Entries from November 2009 ↓

This is brilliant. And about time too. Some people modify their Xbox game consoles so that they can steal games. They don’t want to pay the developers for all the work that has gone into making the game. They are quite happy to be thieves when they think that they won’t be caught.

But Microsoft has caught them! They have quietly been using Xbox Live to check every machine on there (20ish million) to see if they have been modified. And now they are banning all the thieves. Microsoft say a small percentage have been banned. The BBC is reporting that it is 600,000. Rumour on the web has it at nearer a million.

An Xbox is absolutely brilliant with Xbox Live. It is the biggest and best gaming portal in the world. Take away Live and an Xbox is substantially degraded in what it offers. So taking Live away from the thieves makes their Xboxes close to useless.

So the thieves are screaming in anger all over the net. Which is exceptionally funny to watch as they have been caught red handed. They have no options now but to go and buy a new Xbox and start a new Live account. So that’s possibly a million extra Xbox 360s that Microsoft will sell this Christmas. The profit on these will probably not get them back what they have lost to their games being stolen, but it is a contribution. Also their timing is brilliant, just as the biggest game ever, Modern Warfare 2, is launched. No wonder the thieves are so annoyed.

Overall this is one of the better moments in the ongoing war between those who work to create brilliant games and those thieves who try to steal that work from them.

Everyone in game publishing and game journalism should watch this.

Everyone reading this will know that most mainstream journalists and most politicians do not understand video games, it is one of the main themes of this blog and so has been written about here in dozens of articles (here are just a few):

The Bible Vs video games

Keith Vaz

American neo conservative has video game sex problem

Evil American hoaxer exposed

Another silly woman writes for the Daily Mail

German cultural vandalism

Antichrist

Out of the lack of understanding comes fear. So we have lots of politicians and journalists who are frightened of video games. And so they come out with a lot of criticism of gaming that is a best misinformed but which is often just plain wrong, to the point of being exactly opposite to the truth.

Two exceptions to this in the UK are the MPs Ed Vaizey and Tom Watson, both of whom have listened to the games industry. So they are well informed and say sensible things.

Our arch nemesis in Parliament is Keith Vaz who never misses an opportunity to display his lack of understanding of video games in speeches in the House. After Vaz’s latest ignorant outburst, about Modern Warfare 2, Tom Watson had heard enough. He hurried to his computer and set up a Facebook group, Gamer’s Voice, in response. Here is his description of the group: “Are you sick of UK newspapers and (my fellow) politicians beating up on gaming? So am I. The truth is, UK gamers need their own pressure group. I want to help you start one up.  I don’t know how it should work yet but please register your interest if you agree that gamers need their voice hear in the corridors of power.”

News of this spread round the web like wildfire, pretty soon Gamer’s Voice had thousands of members. And there was an emotional outpouring from gamers who have just had enough of their pastime being beaten up by ignorant politicians and journalists. The power of the internet once again proving that it is greater than the power of the establishment.

It is a fact now that most people play video games. So most people understand video games. So the stupid politicians just make themselves look absolutely ridiculous to the voters when they make their ignorant and misinformed speeches. Keith Vaz has succeeded in making himself a figure of derision for a lot of people.

ABC Radio in Australia is the equivalent of the BBC Radio 4 in the uk. They have a programme called the Law Report, presented by Damien Carrick, which looks at the important legal issues of the day. They have just broadcast a programme about the Evony LLC Vs Bruce Everiss case which concerns articles written on this blog.

You can read a transcript of the programme or listen to it online here.

The latest news will come as no surprise to readers here. I have written multiple articles on how and why Electronic Arts is losing so much money. And I have written multiple articles about what is wrong with the games industry and why it is shedding so many staff.

This latest news is that EA losses are even worse than before. They made a fiscal Q2 loss of $391 million, 26% up from the year before. Whilst game sales are booming and the customer base is bigger than ever before. So now EA have instituted massive redundancies. Current estimates are that 1,500 staff are to go. The worst hit studios seem to be Tiburon, Mythic, Black Box and Redwood Shores. Maybe shareholders should be looking at the strategic management of the company.

This is a huge amount of personal tragedy for those involved. There is no way that the rest of the games industry can absorb so many people, especially when so many have already been made redundant elsewhere. So lots of people will be leaving the industry to work in other industries. The upside here is that game developers tend to be very intelligent and well educated people and can generally expect to earn far more outside the game industry and to experience far better working conditions too.

To anyone training to work in the game industry or thinking about such training things look very bad indeed. Not only are there going to be far less jobs for some time, there will also be many very experienced applicants for every position that comes up. Time, perhaps, to reconsider your options.

Finally, if any EA management are visiting  here I very strongly suggest that you read this, it was written with you in mind.

I have written on here before about Kingory. One of a number of Chinese browser MMO games that is just about identical to Evony. In other words the traditional game mechanic has been subverted to generate the maximum revenue.

I have mentioned before the plagiarism that these games often seem to have. So it is interesting to see that Kingory freely uses the image of Kung Fu Panda on their registration page. They must have a very good relationship with Paramount Pictures to have received permission for this commercial use of their IP. Or alternatively Kingory just used it. What do you think?

There are a lot of doom and gloom headlines around at the moment. Lots of development staff being laid off, games selling far less than expected, major publishers making massive losses and release schedules that look a little thin. What is happening here?:

• The industry have become even more lemming like than normal. We get a successful game like Guitar Hero and suddenly everyone thinks it is the second coming. Other people do “me too” imitations whilst the owner of the original title flogs it to death with countless variations. Then we have the inevitable, a Beatles game that flops. Publishers are just not thinking from the customer’s perspective, people really don’t want all these similar titles.
• Annual iterations of popular titles. Another way of flogging a successful IP to death, try and get the customer to fork out every year for a slightly updated version. This is incredibly inefficient as you end up with lots of customers just buying alternate iterations. Or being turned off by the cynicism of the whole exercise. Leave 2 years between releases on popular franchises.
• Modern Warfare 2. Every publisher is frightened of being in the same market as this 800 pound gorilla. So loads of games have been launched early for Q4 ’09 and loads more have been moved into Q1 ’10. This is a good thing as it has spread out the previous very silly Q4 congestion. This is a bad thing because not every customer wants an adult rated war game.
• The customers are moving to online faster than the publishers are. Lots of publishers have misread just how quickly the market would change. Apple’s App Store getting one and a half billion downloads in a year and Evony getting 10 million registered users in just a few months whilst boxed cardboard and plastic retail games gather dust on the shelves is the new reality.
• Unwillingness to experiment with new IP. This is just pathetic. So many publishers now are just sitting there flogging their old IPs to death because they think it is safe. It isn’t safe at all, those IPs will not deliver for ever. Publishers need to build value in their business and the only way is with new IP. Sure it is risky, but publishing is about risk. And these days you can experiment on a cheap to develop platform and then if it works move the IP to the expensive to develop platforms. And the Apple App Store has loads of brilliant new ideas for IP.
• Awful marketing. By and large the industry markets incredibly inefficiently with advertising that preaches to the converted. Instead they should be trying to engage with the public so as to switch their spend from other pursuits. Nintendo have done this incredibly successfully but the rest of the industry have failed to take this on board.
• Secondhand sales of boxed games. Customers now buy games with an eye for the resale value. This inevitably has the effect of concentrating the market into the blockbusters, at the expense of worthy, less well known titles. And the purchasers of the secondhand games are not putting any money in the developer’s pocket.
• Mid generation lethargy. Most publishers have now released all their franchises for this generation of platforms. So they are waiting for the next generation platforms to release them all again. In the meantime they can’t think of anything for their developers to do.
• Piracy. The 360 is being hit quite hard with this now. Microsoft really to need to put a whole pile more IP protection into the Xbox 3/720/phoenix, especially if it is a mainly, or all, online machine.
• Recession. A convenient excuse. Most of the world is out of recession now (except for the UK, which has the worst run major economy). And even in recession people give up paying for their entertainment last.

So it is the management’s fault. And the few well managed companies are making hay.