Entries from January 2011 ↓

The eternal problem of selling a video game as a stand alone package is that it can and will be stolen. If people think that they can get away with stealing then they will, so the level of theft can easily reach the high nineties in percentage terms. In other words often very few users of your product are actually paying for the work that you have done.

The way round this is alternative business models, so the customer is forced to pay in a different way. These can include online games with a monthly fee, pay per play, sale of in game items, advertising or sponsorship, etc etc. All these and more are being used successfully and the industry continues to experiment in order to find viable ways to be rewarded for their work.

When I was Head of Corporate Affairs at Codemasters working for the Chairman, Jim Darling, we were fully aware of the blight of software theft on the business and often discussed ways round it. One idea was online gambling, where we made money from people betting within the game. After analysis we concluded that the level of expertise and investment needed was too big a risk when we were heavily geared up for the conventional gaming business model.

Jez San OBE

However one major figure in British video gaming who was in the same position did take the risk and that was Jez San and he has explained much of this in an interview he did for this blog. In it he says “Trust is everything!  The honesty and compliance issues surrounding online gambling are a huge obstacle for a computer game or video game company entering the gambling market.  in computer games we simply accept that there are cheats and try to avoid them.  in online gambling we simply cant allow cheating of any kind.”

His online gaming company, PKR, is a huge success.

There are two kinds of gambling online. Some games, like roulette, the player plays against the house. This is a pure percentages game with the odds slightly in favour of the house so that over time they always win. The second kind of gambling is a multiplayer game where the players play against each other, such as poker, here the house makes their money out of taking a small percentage of the winnings, known as the rake.

Online poker has a huge advantage over real world poker in that it has very low operating costs, all you need is space on a server. Whereas real world poker requires a building with all the associated overheads which are very difficult to finance with a rake. This, and the fact that it more a skill than a chance game, have made online poker extremely popular. If you want to increase your skill there are even online poker schools.

Some people have moral scruples about gambling. I look at this two ways, firstly that it is just video gaming monetised in a different way. Secondly that people only have so much leisure time in which to spend their money doing what they enjoy. Gambling is very enjoyable so why shouldn’t people be allowed to spend their money doing it if they want to? The only problem comes with the minuscule minority who become addicted with bad social consequences. But there are plenty of other addictions, some of which are much worse.

One problem the online gambling industry has is that the main companies involved are not American, obviously the people who govern America, who are very trade concious, didn’t like this. So it is no surprise that online gambling is banned there. Which is pretty abusive of the state, taking away their citizens’ freedoms. It also dampens the business model when the largest market is officially closed. Of course Americans who want to get round the silly restraints can do so very easily. An Antiguan credit card sorts the money and it is easy to hide behind a proxy server when online.

Which brings us to an interesting facet of online gambling. As an industry it is very new, far newer than the video game industry. So their marketing is fairly unsophisticated and their communications even more so. They obviously have issues with stakeholders, just as the video games industry did with the issue of violence, for example. But the video games industry engaged with government, and other stakeholders, worldwide to explain their case. The online gambling industry seems to be a long way behind with this sort of engagement.

It will be interesting to see how much, in future, the video game and the online gambling industries move together. One thing that may ease the process is when individuals, at all levels, move between the two. This way the culture, practices and technical knowledge will be on a two way street.

After nearly 30 years the unholy Wintel alliance is over. Microsoft have finally realised that there are other processors in the world and have embraced the ARM chip. Superficially this is because ARM processors are far better suited to mobile devices than Intel processors, which is why they feature in portable gaming devices. But there is far more to it than that. Vastly more ARM processors are made every day than Intel processors and they are very easily embedded into other chips and into all sorts of devices. With this move we have the possibility of Microsoft software running on anything with a screen, which these days is a lot of things. Initially Microsoft will go for the low hanging fruit but you can see that the potential for mission creep is immense.

There is lots of bad news in video game retail with many shops now closing and the retail companies in big trouble, something predicted a long time ago on here. I really don’t see any future role for a bricks and mortar video game retailer. Currently they are kept afloat by secondhand sales but this has incensed the publishers who are doing everything in their power to destroy this business model. Supermarkets will continue to sell gaming products for far longer because of the impulse purchase of putting a game into your trolley and because their overheads can be amortized across many thousands of product lines.

Android smartphone sales have caught up with iPhone sales. Another inevitability forecast on here. Apple are in trouble, they are a marketing company who sell a customer experience whilst lagging behind on the technology. Their late adoption of OLED displays and the lack of camera in the iPad being just a couple of examples. Now they have lots of manufacturers marketing Android products, which are often better specified, competing against them. The time has come for a massive technical upgrade of their entire mobile product range. And they need to be more price competitive too.

Just 43 file sharing websites have 53 billion visits per year between them in 2010. If people can steal and get away with it then mostly they will. As a result many industries, from music to porn, are in tatters. Now, with eReaders, the book industry is headed the same way. In the games industry we are lucky because consoles are fairly effective anti piracy dongles and because server based games are too complex for the casual thief to copy. But the lesson must be that if you are going to develop any game it is essential that you have the means to prevent it being stolen by the masses, because if you don’t you are wasting your time.

Games in education. I have beaten the drum about this on here. The fundamental gaming model makes video gaming the perfect educational tool, far better than teachers who are flawed as a mechanism in many ways. The classroom  is outdated and at long last more people in key positions are starting to realise it. Expect to hear a lot more about this in the coming year.

Facebook is not the be all of social networking as the success of Quora and Chatroulette have proven. As social networking and games often end up being the same thing this is pretty important. If someone bright was creating a Facebook replacement they could come up with a far better product. Just look at how clunky Facebook is with video, for instance. And how limited the forums are within it for making new friends.