Take 2 lose $50 million in the quarter ended 1 January. Electronic Arts could buy them for buttons now and must be very glad that their multi billion war chest is still sitting in the bank. The reason we have big publishers running huge losses whilst the industry booms is threefold. Firstly the plastic and cardboard console game business model is close to being broken, they cost too much to make for the potential revenue. Secondly there are too many publishers of these games, we need a lot more consolidation down to just a handful of global giants. And thirdly gaming is still an immature industry so a lot of management are there by accident. And it shows.
Research shows that online gaming is on the up. No surprise there. Xbox Live represents a half of all online console gaming. No surprise there. Massive leap in Wii online gaming leaving Playstation trailing a distant and miserable third. Now that is a surprise.
Microsoft came 21st in the Sunday Times 100 best companies to work for in Britain list. A great achievement and something that more in our industry should seek to attain. Too often the key workers in our industry are treated badly with unpaid crunch, low job security and a management tendency to treat staff like mushrooms. Yet staff are by far the most important element in any business. With the right people you can do anything. Without them you will achieve nothing.
The French National Assembly are now debating the strictest anti P2P law in the world. This will be an interesting experiment. Will they be able to stop the millions of people who now steal their digital content instead of paying for it? Will doing so lead to a renaissance in the creative arts that have been badly hit by the massive theft of their work? And will they be able to do so without impinging upon rights and freedoms?
We just had the annual BAFTA awards for games. And just like every year the industry were shocked and surprised by the results. When I was running such things at Codemasters I eventually refused to even enter for these awards. The game industry should have nothing to do with BAFTA, that F stands for Film and we are sleeping with the enemy. Some presumably think some of the movie industry stardust will be sprinkled on us. If so they are paying too high a price in giving huge chunks of our marketing away to an organisation dominated by a competing industry. We are already bigger than film but I bet that BAFTA isn’t spending more on promoting games than it is Films. The game industry needs it’s own organisations and infrastructure and is held back by not creating them.
UK trade price for the Wii going up by £16.50 +VAT. This is because the Japanese Yen is very strong and the British Pound (due to an inept and incompetent government) is very weak. Nintendo want to maintain their profit levels on every machine sold. And if people in the UK won’t pay the price then they can always find customers elsewhere. This just as Sony is being strongly rumoured to be bringing the PS3 retail price down by £50. So we could end up with the least capable console costing the most money.
I have written many times on here about the current inept, execrable British labour government. One feature of socialists is that they think that they know better than the public who voted them into power. And this know all attitude manifests itself in control freakery. The current labour government have stripped away our rights and freedoms more than any previous British government. They now have more oppressive powers against the electorate than in any other democracy.
This nanny state mentality manifests itself in many ways. And one of these is in spending huge amounts (£275 million) telling us that being overweight is bad for us. Something we obviously need to be told. Their Change4Life campaign is costing a lot of our money and has met much criticism. That it is simplistic, has unsuitable partners such as Nestle, PepsiCo and Mars and that it simply won’t work.
If having the Government hectoring us wasn’t bad enough, a number of charities have decided to waste our contributions to them by joining in this silliness. The British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK have got together in a joint campaign. The adverts have been designed by The Gate agency and will be in women’s weeklies including Heat, Closer, OK and Hello! also in TV listing titles like What’s on TV and TV Choice. The campaign will last for four weeks and will target parents with children under 11 years old. There are two adverts, the one at the top of this article that says that video games kill children and one which says that eating a small cake will also kill you.
These are lazy, simplistic shock adverts that tell a lie. The Gate agency and the three charities involved should be ashamed of themselves. All they are doing is exposing their uneducated prejudices. Everyone reading this knows just how much good video games do for children. And anyone who doesn’t should read some of the articles here on the subject.
You wonder why these people didn’t create an advert attacking books. Books are far more sedentary than video games and reading is an anti social solitary activity that ruins your eyesight.
So I urge everyone who reads this to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority. If possible these adverts must be stopped and the public need to know that they are being lied to. Also I urge everyone to desist from contributing to the three named charities that are doing this, they obviously don’t deserve our hard earned money. In the meantime here is a video that shows just how sedentary video games are:
I have written on here before about the Dizzy brand. It is one of the biggest ever video game brands in Europe and especially in the UK. There is a whole generation out there who are aware of the Dizzy brand. I am especially proud because I did the marketing that created the sales and built the brand. Though this was made a lot easier by the fantastic games the Oliver twins created. I am less pleased about the silly feuding that killed the brand off in its prime and the lack of vision to bring it back.
There is still a big and active Dizzy community out there, 20ish years after the event. A testament to the enduring quality of this brand. And the purpose of this little article is to publicise this by letting you see an email I received:
Hello Bruce,
I’m Alexandru Simion, author of the DizzyAGE engine. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a set of tools designed to create classic Dizzy adventure games:
Every year we have an Easter competition bringing in new and wonderful fan made Dizzy games. This year we’re happy to have The Oliver Twins among the sponsors. As in 2008, they offering three invitations to their Blitz Games Studios.
I saw your blog post about how you tried to put The Olivers and Code Masters together to bring Dizzy back and I’m sorry it didn’t work. When we visited them last year, Philip and Andrew told us how much they wanted to reach an agreement with Code Masters. Well, maybe one day we’ll see it done.
I was also wondering if, considering your interest in Dizzy games, you are willing to have a post in your blog, about DizzyAGE and our competition. It will probably bring in more people and who knows maybe some of them are going to create some great Dizzy games. If you need more details, please let me know.
“New research conducted by games development industry body TIGA shows that the UK games development sector is a highly skilled and successful industry that exports games all over the world. However, the UK games industry is being held back by the Government’s tax regime, skill shortages, and a lack of finance.” A direct quote from this TIGA press release. And something every regular reader here already knows. The British game industry once pulled well above its weight but indifference, neglect, apathy, ignorance and ineptitude from this abysmal labour government have sold the industry down the river. Yet interactive media is the future and Korea, Canada, France, China, Malaysia etc have governments that realise this and who give massive support.
ITV (Uk commercial television broadcaster) loses £2.7 billion, 600 jobs to go. Inevitable. And this is just the beginning of the slide of television as we know it into oblivion. Their business model is broken because their old fashioned media cannot compete. They lack interactivity, connectivity and non linearity. Newspapers are in similar dire trouble. The BBC is impervious to reality with its massive salary culture because UK television owners have no option but to pay for it. Even this cannot go on for ever. Gaming will be bigger than television and film combined. People are switching their spend, both of money and time, away from the old and obsolete media to something that is technically vastly superior. And it could be so different, the TV companies have mountains of amazing IP that could make the transition across from old to new entertainment media, but their management are entrenched with their heads in the sand. Once again this has all been said on here before.
Toys R Us move towards the pre owned game market. So retail makes profit several times out of a single game whilst the developers only get paid once, despite several owners enjoying the fruits of their labour. You can see where this is going, the boxed game market is already a marginal business model. And the alternative of delivering content online works so much better in so many ways. All the retailers are achieving by going to pre owned is to speed up the demise of boxed games as a viable business. They are shooting themselves in the feet. Publishers are already moving from plastic and cardboard distribution to online at some speed. Now they will make the move even faster.
There have now been over a billion online matches of Halo 3 on Xbox Live. Another fact for anyone in this industry to write on their shaving/makeup/both mirror. If you had predicted this to anyone in the industry just two years ago they would have laughed at you. We have witnessed massive change in a very short time. And still there are plenty who don’t get it.
Howard Stringer rearranges the deckchairs on the Titanicrejigs Sony senior management. Something needs to be done. He says: “Consumers want products that are networked, multi-functional and service-enhanced utilizing open technologies, and user experiences that are rich, shared and, increasingly, green.” Something Sony have singularly failed to deliver. Their obsession with media standards has brought them multiple product defeats. The PS3 is a disaster zone. And different divisions, like movie making, televisions and mobile phones don’t talk to each other. So what should and could be competitive advantages are totally ignored. Why have Apple succeeded with the iPhone when Sony was far better positioned in every way to deliver such a device? Why are blockbuster movies produced by Sony studios without integrating the IP into Sony gaming and hardware products as a matter of course? Why are Sony not pushing towards thin client televisions with cloud delivery of a huge range of content?
THQ has 50/50 chance of going bankrupt according to this analyst/report. They are being hit by multiple whammies. They are the wrong size, publishers need to be massive and global to get the economies of scale necessary to be competitive, or small and agile if they wish to exploit niches. The boxed console game market has become a very difficult business model for just about every publisher, it is not a good place to be. And finally product quality is on the up, publishers are realising that they are wasting their time selling bad games and so public expectations of product quality are much higher.
Microsoft Xbox 360 tops Japanese console sales (again). This time it is Star Ocean 4: The Last Hope that is doing the business for them. It is quite simple really, just give the public what the public want. Microsoft are succeeding to an extent in Japan that nobody could have predicted and as a result are building a very respectable customer base. If they continue this stream of must have titles they will become a genuine force in the Japanese market.
This article is not intended as a boast or for showing off. It is just an illustration of how much electronics has gone portable in recent years, what the utility of the individual devices is and how much each device is specialised and how much their functionality overlaps. What happens in this space is fundamental for the future of gaming.
Nokia 6300 phone. I have always preferred the Nokia phone brand for its nice user interface. The 6300 is one of those classic Nokia phones with a perfect balance of features. I keep it turned off a lot because I don’t like intrusions, so it is mainly used for outgoing calls. I have looked at various smart phones and had a Blackberry for a while but that was even worse for impinging on my karma. The replacement for the 6300 could well be the HTC Magic, the first smartphone that I am warming to. But you do pay a price in bulk for the added utility.
Nintendo DS Lite portable video game console. With a few classic titles. A brilliant concept, well executed. They could have incorporated far more utility but chose not to so as to keep the price down.
Canon IXUS 950 IS digital camera. Absolutely brilliant package of technology with a great lens, image stabilisation, face recognition etc. This is the mobile device that I use most, far more than my mobile phone.
Dell Latitude laptop. I bought this with good intentions but never got into using it. It just didn’t bring enough features and benefits into my life for the cost of lugging it around.
Acer Aspire One Netbook. With 7,800 mAh “all day” battery. What a brilliant device. Connection to the sum of human knowledge anywhere I choose to take it, with a near full sized keyboard and display. Most software I use is in the cloud so this gives me full access.
Canon FS100 video camera. Another brilliant device, small and light it is very portable but it has a great lens and image stabilisation. Recording onto SD cards is the only way to go and gives loads of benefits over all other potential recording media. This is a very well resolved piece of technology that works exceedingly well.
Apple iPod classic 60GB. You need to record at a minimum of 192 Kbps instead of the standard 128 Kbps and replace the standards earphones to get anything approaching listenable sound quality, but most users don’t notice, they are too taken in by the whole iPod experience which is an immense triumph of marketing. These devices have just enough functionality to do their job and no more, but the way it is done is so slick that technically better competitors are massively outsold.
Casio fx-991 ES calculator. This non programmable, non graphics calculator is amazingly cheap. And amazingly powerful. If you haven’t used a full featured calculator for a while this will shock you with its capabilities and ease of use.
Palm. I wasted some money when these were a fad. Once again I never got into using it and it is gathering dust somewhere. A ball pen and paper are massively better.
Various electronic watches. I have bought a number of these. But 99.9% of the time I wear a watch with cogs and a spring in it. This may be heavier and less accurate but the aesthetic qualities more than compensate.
Obviously I don’t take all of these devices everywhere with me all of the time! So it is mix and match. For instance yesterday I went to Kew Gardens to see the orchids and took four devices with me. The netbook, phone and both cameras. And here I can illustrate a very important point. All four of these devices are capable of recording video yet I only used one of them for this job, the capability of the dedicated video camera being massively greater than the video capabilities of the three other devices. And so it is with all my mobile devices (except the Dell and the Palm). They are each so much better at their prime task that their secondary tasks never come into play.
We are obviously headed for something approaching a universal portable electronic device. Possibly a touch screen device sized somewhere between an iPhone and a netbook. But we are not there yet because such a device needs to be world class in every one of its capabilities. So the closest we have got is integrating MP3 with phones, which is very easy to do. And putting games onto phones and MP3 players which is nice for our industry even if the games are neutered by the interface limitations.
For me the device that would have the most utility would be a Canon Ixus 950IS with a Nokia 6300 integrated into it. Technologically this would be a doddle to do. The Sony Ericsson K850i and the Nokia N95 both got tantalisingly close but did not go that extra mile to be world class at everything.
So the market for portable electronic devices is a jumbled up mess because we are currently on a very steep evolutionary slope. The whole market is changing at immense speed and nobody, not even Steve Jobs, knows where it is going. My guess is that the lead will come from the mobile telephone industry because they have by far the biggest presence in the market. They make devices which are ubiquitous that they have constantly striven to add extra utility to. Hence Apple, Google and Microsoft moving into this area. Sony have been there for ages so the main absentee is Nintendo. How long can they stay out for?
