World of Warcraft is an amazing gaming phenomenon and is the cash cow of all cash cows. It has 11 million monthly subscribers, which is over 60% of the total world market for these games. And a lot of its success is down to the powerful combination of gaming and social networking.
Other game publishers have tried to compete by bringing out “me too” clones, such as Warhammer Online, published by Electronic Arts. In September 2008 they were reporting that they had sold 1.2 million copies of this yet by March 2009 they were down to 300,000 subscribers. If the might of Electronic Arts can’t crack World of Warcraft then who can?
The World of Warcraft killer will be a game like this. But most important will be the integration of social networking and gameplay, the combination that has made WoW such a success. And Free Realms, from Sony, could be showing us all how to do it. With 5 million subscribers after 7 weeks and growing at the rate of half a million new subscribers a week they have very quickly joined the ranks of the major players in this area. When it goes on Playstation PS3 it will be massive. And if they made it available for the 100 million plus PS2 owners in the world they could hit a whole new audience.
The critical factor with each of these games is the player demographic. A game targeted at too narrow an age group or at just one sex is going to have less WoW killer potential. It is essential to get the content and the marketing right to build the broadest possible community. It can be done.
Bill Gates famously said that most people overestimate the effect of technology in the short term and underestimate the effect in the long time. This is easy to see as progress in technology is cumulative and incremental.
With this in mind it is interesting to see what Michael Pachter, an analyst from Wedbush Morgan has to say about downloaded games. He reckons they will be worth $400 million this year, just 2% of the market. He goes on to say: “Downloads will become 20 percent of the market within five years, and probably peak at around 50 percent of the overall market in 10 years.”
In ten years time we will be enjoying the Sony Playstation PS5 and the Microsoft Xbox 1440. I really cannot see these devices using any physical media for distributing games. Progress over 10 years is immense. Ten years ago my internet came over the latest, red hot, 56K modem technology, now, even in low technology UK, I am cruising along at 10 Mb/sec. And in more advanced South Korea100Mb/sec is the norm with 1 Gb/sec rolling out soon. Ten years is almost forever when it comes to the evolution of digital telecoms.
So not only do I think that Michael Pachter is wrong, you can also clearly see why this should be the case.
Netbook computers have become a massive phenomenon. With their small form factor they make far more sense than traditional laptop computers. And the Intel Atom processors have provided exactly the right amount of processing power with increased battery life. However these machines are still just laptop lite. But their success means that thay are receiving investment that will see them quickly evolve to be a very different animal indeed.
One of the biggest changes will come with OLED screens. These use a fraction of the power of LCD screens, are much thinner, more robust and a lot cheaper to make. So netbooks will become a lot slimmer and lighter with a vastly extended battery life.
Thus far most netbooks come with Windows XP, which is big, old clunky bloatware not exactly best suited to the job. Linux based alternatives such as Ubuntu are still short of critical mass. Expect all this to change. Windows 7 will have a version far better optimised for netbooks, but the biggest competition could come from the mobile phone operating system, Android. This already has more than enough utility for most netbook users and has been demonstrated by a few manufacturers.
With Windows 7 and Android comes touch screens, which means we can get rid of the keyboard. So netbooks will move from a clamshell format to a tablet format.
In fact netbooks will increasingly look and behave like big smartphones. The two devices are set on a course of convergence. And the result will become one of the most popular gaming platforms on earth.
I must admit that I am somewhat confused by the world’s second biggest games publisher. They say such sensible things and they lose so much money. I wish I knew them more from an inside perspective to try and understand how they manage this.
CEO John Riccitiello thinks that half of all games will move over to gesture interfaces and half will remain with traditional controllers. “I really don’t know if you’re going to want to play FIFA with a motion control device. First off, a 75-minute session would be frigging tiring, jumping all over the place. And frankly the traditional controller is pretty fun.” Personally I think that this is a good near term perspective for home consoles from where we sit now. However the advantages of a gesture interface are so massive that I am sure that human ingenuity and creativity will ultimately see a far higher percentage of games controlled this way.
In this Gamasutra article he explains EAs increasing successes on the Nintendo Wii. “No ports and pushes — do things that optimize against the controller system inherent in the wand and nunchuk.” Something other publishers would do well to take note of. There are nearly as many Wiis out there with customers as there are Xbox 360s and Sony PS3s combined. So it is a market well worth developing for, as long as you look very, very carefully at what Wii owners really want.
In the same article he says that the industry will move from 80% console to 50% console as a wider range of business models and platforms gain market share. He is right, but I see the move as being even bigger as netbooks and smartphones become ubiquitous.
Meanwhile The Sims 3, despite piracy, has become the most successful EA PC game at launch ever, with 1.4 million units for PC/Mac sold in the first week. The game iPod Touch/iPhone version also went to number one on the Apple App Store. Well done.
Tim Kretschmer, who committed the shootings, was a very keen table tennis player who wanted to turn professional. If you take a simple view of cause and effect, which the Germans obviously do, then there should be an immediate ban on table tennis.
Video gaming is just another medium, like film, books , the opera or the theatre. Why ban violence in just one of these? It makes no sense whatsoever.
The book Grand Theft Childhood, financed by a $1.5 million US government grant to pay for original and proper scientific research, comes to the exact opposite conclusions to what the stupid German legislators think: “Boys who don’t regularly play video games were more likely than even the boys who played M-rated (adult) games to get into fights, steal from a store, or have problems at school.” Every politician or journalist who wants to pass comment on video gaming should read this book first so as not to look like a complete idiot.
Video gaming is still at its very beginning. The technology it uses of interaction, connectivity and non linearity make all previous media instantly obsolete. Because of this it will become all pervading, not just in recreation but also in education, business, government and the military. It will become one of the biggest businesses on earth. And the Germans are cutting themselves off from it. The future economic harm they are doing themselves is immense.
These school shootings are committed by people who are mentally ill, not by people who play video games. Also the shootings are done with guns. If the mentally ill people couldn’t get their hands on guns then there would be no school shootings. The politicians should be looking at mental illness and gun control before (metaphorically speaking) burning books.
The German legislation on video games is already suppressive. So Germans buy their games by mail order from other countries. This happens on a massive scale and cannot be stopped, because of European Union free trade rules. Also game distribution is moving away from physical media to online, using the internet. So the German legislators will never prevent the purchase, distribution and playing of violent games within Germany. Their laws will have no effect.
The German legislators are acting out of ignorance and fear. They do not understand video games. The good news is that the younger generations do understand video games. And when these people become journalists and politicians we will see some sense brought to the subject.
