Entries from June 2009 ↓

And quite right too.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset, from Minnesota, had damages awarded against her of $1.9 million by a federal court for downloading 24 songs. She could have settled without going to court by paying $3 – $5 thousand but chose not to. She was hosting 1,700 tracks on Kazaa but was taken to court just for the sample of 24.

What is it with these people who think that it is OK to steal other people’s property on this scale?

Gameleon.net is a new social networking hub for both professional and volunteer members of the video game industry’s press corps and other videogame related professionals.

I just joined.

Game Developer have published their report of the world’s 50 top game developers and it makes very interesting reading. With Nintendo an obvious number one, Blizzard number two and Ubisoft Montreal at number three.

Amazingly Rare (which cost Microsoft $375 million) only make number forty nine, Sega only make thirty seven and Codemasters don’t even make the top fifty.

Lord Mandleson is our political leader in Britain and he has a representative in the lower house, a Scot called Gordon Brown. Yesterday, as part of the release of the Digital Britain report Gordon said: “A fast internet connection is now seen by most of the public as an essential service, as indispensable as electricity, gas and water.” The problem with this is that the main use of broadband is theft. Millions of people use it to download many billions of pounds worth of digital content without paying for it. The biggest orgy of stealing in the history of humanity.

There is a massive problem with this in that if everybody steals and nobody pays for the content then the content will not be made. We have seen this many times in the game industry. And it is killing off quality television. And it damages any business that involves knowledge that can be represented digitally. Which is very many businesses in our post manufacturing, knowledge based economy. In other words for our society to work in the future the government has got to stop the thieves. There is no other option.

So it is good that Digital Britain is making the first tentative steps in this direction (the Swedes are already well ahead). It wants to force ISPs to reduce piracy by 70% in one year, supervised by OFCOM. This can be done. However even 30% of the current level still represents billions of pounds of theft. The global Anti Counterfeiting treaty will hopefully force stronger action and in more countries.

It really is about time that the worst peer to peer IP thieves were brought to court and prosecuted for their crimes. If they went on a rampant shoplifting spree in London every day they would soon be dealt with. But do exactly the same online and they currently go unpunished.

Of course the IP thieves come up with all sorts of spurious excuses to justify their actions. But then this is the same for all criminals.

Brilliant news. The Digital Britain review has come out in favour of the PEGI system of game age classification, as championed on here (and the rest of the industry). And they have rejected using the BBFC quango as championed by Tanya Byron.

However, before we open the champagne, it is worth noting that the review says that PEGI will be overseen by the Video Standards Council. Let’s hope this does not mean taking a system that currently works well and burdening it with unnecessary bureaucracy and bureaucrats.

And always remember that books, which contain far stronger adult material than any video game, have no age classification system whatsoever.

Game consoles are just specialist computers and so, like all computers, they obey Moore’s Law. This is something that it is very important to keep in mind when looking at the console generations. Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors that can be placed on a chip doubles every two years. So if a new console is launched 6 years after its predecessor it will be 8 times more powerful. This also means that a given game console should approximately halve its manufacturing cost every two years. It is this these realities that drive our gaming hardware forward.

Now let’s look at our current generation of HD consoles, the Xbox 360 (first available Nov 2005) and the PS3 (first available November 2006). These are both architecturally very different from their predecessors, the Xbox and the PS2. This meant that the whole industry had a massive learning curve to get games working well on them. We have now climbed that learning curve and are driving these machines to pretty near the max, so in pure processing terms games are not going to get much better on them.

The next generation of home consoles from Microsoft (definitely) and Sony (probably) will be just massively upgraded developments of the current generation. They will simply use the latest evolutions of the same CPU and GPU families. Their introduction will not be industry disruptive because they will be 100% backwards compatible. Not just with games, but also with online services like Xbox Live.

So when will we see these machines? It is simply a matter of choosing when to freeze the specification of the processors. The longer they leave it, the more powerful the machines will be. Moore’s Law. But there are huge advantages of being first to market, as Microsoft proved with the Xbox 360. So it is a matter of balancing commercial reality against computer power. In the past this balance led to new consoles being introduced after approximately 5 years. Which means that a new Xbox could be with us next year (2010).

But now we have Natal to muddy the waters. Natal is a step change in what video gaming can do and puts Microsoft a long way ahead of its competitors (presuming Natal works as advertised). So effectively adding a Natal unit to an existing Xbox 360 gives the user a jump in capabilities comparable with buying a new generation machine.

This brings us to two scenarios. The first is that the Xbox3 / Xbox 720 will be with us next year fitted with Natal as standard and that Microsoft just showed us the Xbox 360 version at E3 to demonstrate the technology. The second scenario is that Natal gives Microsoft breathing space to delay the introduction of a new machine by, say, a year. Thus making the new console significantly more powerful. Certainly Microsoft will have had many internal strategy meetings to work out which of these scenarios works best for them.

Currently the rumour machine is going for the first option and Microsoft aren’t denying it. Which would put the new machine in your local shop in 18 months time. Start saving.

I worked on the original Operation Flashpoint at Codemasters (I am even in the game!). At the time we were mainly a console publisher and were being hammered by PS1 piracy and the console transition. Things were so bad that 20% of the entire workforce were made redundant. And there was nearly zero marketing budget for Operation Flashpoint. So we concentrated on the online community and PR. And we got Flashpoint to number one in every country with a chart (and presumably loads more as well). So it pretty much saved the company.

That was way back in 2001. We had created a world class gaming brand. Yet, amazingly, no sequel has yet been released. This must be one of the most successful attempts not to make money in the history of the games industry. When I left Codemasters in 2005 I was sure that Operation Flashpoint was the biggest brand that the company owned, more valuable than all it’s other brands put together. And I was sure that it was possible to build a world class publisher on the back of it. But it is now 8 long years since the original release.

But, after many delays, we are promised that a sequel will be released this autumn, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. An opportunity for Codemasters to take on the world. But there is a big problem and that problem is Modern Warfare 2, the latest Call of Duty title, which will be released at around the same time.

Modern Warfare 2  is published by Activision, the world’s biggest game publisher. The Call of Duty brand first surfaced in 2003 to critical acclaim, scoring 91% on Metacritic and 92% on Game Rankings. Activision have milked the brand with four main versions and numerous expansion packs and spin offs. The fourth version was called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and was the catalyst for splitting the brand in two. Going forward Call of Duty and Modern Warfare will be two separate brands.

So the marketing team at Activision have done the exact opposite of what Codemasters have done. They have milked the Call of Duty brand for every penny possible and built it into one (or two!) of the world’s greatest game franchises. For example Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was released in Q4 2007 (with Metacritic and Game Rankings both giving it 94%) and so far has sold around 13 million units, making it one of the world’s biggest selling games.

As you can see things are very interesting. Can Codemasters revive the Flashpoint brand and take on Modern Warfare 2? Or will they just be struggling for the crumbs that fall of the edge of the Activision table?