Entries from January 2009 ↓

Bruceongames is now a respectable body of work with over 460 articles, some of which have become “standards” and are now read by people every day. The blog has achieved everything I set out to do. I have expressed my views on a range of topics, proven that I can think and write and even become a little more well known. Some of my predictions have come true, others haven’t, but I am not unhappy with the success rate.

However creating this stuff takes a lot of time and I don’t get paid for it, the Google ads at the side literally only bring in pennies. So I have decided that there are better things I can be doing in my life than 5 articles a week on here. However I don’t want to lose the platform. So starting now I am going to try to generate just two articles a week. One in the first part of the week will be a proper article and the second one, later in the week will be an overview of bits of news that support my world view. It may pan out that there is more, or less. We will see.

I am looking for a challenge. I love the idea of marketing and managing during a recession to build a business and make profits. I have done it before and would love to do it again.

What we are looking at here is getting the maximum marketing impact for the minimum budget using the marketing mix creatively. Just as I did at Codemasters when we achieved over 27% of the total UK games market on a minimum budget. Or once again a few years later when we got Operation Flashpoint to number one in most world markets on a very small spend.

Now you might be looking for someone who understands the internet. Well the online community marketing department at Codemasters was my innovation, something that has now been widely imitated. And I run a successful forum and a successful blog. But I still have plenty of real word advertising and PR experience.

In this work I am your flexible friend. I could two two jobs for 2 or 3 days a week each. Or even fill an interim post for a few months. Just don’t expect me to burn through budgets spending by rote, lazy marketing like this annoys me. Expect instead creativity in reaching the right person with the right message.

One project that would be ideal would be setting up the UK or European office for an American or Asian company. I have a lot of successful startup experience so this would be right up my street.

If you are interested you can find my CV on Linkedin and more information here.

I think I should start this be saying that I have always admired Sony. Their combination of quality, technology and design has been spot on for decades. So I have bought a lot of Sony kit: hi fi, TVs, digital cameras, walkmen, diskmen, video etc etc. Not only that I have also worked on many Playstation games, helping to get a number of titles to number one.

So it has not been good that on this blog I have had no option but to document the slow motion train crash that is the Sony Playstation PS3. Sony have got just about everything they can wrong, they have lost sight of their customers and in doing so they have thrown away their previous dominance of the home console market. The simple fact is that the PS3 is a far less good ownership proposition than its main rival, the Microsoft Xbox 360. Even if they were the same price, which they are not.

And now we have the worst possible news. We are right in the middle of this console cycle so sales volumes should be ramping up considerably. They certainly are for Microsoft and the Xbox 360. So it came as a shock, even to me, that Q4 ‘08 PS3 sales were 440,000 down on the same period in 2007. This is an unmitigated disaster and will take a huge amount to recover from if it is not going to be terminal for the Playstation brand.

Sony have their back against the wall in that the PS3 is too expensive to make, it has an uncompetetive software catalogue, its online offering is second best by a long way and Sony have no money to buy the manoevering room they need to fix things.

2009 will be a long and very hard year for the PS3 and I just hope that Sony find some way, against the odds, to get back in the game.

• Warner Brothers confirm the third Tomb Raider movie. (The previous two were made by Paramount). This is indicative of two relationships. The first between Warners and Eidos, which could well end up in marriage. And the second wider relationship between the movie and gaming industries. We have a technology superiority that means we will grow to be bigger than film and TV combined. But film still has the best creative talent. Soon it will be routine for people to work in both industries as what they each do becomes ever closer.
• Speculation about the future of Zune. I feel that this is misplaced and Microsoft have denied it. The Zune is one of the three legs of Microsoft’s strategic plan for world domination. The other two legs being Xbox Live and the home entertainment hub, currently the Xbox 360. All three will work together more and do much more as they evolve. The Zune will become the ubiquitous, do everything, pocket device. And in the plan it will be better than iPhone because of its integration into Live and the home hub.
• Sony deny PSP rumours. Now these I believe. The PSP is looking a bit creaky with a fairly useless disk drive and no touch screen. Advances in flash memory and screen technology (OLED) are such that you could massively extend battery life. And that is just for starters, there is the whole telephone and MP3 thing. The only thing holding them back must be their current strained financial circumstances. Let’s hope they get over it and show us what they can do.
• UK broadband tax to compensate entertainment companies for lost revenue. What stupidity, this means that honest people who don’t steal content online will pay to subsidise the thieves that do. There are three solutions to online content theft. 1) Use technical protection. A game console is an anti piracy dongle. 2) Punish the thieves, this is technically possible and thieves in other walks of life sometimes get punished. 3) Change your business model. Go for micropayments, sponsorship, advertising, subscriptions or whatever.
• Video game sales up 20% in 2008 to $32 billion. Now they sell more than DVD and Blueray.  In fact games were more than 50% of total global packaged entertainment retail. And remember that a huge amount of the game industry now isn’t “packaged entertainment”. So we are a lot bigger than this article reports. And still the British government has no time for us. It is amazing that they will pump many billions into the short term entertainment event that is the London Olympics yet they won’t even give the British game industry the same financial treatment as the British film industry. Unbelievable.
• Future publishing start to feel the benefit from their switch of emphasis to online. And a good thing too, otherwise this critically important company was looking doomed. They should have made the switch in emphasis years ago and by not doing so allowed many competitors to steal market share from them. Something that they will try and claw back using the leverage and goodwill of their paper magazines.
• Marketing and PR jobs go at EA UK. In comparison Jaguar Land Rover just made 450 redundancies. 300 managers and 150 agency staff. I have said before that if you have zero marketing for a game then you have zero sales and sales are what EA needs. So the only valid explanation is that the department was historically overstaffed. In which case the manager responsible should go.
• World of Warcraft continues to grow and prosper, dominating the MMORPG space. Recent competitors haven’t even dented its armour. It is so embedded now that it would take a massive spend ($1 billion?) and an incredibly talented team to even think about taking them on. And who is going to gamble with those sorts of stakes?

Every day the average person is bombarded with thousands of marketing images: on the bus, the train, in magazines and newspapers, on television, the web and in just about everything they do. It is a total onslaught. Obviously virtually all this imagery is ignored. We have become so shell shocked that we learn to create powerful filters in our minds that prevent all this unwanted imagery getting in. So most of the time most marketing spend is wasted.

Of course when we are working on the other side of the fence we want to get past these powerful filters and get our marketing messages into the minds of our potential customers. And the way to do it is creativity. Just take TV adverts that you have seen recently and ask yourself which ones you remember. The answer is always the most creative ones. This is why creativity is the most important talent that a marketeer can have. And it is why me too marketing and marketing by rote are an almost complete waste of money, they don’t have what it takes to get past those filters.

However there are dangers in creativity. The main one is being too clever and creating a great advert but failing to get over the key messages and the brand. This happens all the time. There are quite a few great TV adverts I have seen that have caught my attention but I cannot remember what they are for.

So here is an exercise for you. Get a game magazine that covers your sector of the marketplace and get three felt pens of different colours. Firstly go through the magazine with one pen and write physically on each advert a score out of ten for creativity. So if is something that really catches your attention give it a ten and if it is yet another piece of me too drivel give it a zero.

Next take a different colour felt pen and go through the magazine and score every advert again, this time for getting key messages and brand across. Features and benefits.

Finally go through the magazine with a third felt pen and score according to how likely you are to want to play the game after seeing the advert. So now you have three numbers written on every advert.

To make it more interesting get one or more colleagues to do the same exercise on the same magazine. With no consultation allowed between participants. Then have a meeting going through the adverts one by one justifying to each other the scores that you have given.

You will now be empowered. If you have done this right you now know exactly what you have to do to be better than your competitors at getting past those filters and selling more games. So less of your budget is wasted.

In February 2008 the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl (SSBB) on the Wii was being treated by some sectors of the game playing community as if it were the second coming. They were little short of hysterical about how this was the greatest thing ever and how it would dominate the market for the year.

Against this background I wrote an article on here putting SSBB into context. It is a truly excellent game (currently it is the fourth best Wii game on Metacritic with 93), which is something that gaming always needs. And though I said it would be massive I said that it would not be one of the biggest games of 2008, just like Super Mario Galaxy (metacritic 97) hadn’t been one of the biggest games the year before, and for the same reason. The Wii is mainly owned by very casual game players and SSBB is a game for serious game players. So there is a mismatch of the game against the owners of the platform it was on.

I went on to say that many gamers games on the HD consoles would do better than SSBB on the Wii and that casual games, such as Wii Fit, would do better than SSBB on the Wii. In fact I said that Wii Fit would still be in the charts long after SSBB was forgotten. All this was sensible analysis based on my knowledge of the market and experience.

The article set off an amazing tirade of abuse from the fanboys. The article received vast numbers of comments from them, most of which were personally rude and abusive towards me. Obviously I deleted them. But I left a lot of the non abusive comments for posterity just so people can see how misguided fanboys are. The ignorant abuse wasn’t limited to here, it was elsewhere on the interweb. Just look at this thread on VGChartz for example.

But now it is nearly a year later and we can look back at what actually happened in the market. I was right and the fanboys were wrong. In the UK all formats chart for the year SSBB only managed to come 36th. And like I said would happen it was beaten by lots of gamers games on the HD consoles. GTA IV at number 3, for instance. And the casual games on the Wii massively outperformed SSBB. Mario Kart at number 2 and Wii Fit at number 5 for the year, for example. And as I pointed out, these casual games keep selling for far longer, Wii Fit is currently the number one best selling game in the UK.

So the fanboys have egg all over their faces. Will they be contrite and apologise for their abuse? Will they revisit their thread on VGChartz to say how wrong they were? Hardly likely, is it?

The fact remains that the Wii is a brilliant toy and so the vast majority of its users are casual, but when it comes to serious gaming the Xbox 360 is by far the best console, with the PS3 also being significantly better. And you don’t have to take my word for it, just look at what the serious gamers on rllmuk forum are saying.

As you all know the world economy is in a bad shape just now and that malaise extends to the technology and IT industries much as it does to everything else (except video games). Against this background the sheer explosion in Netbook sales is quite amazing, according to IDC 182,000 were sold in 2007 which increased to 11 million in 2008 and they are predicting 21 million this year (other analysts are predicting as many as 50 million). This whole new class of devices have appeared so fast that a lot of people still haven’t realised they are there and how important they are going to be.

Deloitte make annual annual Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) predictions and say that netbook will be the fastest growing segment in the PC market this year. Currently 8 of the top 10, and 14 of the top 20 mobile PCs for sale on Amazon’s US site are netbooks. The mobile phone industry has been very quick to cotton on to the mobile broadband potential and in Europe half of all netbooks are sold by telecom operators (many are given away “free” with an airtime contract). In fact the netbook explosion is so fast and so big that telecom analysts are predicting that the mobile telephony infrastructure will have trouble handling it.

Conventional PCs in consumer hands are largely a one per household device but netbooks are one per person devices, like mobile phones. This, and their amazing portabilty, changes the way they are used. They are personal devices, an extension of a given individual’s lifestyle. And they are enabling devices in that the user has access to the sum of the world’s knowledge and immense processing power (on servers) everywhere they go. This is a paradigm shift in the human condition and will lead to all sorts of outcomes that we cannot predict. One thing is absolutely for sure, there will be a huge amount of games played on them. So there will be a lot of money to be made by developers and publishers who gauge this market right.

The whole technogy industry is behind netbooks. Intel have created the Atom processor which offers the maximum processing power for a given amount of electricity. Microsoft are creating Windows 7 which will do everything Vista will do, but on a netbook. And all the big hardware manufacturers are rushing to compete, especially as it offers a way to beat the recession. Even Apple are rumoured to be about to join the fray, which makes eminent sense now they are a significant telecom manufacturer as well as being a computer manufacturer. And Sony have released the gorgeous Vaio P, but with the base model at £849 in the UK it is about three times the price it needs to be in order to be competitive.

Already the game industry has a massive amount of legacy PC gaming software that will run on netbooks. Remember that they are quite powerful with a specification similar to a good desktop machine of just three or four years ago. However a lot of the game industry needs to make a shift in their philosophy going forwards. Traditionally PC games have pushed the boundaries of the performance envelope, demanding ever more powerful machines to be bought to play them on. Now, with netbooks emerging as a massive market, there will be more money to be made from games that are less demanding of the hardware. And with netbooks having such good online capabilities as standard the move to internet based gaming in all its forms is bound to accelerate.

Because netbooks are consumer devices they are bound to follow the mobile phone example by bolting on extra features such as GPS, and television tuners. So we will be heading to two sorts of universal portable devices. Firstly the mobile phone/MP3 player based devices like the iPhone which have the advantage of portabilty. And secondly the netbook based devices that have the advantage of a proper keyboard and a far bigger screen. Presumably these devices will live side by side in a person’s lifestyle with the larger device being carried most of the time and the smaller device carried always.

As ever, interesting times lie ahead.