As an industry we either show too much respect for our heritage bringing out core games for core gamers. Or we flip to the opposite extreme bringing out often condescending casual fodder for any random person that happens along. We need to take a lesson from other IP entertainment such as films and books. They make much of their money by being firmly in the middle ground. By bringing quality narrative, content and production values to large audiences. By doing this they can often be challenging yet still be commercially successful with large audiences. Schindler’s List and Ghandi are two of just many examples of this.
This is getting very interesting. Sales of the Wii have slowed down a lot and so Nintendo, who have resisted price drops because of the previous huge demand, will now be forced to bite the bullet. With the HD Super Wii on the way it will not be long before they are back with an offering at a premium price point.
Sony have their back to the wall because the PS3 has cost them billions. However sales are stalling purely because it is far too expensive to buy. They have no option but to drop the price if they are to survive in the market. So another platform holder will be biting that price bullet pretty soon.
Which brings us to Microsoft. The Xbox division is nice and profitable and Microsoft have enough money in the bank to buy a country, or two. Already they have made the Xbox 360 the cheapest home console in the market, as well as being the machine that brings its users the most features and benefits. So will they respond to what the competition do to maintain their price advantage? They easily can if they want to.
Microsoft have a number of options. They can bring the price of the base, Arcade, model down to $149 or even $99. This would get them nice headlines. Or they could take advantage of low hard drive prices to bring down the prices of the Pro and Elite models. Or they could just instal far bigger hard drives. Or some combination of the above.
My guess is that there will be a price move from Microsoft in response to what the competition do. Consoles are a bait and hook business model and they will soon get their profit back as the owners buy games and subscribe to Xbox Live. Which means I will finally be going to the shops and buying one.
Intel are the largest manufacturer of processing power in the world. With 84,000 employees and a turnover of $37 billion they have immense power and influence. Their Atom processor is the current standard for netbooks.
Nokia is the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world. With 124,000 employees and a turnover of $51 billion they are even bigger and more powerful. They make 37% of all the world’s mobile phones.
Where they have common interest is mobile electronic devices. Like the netbooks and smartphones that are the fastest growing gaming devices at the moment. And the devices that evolve from them.
So we can expect a pooling of not only hardware from these two companies, but also of software. This has the potential power to take the market on in a significant way. However there are two young upstarts that are currently making all the waves in this market, Apple with iPhone and Google with Android. The competition is fierce. And for gamers Nokia have the legacy of nGage to get over.
I had a go on here at Michael Pachter, analyst at Wedbush Morgan, when he said that downloads would become 20% of the market within 5 years and peak at 50% in 10 years. To me that is incredibly conservative and I expect there to be no physical media at all in 10 years time, online distribution will be 100% of the market by then.
Online distribution confers huge advantages over plastic and cardboard distribution. Instant global distribution, ensuring that the customer has the latest version of the game and massively reduced product costs for starters. Physical distribution is cumbersome, slow, inefficient and expensive. In fact it is amazing that we haven’t switched over sooner, another example of the platform holders stunting progress.
So it was nice to see Wonderhill CEO, James Currier supporting my position. “My money is on the Web people to take the lion’s share of the gaming world by 2013″ is a sentiment I can understand. And it comes in an interesting interview.
Personally I think that once publishers and customers have experienced good downloadable game distribution they won’t want to go back to archaic plastic and cardboard. So we will very soon reach a tipping point. After which plastic and cardboard will very rapidly be consigned to history.
And to see exactly what I am talking about you have to look no further than the iPhone App Store.
I have written before about 3D gaming. The effect is more impressive than it sounds when you see it done properly for real. Having depth is like going to the theatre when all you have seen in the past is the cinema. It is just so much more realistic. More importantly for games it is also more immersive And soon you will be able to see for yourself in major game releases.
Disney lead the way, as an extension of what they are doing in 3D movies. First up are the PS3 and 360 versions of G-Force, coming next month, just before the movie debut. 3D is achieved using the bundled coloured glasses and has impressed journalists. Toy Story Mania! for the Wii follows this autumn. These are mass market titles that have the potential to give 3D the breakthrough that it needs. But, unfortunately, the Disney marketing people are not going to town with the breakthrough they have, instead relying on halo effect from the crossover of the movie IP.
Avatar, from Ubisoft is a different matter and is being touted as “the first 3D stereoscopic title in gaming history”. Once again it is a film tie in but this time it is a co-development, with the game developers having input into the film and vice versa. The director is the famous James Cameron who will bring the highest creative and production values to the whole project. Already under development for 2 years it is scheduled for Q4 ’09. Ubisoft probably have the finest reputation of the global games publishers so this whole enterprise will have massive credibility. History could look back on Avatar as being the defining moment when gaming made the step change to 3D. Just as the movie industry looks back to 1927 and The Jazz Singer when it made its step change to incorporating dialogue with the invention of the “talkies”.
As I explained at the beginning 3D makes games massively more immersive. But there is another upcoming technology that also massively enhances the experience, which is Microsoft Natal. And the very clever and very interesting thing that most people have missed is that Natal is also 3D. So we are talking about gaming with a 3D input and a 3D visual image. Can you just even begin to imagine how revolutionary this will be?
The business model for console games in this generation is not a good one. Games are very expensive to develop but most make a loss, it is only the occasional hits that keep the industry going.
The reason the games cost so much to make is that the consoles are far more content hungry than previous generations of machines yet are not powerful enough to use the large swathes of middleware necessary to reduce production costs.
And the market has changed. Increasingly each product niche is owned by just one title, which can sell massively. All the competitors to that dominant title sell in far smaller numbers than they did in previous generations. Making a “me too” title is no longer a good idea, now you have to try and ensure that each title you release dominates its niche, something EA (for instance) have failed to do.
In this generation the Wii is by far the cheapest to develop for because it is not HD. However game sales are dominated by Nintendso first party titles and much that has come from third parties has been shovelware dross that is a waste of everyone’s time. Here, once again, are the rules for Wii game development:
1) Don’t do shovelware. You are just damaging your brand(s).
2) Write Wii specific titles. Don’t port. You have to respect the interface difference.
3) Understand that most Wiis live in the lounge. And most other consoles live in the bedroom.
4) Polish, lots. Then polish some more.
5) Realise that you have to provide entertainment for the population at large. FPS titles are not a good idea.
6) You need to market completely differently. PR in women’s magazines will work a lot better than adverts in game magazines.
7) Talk to your wife/girlfriend. They understand the Wii better than you do.
The Microsoft Xbox 360 has been a huge success as a platform to develop for. It has simple, elegant, architecture and Microsoft have supported it with good tools, as you would expect from a software company. No surprise then that Metacritic lists 645 games for the Xbox 360 against 425 for the Wii and only 351 for the Sony Playstation PS3.
The problems of the PS3 are multiple. It has a quirky new CPU architecture and a poor GPU which acts as a bottleneck, hobbling the capabilities of the machine. If this weren’t enough there is the unavoidable fact that the PS3 isn’t selling very well. We are in mid cycle now, the point at which sales volumes should be ramping up. And for the PS3, they aren’t. The main reason for this is price, the PS3 is still vastly too expensive for the market and is cruelly exposed by the bargain that is the Xbox 360.
Sony are caught between a rock and a hard place. The PS3 design contained so many newly developed bits that it was, and remains, very expensive to manufacture. But Sony are not in good financial health so do not have the resources to subsidise a price reduction. Already they have lost billions on the PS3 project. It has proved to be probably the biggest loss maker in the history of video gaming.
And now things are getting even worse for Sony. Activision is the biggest game publisher and their boss is Bobby Kotick. He is not happy with the PS3: “I’m getting concerned about Sony; the PlayStation 3 is losing a bit of momentum and they don’t make it easy for me to support the platform. It’s expensive to develop for the console, and the Wii and the Xbox are just selling better. Games generate a better return on invested capital on the Xbox than on the PlayStation”. And this unhappiness becomes a threat: “They have to cut the price, because if they don’t, the attach rates are likely to slow. If we are being realistic, we might have to stop supporting Sony”.
In the real world very few games are actually developed for the PS3. They are mainly developed for the Xbox 360 and then converted to run on the PS3. So things are very bad when that conversion cost is becoming uneconomic.
