Sorry for mentioning this again so soon, but the speed that this is ramping up is increasing. A great success story for Sony to have after a few bad years. At this rate it will soon be one of the biggest games in the world.
Free Realms is a free to play PC MMORPG (soon to be coming to PS3). The business model involves paid for enhanced subscriptions, micropayments for in games items and the sale of playing cards for the associated physical version of the game.
The social networking side of the game is very strong. Players each have their own social networking page where they can share images and videos, send links and chat with friends. Exactly what an MMO should have.
A brilliant feature is that the game has built in video capture and videos created this way can be posted straight onto YouTube. This is going to be massive and videos of this game in action are going to be all over the internet.
It looks nice and has nice features but Microsoft have lost it. We are at a time when the number of pocket devices we carry is reducing as the features integrate into one piece of equipment. And the Zune HD is behind the market. No camera and no phone, who will want to carry that around? Meanwhile the iPhone and Google Android phones offer a far better real world ownership proposition.
The need to play is an irrepressible part of the human spirit, we all do it all our lives. We make games out of the most unlikely daily chores. And we use the most unlikely things as toys when we play.
Here is a video of a traditional English game using a cheese:
So it should come as no surprise when the hottest thing on the interweb becomes used for games. Even though it was never designed for this task.
One of the effects of capitalism is that competition drives prices down. Hence globalisation enables us to buy far more stuff with our money than ever before. And where something can be delivered over the interweb the competition is effectively infinite so the price the customer has to pay moves towards zero.
We have seen this most dramatically with journalism. Pre interweb you paid at the newsagent for your newspaper or magazine which in turn paid the journalists. But now news is free, every major newspaper has a website where you can get a better product (because it is more up to date, which matters with news) than the printed one, without having to pay for it. As a result lots of professional journalists no longer have jobs and lots of newspapers have closed down. But as news consumers we have not lost out because we now have citizen’s journalism with blogs and forums supplementing and often replacing the old fashioned news media.
With PC MMOs we have had a similar drive to zero priced games. Maple Story, Habbo, Club Penguin, Runescape and Free Realms all have millions of players. And there are many more such games out there. Obviously the money has to come from somewhere to pay for these games to be written, hosted and supported. This business model works by providing upgrades in the gaming experience for small payments and from advertising. Which with millions of players can add up to a lot of money.
Console gaming works to a completely different business model. They use something called “bait and hook”. You buy the initial brilliant value offering but are then locked into a standard where you have to keep paying a premium price. The huge profit in the high price consumers pay for console games effectively subsidises the cheap price of buying the console in the first place. This business model was made famous by system shaving razors from companies like Gillette and Wilkinson Sword.
These two business models are poles apart, so you would expect them never to come together. However the console manufacturers would still like to find a way of making money from the millions of people who play these MMOs. And the publishers of these games would like the jump in potential revenues that comes from being on additional, widely used platforms.
If ever there was an opportunity to break the World of Warcraft position as the world’s number one played commercial game it will be with these console MMOs.
As regular readers will know Keith Vaz, who is a member of parliament and chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, has been a persistent critic of video games.
He demanded that Rockstar Games’ Manhunt(certified 18 by the BBFC) be banned, because it allegedly influenced the 17 year old killer of 14 year old schoolboy Stefan Pakeerah. Despite the police denying any such link. Despite the Judge denying any such link. Despite it actually being the victim Stefan who (under-age) had a copy of “Manhunt” and not the killer.
Obviously someone who upholds our morals in such a manner must be morally correct himself. So this quote from the BBC may come as a surprise:
“Claim: The chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee claimed more than £75,000 to fund a second home in Westminster, even though his family home is just 12 miles away in Stanmore. The Telegraph also suggested he changed his designated second home for a single year to property in his Leicester constituency, before claiming more than £4,000 on furnishings.”
Thieves must cost Nintendo billions a year, stealing games that should have been paid for. Mostly using the R4 device. It appears that at long last Nintendo have got their act together and done something about it.
For a start the R4 is now illegal in Japan. Amazon and eBay have banned them from sale on their sites. And since January last year Nintendo have been involved in more than 560 actions that have led to the seizure of 411,000 of these devices. But this is too little, too late. Already many millions of people worldwide are using R4s to play games they have stolen.
More promising is MetaFortress technology from Metaforic which is going into use with seven publishers this year. Whilst everything is ultimately crackable, this protection makes it very difficult because each game title is protected in a unique way. It will provide a considerable obstacle to the thieves.
Human beings evolved as hunter gatherers in the African Savannah (unless you are one of those who think we were created by magic). Video games exist inside the electronics of silicon chips. So enabling human beings to play video games involves some sort of interface that works with hunter gatherer senses.
Early video games used computer keyboards, or dedicated buttons on dedicated machines as input devices. This evolved into the joystick and then the controller. Now, of course, we have gesture interfaces which are even more “natural”.
For output we have the main element of the video screen, which may well be going 3D some time soon. We also have sound, though not as well developed as it could be. And we have force feedback. Obviously the closer we can get to the real world the more realistic games become. This makes them more immersive and helps suspend disbelief. So we get better games, so it is something we want.
Therefore it will come as no surprise that people are thinking of adding smell to our games, thus bringing another of our vital senses into use when game playing. As in many things this is being led by the military. But mass production could very easily see smell technology in everyday home video games.
