I worked on the original Operation Flashpoint at Codemasters (I am even in the game!). At the time we were mainly a console publisher and were being hammered by PS1 piracy and the console transition. Things were so bad that 20% of the entire workforce were made redundant. And there was nearly zero marketing budget for Operation Flashpoint. So we concentrated on the online community and PR. And we got Flashpoint to number one in every country with a chart (and presumably loads more as well). So it pretty much saved the company.
That was way back in 2001. We had created a world class gaming brand. Yet, amazingly, no sequel has yet been released. This must be one of the most successful attempts not to make money in the history of the games industry. When I left Codemasters in 2005 I was sure that Operation Flashpoint was the biggest brand that the company owned, more valuable than all it’s other brands put together. And I was sure that it was possible to build a world class publisher on the back of it. But it is now 8 long years since the original release.
But, after many delays, we are promised that a sequel will be released this autumn, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. An opportunity for Codemasters to take on the world. But there is a big problem and that problem is Modern Warfare 2, the latest Call of Duty title, which will be released at around the same time.
Modern Warfare 2 is published by Activision, the world’s biggest game publisher. The Call of Duty brand first surfaced in 2003 to critical acclaim, scoring 91% on Metacritic and 92% on Game Rankings. Activision have milked the brand with four main versions and numerous expansion packs and spin offs. The fourth version was called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and was the catalyst for splitting the brand in two. Going forward Call of Duty and Modern Warfare will be two separate brands.
So the marketing team at Activision have done the exact opposite of what Codemasters have done. They have milked the Call of Duty brand for every penny possible and built it into one (or two!) of the world’s greatest game franchises. For example Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was released in Q4 2007 (with Metacritic and Game Rankings both giving it 94%) and so far has sold around 13 million units, making it one of the world’s biggest selling games.
As you can see things are very interesting. Can Codemasters revive the Flashpoint brand and take on Modern Warfare 2? Or will they just be struggling for the crumbs that fall of the edge of the Activision table?
World of Warcraft is an amazing gaming phenomenon and is the cash cow of all cash cows. It has 11 million monthly subscribers, which is over 60% of the total world market for these games. And a lot of its success is down to the powerful combination of gaming and social networking.
Other game publishers have tried to compete by bringing out “me too” clones, such as Warhammer Online, published by Electronic Arts. In September 2008 they were reporting that they had sold 1.2 million copies of this yet by March 2009 they were down to 300,000 subscribers. If the might of Electronic Arts can’t crack World of Warcraft then who can?
The World of Warcraft killer will be a game like this. But most important will be the integration of social networking and gameplay, the combination that has made WoW such a success. And Free Realms, from Sony, could be showing us all how to do it. With 5 million subscribers after 7 weeks and growing at the rate of half a million new subscribers a week they have very quickly joined the ranks of the major players in this area. When it goes on Playstation PS3 it will be massive. And if they made it available for the 100 million plus PS2 owners in the world they could hit a whole new audience.
The critical factor with each of these games is the player demographic. A game targeted at too narrow an age group or at just one sex is going to have less WoW killer potential. It is essential to get the content and the marketing right to build the broadest possible community. It can be done.
Bill Gates famously said that most people overestimate the effect of technology in the short term and underestimate the effect in the long time. This is easy to see as progress in technology is cumulative and incremental.
With this in mind it is interesting to see what Michael Pachter, an analyst from Wedbush Morgan has to say about downloaded games. He reckons they will be worth $400 million this year, just 2% of the market. He goes on to say: “Downloads will become 20 percent of the market within five years, and probably peak at around 50 percent of the overall market in 10 years.”
In ten years time we will be enjoying the Sony Playstation PS5 and the Microsoft Xbox 1440. I really cannot see these devices using any physical media for distributing games. Progress over 10 years is immense. Ten years ago my internet came over the latest, red hot, 56K modem technology, now, even in low technology UK, I am cruising along at 10 Mb/sec. And in more advanced South Korea100Mb/sec is the norm with 1 Gb/sec rolling out soon. Ten years is almost forever when it comes to the evolution of digital telecoms.
So not only do I think that Michael Pachter is wrong, you can also clearly see why this should be the case.
Netbook computers have become a massive phenomenon. With their small form factor they make far more sense than traditional laptop computers. And the Intel Atom processors have provided exactly the right amount of processing power with increased battery life. However these machines are still just laptop lite. But their success means that thay are receiving investment that will see them quickly evolve to be a very different animal indeed.
One of the biggest changes will come with OLED screens. These use a fraction of the power of LCD screens, are much thinner, more robust and a lot cheaper to make. So netbooks will become a lot slimmer and lighter with a vastly extended battery life.
Thus far most netbooks come with Windows XP, which is big, old clunky bloatware not exactly best suited to the job. Linux based alternatives such as Ubuntu are still short of critical mass. Expect all this to change. Windows 7 will have a version far better optimised for netbooks, but the biggest competition could come from the mobile phone operating system, Android. This already has more than enough utility for most netbook users and has been demonstrated by a few manufacturers.
With Windows 7 and Android comes touch screens, which means we can get rid of the keyboard. So netbooks will move from a clamshell format to a tablet format.
In fact netbooks will increasingly look and behave like big smartphones. The two devices are set on a course of convergence. And the result will become one of the most popular gaming platforms on earth.
Starting in the 1970s LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) screens have gradually taken over the whole world of displays. The early LCDs were small and mono, without backlighting, so used little power. They were ideal for watches and calculators. Then came colour LCDs, these are technologically crude devices using layers of filters to achieve colour. However they are relatively light in weight and quite thin so became the display of choice for applications like laptop computers. As technology advanced LCDs became bigger and became the display of choice for televisions.
There are several drawbacks to colour LCD displays:
They are very complex, with polarisers, filters, backlights etc which make them very expensive to produce.
Most of the light produced by the display is absorbed within the display, this makes them very inefficient users of energy. With mobile devices they are the main limit of battery life.
The fundamentals of the technology produce a narrow viewing angle.
LCDs switch relatively slowly so are not very good at displaying motion.
They cannot display black, which reduces picture quality enormously.
As many people have discovered they are fragile and easily broken.
LCD displays have become the TVs of choice because they have big screens which are thin and thus easy to live with in a domestic environment. Most users are not critical enough to be bothered by the poor picture quality.
I still use a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) television because it is better. My Philips 36PW9525 has a picture quality that puts any LCD television to shame. It does, however, need three people to pick it up.
But both LCD and CRT technologies are in the process of being made obsolete. There is a display technology being introduced that is vastly superior to both in every way. It is called OLED and it works by semiconductor emissive electroluminescence. The advantages are startling:
Manufactured by a lithographic process, the screen is literally printed. This will, ultimately, make them very cheap to produce.
The incredibly simple construction makes them very light, a fraction of the weight of an LCD. Also they are extremely robust. And only a few millimetres thick.
Nearly all the energy is turned into the light that you see, this is incredible energy efficiency and will revolutionise portable devices.
Black really is black because no light is being produced. This massively improves picture quality.
Better colors, brightness, contrast and viewing angle than LCD.
Switch very fast (0.01ms) compared with LCD (2.0ms) so can display motion vastly better.
They can be made curved and they can be made out of flexible materials. You could even make clothes out of them!
As you can see OLED confers massive advantages, the main problem is in productionising the technology. They are starting with small screens, just as LCD did, and then gradually working their way up. But already they can be found in a number of production devices. The Zune HD and Samsung i7500 for instance, in the world of gaming. Soon they will be in iPods and iPhones, which will really bring them to the public’s attention.
So every LCD device will become obsolete, the features and benefits of OLED devices will be so overwhelmingly superior. And games will look so much better.
The BBC have a really good interview here which is well worth watching. And I must admit that the more I read and think about this, the more impressed I am.
The Wiimote will now be seen as interim technology, a side story on the road to the whole body interface. Having face (and emotion) recognition in Natal is a big step forward with huge gaming potential. Allied to the whole body scanning and voice recognition we have something that is of groundbreaking importance.
Natal has immense possibilities way beyond recreational gaming. Sports coaching, medical rehabilitation and military training spring immediately to mind. In fact any human activity where you have to build neuromuscular facilitation.
The limitations put on the human imagination by previous gaming interfaces have all been swept away. A lot of clever and creative people are going to do a lot of clever and creative things with Natal.
With all this talk of Android here and elsewhere on the web it is perhaps worth looking at what it is. Especially as it has the potential to very rapidly become one of the biggest gaming platforms.
Android is a Linux based operating system for smart phones championed by Google. It is open source and is developed by the Open Handset Alliance, whose 47 members include nearly all the major organisations in the smartphone industry. Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, LG, Samsung, Motorola, HTC, Garmin, Intel, Nvidia, ARM, Google, eBay, Vodafone, Sprint Nextel, etc etc. So there are more major players behind it than there are behind all the other smartphone standards put together. So it has the makings of becoming a standard.
Android has also been implemented by users on a wide range of devices that it was not installed on by the manufacturer. This includes devices from Nokia, Dell, Asus and Motorola. This is possible because Android is open source. Expect users to implement it on just about every device that they can!
Android can use touch screens, still & video cameras, accelerometers, GPS and accelerated 3D graphics. It works with most media standards.
The application store is called Android Market. Initially everything was free, but since February 2009 it can handle paid for applications with developers getting 70% and carriers getting 30%.
Android is the new kid on the block when it comes to smartphones. However it already works amazingly well. Just look at an HTC Magic or Samsung i7500 to see just how amazingly well. Android has a very strong potential to end up beating competing smartphone systems from Nokia, Microsoft, Blackberry, Palm and Apple, here’s why:
Because it is open source and the SDK is freely available there will be a massive number of people developing for it. So there will very soon be more applications available than for the competitors.
Handsets will be available from nearly every handset manufacturer. There will be a huge choice of such devices with different specifications and price points. Android will also be used on netbook devices.
With the backing of Google there is already the huge array of Google applications that run on it. These make Android phones immensely useful even before you start downloading applications from other people.
This is exciting and important stuff, everybody involved in the game industry should be watching it very closely indeed.
