The first important concept to realise is that Apple are involved in two wars with the iPhone brand. They are involved in a handset war with Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Motorola etc. And they are involved in an smartphone operating system war with Microsoft, Symbian, Blackberry, Android etc. It is the second of these that is by far the most important.
The second important concept to realise is that the mobile phone business model has changed. For years the airtime providers had all the power and demanded ever cheaper handsets for their customers. They were selling a simple commodity, airtime, so the main strategic advantage came from lowering costs. Now, with smartphones, the user is being offered a myriad of other services so the business model has moved to bait and hook (like system razors and game consoles). The profit for the the Apple iPhone comes mainly not from the initial sale but instead from the potentially endless income stream as owners pay for the services that they are using.
Apple have now sold more than 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices. This is the fastest and biggest ever uptake of a new gaming platform from a new platform holder in the history of the gaming industry. It is amazing that the App Store is still less than a year old and now it has over 50,000 applications!
The smartphone war is so fierce that all protagonists have to constantly update their offerings, or be left behind. So Apple have just announced changes to their iPhone brand offering. Firstly they have announced a new premium model the iPhone 3GS with a few added features and benefits. It runs twice as fast, which is important when you remember that these devices are computers. They have upgraded the camera quite a lot (they needed to) but it still falls far short of the camera on the Samsung i7500. And there are a number of smaller features such as a compass and voice control. There is no OLED display this time, which is a big pity.
Secondly and very cleverly they have continued with the old model, the iPhone 3G, but at a much lower price. They can do this because of their bait and hook business model and because they have already amortised its development and tooling costs. The 8GB model is now just $99 and so comes free with airtime contracts. This will allow the iPhone to go far more mass market, it will now be competing with non smartphones on price.
Sweden’s Pirate Party won a seat in the European Election. This is what happens with proportional representation, populist single issue candidates get into power. They got 7.1% of the vote on their platform of reform of the patent and copyright laws.
Starting in the 1970s LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) screens have gradually taken over the whole world of displays. The early LCDs were small and mono, without backlighting, so used little power. They were ideal for watches and calculators. Then came colour LCDs, these are technologically crude devices using layers of filters to achieve colour. However they are relatively light in weight and quite thin so became the display of choice for applications like laptop computers. As technology advanced LCDs became bigger and became the display of choice for televisions.
There are several drawbacks to colour LCD displays:
They are very complex, with polarisers, filters, backlights etc which make them very expensive to produce.
Most of the light produced by the display is absorbed within the display, this makes them very inefficient users of energy. With mobile devices they are the main limit of battery life.
The fundamentals of the technology produce a narrow viewing angle.
LCDs switch relatively slowly so are not very good at displaying motion.
They cannot display black, which reduces picture quality enormously.
As many people have discovered they are fragile and easily broken.
LCD displays have become the TVs of choice because they have big screens which are thin and thus easy to live with in a domestic environment. Most users are not critical enough to be bothered by the poor picture quality.
I still use a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) television because it is better. My Philips 36PW9525 has a picture quality that puts any LCD television to shame. It does, however, need three people to pick it up.
But both LCD and CRT technologies are in the process of being made obsolete. There is a display technology being introduced that is vastly superior to both in every way. It is called OLED and it works by semiconductor emissive electroluminescence. The advantages are startling:
Manufactured by a lithographic process, the screen is literally printed. This will, ultimately, make them very cheap to produce.
The incredibly simple construction makes them very light, a fraction of the weight of an LCD. Also they are extremely robust. And only a few millimetres thick.
Nearly all the energy is turned into the light that you see, this is incredible energy efficiency and will revolutionise portable devices.
Black really is black because no light is being produced. This massively improves picture quality.
Better colors, brightness, contrast and viewing angle than LCD.
Switch very fast (0.01ms) compared with LCD (2.0ms) so can display motion vastly better.
They can be made curved and they can be made out of flexible materials. You could even make clothes out of them!
As you can see OLED confers massive advantages, the main problem is in productionising the technology. They are starting with small screens, just as LCD did, and then gradually working their way up. But already they can be found in a number of production devices. The Zune HD and Samsung i7500 for instance, in the world of gaming. Soon they will be in iPods and iPhones, which will really bring them to the public’s attention.
So every LCD device will become obsolete, the features and benefits of OLED devices will be so overwhelmingly superior. And games will look so much better.
Speaking as someone who has been working in interface and sensing technology for nearly 10 years, this is an astonishing combination of hardware and software. The few times I’ve been able to show researchers the underlying components, their jaws drop with amazement… and with good reason.
The 3D sensor itself is a pretty incredible piece of equipment providing detailed 3D information about the environment similar to very expensive laser range finding systems but at a tiny fraction of the cost. Depth cameras provide you with a point cloud of the surface of objects that is fairly insensitive to various lighting conditions allowing you to do things that are simply impossible with a normal camera.
But once you have the 3D information, you then have to interpret that cloud of points as “people”. This is where the researcher jaws stay dropped. The human tracking algorithms that the teams have developed are well ahead of the state of the art in computer vision in this domain. The sophistication and performance of the algorithms rival or exceed anything that I’ve seen in academic research, never mind a consumer product. At times, working on this project has felt like a miniature “Manhattan project” with developers and researchers from around the world coming together to make this happen.
We would all love to one day have our own personal holodeck. This is a pretty measurable step in that direction.
Ed Vaizey is the Conservative Shadow Arts Minister, with responsibility for video games. He sends me his newsletter about what is going on with regards to gaming and UK politics. This week he has sent me this:
“A home affairs select committee report into Knife Crime, published this week, expressed concern that exposure to violent films and video games on ‘young people’s propensity to commit violence’ moreHERE. We remain stout defenders of the video games industry. While there are obviously inappropriate games that can be accessed, we would remind readers that only 3 per cent of video games are 18 rated.”
The fact is that there is no credible research linking video games to knife crime in society. Quite the opposite, violent youth crime has gone down in every country in which video games have become widespread. Professional researchers think that this is because video games act as a catharsis, the kids take it out on the game instead of on each other.
Also the kind of kid that is spending lots of time on the street getting involved in gang culture is not the kind of kid that is heavily into video games. There isn’t the time for both.
The reasons for violent youth crime lie far deeper in society than video games. The breakdown of the nuclear family, chidbirth as a way of earning money in dependency culture, desertion of old fashioned policing methods, lax criminal justice system, the destabilising effects of excessive immigration etc etc. Most of which have been brought upon us or have been made worse by this execrable labour government. I blame them, not video games.
Hopefully, with the current implosion of the government, they will soon be gone. Ed Vaizey has a far more sensible attitude towards us and will then be in power.
This could be very big for game publishers and game players. Shane Kim, Microsoft’s corporate VP of strategy and business development in the games group (he must need oversize business cards!) has said that existing games can be patched for Natal: “You can take an existing game, and make it work”. And he held up Burnout Paradise as a game that Microsoft had done this to: “It’s a great example of just how simple it is to adapt a game”.
Of course game developers and publishers aren’t going to do the work for nothing, so one potential way forward is for Microsoft to sell Natal patches for their existing game catalogue using Xbox Live.
Kim also said that Natal development kits are going out this week, which gives you an idea just how stable and mature the technology is.
Several times here I have gone on about the importance of polishing games. It is the one simple process that can make a good game great and an average game good. It seems a no brainer that investing time in polish will be immensely cost effective in generating disproportionately more sales revenue. And we have the example of Wii first party games to see just how important and successful polish is a development process. Here are my rules for Wii game development that have been on here several times before:
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.
Yet still far too many games go out with rough edges, which is ridiculous. Why degrade a multi million dollar product for the sake of a relatively small amount of extra work? It really makes no sense.
“We’re trying to much more aggressively put in at least two to three months of polish time back into the schedule. So a game is actually functionally complete, content complete, then we go in and we put it through mass amounts of tests, massive amounts of replay-throughs, so that we can really get those five, 10, 15 points on Metacritic.”
“ Dead Space was one of those titles that had a lot of polish built into it, and a lot of the games that we’re doing right now like Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age and Need for Speed Shift also have built-in polish.”
This is new “Three or four years ago, products were coming in hot, hitting the market hot. … You know, last year’s Need for Speed finished tests, and that was it. There was no time in the schedule [for polish] because of the way the studios had been set up. We had to break the cycle and give very careful consideration to polish times. We have to have that polish time at the end of the project, or none of it matters.”
For inspiration on polishing entertainment products we only have to look at the film industry. They have over a hundred year experience (since The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906). And for them post production typically takes longer than actually shooting the film, although it obviously costs a huge amount less.
The problem we have is that game industry management have a very strong imperative to meet street date deadlines and to get the game out there making money. What they are missing is the bigger picture. For a three month delay and a relatively small additional investment they can have a game that will sell a whole lot more and make a huge amount of extra profit.
And of course we live in the age of Metacritic as Gibeau pointed out. For each dollar spent polish will improve your Metacritic more than just about anything else that you can do.
Finally we owe it to the customers. We should be doing our very best to give them quality for their hard earned money. And publishing a game all rough and unpolished is really being disrespectful of your customer, which is no way to run a business.
