Entries Tagged 'News analysis and background' ↓

Eric Lam Recounts 19 March 2010 China Time

Hi Bruceongames.com and readers,

This is Eric Lam writing. I specifically ask Bruce to let me write this piece of blog. Because I deem this action to be most beneficial for my own personal sake. I’d start by presenting a piece of 2-page statement that I wrote and handed over to the two Chinese policemen who visit my home yesterday. It was written in Chinese and I translated it in English. (I don’t have a scanner so I’d just type it out for now.)

Another note is that I verbally got the policemen’s consent to recount the things that happened yesterday to Bruce. However, it’s my own decision to write this blog on my own and to avoid any biased view from Bruce.

The way I got the policemen’s consent is by saying:

Lam: 我会将今天发生的事情，马上就告诉 Bruce，因为都是事实发生在我身上的。 (I’d tell everything that happened today to Bruce since that’s what happened.)

Policeman A: 你可以这样做. (You can do that.)

Policeman B: 这个是你的自由. (You have the freedom [to do so].)

Statement presented to the policemen are as follows:

标题: 声明书

本人林川在此声明并无主动地以任何方 法将本人拍摄之私人和公司照片通过任何直接或间接手段/方法给英国人blogger Bruce.

本人见到了 Bruce blog 上的林川的照片之后，才联络上的。

曾经谈论内容包含以下几点：

1. Evony 是否有木马？

2. Evony 是否有洗黑钱？

3. Evony LLC 公司是否有多过十个人工作。

本人林川的回应如下，对 Bruce 声明过的：

1. 技术上不可以，因为 Flash 有限能力；

2. 是否有洗黑钱，本人无能力回应；

3. 游戏本身不可能少过十个人搞和管理；但是，因为林川早已不在公司工作；Evony LLC 是林川离职之后才有的，所以本人林 川不知道具体情况。

林川在和 Bruce 联络上之后的目的，是未了请 Bruce 把林川是 Evony 的其中一个 Boss 的说法改正，因为林川不是 Boss。Bruce 最后相信了林川的话，吧林川的在 Blog 上的说法改了，说是 Manager ( 经理)。

林川答应用往常对此类问题的态度，继续对不产生好处的事情不会做，不会和非执法机构的人交流此事。

林川本人保证上述声明会在未来履行。

19/03/2010

林川 (盖手指章)

Statement presented to the policemen in English translation are as follows:

Title: Statement

I, Eric Lam, didn’t initiate any contact with UK blogger Bruce to hand him my personal photos in any direct or indirect way.

I, Eric Lam, saw Bruce’s blog with my pictures, and then I contacted Bruce.

We talked about the following things [Bruce asked me the following questions]:

1. Does Evony has trojan?

2. Is Evony money laundering?

3. Does Evony LLC has more than 10 workers?

My responses to the questions above were:

1. Technically impossible. Flash has its limitation.

2. I am incapable of answering that. [Meaning I didn't know and I would have had no way of knowing.]

3. There’s no way the game can operate with less than 10 persons. [personal opinion] But I am incapable of knowing since I left the company way before Evony LLC was heard. [fact] And I have no way of knowing how the company’s structured. [fact]

Lam initiated the contact after seeing his own personal photos were published on Bruce’s blog. The purpose of the contact was to correct Bruce’s incorrect statement about Lam being the boss of Evony. I was not the boss. I was [one of] the manager[s] in the company. Bruce changed it agreeably after believing what I said to him.

I agreed to behave as I have always been acting, that is, not to do anything unbeneficial to myself, and not to communicate anything of relating to Evony to anyone else other than law enforcement agencies [with exception of this since I got their consent to recount what happened on 19th March 2010 to Bruce].

Eric Lam promises to honor the above statement in the future.

19/03/2010

Eric Lam (signed and finger printed)

Recounting what happened on 19th March 2010 are as follows:

I write in my first person point of view and try my best to be as objective as possible. I present only the facts and also my personal feelings without passing judgments to the others.

On Friday 19th March 2010, around 11am, my home’s door bell rang. I just got up from my bed because I worked late into the night the day before. The hallway was dark because the light was out. I couldn’t see who’s who through the door viewer. One of the men asked for Eric Lam.

I opened the inner wooden door try to get a clearer view through the outer steel gate which is covered in metal mosquitos’ fence. And the men asked for Eric Lam again. At one time, I thought I saw a familiar face who I thought was my former employer’s personal driver at the far back. I said to him: “Hey. Do I know you at the back?” But he moved away from my sight immediately, so I still couldn’t see who’s who so I decided to shut the door.

I panicked. (Due to a few reasons which I’d prefer not to disclose for my own benefit.)

I looked and I knew that my wife and two daughters were out. I instinctively thought that they might be in danger so I looked everywhere for a phone to call them. But I just couldn’t found my phone due to my dizziness in the morning.

I heard the men outside claiming that they’re from the Qingdao [a city in Shandong province] police force. I guess I knew by then that that has something to do with one of the three things that have to do with my former employer. But first, I must first find out if they’re true policemen since there has been quite a few incidences of fake polices entering the house in the news.

While I was still looking for my phone to call 911 or someone to verify, I heard my wife and kids’ voice at door.

I wasn’t sure what to do but I acted on instinct to open door and try to let them in first.

I opened the door. Three men, my wife, my 2-year old and 1 year old daughters were at door.

I dragged my one year old daughter’s cart in first, and then trying to drag the other two in.

There was no time to explain to them what’s on my mind. I thought to myself.

I tried to shut the door right after but two men started yelling and pull my arms. I told them that I have to find out if they’re real police or not first but one of them stuck his feet in the outer door and slipped in the doorway and said that he’d prefer the door being open that way. I didn’t think that was a good sign at all so I acted on instinct again and I forcefully pushed him away from the door and try to close the outer gate again. But two of them came forth together with one keeping the door open while the other dragging my arm preventing me from having further movement.

My two kids seemed to have sensed hostility and danger and started crying seeing what they’re seeing while my wife yelling at them saying if you’re true policemen why were you consider less about the safety of the children while having a fight here at door. One of the policemen replied in Chinese: “就是冲着这样来的，怎么啦！” (Literally, “We came here for this. What then!” My wife’s personal understanding of what he said is that they’re here to make a scene at my home just so that the children can see it all.)

During the pulling and pushing, my lower end of my right hand sleeve was torn off.

And while I was prevented from further movement, I held them back from entering. I shouted to my wife to call the police and to call 911 (but in fact the Chinese police emergency phone number was 110 so I guess no one could have understood what I meant by saying to call 911).

When they saw my wife picked up the phone and started calling, they started to loose their grip on me and move away from the door. They said it’s better this way and let’s wait till the local police arrive. I closed the doors. They waited outside the doorway.

A uniformed police and a security guard of my apartment complex arrived. I recognized the security guard so I let them all in.

First, I had to clear my residence permit registration formalities with the local policeman (ID025242 with driver batch A3546). For I’m a foreign citizen, I was obligated to report to the local police station where I lived with the apartment owner’s IDs. However, my landlord was a busy man so he hadn’t been available for running the errands with me.

Once that’s cleared, 025242 calls up his superior for the Qingdao policemen’s clearance to conduct their business here. They are, after all, cleared of conducting investigation here. 025242 and I asked for their authorized investigation paperwork and they couldn’t provide any. But we believed they’re true policemen nonetheless.

Because I was in such an emotional state, I asked for a few hours to prepare myself before conducting any further communication. Both 025242 and the two policemen suggested me otherwise. They wanted me right away. I didn’t felt alright about that. If that was not an arrest, what right do they have to ask for my immediate assistance? I asked them what’s that all about? What’s the purpose of the investigation? If not allowed to tell me, I asked if they could at least tell me the nature of the investigation. One of the Qingdao police waved a heavy stake of paper wrapped in transparent plastic holder claiming that’s what he’s about to talk to me.

I asked him if he can show me that. He said that I’d know when I talked to them. He held it up high and claimed that it contained important evidence that’s related to me. I asked him if that’s related to me, why I couldn‘t see them. Or couldn’t he tell me what that is all about?

They continued to refuse my request for freshening up (as I was just out of bed) and my request for preliminary information with regard to their investigation. The back and forth dialogue, which was going nowhere, lasted a few minutes.

But I stood my ground for asking for a few hours before conducting the interview and 025242 went outside again and assumingly talked to his superior again for advice. He came back and talked to the other policemen about me and they told me that we could all meet later. I promised them that I won’t take long and I’d meet them at the local police station to talk. It’s just around the corner of my apartment block.

Once I saw them out and regained my composure. I made calls to Canadian Consulate General and Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in Guangdong. They were extremely helpful. Their representatives provided extensive legal advises and promised me that they have legal counsel standing by to help me out if in need. They can help me deal with the law enforcement in China on behalf of me. They advise me that I have the right to know the preliminary of the investigation before responding to anything. With my right told, I conjured up my courage to make a call to the local police station.

Unfortunately, the head of the local police office was out to lunch. The lady at the police office asked me to call back at a quarter to three.

I didn’t want to get the Qingdao policemen to wait for too long. But I failed to get the Qingdao policemen’s phone number before they left. I went downstairs to see if they’re still around my apartment complex. But instead, downstairs, I saw the driver of my former employer. It was really him that I had seen back there. I thought to myself.

I waved at him who was sitting outside my apartment building‘s gate and asked him to help me call the Qingdao policemen back.

A moment later, I saw them coming back with a security guard of my former employer. The security guard was a former military soldier in Northern China, as I was told once by Consultant Ma when I was still with the company back in March 2009. “Oh, we meet again.” I smiled at him and thought to myself. (He’s a friendly enough fellow who paid for my drink and snacks during the rest of the long hours of interview by the policemen. He also escorted me to the washroom and waited outside whenever I was out of the sight of the policemen. He’s a very responsible young man.)

I gather the two policemen around and they dismissed the driver and the security guards. I told them whom I’d called and what right I had in China. I insisted and demanded to knew the preliminary first.

They didn’t refuse though failed to acknowledge but I thought I planned to make them feel at ease first. I told them that there were three things that was relating to my former employer. They’re issue A, B, and C. (I will omit A and B intentionally for my own benefit and very probably for my former employer’s benefit as well.)

I tried to show my good will by telling the Qingdao policemen the following.

I watched police movies a lot and once wanted to be a police myself and even applied to become a Commissioner of Police in Hongkong passing two rounds of interview before I decided to come back to China for my career and to explore business opportunity. I hoped they could understand my respect for their line of duty, my willingness to cooperate and I was sure they weren’t intended to make a scene back there. (I thought to myself that it was just unprofessional police academy training, at most. The ugly scene could have been prevented simply by bringing my apartment complex security guard along when they rang my door bell. I could have saved my shirt, to say the least, if not frightened my wife, kids, and the neighbor. Right. Beside writing this piece tonight, I had spent my day talking to the neighbors about, oddly, my financial stability. All of them started to gossip about this already thinking that it was some mafia loan shark who wanted to get a piece of me for they could hardly believe those were the act of policemen. But I told them it was just misunderstanding. Apparently, the last thing I wanted to do is to express my own fear and alarm them further.)

For issue A: I thought it was over and I doubt if it’s anything to do with it. But I’m preparing to get it over with nonetheless because I didn’t do anything wrong. It was merely an unfortunately misunderstanding if anything. (Sorry readers for being cryptic. But just bear with me till issue C.)

For issue B: I thought I had an agreement indirectly with someone through a personal assistant that I shouldn’t be talking to them anymore as if “I’ve never known them.” (Sorry again for being cryptic here. It’s just for my own good.)

For issue C: Apparently, I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t know anything about Bruce’s blog. So if that’s what it was all about, I’m more than willing to talk about it to the best of my knowledge. The only reason preventing me from contacting the right persons to talk about issue C was due to issue B’s promise. So, I’m glad to talk to a third party, especially law enforcement.

I played my part to be more than open to clear the air and the police signaled that what he’s holding in his hand was all about Bruce’s blog.

I signed with relieve and divulged what I knew about Bruce and the blog. Apart from the statement that I wrote above, which was all true and was not forced upon to write (if you readers have speculated). I told them a lot more about what had happened in details so that they could feel surer about my statement being true. We sat in the apartment complex playground for a long time and they listen and sometimes barge in with dissatisfaction of what I said while they couldn’t be clear of what they wanted to ask for obvious reasons: that’s how policemen were trained to talk to suspects. They cannot let the suspect know what they know or don’t know while they want to know as much and ask as many relevant questions as they could. So the back and forth dialogue went longer than it could have been due to the nature of the conversation. Eventually, after much misunderstanding and even yelling at times due to frustration on both sides, they said they’re temporarily satisfied with my side of the story and went over to my apartment complex’s security room to get a written statements.

The official written statement contains more information than the above statement. The official statement was supposedly to be read by the police authority only. They requested me to write the above statement on my own. I thought it must be for someone else’s eyes then. To whom I have no way of knowing who would eventually read it. But I’d hope it can reach the right person. But just in case it couldn’t, I’m hoping by posting here, the content of my hand written statement can have a chance to meet his/her eyes.

I felt that I was one the key suspects of providing information to Bruce. I felt that there was no way of denying the facts that the photos were mine. So I was very clear about how all it went. What I said to the policemen went most unrecorded due to technicality, which I thought the policemen were not internet savvy enough to understand what I told them but were too shy to admit.

I knew Bruce’s attack on Evony all alone. But it was really none of my business because I left the company for a long time. There’s hundreds and thousands of Eric Lam out there and for the obvious speculative nature of those claims were, I didn’t think it was worth my time to act upon it. Besides, the rumors out there got many of my facts wrong. (For example, I corrected Bruce yesterday, again, that I wasn’t living in Canada. I’ve been living mostly in China since 2005.) And most importantly of all, issue B is at stake and I was obligated on two ends not to talk about this (sorry for being cryptic). But I became acutely aware of Bruce’s blog once my personal photos were up. After two to three blogs were out containing my photos, I decided to reach out to Bruce to correct one perhaps minute to many others but fairly substantial claims against me.

I was not the owner of Evony.

That’s it.

It’s affecting my life and work on many ends so I had to stopped it.

I would have been honored and glad if I was really one of the owners simply because it was the first game that’s been created by Chinese and gone out to make it big in the English-speaking audience market. But unfortunately, I wasn’t the owner. And it was really getting on my nerve from too many ends. I had to stop the source from continuing spread the untrue info that’s affecting my life.

I still don’t know how Bruce got a hold of my photos and I didn’t bother to ask neither because they would have been publicly available online as they were sent to many of my co-workers in the company. I was THE photographer and I advocated company life on my photo blog. Hundreds and hundreds of workers come-and-gone could have tipped off Bruce about the whereabouts of the photos. Or it could simply been have Bruce’s own might in power searching through Google.

If you Google eric lam <a rather popular online photo gallery>, my photo gallery result comes up first. (That’s the part I thought the policemen failed to grasp what I said.)

I wouldn’t have trusted Bruce even he told me the way he got the photos so I didn’t bother to ask. It was simply my mistake to have not locked that part of the photo gallery sooner. I thought Bruce’s blog writing was AdSense ad driven. I thought he was driven by greed for readership and AdSense income.

And you bet. I was a greedy person and so I assumed everyone else’s so.

I did everything for the benefit of profiting for myself. I have stopped donating and volunteering for a long time. And I have stopped doing things that’s unbeneficial to my ends for a long time. And I’ve stopped doing all random act of kindness that I used to do except giving a few dollars to the wondering singers and performers on the streets.

The last thing I wanted to do is to provide petty information to Bruce’s blog for fighting so-called justice in his eyes.

I asked Bruce how much he got for the AdSense, he said it’s petty money that could hardly cover his monthly utility bill. So I thought to myself what an idealistic and unworldly man he was, fighting for justice of the public with flimsy information. (Of course, I didn’t tell him that in his face since I care less about others’ dealing as long as my life’s not at stake.)

Besides, half of my life was in the east and other half been in the west. I think it’s just a joke what Bruce was writing about. It wouldn’t have been so much an issue in China anyway even if they’re true.

Now, I know you’re happy now knowing the Eric Lam guy is as bad as you might have imagined. But I really don’t care as long as you’re not in my life.

The truth is: my neighbors and the Shandong policemen are in my life. Someone will continue to exist in my life no matter what, simply because he/she thought I knew too much. They’re all part of my life. They’re as much as my wife and kids are in my life.

So **** you, Bruce, and all the other rumors and info tippers (if you’re even really reading this at all…), as well as you, supporters and other commenters/readers of Bruce’s blog.

You don’t care what’s happening to me as much as I don’t care half about what’s happening to you. So now you know what’s happening to me and please show yourself and at least stand up like a man like Bruce. Show yourselves so that I don’t become the fall guy who got his sleeve torn off right after getting out of my bed, and so that I don’t become the man who forever feeling regretful of not able to protect my baby girls enough from imprinting their fragile hearts with the ugly scene.

Last but not least, **** myself for not being able to add a password on the photo gallery sooner. Or better yet, might as well ****ed my photography hobby.

For the sake of me, I specifically ask Bruce to pull off the latest blog about the things that happened on 19th that god knows who tipped him off. I decided to write this accord on my own and let you all know that I’m a real person and I’m in real trouble. So spare me your endless analysis of the latest evony gossips and freedom of speech point of view. Get a life and even play some evony for god sake.

I will continue to fight for my own peace if you anyone out there decide that you have more to say to me, I suggest you to email me at eric@clickbankcsv.com where my own business endeavor is undergoing besides consulting for a few game companies on a part-time basis.

Or better yet, subscribe to my service at ClickBank Products Data CSV at http://www.clickbankcsv.com . I’d always be glad to chat with my customers. My men at ClickbankCSV will greet you with nice things to say. Just leave them your phone number, and contact methods, and I’d get back to you right away during my waking hours.

Eric Lam

I have written on here many times before about the way the internet has facilitated an orgy of stealing unprecedented in the history of mankind. Many tens of millions of people are stealing many billions of dollars worth of other people’s property every month in the form of digital content. And the main reason this is happening is that the chance of being brought to account for this stealing is very close to zero.

The damage this does is massive. If people don’t receive payment for their work then they don’t have a job. I have worked at companies massively impacted by piracy so I have personal experience of the trauma and suffering this brings. But the thieves are in total denial of the harm they cause. They even throw their toys out of the pram when the owners of this property try to protect it from theft.

In the game industry we have seen theft rates of over 90% on traditional boxed retail PC games, so the publishers have cut back massively on making them as any visit to a video game store will show you. Instead the PC as a platform is now reduced to supporting games that can be financed by non retail business models. This means casual games and MMOs that use micropayments and subscriptions. The glory days of the PC blockbuster are over.

Another game platform destroyed as a viable target to publish on because of the thieves is the Nintendo DS. There are about 130 million of these in the world. Very similar to the number of Wiis, 360s and PS3s all combined. So the DS should be an exceedingly popular platform to develop and publish games for. But it isn’t because the vast majority of DS owners just steal what they want over the internet.

Now an economics firm, TERA Consultants, has quantified the damage done. It could cost European countries 1.2million jobs and 240billion euros (£215billion) by 2015. In the UK we could lose up a quarter of a million jobs by 2015. And that last year the creative industries here suffered losses of 1.4billion euros because of online stealing.

Of course the thieves are in denial. They cannot see why a person should be paid for their work. They think that access to the internet is a human right and that this means that stealing anything they want off the internet is also their human right. But the person who has done the work has no rights.

Obviously something has to be done or we face a cultural desert. There will be no income for the creative industries and they will disappear. The anarchists among the thieves applaud this, they think that new structures will replace the old. But they miss the vital point that people must be paid for their work, otherwise they won’t eat and won’t have a roof over their heads.

Because the distribution mechanism the thieves use to facilitate their stealing is peer to peer networks, the only people in a position to actually do anything positive are the Internet Service Providers. So Western countries are introducing laws that force the ISPs to do just that. This is the only solution and it is desperately needed. Amazingly the thieves are screaming with rage about this. It is unbelievable that they have the effrontery to demand a carte blanche to steal. But they do.

Working in the video game industry and seeing people enthusiasm to steal, no matter how much harm it does to others, has done a lot to destroy my faith in human nature. These thieves are totally contemptible and I find it amazing that their conscience lets them sleep at night.

The guys that do the marketing for the big Hollywood studios know what they are doing, the games industry is in the dark ages by comparison. And movies have suddenly found a great strategic advantage over other entertainment media. One that is more than working. It is packing them in.

Stereoscopic 3D using polarising glasses is the hottest thing since the talkies. Avatar, which I have already written about, is the biggest grossing film in history. Yet now Alice in Wonderland out grossed Avatar in its first UK weekend. Cleverly Alice leverages the Johnny Depp brand to appeal to a different demographic to Avatar, so my wife liked it.

Obviously part of 3D is hype, marketing and the usual human/lemming behaviour. But part of it is also a step change in the immersive experience. The ability to suspend disbelief yet further.

Before Alice screened they showed a whole pile of trailers. All for blockbuster films and all 3D. How to Train your Dragon, Shrek Forever After and Toy Story 3 are destined to be surefire hits. It is a new golden age for the movie industry. The only caveat is that these are all Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) films. It will be impressive when Hollywood delivers a non CGI 3D blockbuster.

Whilst the movie industry has a lead in this jump to 3D it will not be for long, TV manufacturing and broadcasting are both heavily committed to it. Televisions are a commodity product, a rectangle of moving image. In recent times manufacturers have tried to use size as a differentiator. But you can only go so far. So currently in the market they are using thinness, which is not the sexiest of USPs. This makes 3D a very tempting technology to help maintain manufacturing margins. So the manufacturers are jumping in with both feet. Soon the market will be flooded with 3D sets and all those big flat screens sold over the last few years will be obsolete.

Time now for a brief technical interlude. Stereoscopic 3D works by fooling the brain. To do this it feeds a different image to the left eye and to the right eye. This is why you need to wear polarised glasses in the cinema, each lens is polarised in a different direction to only let through the right imagery for its eye. So the cinema needs to project twice as much onto the screen to maintain the same quality as 2D films. This is why the whole industry has invested a fortune in re-equipping.

Which brings us to video games. I reported on 3D gaming last year and again earlier this year. It definitely provides a compelling experience. But it requires us to put twice as much information on the screen if everything else about the game remains the same. But our current generation of consoles just don’t have the spare capacity, they are already working at full stretch to deliver the current crop of 2D games. Moving to HD was a big jump for the gaming industry and 3D is yet another big jump without much of a breathing space in between.

So every PS3 and 360 game developer now has a choice. Either create spectacular 2D graphics or go 3D with a lesser graphics quality. There is only so much processing power available and they have to decide what to use it on. This puts us a long way behind the movie industry who have already re-equipped to deliver the highest quality images and 3D at the same time. We are going to have to wait for PS4 and Xbox 720 to really do 3D properly.

Sony and Microsoft have different attitudes to 3D. It looks like Sony are betting the company on 3D. Every division and every product that can embrace it is doing so, big style. Televisions, movies, camcorders and of course, video games. This summer Sony are releasing a systems update for the PS3 to optimise it for 3D games. This can’t add in the power necessary to do the job properly, but it is a viable stopgap. If 3D continues to take off in the public perceptions this could give Sony a big strategic advantage.

Microsoft’s attitude is far more wait and see. They obviously feel either that 3D is a fad or that current technology isn’t up to the job of doing it justice. Or maybe even they are so tied up with Natal that they simply don’t have the resources necessary to do 3D. It is a big nuisance that two paradigm shifters like 3D and gesture interfaces should come along at the same time.

So let’s look at what this all means. If 3D really is our future then it is advantage Sony, in a big way. 3D is embedded throughout the corporation. If 3D is a fad then it is advantage Microsoft, they won’t have wasted resources chasing a rainbow. What is absolutely for sure is that it has accelerated the release of the next generation of platforms. We suddenly need the extra horsepower that Moore’s law always delivers for us in new machines.

Neil Young (not the Canadian grunge musician) is a man who knows what he is doing. Like me he was involved in the Sinclair Spectrum game industry in Britain in the early 1980. This was a creative and commercial hothouse where much that we now take for granted about the game industry was invented. He subsequently spent 11 years at Electronic Arts rising to Group General Manager of the EA|Blueprint Studio group. And now he is the founder and CEO of ngmoco, one of the leading publishers of mobile phone games.

One thing he has always said is that the iPhone / AppStore gaming market is just like the Sinclair Spectrum market was. And here are a few reasons why this is so:

• Very low barriers to entry. Download the SDK and you are away. This is a huge contrast to the established platform holders like Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony who make you jump through lots of hoops and invest in expensive hardware development kits.
• Huge flowering of creativity. Anyone can have an idea, no matter how oddball, and realise it. Then (theoretically) in the Darwinian world of the AppStore the fittest succeed. New genres of game are being created without anyone realising it. It will take historians to unpick  because so much has happened so quickly.
• Equally huge upsurge in new game publishing companies. I bet that more new game publishers were set up last 18 months than in the preceding 18 years. The problem here is that a publisher has three main functions 1) Editorial control 2) Finance 3) Marketing. Most of these new publishers don’t realise this yet. The ones that survive will be the ones that do.

So far all a reader will be seeing here is a rosy story. But the reality is that, just like the Sinclair Spectrum market before it, the AppStore business model is largely broken (as I predicted would happen in 2008), and for much the same reasons.

• Piracy. People will mainly steal a game if they think they won’t get caught. The barriers to stealing iPhone games are very low. So more are stolen than bought.
• The collapse of prices. Inexperienced marketeers use the price mechanism to gain competitive advantage. Experienced marketeers use the price mechanism to beat the game thieves. Together they drag prices down so there is no budget for marketing. This creates a downwards spiral so there is no money for development.
• Imperfect market knowledge. The AppStore has happened so fast that the mechanisms are not in place to inform people properly what is on it. So a total gem of a product can be hidden from view because of all the dross that surrounds it. This is partially Apple’s fault for having an inadequate front end to the AppStore. It is partially the fault of the news media who are not reporting sufficiently in depth, the volume has overwhelmed them. And it is partially the fault of the users who mostly take a very casual attitude to their downloads and who would be massively rewarded if they did more research.

So the net effect is that you are lucky if someone finds your game, even if they do you have to sell it to them at an uneconomically low price. But even then they are most likely to just steal it from you.

Which brings us back to Neil Young. He has given up selling games on AppStore. Now they are free. Really he had no option, because of the broken business model. So instead he charges for in game stuff with micro transactions. And it works. He has already had two successes with Touch Dogs and Eliminate Pro. Both of these allow a daily amount of play time, over which you have to pay.

A measure of just how broken the pay before you play business model is on the AppStore is that Neil Young has just cancelled the latest iteration of one of his biggest properties, Rolando 3. It was just not worth throwing good money after bad. The IP isn’t dead though, obviously, it will just appear in a new micropayment form.

So the lesson here is that the AppStore is a broken business model for selling Apps. But you can still make money and do good business on iPhone, it is just a matter of selling a service instead of a product. This is a very big and very serious lesson for the whole future of gaming.

The stupid British government is misspending a fortune. One example is forcing climate change propaganda down our throats. Mainly to justify hitting us with more and more “green” taxes. And part of their propaganda effort was a video game.

According to the Tax Payers Alliance: “The Yigal Allon Educational Trust received a grant of £49,480 to produce a “fun and engaging multi-player computer where the player’s role is to decide on local environmental policy, and interact with other players to decide global policy…………The report says that 1,048 active sessions (games with at least one player) created between July 2007 and April 2008. That implies that the project cost around £47 in grant funding per game played…..”

Under this government the British video game industry has gone from being third in the world (behind America and Japan) to almost certainly sixth (behind Canada, Korea and China). One of the main reasons for this decline (which has cost the country many billions) is government ignorance, ineptitude and apathy. Especially compared with more enlightened governments elsewhere. One example was the tax regime that they devised for the film industry (reflecting the risk and financing problems) which has been a great success. But which they did not extend to the game industry which was beset with identical problems. Yet they can throw money away at misguided propaganda when it suits them

There is a solution to this problem. Shortly there will be a general election and we can vote in a better regime (it can hardly be worse, can it?) and this interview with Ed Vaizey gives us some idea what to expect.

The internet is changing very fast. Take video for instance, last year (2009) YouTube was bigger than the whole internet was in the year 2000. And in many ways Facebook is now the biggest thing on the internet. Right at the very beginning of the history of this blog I said that social networking and gaming would converge to become the same thing. The evolution in this area since then has been astounding.

So Facebook has 400 million active users worldwide. Let’s compare that as a gaming platform with some of the others. Wii 67 million, 360 38 million, PS3 32 million, DS 125 million, PSP 54 million, iPhone 43 million. Do the maths, Facebook is bigger than all these platforms put together.

With such a huge audience you would expect Facebook games to reach a substantial audience. And they do. FarmVille has over 75 million active users (and it is just 8 months old). Compare that with some other games. World of Warcraft is perhaps over 11 million active, RuneScape is probably about the same, Modern Warfare 2 has maybe sold 16 million units. You must be getting the idea now, Facebook games can dwarf those on any other platform in terms of popularity.

Which brings us nicely to Facebook on smartphones. According to research published by the Guardian it is the number one website for mobile popularity, and their research showed that already over a quarter of the UK’s population is accessing the internet by phone. And, by coincidence, a quarter of Facebook’s users in the world are accessing it from their phone. That is 100 million smartphone facebook users.

So these are impressive number. Now they get more impressive. In September ’09 there were just 65 million smartphone facebook users. So it has gone up by over 50% in just 5 months. Show me any other gaming platform that is exploding in popularity at this rate.

And there is a huge amount more to come. The world makes about a billion new mobile phones each year, currently very approximately10% of these (100 million) are smartphones. This percentage is going to ramp up massively, already £100 at retail smartphones are predicted for this year, so hardly anyone in the first world will buy a non smartphone. But as the price collapse continues this will spread to the rest of the world.

So then you have to ask the question. Do you develop games for Application Stores or for FaceBook? That looks like the subject of another article.

Day one of the Mobile World Congress and already Microsoft have delivered, massively. But they needed to, they were being left well behind. In fact Microsoft could have been reading this blog. What they have done is to integrate many bits of Microsoft together to create a market leading product.

Windows Phone is a synergistic combination of Xbox Live, the Bing search engine, Zune MP3 player and the Windows Mobile operating system. All these elements have been upgraded to become state of the mobile art and to work together seamlessly. And it looks like Microsoft have designed it for real people instead of for “business”, which is a massive step in the right direction.

This has changed the smartphone game. The Apple App Store may have lots of applications, but it has nothing like the user resonance the Xbox Live provides. Google may have lots of very nice proprietary software, but then so does Microsoft. Android may be used by many different phone manufacturers, but so is Windows Mobile.

So now the war has hotted up. Between iPhone/iPad, Android, Symbian/Maemo and Windows Phone. There are others such as RIM (Blackberry), which is currently still the second most popular smartphone, but whose “business” bias and walled garden could see them left behind. Also Palm, who have their Treo operating system but have also used Windows Mobile, so they will probably major on the new Windows Phone O/S. And finally there is Samsung Bada, of which little is known.

This is going to be fantastic for consumers as the industry brings out new models, update their software and bring out new services and apps, all at breakneck speed. This is a billion handset a year business they are fighting for so they are playing for massive stakes.