Over the last week, whilst I was in Spain, a number of interesting stories supporting my world view made the news. Here are a few of them.
- Warner Bros. (with some of their $500 million of Abu Dhabi finance) buy Midway as part of a drive to build a stake in the game industry. They already bought Traveller’s Tales, missed out on SCI/EIDOS and are very strongly rumoured to be on the verge of buying Codemasters. All this is part of two trends, firstly consolidation of conventional plastic and cardboard game publishing (online publishing, by its very nature will remain fragmented) and secondly the move of big media/movie companies into gaming. They have no option as older forms of media are in sharp decline whilst video gaming continues to ascend.
- Four million people play Mafia Wars daily. On Facebook, MySpace, Tagged, Yahoo and, most recently, iPhone. This is symptomatic of a huge trend. Social networking and gaming are converging at some speed. The success of World of Warcraft, Free Realms, Habbo and Guild Wars (amongst others) owes much to their social networking capabilities.
- Sony has a new gesture interface patent that allows everyday items to be mapped for in game use. We live in exciting times for the man/machine interface. After decades of zero or slow development we are now seeing a veritable explosion which will be felt well beyond the confines of recreational gaming. Creative content is going to take a long time to even begin to catch up with some of the potential being unleashed. And this is going to have a significant effect on human development.
- Michael Pachter predicts that online downloads of full console games will not happen till 2019 and even then will have a smaller market share than plastic and cardboard distribution. He is very brave making this prediction and he is wrong. The advantages of online distribution are so great for everyone involved (except retailers) that we will arrive at a tipping point after which physical distribution will rapidly disappear. And that tipping point is sooner than ten years away.
- 100 million (possibly) used video games traded annually in the USA. Without a single penny from these transactions going towards the development of these games. There is an argument that new game prices are far too high precisely because a trade in value is factored into the initial price. If this is so, then online games should be sold for far lower prices because of the removal not only of the secondhand trade but also of retailers and their sales margins.
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Warner Brothers has an interesting take on piracy. From magician and sceptical author James Randi’s online blog:
“I keep getting mentions from readers that the Steve Martin movie “Leap of Faith” appears to have a certain similarity to the text in my book, “The Faith Healers.” Really? When that film came out, I sat through two showings, with increasing rage and dismay. I counted nineteen items that were taken directly from my book, and several instances of the same dialog being used that was quoted in my book. Without those extracts and usages, they would not have had a story at all. The script was most decidedly based upon my book, with the only change being a love-interest worked in.
What to do? My book wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the credits, and I certainly received no payment of any sort. Well, I was soon disabused of any notion of taking legal action, since I learned that I’d have to look at investing some $20,000 up front, and be prepared to spend some two to three years fighting the battle, with another similar sum being laid out during that time. And, said those I consulted, Warner Brothers has a standing army of lawyers to handle such matters, all skilled in obfuscation and prolongation of legal actions. Also, even if I were to win the case, costs would outweigh any award — a fact that doesn’t bother Warner Brothers, but certainly had to concern me….
Sigh.”
Any thoughts on this, Bruce?
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“100 million (possibly) used video games traded annually in the USA. Without a single penny from these transactions going towards the development of these games.”
Yes, and ? Used books, cars, DVDs and so on have been sold for years. And, oddly enough, you can still find people who write books, make cars or create movies.
“There is an argument that new game prices are far too high”
I totally agree here. It should also be highlighted that if videogames were not so expensive, we might have much less piracy…
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“Used books, cars, DVDs and so on have been sold for years.”
I must have missed the sections of Waterstones and HMV where they’re making new books and DVDs fight for shelf space and consumer spend with dog-eared second hand copies.
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I agree ten years are out there. Now today IBM has made a partnership to get in the EU smartgrid. This may include the BPL portion of it that will be starting at 400mbs a second per household, here in the USA scheduled for a early 2010 rollout by our (USA) energy secretary Steve Chu.
We and the UK are trying to get to 1.2 GB by 2012! So if we even get the 400mbs it makes downloading a hugh game very easy.
The only other obsticle is storage space for the very hardcore. But there are disk upgrades for that. We have the technology and it has been tested. We already have 7.4 billion as Joe Bidden said last Friday budgetted for it.
Let the greening began!