Entries Tagged 'Anecdotal musing' ↓

When I was at Codemasters I was a member of the Games Industry Forum, a pan industry talking shop that met regularly under the aegis of the DTI in London. It always seemed strange to me that the government department responsible for games was the department of trade and industry (DTI) whilst film and music were dealt with by the department of culture, media and sport (DCMS). I suppose it is just as silly as the BBC handling games in their technology department, not their entertainment department.

At one of the forum meetings I put forward the idea of setting up a Games Council, just like there are a Film Council and a Music Council. What I was seeking was a broader public cultural role for our industry. Obviously my idea was talked down by the civil servants. It would have cost public money. If film and music get public money then why shouldn’t games? But the real killer was ELSPA, they totally rubbished the idea, obviously worried about retaining their pre eminent position representing the UK industry. So it didn’t happen. Not because it wouldn’t have been a good thing, but because of petty entrenched  narrow interests. 

Fast forward to today and we find that the industry is after money from the government again. Like the UK film industry gets. Or like the illegal (WTO rules) subsidies the games industry gets in Canada and (possibly illegal) France. All trade subsidies are silly, especially the ones given to farmers, so I have no sympathy with what our industry is seeking. I think we would be far better off using the law to stop subsidies elsewhere.

Meanwhile the industry still doesn’t have what it really needs. An organisation to broaden the cultural appeal of games. Luckily Nintendo is now doing the job for them.

So does your job rely on taxpayers money being spent on you?

During the early 1980s there were a number of superstar journalists in the area of microcomputers and home technology. They did a fantastic job of driving public awareness. People like Guy Kewney and Dave Tebbut. And I was quite friendly with them, which worked both ways. I told them what was happening inside the UK industry and they told me lots of background to news events.

One of the journalists I was friendly with was Jerry Saunders, who was a linguist. Every year he learned another language. Previous to journalism he had been a spy. Working at GCHQ in Cheltenham. He had resigned in disgust after the Falklands war when he had been at the centre of the work to tell the British military commanders and politicians what the junta had been eating for breakfast. The reason he resigned was typically British. After the Falklands all the wrong people at GCHQ got promotions and honours and all the right people didn’t.

Roll on 20 years and I am talking to another British GCHQ spy. This time in Cheltenham. And I am buying a car from him, a Caterham. Like Jerry he is exceptionally bright. But things have moved on. This guy is an internet spy. Presumably looking inside other people’s computers all over the world. Without them realising.

These days, with the so called war on terror, there is a lot of recruiting of spies. At GCHQ they obviously want to recruit people who are very computer literate, as well as being prodigiously bright. So it really comes as no surprise that they are advertising jobs within computer games. It will give them exactly the people that they are looking for.

In fact it is a big surprise to me that computer games aren’t used more for marketing. The US Army has had a massive recruitment success by using a game. Yet they are the exception rather than the rule. And the game playing demographic is a highly important and difficult to reach one for so many goods and services.

Once again it is because often the people controlling the budgets are the over 40s and they haven’t the faintest idea what they are doing. The world has moved on and they haven’t kept up with it.

So are you a spy, or over 40? Do you think we are misunderstood, or only by the Daily Mail?

A few years ago, at the height of the PS2 generation, I was at an industry conference in London. The speaker asked the audience for a show of hands as to whether the PS2 to PS3 transition would be as commercially damaging as the PS1 to PS2 transition had been. The vast majority of the room thought it would be as bad, I (obviously!) was one of only a small handful who thought that it wouldn’t be.

Platform transitions can be very difficult times. There is only a small installed base of the new platform so there are not many customers. Your technical staff are struggling to learn the new platform’s architecture (especially if it is a Sony) so the games aren’t that good. The old generation games become a lot cheaper at retail so it is difficult to get revenue out of them. And so on.

The PS1 to PS2 transition was especially difficult for two reasons. Firstly because Sony was the only show in town (except for a bit of PC stuff) so you were nearly totally reliant on a single income stream. Secondly because piracy became massive over a very short period of time, catching the industry unawares and totally cannibalising the PS1 market. These had a terrible commercial effect on the industry and most companies went through very difficult times. Some didn’t survive. So you can understand why the audience at that London conference were so nervous.

It turns out that the PS2 to PS3 transition was a whole lot easier. Mainly because the PS2 market kept working and wasn’t destroyed by piracy like the PS1 market was. Also because Microsoft went early, staggering the transition. And also because there were far more diversified platforms and income streams for the industry to make money out of. MMOs, casual games, telephones etc.

This trend will continue in the next transition to the point where the change will be hardly noticeable. Both Microsoft and Nintendo look set to emulate Sony by running two home platforms each. The old generation platform at a low price point with cheap games as an entry level machine and the new platform as a premier product with prices to match. So we will look at new platforms being introduced by a manufacturer every 5 years or so but those platforms having a manufacturing life of around 10 years, just as the PS1 did, to give us overlapping generations. Also there will be much more stagger between the manufacturers when they introduce their next generation. Nintendo will go a lot earlier than the other two because the Wii will obsolesce earlier. Sony could go second this time just to escape the disaster that is PS3 and they saw how Microsoft gained advantage by going first with the 360. We will see.

So we are looking at a huge and increasing diversity of platforms for the industry to live from. At any given time there will be two each of home consoles from Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. There is the traditional PC market, MMOs and the recent explosion in casual gaming. Then there is the DS and new handhelds from Nintendo, the next generation PSP needs to be better and Microsoft cannot leave mobile gaming alone for ever. So son of Zune should be interesting. And then there is Apple, each generation of iPod is more game capable. It may be a game of softly, softly but one day Apple will go for the gaming market in a big way. And then there is the potential of social networking, this will involve more and more gaming till it just merges with the games industry. Also the humble telephone will integrate with some, or maybe all, of the above.

And the platform transitions will be looked back on as a historic oddity. The huge danger, however, is always piracy. Once it gets a hold it can destroy the commercial viability of a platform very, very quickly.

So were you wiped out by the PS1 to PS2 transition? How many different platforms provide your income now?

A blog is an enormously powerful enabling tool, potentially anyone on planet earth can put their views in front of everyone on planet earth. This has led to all sorts of interesting phenomenon. The Baghdad blogger told us what it was like to be living in a country that we, the West, were (illegally) attacking. This gave us a unique insight into what it was like to be on the other side.

In computer games we have the EA Spouse who, by revealing working conditions and pay, succeeded in improving the lives of thousands of game industry workers. It has become a very powerful marketing tool. Every game should have a development blog that enables potential customers to follow the story of what they are going to buy.

Now we have Nintendo technical recruiter Jessica Zenner (pen name Jessica Carr) sacked for writing about work.

Here is an extract from her blog: “One plus about working with hormonal, facial-hair-growing, frumpy is that I have found a new excuse to drink heavily” “My gut tells me that this woman hasn’t been fu***d in years.”

About 5 or 6 years ago, before the blog explosion, I was using Google in different ways to research Codemasters’ online presence. I came across a blog from one of our employees, Andrew Pallister, which was a detailed written and photographic diary of his life. It is called MeDiaryPics. And any journalist or competitor would have made hay with the contents. Hundreds of photographs of inside the company and a detailed log of all his work on our games. All created in innocence of the potential downside.

So obviously I told my superiors. I also had to explain to them what a blog was. What I was hoping was that we could stop the potential leaking and at the same time harness Andrew’s knowledge and talent for marketing advantage. But HR have a very one dimensional view on life. Andrew was asked to remove all the sensitive stuff from his blog, which must have taken him ages. A blog policy (ie don’t write anything about the company) was instituted and sent to every employee. Marketing opportunity lost.

So is your company frightened of blogs or does it embrace them for the good that they can do?

In 1983 at Imagine we realised that the company was being killed by piracy. We had plenty of anecdotal knowledge that nobody was buying legitimate product any more, they were just making tape to tape audio copies. And we could see that our sales were being badly hit, it was only the fact that we had geared ourselves up for export that kept us going.

So we looked at technical protection and we looked at making the instructions photocopier proof. But, nothing looked like working. So we came up with the idea of the megagames. Basically the idea was to have part of the game on cassette as normal plus another part of the game on a chip which plugged into the computer. You needed both bits for the game to work and whilst the tape was easy enough to copy the chip wasn’t.

So it would beat piracy and force people into actually buying our work instead of stealing it. Another added advantage was that we could make the game much bigger and potentially better, hence we called them megagames. Which in turn gave us the advantage that we would have a great USP with games far better than our competitors could make, until they caught up with the technology.

In those days a game was usually written by one person. For the megagames we made teams of our best people with support from artists and sound people. David Lawson asked me to come up with names. Bandersnatch I just stole from the Lewis Carol poem The Jabberwocky . For the other game I decided on a two syllable word and sat down with a piece of paper and wrote down lots of cool and interesting first and second syllables. These I mixed and matched to come up with some new words. Psyclapse was the one I liked best and was also chosen by the others.

To market the games we decided that we wanted very powerful visual imagery. So we went to the famous fantasy artists Roger Dean and Chris Foss and gave them a game each. Not only to come up with the packaging image, but also a typeface for each game. For advertising we decided to start before the games were available in a series of wind up adverts. To make them really stand out in the media they were used in we decided to major on white space. All of this worked well and we whipped up a huge amount of interest.

Which was a pity as the process of making the games was going nowhere. So we had to extend the wind up campaign. And then the company went bust, killed largely by piracy. So they never happened.

But they had an influence. Other publishers worked at copy protection from other angles, dongles became a common way to protect commercial software. Art and imagery became more important in game marketing. Roger Dean went on to be involved in many more games. The technical teams took the ideas behind the megagames and used them elsewhere. The term megagame entered the english language.

Piracy is still a problem. It was endemic at the end of the original Playstation generation. Now the approach to keeping it under control is far more professional. ELSPA in the UK do a very good job. Unfortunately the legal system still does not treat IP theft the same as it treats the theft of physical objects. Which is wrong as they are both the result of man’s labour. The solution to the 8 bit tape piracy that Imagine had suffered turned out to be budget games. At £1.99 they weren’t worth copying.

So a little piece of gaming history. Comments, as ever, are more than welcome.

During world war one the allies wanted to know what was happening inside Germany. What people were thinking and doing. The effect of the war on them and the routine of their lives. The allies could have recruited a lot of spies but instead they had a far better and more effective idea. What they did was to obtain every possible local newspaper from across Germany and then analyse their content.

This mechanism used the editors of the newspapers firstly as unsuspecting spies and secondly as low level analysts. It works like this, the editor has only so much space to fill and only so much time to fill it yet he has access to enough potential content to fill it several times over. So he works as a filter deciding what goes into the newspaper and what doesn’t. This filtering process did the allies job for them because the content of the paper told them what was currently of importance to the German population.

You can take advantage of this mechanism when marketing computer games. Just like the world war two newspaper every game periodical has finite space and finite time to fill it yet they have enough potential content to fill it several times over. Each journalist has only so much time to gather material and then so much time to write content. So if you take a journalist’s time it follows that you have the space in his periodical. As simple as that.

You see it very widely in other industries. Car manufacturers launch new models in exotic places and fly the journalists in. They know that with travel time they can take a week out of a journalist’s schedule and they know that this guarantees them a quarter of that journalist’s output for the month.

This was precisely the mechanism I used at Codemasters. Regularly flying in batches of journalists from our European territories to visit sunny Southam. And they always said yes. It was a free overseas trip and the chance to see a games company from the inside and pick up all sorts of knowledge and information. When they got back they wrote up lovely multi page features. But in reality they had no option about this because we had used up their time and so there was nothing else that they could write. It also deprived our competition of those pages.

We were also after the holy grail of selling more of our games in America. This is a rock on which many British game companies have foundered. So I tried to institute a mechanism of flying over an American journalist a month to visit us. With travel this gave us about a week of their valuable time. And there was no shortage of journalists wanting to come. And we tried it and it worked. But the powers that be preferred to spend (waste) their money on TV advertising. And we continued to fail in America.

On a slightly different tack this is an excellent article on marketing computer games from a journalist’s perspective. It should be essential reading for everyone involved in marketing in this industry.

So have I wasted bandwidth stating the obvious? Or are all the world’s game journalists suddenly going to find themselves invited on trips to exotic places (me! me! me!)? Post your comments below.

One year, to support the Colin McRae Rally game, I had the idea of making a very small number of replica helmets to give away as competition prizes. Colin was happy to go along with the idea as long as I made an extra one for him. So I contacted our European offices and they were up for the idea, which gave me a production run of just 6 helmets (Colin, UK, Benelux, Spain, Germany, France).

The first thing was to buy the helmets. These were the exact make, model and size as Colin’s real helmet (iirc they were Sparco, from Italy). Then we had to ship them to the artist in Europe (iirc Holland) who had handpainted Colin’s original helmet and who painted all six of these identically. Then they were shipped to Colin in Scotland (he was living in Switzerland at the time) for him to sign on his next visit there. Then they were shipped back to Southam and thence shipped to the individual countries. So it took a while and a fair bit of logistics.

But it was worth it. The end result was gorgeous. A genuine hand painted race helmet signed by a great race driver. When they came back to the office after signing I took a look at them and would have liked one for myself.

So there are a very small group of gamers around Europe who now own a great momento of Colin McRae which I am sure that they are treasuring.