in Japan Koei’s has merged with Tecmo to create a $700 million turnover company, which is the minimum sort of size you need to be to have critical mass in the global market.

As this activity continues it is interesting to look at who the targets may be. And looking at the numbers you would have to think that Codemasters, THQ, Take Two and Sega are all companies that are ripe for a bit of M&A activity.

This article contains practical information based on marketing games. It also has input from experience in marketing forums and blogs (both of which are applicable to games). Everything here is free. All you need to do is the work. And the more work the better the results. Not all these methods are equally effective all the time, it is a matter of picking and mixing according to what you are trying to do.

We have become accustomed to an internet where a lot is free. Google, Wikipedia, the BBC and much of casual gaming for instance. Because this same ethos runs through the internet it is possible to do a lot of marketing without spending a single cent. Obviously using each one of these methods takes skill to get the optimum results, but that will come with practice.

1. Start a blog. Use Google Blogger or WordPress. Post your marketing content and links to it. It will show up on Google search within hours.
2. Use Google Blog Search or Technorati to find other people’s blog entries that relate to what you are doing. Add valid comments to these blog entries, with links where applicable.
3. Use social networking sites such as Facebook and Linkedin. Post links on it, form groups and put an RSS feed from your blog in.
4. Post videos to Youtube. Form groups. Put RSS feeds in to your social networking. One advantage of the internet over paper media is that you can use moving images, make the most of it.
5. Use social content websites such as Digg, Reddit, Slashdot and Stumbleupon. These can generate huge amounts of traffic if a story catches on.
6. Keep a track of the forums that are relevant to you. Create and post to threads where relevant. Put your url in your signature if it is permitted. Do not spam or abuse the forum, it is a community.
7. Seek out all relevant Wikipedia entries and ensure they present your perspective accurately. Add to the external links section at the bottom of the entry. Do not spam, only post what is valid. Also create Knols for everything relevant.
8. Make sure that you are getting onto news aggregators like Google News and NewsNow.
9. There are literally thousands of directories on the net that each need applying to by hand. Use Google to find the relevant ones for you and fill out the forms. Here is a game blog directory, for instance.
10. Many news sites allow you to add your comments to stories, Metro for instance. Do so when relevant. So if there is a major general news story that effects you it is an opportunity to whizz round a few big news sites and get your perspective over. Also many specialist news sites work the same way.
11. There are lots of free press release services, Free Press Release, ClickPress Fastpitch and Pressbox, for instance. Write a press release and stick it on a few of them. Choose services from different countries if applicable.
12. Website valuation tools. These are a bit of fun but they also often archive their results. So in a few minutes you can create a lot of good links into your website. Wesite analysis and statistics sites often work in the same way.
13. Join the reputation management sites. Like Naymz and Lookuppage. These create quality links and tell your side of the story. They help to balance out the anarchy of the net.
14. Free advertising on Craigslist, Vivastreet, Gumtree and all the other free classified services. These need refreshing regularly. They are nicely targeted and you can reach people in lots of countries.
15. Review your own products! On sites such as Amazon and Metacritic. In fact it is really good fun to go through and work out which comments are marketing plants. Your skill is in making yours impossible to distinguish.

By now it must be obvious that these methods are best used together, synergistically. Which is true of all good marketing. They also require creativity if what you do is going to stand out. And you will need a thick skin from time to time as the usual web idiots throw brickbats at you.

Microsoft once had a near monopoly on web browsers with Explorer, so it comes almost as a shock to find that the web browser most used to access Bruceongames is Firefox 3 and that even the undermarketed Chrome has made a significant impact. When it comes to search Google always had the majority of the market but MSN now seems to have slipped away to nearly nothing. It doesn’t bring many people here.

You can forgive the above because Microsoft, famously, misunderstood the internet so came to it late. Operating systems are different though, Microsoft have owned this sector since MSDOS. But even here there are massive cracks appearing. By far the fastest growing section of the PC industry is Netbooks. And the Linux derived Ubuntu has become a great success. Microsoft have fought back by bringing XP from the grave. But they are imposing stupid maximum system specifications that attempt to defy Moore’s law.

And of course their worst operating system problem is Vista. This has been the biggest trainwreck in the history of Microsoft and they are rushing out Windows 7 to try and mitigate the disaster.

You might think that Microsoft own the market for standard applications with the Office suite of programmes that have swept all in front of them to become global standards. Even here, though, Microsoft are in big trouble from Google Docs which is free for most users and which massively reduces the IT costs for the many corporates that are now using it. Basically Microsoft didn’t see the cloud coming.

So Microsoft are having problems in many of the most important areas that made them great. But the reality was always that this was inevitable, you cannot hang on to monopolies for ever, especially in the fastest changing area of technology that the world has ever seen. And Microsoft must always have known this. Their monoplies will continue to fade away in the face of this change and new competition from agressive competitors.

So it is against this background that the Xbox/Zune/Live project makes so much sense. The gaming industry is still at its very beginning. The future growth potential is very many times the current size of the market. So it will grow to be a far bigger market than the IT markets that Microsoft have monopolised for so long. In other words Microsoft could become a bigger company because they will be in a bigger marketplace, as long as they have a significant market share.

So Microsoft are playing a long strategy in gaming (and it is growing to be a lot more than gaming). They are building market position over successive generations of platforms, both hardware and software. And they are using their massive financial and intellectual resources to win.

Applying this strategy they must have been amazed that their main competitor, Sony, decided to make so many strategic and tactical mistakes and to basically throw away their market dominance. They must also be very pleased that Nintendo chose to remain in the “toy” end of the market and so did not build the infrastructure necessary to compete in the long term.

Microsoft are in the middle of one of the biggest shifts that any major corporation has ever made. From an IT company that did a bit of gaming to a consumer media company that does a bit of IT.