Bruceongames now comes top of quite a lot of Google searches, this makes me a target for people who only want their version of the world reported on the internet.
I took the article down for a little over a week whilst I spoke to various legal and journalistic experts including no win no fee solicitors. One told me that the charges against me are ridiculous. Obviously the article is now back up.
Read this letter, it is amazing stuff, they are even trying to prevent me from talking about the Blitz Academy website. How blatant an attempted suppression of free speech can you get?
My personal experience of Chinese video games goes back to the Chinese government banning the Codemasters game IGI2 in 2004. A massive blow when we had no sales or distribution there!
I have pointed out on here before, China has a rich heritage of Gold Farming with about 400,000 people employed in this “industry”. So there is a very big understanding there of game mechanics and business models. And it is hardly surprising that the dominant games are MMOs and the dominant platform the PC. One of the largest PC manufacturers in the world, Lenovo, is Chinese.
Also there is a cluster of game development studios in Shanghai which grew out of Ubisoft’s decision to site a major development studio there.
An Internet Publishing License will be required to publish online games.
There will be an approved management system for imported online games.
Unapproved online games cannot be exported.
Bodies promoting the export of unapproved games will be banned.
Games not registered before publication will be suspended.
The Chinese General Administration of Press and Publication has inspected over 200 online games (which gives you an idea of just how vibrant the market is there). They found:
3 websites were publishing unapproved imported games. It doesn’t say whether or not these were pirated
25 Chinese made games had added unsuitable content after approval. Which gives you an idea how much they respect the rules. Unsuitable content includes violence, gore, and sex. They don’t seem to have twigged yet about the gambling content in some of these games.
9 Chinese games hadn’t followed the correct publishing procedure.
7 Chinese games didn’t have a fatigue testing system. Presumably the government don’t want people playing these games for excessively long periods of time. And quite right too.
So we have a big market that will grow to be immense but which is dominated by government red tape and some “interesting” local game producers.
There are two lessons here. One for the many other companies who are going down the application store route. They must put technical protection into the store, otherwise thieves will destroy the business model. The second lesson is for Apple and their upcoming home console. If they do it with exactly the same mechanism as they have done iPhone applications then it won’t work commercially. They need to be far closer to Xbox Live in what they do.
And, to finish off, Ngmoco are going to in-game payments on iPhone to beat the thieves. Doing this they would probably be best giving the game away.
Leonard Riggio is board chairman of GameStop and until recently owned 6.9% of the company. He now owns 5.5% of the company having sold 2.3 million shares for about $60 million. A very smart move. And one which shows us exactly where the video game industry is going.
GameStop and other high street game retailers rely on video games being distributed and sold in cardboard and plastic and there is a lot of reasons to think that this practice is at the start of a very significant decline. In fact physical inventory for content in this industry may well be about to go the way of the Dodo. And all because online distribution is better:
No physical inventory to manufacture and distribute.
No need to give a share of the sale proceeds to distributors and retailers.
Instant global distribution.
Ability to update the game for bugs and to give or sell further content.
Possibilities of more sophisticated business models.
The internet can stock a far bigger inventory and can keep it in stock for ever.
So online distribution wins hands down. But over the last year the market has changed significantly to rapidly accelerate the move away from physical stock.
Retailers have moved hugely and aggressively into the secondhand game market over the last year. It runs at far higher profit margins than selling new stock. Unfortunately it has massively angered the game developers and publishers who receive no revenue from the resale of their content. They are very unhappy and are now highly incentivized to move away from physical product.
All three platform holders, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, are seeing uptake of digital distribution on their current generation platforms that massively exceeds their wildest predictions. The customers are voting with their feet. To the point that it is rumoured that the next generation Microsoft home console, the Xbox 720 or Phoenix, will have no disk drive at all. That it will receive content 100% online.
So the process of moving from physical stock to online distibution is speeding up in front of our eyes, every week we see news of the industry moving in this direction. And moving far faster than anyone predicted. A very good time indeed to bail out of share ownership in high street game retail.
You may think that with tens of millions of bloggers and millions of forums that we live in an age where there is a free flow of knowledge and information. That you can go to Google and get a balanced and rounded view on any subject by reading the results of a search. And you would be very wrong.
The mechanism for the wholesale denial of free speech is the English libel system. Here are some of the factors at play:
A plaintiff can sue you for libel and make a whole list of grievances. They don’t have to prove that any of these are the truth. It is up to the defendant to disprove each claim to the standards required by a court. So the whole system is weighed very heavily in favour of the plaintiff.
Going to court to defend a libel claim is immensely expensive and there is no legal aid. Many cases now get to over a million pounds in legal fees.
Libel tourism is a reality with plaintiffs now making London their city of choice when they want to take action because the libel laws here are so repressive. This alone should tell you that there is something wrong.
Once you realise the above you can see what the mechanism for suppressing free speech is.
A company does a Google search to see what is written about it on the internet.
The company gives a list of all the stuff it doesn’t like (whether it is the truth or not) to an English solicitor.
The solicitor writes letters to all these websites threatening legal action.
The solicitor also writes to the website hosting company threatening legal action.
The owner of the website and/or the owner of the hosting company immediately remove the content, they have no option because of the financial consequences of the threat.
The internet is censored and no longer tells the truth.
This mechanism works for getting the truth off the internet as well as lies, because it is not tested. The authors and site owners are in no position to defend their content. And once the content is removed it is removed for the whole world. So a heavy handed bully in London will deny free speech in America, Canada, everywhere.
This mechanism is now being used on a massive scale. Solicitors in London are making a very nice living by processing large numbers of these threatening letters. Vast amounts of internet content is being removed. And of course it is the bad guys, the people with something to hide, who use this mechanism most. So the world is denied the knowledge that it most needs for people to protect themselves.
What is deeply ironic is that the blogs and forums that are being acted against have a built in reply mechanism. So when somebody sees something that they think is wrong then they can say so. This happens millions of times every day. These sorts of websites are far closer to a conversation in a pub than they are to the printed newspapers that the libel laws were intended for. So all sides of an argument can be discussed.
And so to Bruceongames. The success of this blog means that it now comes near the top in many Google searches. And I am often saying what I think about companies. (In law this is called fair comment and is allowed). So I have been threatened with libel action now by two companies. Evony and Train2game. Evony are taking the action in Australia because it is almost the same as English law (and there is a reciprocal arrangement for collecting judgement) but I have the added inconvenience of trying to defend myself on the other side of the planet. Train2game seem to have succeeded in removing a lot about themselves from the internet. I have also temporarily removed my article about them, even though it is 100% truthful, whilst I consider the implications. Another successful censoring of the internet.
A massive multiplayer game (MMO) runs primarily on very powerful servers that live in the internet cloud. This is obviously essential so that all the interaction between players and with the game itself can take place. However a lot of the game also runs on the player’s computer, the software that does this is known as the client. In traditional boxed MMOs the client is quite big and comes on a disk when you buy the game, or as a big download.
A lot of more recent MMOs are so called browser games, because they work inside your Windows Explorer, Firefox or other web browser. Some people, very mistakenly, think that this makes these games safe. It does not. When you play the game you are letting it download client software into your computer without you knowing. And once that software is in your computer it can do anything it wants and it can download new software into your machine any time it wants without you knowing. And because you chose to download the client in the first place (by playing the game) your anti virus and anti malware protection software will see nothing.
So what could malignant client software do in your machine? Well it could log your keystrokes and send your credit card details back to its operators. You wouldn’t know this had happened until your credit card was robbed. And obviously it would know all your passwords. Another thing it could do is to access and use all your contacts, in your email, your facebook and so on. Then it could use these contacts for spamming or for spreading a virus or for lots of other purposes. Yet another thing the client software could do is to work as a trojan, taking over your computer and using it for all sorts of illegal activities. As you can see the potential downside is massive.
Now you are going to tell me that the same applies to any game. It does and there have been instances of viruses in boxed games. So basically, every time you play a game on your computer you are entering into a pact of trust with the provider of that game not to abuse their position by putting naughty software on your machine. Obviously with big, established publishers there is no problem, they have their reputations to protect and it would be commercial suicide for them to do anything wrong. So they can be trusted. However when a game company comes from nowhere and doesn’t even have an address or a phone number you are taking a massive, an enormous risk.
You can see how attractive this is for someone who intends harm. They can put a game out and very easily gain control of millions of computers. Because game players are ignorant about the client software being put on their machines. This could even be used as a weapon by a hostile government.
Finally, for some well established MMOs, it is possible to download alternative clients into your computer that have not been written by the game’s publisher. These alternative clients are engineered to do part of the game playing for you, to enable you to cheat. Once again you need to be very, very careful of these because they are not coming from the proper game publisher. So they can put anything they want inside your computer.
We must have a ton of paper in our house in the form of books. Some great literature, my wife’s degree materials, the libraries for my hobbies such as SCUBA diving and wine, a mountain of travel books and so on. Pulped trees are an enormously inefficient method to store and transport all this information. If it was transferred to silicon or to rotating memory I could carry the whole lot around in my pocket.
Which brings us to the current explosion in the use of electronic books. Most notably the Amazon Kindle (which holds 1,500 or 3,500 books) and the Sony Reader (which can store up to 13,000 books). These devices rely upon ultra low energy electronics, especially in their “paper” displays which only use a tiny fraction of the power of a traditional LCD display. And they work just like books, the content is the same and it is presented in the same manner. So they are making the old fashioned books made from trees obsolete.
These electronic books are an interim technology. Soon we are moving, en masse, to having electronic tablet devices in our lives. These tablets are a combination of netbook and smartphone. They are “always on” devices and they are Swiss army knife devices, designed to do as many tasks as possible that we might need in our lives. Watch television or a movie, surf the interweb, do some office or school work, talk to a friend, shoot some video, listen to some music and so much more.
Of course once people are using tablets for books a whole new world of possibilities opens up. A revolution in fact. Books can become interactive, non linear and connected. In fact books can start to take on many of the characteristics of a video game. And this will inevitably happen, slowly at first, but the possibilities are too great for it not to. It is just more of the ongoing convergence between new media and old media. And what applies to books applies to magazines and newspapers too, in fact anything that was historically printed on pulped trees.
