Entries from May 2009 ↓

Last night at the IGDA meeting in Leamington Spa I saw a presentation and then a demonstration of 3D gaming from Andrew Oliver and Aaron Allport of Blitz games. Most of us are familiar with old B movie 3D, with cardboard blue and red glasses. Well technology has moved on a long way since then and we are at the cusp of it going mass market.

Just now the movie industry is producing 3D films at an unprecedented rate. Partly because they now can, with digital distribution and digital movie projection. And the TV manufacturing companies are switching to a variety of 3D technologies in their latest models. So there is a groundswell out there and gaming will be a part of it.

Blitz have developed proprietary 3D software that enables 3D games to work on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. There were a number of hurdles to overcome in the sheer amount of information that needs to be delivered to the screen, so these consoles are being stretched to their absolute limit. It is only with the next generation of consoles that the power will be there to do 3D easily and well across all game genres.

The 3D game I saw was using active glasses and was far more effective than the old coloured lens technology. And the results were deeply impressive. It was like going to the theatre having only previously seen the cinema. The whole experience was vastly more immersive. And as this is one of the things we strive for in gaming Blitz would appear to be on a winner with their technology.

I am told that the journalists who have tried this have written it up very positively but then their readers have responded with very negative comments. This is because you really are in no position to form a judgement on the experience till you have tried it yourself.

It is a fundamental aspect of human nature that most people will steal something if there is no danger of getting caught. And this is what has happened to the recorded music industry. Most music residing on MP3 players in the world is stolen, it has been downloaded over the internet using peer to peer filesharing. In fact most young people today think that it is quite normal and acceptable to steal in this way and they kick up a fuss when someone tries to stop them.

With the advent of broadband this stealing spread to movies. So now every movie is available online before it is in the cinema. And many millions of people are regularly stealing from the film industry. To these thieves it is the acceptable norm.

Which brings us to games. To a large extent these have the DRM protection of being on a console. Where this breaks down, as in boxed PC games, the market is decimated and the supply of new products dwindles to a trickle.

The thieves make lots of excuses for their thieving. Such as the fact that one incremental copy does not cost the producer anything. But they miss the fundamental moral point that they are benefiting from another person’s work without contributing towards it. And if everyone steals, then who will pay for new music, films and games to be made?

The only way to stop this stealing is to stop the illegal traffic on the internet. It currently comprises well over a half of all internet traffic, so widespread is the stealing. The French have introduced a law that thieves will have their internet connections stopped if they offend repeatedly. This approach is what a lot of governments and a lot of the industries involved want. So if it works in France it will be rolled out to other countries.

This stealing is not victimless, the recorded music industry has been decimated, the film industry is suffering from a huge loss of revenues and the games industry has just about deserted several gaming platforms. All this means people losing their jobs and less content being produced.

In the UK the creative industries contribute £112.5 billion (or 8%) to the economy and provide 1.8 million jobs. It has been researched that half of this is at risk from illegal file sharing. So something has to be done. Peer to peer downloading is the biggest epidemic of theft in the history of mankind. The law has not kept up with the technology and everyone will be a lot worse off until it does.

So Sony lost 98.9 billion yen ($1.04bn, £685m) in the year to the end of March 2009, its first annual loss in 14 years. Back in January they were predicting a 150 billion yen loss.

Sales were down 12.9% year on year and Sony are making 8,000 redundancies from it’s 185,000 employees and is closing a tenth of its factories.

As I have said on here, Howard Stringer seems to have a grip on what needs to be done. But for me the biggest problem seems to be the walls built up between the different divisions.

Ed Vaizey is the Conservative shadow minister for the arts. His remit includes the video games industry and pretty soon now the Conservatives will be the government of the United Kingdom. So what Ed Vaizey has to say is well worth listening to. The good news is that he is very supportive of the gaming industry. A full 180 degree change in attitude from the current government. And quite right too.

Ed Vaizey has said that the two trade bodies, ELSPA and TIGA, that represent the industry, should merge under a common name that everyone can understand. He thinks that the combined body should concentrate on getting good news stories about the industry and should harness the power of celebrity to do so. This is a very strong message coming from someone in Ed’s position.

Which is nice for this blog because the trade body merger and the use of celebrities are both things that have been evangelized on here.

Screens and user interfaces absolutely everywhere. Technology gets every cheaper which is good because it would cost a fortune to implement this sort of stuff. One thing is for sure, there will be games on all the screens.

We are heading into E3 with Apple firmly in the driving seat when it comes to mobile gaming. Their iPhone and App Store combination has been one of the biggest and fastest events ever in the history of video gaming. Very rapidly they have built themselves an entrenched position that you may think puts them a long way ahead of the competition. But maybe not.

Apple have a business plan of only using one airtime provider per territory. This has been fundamental to how they make money out of iPhone. However it is very limiting. So expect Apple to bring out new, different, iPhones with different features and benefits that can be sold through a different airtime provider in each territory. They need to do this to expand their use base.

Another area that Apple need to address is netbooks. These are taking the world by storm and Apple are being left out. Apple have two possible answers to the market need. They can make a very small MacBook. They have done this to an extent with the new 13 inch model but it is three times the price it needs to be in order to compete. The second answer is to make a big iPhone/iPod, something tablet sized that uses touch screen and has the functionality of an Atom netbook. This is very strongly rumoured to be imminent.

Of course Microsoft want to change this situation and the combination of Zune and Xbox Live will be their weapon of choice. Everyone is getting very excited about a couple of Tweets that have emerged recently from Microsoft. “June 2009 will be an important month for Zune lovers.” and “New product launch, that’s all I’m allowed to say. Hold off from buying an iPhone/Pre.” I bet that has got you excited. It would be extremely foolish to underestimate Microsoft who traditionally win in new markets they enter after an initial slow start. So I think this new Zune really could be very special indeed.

But the big threat to Apple does not appear to be coming from Microsoft at the moment, it is coming from Google. In Android Google have created their best product yet in that it integrates all their other products and a whole lot more in your pocket. And because Android handsets are manufactured by third parties and sold by third parties they are not blighted by Google’s abysmal lack of marketing culture. Expect a flood of Android handsets from a wide range of manufacturers, it will take a lot to stop them dominating the market. And just as with Apple there is the potential to build a netbook beater, all they need to do is increase the form factor. Such a device will be a lot cheaper than the Apple equivalent and on current performance it will be a lot better too. It is coming.

This whole product area could have been owned by Sony. They were uniquely positioned to exploit it with a rich back groung in mobile video games, MP3 players and mobile phones. Yet they screwed up with their different corporate divisions not talking to each other. And still they seem to have lost the plot. The new Sony X series Walkman has some nice features but it completely misses the target. If the new PSP is not a phone then Sony might as well give up.

Finally we have Nokia and Nintendo. Two massive players who seem to be peripheral to what is happening out there. They are both too big and too successful to see this whole market pass them by. So they both need to come up with big announcements soon.

So the whole pocket device landscape is in extreme flux. It will be massively different three months from now and even more different six months from now.

Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of action films and television shows such as Top Gun, Pirates of the Caribbean and C.S.I. is creating a new development studio based in Santa Monica. They are going to create new big project IP that can be published as videogames, movies, TV and anything else that works.

Because Jerry Bruckheimer knows nothing about games and the games industry he has recruited two industry veterans to help him. Jim Veevaert will be president of production, he was at Microsoft for 8 years as executive producer on titles including  Halo 3, and managed the relationships with Rare, Epic Games and Bungie. Jay Cohen will be president of development and comes from Ubisoft, being involved in Splinter Cell Assassin’s Creed, Prince of Persia and Ghost Recon.

This business will be very Hollywood, concentrating on creativity and finance. Actually publishing them and distributing them will be contracted out to MTV games. With outside contract studios doing the game development. This could be an example of the way the industry is going. Or it could fizz out like several previous attempts to combine the two industries.

What is for certain is that a lot of Hollywood is going to sit up and take serious notice of this, so we may well see similar stories cropping up again.