Entries from January 2009 ↓

When I was at Codemasters the Race Driver series (now Grid) and the Colin McRae series (now labelled as Dirt) were made by two large teams of highly skilled game professionals working in a converted warehouse in Southam, Warwickshire. Admittedly some of the Race Driver art was outsourced to Dhruva in India, but the creative and the bulk of the work were done in England.

No more. These games are now largely made by 76 people (100 by the year end) working for Codemasters Studios Sdn Bhd in Malasia. Maxime Villandr, their general manager said “DiRT 2 is one of our biggest projects after the success of GRID, which was Malaysia’s first locally designed computer game.” He also says that the technology transfer from the UK has allowed them to progress from simple animation to making complete games.

So why move this work and these jobs from the UK to Malasia? The simple answer is money. Malaysia Debt Ventures Berhad (MDV), a government body, financed GRID to the tune of 44 million Ringgits and have announced that they are now financing DIRT 2 to the tune of 36 million Ringgits. There are approximately 3 Ringgits to the dollar so you can see that Codemasters are pretty much getting the development of their IP paid for by a foreign government.

And there you have it. The British government had a policy of building up the city to be the powerhouse of our economy. A policy that has failed in a most spectacular way and which will take many years of taxpayers money to fix. Meanwhile they ignored manufacturing and knowledge based industries like games, much to their, and everyone else in the UK’s, cost.

Most other governments were less inept and focussed on a more balanced economy. And they have been sucking the knowledge based jobs out of the UK. These 100 skilled jobs lost from Warwickshire to Malasia are just one small example, similar transfers have happened throughout our economy costing us billions in income and wealth.

This is massive news. As recently as October Sony were predicting a profit, now they have made their first loss in 14 years. Already they have an austerity programme in place with company wide redundancies. And their cash shortage has forced them to raise new capital in the middle east and to sell off parts of the company.

Two bits of Sony are in especial trouble, their mobile phone joint venture with Ericsson, which has seen a 23% sales slump. And their Playstation division. From being runaway leader in the last console generation Sony are now running third and last in this generation with nothing in sight that could improve matters. Some analysts have said that the Playstation PS3 losses are so great that they have more than cancelled out the previous profits made by earlier Playstation models.

Sony are in trouble because they have no big, successful product differentiators. In fact for much of what they make you can buy a better equivalent for less money. The Xbox 360 is a prime example and many consumer electronic items from Samsung and LG are further examples. The high value of the Japanese yen is making this even worse.

There will now be a massive restructuring at Sony. It is a matter of survival. They need to find a way back to giving customers what they want, to innovating and to running the business more commercially. Things are so bad that you must wonder whether they have the will and resources necessary to produce the Playstation 4.

• Will Obama change the game industry? As the most powerful man on earth he is in a position to. But can he be bothered with problems like Putin, Hamas and the recession to deal with? His new administration should have a more liberal attitude towards entertainment media which is good. And they are more likely to be commercial interventionists which may lead to some action to stop the gaming brain drain to Canada. They should be doing all they can to look after the technology companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft that bring in huge global earnings. All in all the US game industry could well benefit from the change.
• Television is now less than half children’s viewing time in the UK. The internet and games are now more popular. And this decline of television will continue because TV is not interactive, it is not connected and the content is linear. It just cannot compete with more modern media.
• 95% of all digital music is stolen. The recorded music industry is in terminal decline and there is no way back, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. There is a lesson here for gaming, currently we do DRM by dongle. And that dongle is a console. Just how long will this business model persist? The PC has moved on and the industry has largely given up trying to charge for boxed PC games. PC gaming has largely changed to business models such as advertising, subscriptions and micropayments and as a result has gained considerably in strength.
• Hirai: “We continue official leadership in this industry”. A very strange thing to say when you are coming third and last by a big margin in this generation of the console war. Maybe he was referring to Sony Home’s massive advantages over Xbox Live.
• Wii Fit dominates the UK sales chart yet again. Is 2009 going to be the year that 3rd party developers finally “get” the Wii and start to release games that Wii owners actually want? Don’t hold your breath.
• Job cuts at Mythic, Tiburon, Atomic Planet and Sega. There has been a spate of bad employment news despite the industry booming. Part of this is the normal Darwinian effect of capitalism sorting the weak from the strong. Part is the cyclical mid generation crisis when it is not worth starting some new projects till the next generation platforms come along.
• Prince of Persia, Resistance 2, Little Big Planet and Tomb Raider: Underworld all fail to make the December NPD top 20. There will be a lot of extremely unhappy executives around after that. It also considerably reduces any room for manoeuvre that EIDOS might have clung onto. Going for Xmas number one is an easy way to get your fingers burnt.
• Circuit City closes 567 stores and lays off 30,000 staff. The whole concept of retail is changing. If your business model or career depend on high street retail then you need to make some changes, quick.

On Saturday my wife had a hairdresser appointment (still something you can’t do over the web) in Leamington Spa so I went along for a wander through retail. This is one of the best shopping environments in the Midlands so it was quite shocking to see just how many shops are now standing vacant. I went to WH Smiths to browse the books because we are thinking of going to Ethiopia, they had one for £15 and I thought sod it let’s  wait and look at Amazon. And sure enough I bought it later (used) for £3. And whilst in Leamington I popped in on my men’s clothes store friend who says that his business is the worst he has seen in 20 years.

A week earlier I had heard that Zavvi were selling everything off cheap (mimum 20% 0ff) so I went along and there was nothing I wanted to buy, I can get it all cheaper elsewhere. As an aside they had sold out of Wiis and Xbox 360s but still had PS3s unsold at the discounted price. My Zavvi experience echoes that when I went to Woolworths closing down sale, there was nothing I wanted to buy even at the low, low prices.

And it is not as if I am not buying anything. I bought a netbook just before Christmas and in the new year have bought a still camera, a video camera, a laser printer, several memory cards and sticks and a few books. All via the internet.

High street retail has been kept artificially buoyant over the last few years because of people spending borrowed money, or the income that came from borrowed money being spent. This hid the effect of people moving more and more of their spend online. So now retail has a double whammy. There is no more borrowed money being spent and at the same time what retail there is will move increasingly online.

Of course the one area of retail that is rock solid is the big supermarkets. People still need to eat. And these days they can do a lot of their non food spend in the same store. A further blow to the traditional high street. In fact things are so bad that Experian say that 15% of stores will be empty by the end of the year.

And high street game retail has more problems than most. Traditional boxed games are cheaper online or more convenient picked up during a food shop. But boxed games are now far less than half of revenue. Publishers are rushing to move away from them because the business model has been corrupted by piracy and secondhand sales. If there is any part of the gaming industry that is going to suffer bad damage during the current recession it is high street games stores. Everything is working against them.

I have been asked how I would manage the process of making a game, something I have never done. But it is an area that is notoriously inefficient.  Obviously where I in such a position I would take a lot of advice. However from what I have seen and learned of the industry there are some pointers to the direction I would be going in.

In charge of the whole operation would be a proven professional manager, let us call him The Boss, his knowledge of games would be secondary to his knowledge of management. He would be mini CEO of the whole project, would be responsible for street date and budget and would have absolute right of hire and fire. To a large degree he would be autonomous of the development/publishing company that employed him. He would be somewhat like a film industry producer. He would have two main reports.

The first report would be the creative director for the game. This person would have a lot of game making experience but would still be an experienced and trained manager. The creative leads of the team would report directly to him. His role would be comparable in many ways to that of film industry director.

The second report would be the operational director for the game. He would look after time and financial management. Working in harness with the creative director they will ensure that budgets and street dates are met. There will be a lot of tension between the two directors as their aims and solutions will often conflict. This is excellent as it will bring the best out in them and give The Boss material to manage and decisions to make.

The team would start small and ramp up and then dissolved at the end of the project. In the beginning there would be lots of design and operational planning, only when that is bolted and signed off would the actual making of the game go ahead.

There would be a lot more concentration on tools and libraries with a big central technology department. The development team should be a free as possible to create so their technology should be as transparent as possible. There needs to be a central tech representative in the development team to ensure a two way flow of information. Re using assets from previous games should be the norm.

QA should be within the team. But their role would be much, much bigger. They would be working with focus groups and on polish as well as on what is now QA. Focus groups should be used throughout the development process. They need to represent all relevant demographics. And the best methodology is chatting one to one with the members of small groups. Clipboard, box ticking focus groups only tell you what they think you want to hear. Polish is mostly still well underdone in gaming and can have a big impact on the customer experience.

Outsourcing is the game industry equivalent of the film industry second unit. With good management they can reduce costs. But far more importantly they bring great flexibility to the whole time management of the game. So the team should have as wide a range of outsourcing options as possible open to them.

There should be a marketing person within the development team. Their responsibility would be community marketing and assets. They would run things like blogs, forums and facebook groups. And they would also make sure that the main marketing department has all the screenshots, videos, interviews, renders etc that it needs to do its job. I have worked with this arrangement and it was good.

The whole team should be dissolved at the end of the game. Mostly for jobs elsewhere within the same company. The key people could immediately re form to produce a sequel. But once again the team would start small and ramp up. Industry professionals could be much more mobile, cherry picking the projects they want to work on and the people they want to work with.

And the role of the company that own this game development team would be to keep out of it. Once they have selected their Boss for the project and given him a street date and a budget they should let him get on with it. This structure reduces the need for wasteful middle management enormously and ensures far greater game development efficiency. The only major company function external to the project team is central tech. But one day this will be subcontracted out. We will have technology companies that service the industry so that development teams can concentrate on creativity. This would prevent the current stupidity of repeatedly inventing the wheel.

As I have said I have never done this, but the above structure is far closer to what a single team independent developer does. And they are a lot more efficient than the studios owned by the big publishers.

It is so quick and easy to create a Facebook group that it is very tempting to create one for any collection of people you know of that have an interest in common. In fact the groups are so useful for their members that it is criminal not to create them when you can.

I worked at Imagine Software in Liverpool does what it says. A private group that is obviously limited in size. This has been a great opportunity to contact long lost colleagues and to dig out resources for the group to share.

All Formats Computer Fairs is for anyone who had anything to do with these events. Over a 1,000 of them over a 20 year period. So the potential is great. But will it be realised?

Artforums.co.uk is for this friendly and supportive community of practicing artists. They can post their work to the group and use it to plug their websites. So there are good reasons to join.

People with the surname Everiss is another private group that can never be big, there are only a few hundred of us on earth, descended from one Gloucestershire man who changed his name from Deveraux to Everiss in the 1700s.

Bruceongames is for people who follow this blog. Feel free to join if you are a game industry professional. Use it to plug the websites of your companies and games in the “post a link” section.

So have you started any Facebook groups? Post their links into the comments on this blog if you want, let’s make the most of this social networking.

Just now tens of thousands of highly educated and commercially savvy people are losing their jobs in the financial sector and are looking for a job. (Some say they cannot be too clever because of the mess they got us all into). There are very few jobs going for them anywhere in the economy, everywhere is hurting. Except for gaming, which is booming.

So here are some little tips and hints to help them with their future careers.

1. The game industry is about entertainment, it is a good idea to remember this as even some who work in the industry seem to have forgotten.
2. Management ability and management structures are often little evolved from lemonade stands. You will be shocked when you see just how bad it can be. And how many people there are in organisations who are not needed.
3. Marketing is mostly very poor, by rote with little innovation and excitement. They usually just burn through the budget.
4. Development is incredibly inefficient. Every studio continually re-invents the wheel. Too much time is spent on technology and too little on creativity. It is as if the movie industry had to design and build new cameras for every movie they make.
5. Big budget console games mostly lose money. It is the occasional hit that pays for the rest. Maybe 7 out of ten are losers.  And these days the budgets are not dissimilar to the movie industry.
6. The big growth areas of iPhone, XNA/XLA, Flash etc are crowded because of low barriers to entry. This crowding can often lead to low quality and poor marketing. So it is obvious how to differentiate your offering.
7. High street game retail is dying, do not go there. Unless what you are doing is online you will have a very bleak future.
8. MMORPG games are all the fashion. The rate of failiure is even higher than for boxed console games. And to create one vaguely competetive game costs a lot more than making a Hollywood blockbuster.
9. The industry is incredibly fickle and fashionable. Guitar games are all the rage this week. They weren’t two years ago and they won’t be in two year’s time. Which is fine till you remember that two years is about how long it takes to develop a mainstream game.
10. No matter how good and clever and hard working you are piracy can just suddenly appear and wipe you out. This has happened many times and will happen many more times.
11. The route to success is product quality and looking after your customers. This has been proven repeatedly yet most in the industry still ignore the lesson.
12. Here are a big pile of really good industry resources. With these you should have no problem getting up to speed.

Don’t be put off. If anything be encouraged. If the industry is booming now, imagine how it would be with an influx of competent talent.