Entries Tagged 'News analysis and background' ↓

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.

The App Store is an accident of history. (But one that was predicted on here). Apple had been making MP3 tracks available for a few years on the iStore. When they added a bit more memory and processing power to the iPod they realised that it could run third party applications, so they made an iStore for applications. And amazingly they were only doing it as a service to users, they didn’t see the business potential.

Now after a little over a year there are over 100,000 Apps and there have been over 2 billion downloads. 125,000 developers have signed up with Apple and 19.6% of Apps are games. All this has brought up some very pertinent points.

• This is the biggest success and the fastest growth, by a huge margin, of any new gaming platform in history. It has changed everything.
• Most App authors self publish to cut out the greedy publisher. They end up making far less money as a result. Apps need marketing and marketing is one of the jobs of a publisher.
• Intense competition has driven down App Store prices remorselessly. This is largely due to self publishers, in their ignorance, using the price mechanism as a marketing tool.
• Apple put up very little in the way of barriers of entry to publishing on App Store. This means that there are vast quantities of total rubbish on there.
• The other side of Apple’s policy is that there has been a vast flowering of creativity on App Store. The biggest ever in the history of the video game industry.
• Because Apple set this up as a service, not as a proper business, there is little IP protection. Piracy is rampant. Several game publishers have reported it as being in the 90% zone. Even at the stupid low prices that Apps are. People will steal to save pennies.
• The App Store gives you instant global distribution. 77 countries can download your app the instant it is available. This has shocked the whole digital IP distribution industry. There are now lots of App Store clones for other platforms.
• High street, cardboard and plastic retail distribution of digital IP has been shown up as being a dinosaur, their business model is now in steep decline.

Apple realise that they have a business model that is a license to print money. So it is pretty obvious that they will use it as a template. Firstly for their imminent tablet device which will be like a cross between a netbook and an iPhone. Then with their home console which will evolve from Apple TV just as the iPhone evolved from the iPod.

Inevitably, and for reasons explained many times on here, the Wii bubble has finally burst. In the half year to the end of September sales were down by 40% compared with the year before. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has no option but to admit: “Wii has stalled” he even admitted that the price drop has failed to arrest the decline: “With the price drop, sales returned to a certain level, but they just did not reach the level of last year around this time”. Which was all as inevitable as night follows day.

A lot of the success of the Wii was fad. People becoming lemmings under the onslaught of peer pressure. Just like the Hula Hoop and Rubik’s Cube for previous generations. And fads have very sudden endings as the zeitgeist moves on to something new.

The Wii is a very strange and paradoxical device, its hardware capability is mainly last generation yet it boasts an innovative and compelling gesture interface. Most Wiis are bought as family toys and are little used yet it has some amazing games including possibly the stand out title of this generation, Super Mario Galaxy.

The Wii has had its popularity and life massively extended by the Balance Board and Wii Fit, but there are only so many overweight middle aged women willing to pay so much in a feeble attempt to assuage their vanity. So it looks like this market is exhausted, much to the dismay of the many publishers who thought that this was a bandwagon they could jump on. The reality is that the Balance Board is panning out as being the Reebok Step mark 2.

It doesn’t help that you can buy a vastly better machine, the Xbox 360, for less money. Even Sony have tried to be more price competitive and have improved their act in many other ways. Both these machines are introducing gesture interfaces that will finally remove the Wii’s main trump card.

We have known for a long time that the Super Wii is in the way with HD graphics and a rumoured Bluray disk drive. But this is thought to be coming some time after the middle of next year and the market needs it now. Nintendo have got their timing very wrong this time.

It has to be said that the Wii has done video gaming a massive amount of good. It has taken the medium to new markets and new demographics, vastly expanding it for everyone’s benefit. They have introduced new genres of games and extended old genres in a prodigous burst of creativity. And they have continued in their fine tradition of production values that put most of the rest of game publishing to shame.

So what is going to happen? Well it is a golden opportunity for Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Sony) to make hay whilst the sun shines. They can fill the vacuum that Nintendo have created. They need to give tens of millions of Wii owners a compelling reason to upgrade and I am sure that their marketing teams are working at doing exactly that. And my prediction still holds that the Xbox 360 will ultimately sell more units than the current non HD version of the Wii.