This is why new game consoles are so expensive and become so cheap after a few years. It is why we have a flood of ever more powerful and ever cheaper consumer gadgets. And it is why Bill Gates said that people overestimate technology change in the short term but underestimate it in the long term.
Moore’s Law also means that it is now very cheap and easy to put processing power in just about every electronic and electrical device, even the humble toaster! And one device in every home that has plenty of processing power is the television. This processing power could (and is) very easily used to play games. In fact I have written on here before that the increased processing power of televisions could be such that you won’t need a game console, that games will just become a service freed up from hardware constraints.
Which brings us to PlayJam, the leader in television games. They started in 1999. As it is now 2010 Moore’s law tells us that televisions already have 32 times the processing power than they did back then. In four years time it will be 128 times the power. As I said Exponential is powerful.
And so PlayJam can also grow exponentially. Currently they are in 30 million homes with 550 casual games and have generated 8 billion downloads in the last five years. Impressive. But it is going to get a lot more impressive still. With deals announced with Sony, Samsung and others announced at CES PlayJam are going to ramp up to 450 million devices.
So interactive television is going to be a more numerous gaming platform than all the game consoles put together. But it will still be miniscule compared with smart phones. These are also the recipient of the Moore’s Law bounty and will soon be churned out at over a billion units a year.
Just over a year ago I was talking on here about netbooks and how big they would be. And so it happened, in 2009 their market share in portable computing went from 5% to 25%. And quite right too. Offering just the power you need and outstanding portability, netbooks are a very effective tool for a huge array of tasks.
But I also warned that netbooks were an interim technology. They are held back by the need to adhere to the old Intel/Windows hegemony. Mainly because there were no viable alternatives. Also they arrived just as we were on a cusp of display technology. LCDs are not very good for displays, whatever way you look at it. Power hungry, fragile, over complicated, expensive to make and giving a poor image quality they are only used because of the lack of alternatives. Now OLED is making its presence felt all those disadvantages are being swept away.
OLED displays bring a massive power saving, but so does dumping Intel processors for the far more elegant ARM based computing. The big problem here is that the Intel processors have the heritage of over 30 years of software and ARM has a lot of catching up to do. This is especially felt in the areas of operating systems, browsers and all those utilities you take for granted like Flash, media players, email, pdfs and so on. No matter how good the machine you have to be able to use it.
This brings us to the ongoing war between Google and Microsoft that we are all benefiting from. Microsoft rescued Windows XP from the ashes to become the OS of choice for netbooks, but it is still bloatware. Google saw the opportunity and with amazing overkill decided to give us two new operating systems. Android is intended for smartphones and is rocketing in popularity, however it is already working very happily on far larger devices and runs on Intel, ARM and other processors. The Chrome operating system is a development of the Chrome browser and is available for both Intel and ARM processors.
So now, increasingly, manufacturers of portable devices can choose between processors without putting users at a software advantage. And increasingly they are choosing ARM. These ARM processors are made by a variety of chip manufacturers competing against each other so there is a huge pressure to get them into devices. Their biggest advantage is their immensely energy efficienty as their heritage includes a lot of mobile phone applications, this makes them ideal for Slate computing.
With all the above information you can see where we are going, there will be a whole new generation of devices (over 30 product launches in the next three months) that are some way between a laptop computer and a mobile phone. They will use OLED displays and mainly ARM processors, this will give them such low power consumption that they will always be switched on, like a mobile phone. Some will use keyboards, some touch screens, again just like mobile phones. These devices are so new that they don’t even have a name, some are calling them tablets, some smartbooks and some slates. And prices will start at below $200.
And the highest profile launch will be from Apple. On January 27 Steve Jobs will announce the iSlate at the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts in San Francisco. The air is thick with rumours. That there will be two models with a 7 inch and a 10 inch display. That it will incorporate some elements of 3D. That its inbuild camera will be supported with powerful image recognition software. And that it will be a strong media player and that deals with major content providers such as TV companies have already been signed up. We are all sitting on the edges of our seats for this one.
But we need to put this whole market into context. Smartphones will very soon become the most common computing devices on earth. Over a billion a year will go into use. These slates/tablets/smartbooks will just be a subset of this market for people who need bigger screens and enhanced capabilities.
Which brings us to gaming. As the iPhone has already proven this will be one of the main uses for all these devices. We are entering a stage where the dedicated gaming machine is being abandoned in favour of general purpose devices that also happen to play games.
It is well established that the Daily Mail does not understand video games, which puts them at some distance from their readers who mostly do. The Daily Mail and it’s sibling the Sunday Mail relentlessly attack video games, but in doing so they only serve to display their ignorance.
All that video games are is another form of entertainment medium. Just like books, television, film, radio, opera, ballet etc. Games have several technological advantages in that they are interactive, non linear and connected, which gives them capabilities that are beyond the other media. But they are still just another form of media.
So when anyone is being critical of games it should be in comparison with other media. So issues such as sex, violence and addictiveness should not be taken in isolation in gaming. We should be looking at books, film etc and see how the same issues apply. And when it comes to sex and violence video games are tame. Film and books are far worse and books don’t even have an age rating. I read Karma Sutra, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Perfumed Garden etc in my early teens.
Another thing that the Mail do not understand is that video games is a thriving business that adds to the economy. Worldwide it is worth somewhere between $50 and $100 billion a year. And the British share of this massive cake has been going down under the current, labour, government. For many years we were third in the world behind America and Japan. Now we are definitely behind Canada and almost certainly behind Korea and China as well. Which puts us sixth and going down rapidly.
The demise of the British video game industry is almost all down to government policy. Other countries have seized the opportunity to build for the future whilst British politicians seem mainly to attack that which they don’t understand. It is incredible, for instance, that video game development does not receive the same tax treatment as film making in the UK. These politicians are not in the real world.
‘Culture’ also has a minister of its own operating under the grand panjandrum of the Secretary of State. The Shadow Minister, Ed Vaizey, provides a foretaste of nonsense to come with his declaration that the video games industry – there’s culture for you – has been let down by the Government. It has not grown fast enough.
He proposes a Video Games Council.
Why there should be a government role in this field may well defeat you. It is at least as silly as the role of Hereditary Butler to the Crown etc and no doubt more expensive.
I have some news for Mr Alexander, by any and all definitions video games are culture. They entertain, have creativity, genre, subtlety, a history, engender emotion and have everything else that ballet or the opera have. Except that video games are massively more popular.
Then he completely misses the point that games are a huge industry that provide jobs, profits, wealth, exports etc. Just as heavy manufacturing once did in this country.
And then we come to him disparaging the excellent idea of a Video Games Council. It is a massive shame and a huge detriment to Britain that we don’t already have one. If Mr Alexander wants to criticise the concept he should put it in context. Let’s see him rubbish the Film Council, the Arts Council and the Music Council as well.
In fact Mr Alexander actually provides compelling evidence for the need for a Video Games Council, because if we had one we would not have to suffer so much ignorance from journalists (and politicians).
That’s right, over 300 million dollars stolen just of the one game, Modern Warfare 2, in 2009. Obviously Activision had much more stolen from them with other titles, but MW2 is by far the worst affected. According to TorrentFreak 4,100,000 copies of the PC version of MW2 were stolen and 970,000 copies of the Microsoft Xbox 360 version.
Thieves using bit torrents are indulging in the biggest orgy of theft in the history of humanity. When they can steal with no chance of getting caught then they will. How they justify this appalling lack of moral fibre to themselves is beyond me. I have heard a whole litany of empty excuses from the thieves to try and justify their actions but the fact remains that they are benefiting from other people’s labour that they should have paid for but haven’t. So they are thieves.
And they are stupid because they damage that which they love. Activision are not about to go out of business because of this particular frenzy of stealing. But in the past plenty of other game companies have gone bust because of game theft. And many top creative game developers have left the industry for ever. We have lost a huge number of potentially great games to piracy. It doesn’t even need for the company to go bust, they can just allocate their resources elsewhere. There are nearly as many Nintendo DS consoles in the world as Wiis, PS3s and Xbox 360s combined. So where are all the great DS games? That’s right, piracy stops them even being written.
The fact is that if you want people to work for you creating great games then you have to pay their wages, they have to pay for their food and rent just like everyone else.
There are a number of possible solutions to this massive stealing problem:
Educate the thieves. Explain their low morality to them and the harm they do to the development of games. I think this has no chance of succeeding, they have proven, on a massive scale, that they are perfectly happy to steal.
Technical protection. This is the best solution. A game console’s main purpose in life is to serve as an anti piracy dongle. All three current generation home consoles succeed at this, the PS3 works best, followed by the Wii with the Xbox 360 putting up a distinctly average performance. But open, multi purpose platforms like the PC and the iPhone lack this technical protection and so piracy is rife.
Using the ISPs to stop peer to peer distribution of stolen IP. This is probably the main viable route. Already implemented in France and proposed for the UK and most other civilised countries. The scale of thieving is so enormous that the thieves are not directly punished, instead they get a warning letter. If they continue to steal they get another warning letter. Then if they ignore both these warnings they are disconnected from the internet. A very mild course of action against thieves, many of whom have stolen thousands of dollars worth of stuff they should have paid for.
Publisher activism. The publishers can go after the thieves that are stealing from them directly. However the thieves don’t like this and indulge in massive online activism to stop it. So the publishers, even though they are morally right to protect their property, are loath to take this sort of action for fear of Streisand effect.
Government action. There are millions of thieves out there that the government is turning a blind eye to. In fact government authority is being totally usurped. If I fancied a new Ferrari and went and stole it the police would show a great interest. However is someone steals a game that I publish, using torrents, they aren’t interested. Yet the Ferrari and the game are both the result of people’s labour.
Eventually something will be done, stealing on this scale is unsustainable whatever way you look at it. In the meantime game development suffers and the thieves are too stupid to realise it.
If you haven’t seen Avatar yet then you owe it to yourself to correct this omission as soon as possible. Avatar is a hugely significant jump in what constitutes human culture and its ramifications will impact heavily on the future of all entertainment media worldwide. Gaming will be influenced enormously.
Obviously Avatar is a global release. If you are not global then you will be out performed by competitors that are. Only global sales can bring in the returns necessary to fund the huge investments.
Avatar is a technical tour de force. Real film footage seamlessly integrates with motion capture, CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) and, my favourite, true facial expressions on the CGI characters. Humans communicate emotion using an array of facial muscles which are in continual movement. Previous CGI attempts (Gollum, Jar Jar Binks) to replicate this have been less than convincing, making a mouth wider is not a realistic smile. Avatar got round this by continuously recording the actors’ faces during motion capture and then merging the footage of the expressions into the CGI. There are lessons here for the game industry as we continually strive towards realistic representation.
Another lesson of Avatar is that it is new and original IP. This is not Jaws 47, or whatever. Avatar is part one of a planned trilogy. The second and third parts will obviously be easier to make as all the groundwork is done. However as old IPs become tired we need a constant pipeline of new IPs to serve to the public. Whilst some, like Hornblower, Biggles and Poirot are strong enough to survive many iterations, most reach their sell by date much earlier. Console gaming has been very weak for new IP, especially from third party publishers. We really do need to allow creativity and imagination to flower and Avatar can be held up as a superb example of how successful this can be.
Then there is 3D. The temptation is to use 3D to create spectacular effects. The problem with this is that it reduces the audiences’ sense of immersion. Avatar, very cleverly, does the opposite and uses 3D to increase the sense of immersion. It is an immense success and surely sets a benchmark for the future of 3D in screen based entertainment. 3D is set to become the norm for films, television and gaming. A whole new age has just opened up.
Of course the success of Avatar is not just down to artistic merit. As I have pointed out on here marketing is three times more important than game quality. So it will come as no surprise that Murdoch invested $150 million into the marketing of Avatar, for a total spend of $450 million in bringing this film to its public. There is no point in making fabulous IP if you don’t communicate effectively with your potential customers.
The overall effect of this (and very much more that went into Avatar) is to create a must see event. The force of compulsion to see this film is immense, making it a significant collective human experience. Also, like the original Star Wars trilogy, it will support repeated viewings and will enter into the human psyche. Video games are still a long way from doing this.
The most striking thing is that Sony, which once owned the console market now only have a total 25% market share across their three platforms. Playstation PS2 game sales have collapsed from 8% of the market to just 2%. And 2% is exactly what the PSP did for both years. As you would expect after the price cut, and more importantly the marketing activity that went with it, PS3 game market share is up, by 4%, from 15% to 19%. Hardly stellar but a move in the right direction after all the PS3 disasters.
And the big winner, as anyone could have predicted, is Microsoft and its solitary platform in the market, the Xbox 360. In the year its market share of software sales went from 28% to 37%, a massive 9% rise. This makes it by far the most successful platform for game sales, overtaking the Wii.
In fact Microsoft is selling nearly twice as much dollars worth of games for the Xbox 360 as Sony is for the PS3, an enormous advantage. This is the true measure of the success of the Microsoft Xbox 360.
I am not going to apologise for writing about Android so much. Smartphones are set to become the most used computing devices on earth, easily outpacing personal computers and game consoles. Pretty soon they will be selling a billion handsets a year as Moore’s Law kicks in and they replace dumb handsets. And Android, despite Google’s traditional lacklustre marketing, looks well set to become the leading software standard, with handsets being made for it by many companies.
But now Google has issued its upcoming Nexus One handset to its staff. It is manufactured by HTC in Taiwan and Google intend to sell it direct to customers, which should make it very price competitive.
So the war against iPhone will be waged by Android on many fronts. It will be the gaming platform story of 2010.
I have mentioned this several times before but it is fundamental to understand the implications of Moores Law if you are to understand where the video game industry is going. This says, quite simply that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. Extrapolate and it means that the cost of anything involving chips halves every two years. And the very important thing to realise is that the effect is exponential. After four years costs are a quarter. After six years an eighth. After eight years a sixteenth. And so on. Exponential is a very powerful word.
