Entries Tagged 'News analysis and background' ↓

Well, I must say that I am amazed at this. Someone has put a lot of time and money into forensically examining the truth behind Evony. And Evony’s lies are exposed open for everyone to see.

You can view the video here.

Download this video in full high quality free and distribute (no copyright on it) : http://www.tffusa.com/evony.wmv

I have written on here before about 3D gaming and how it greatly enhances the experience and immersiveness of gaming. To me it is like being at the theatre, whilst 2D gaming is like watching the TV. A huge jump.

Now Sony have come out with their 3D plans and they are really going for it. Which makes a lot of sense to me. This forms a part of their overall corporate strategy and is not just limited to video games. Their corporate goal is a “Target revenue from 3D-related products of more than 1 trillion yen (excluding content) in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2013″. So they are being pretty ambitious.

When it comes to the Playstation PS3 they have already demonstrated 3D gaming with Wipeout HD and Gran Turismo 5. In 2010 they plan to upgrade the PS3 firmware to enhance it’s 3D capabilities. In fact Sony list 3D as one of the 5 key advantages of the PS3. The other four being Motion Controller, Blu-ray disk, PlayStation Network and PSP Linkage.

It has to be said that Motion Controller and PlayStation Network are not really advantages when Microsoft’s equivalent offerings are both currently looking superior.

Back to 3D and Howard Stringer has predicted that3D games, pictures and movies will be the next ten billion dollar business for Sony. This is brave. They could end up with a competitive advantage that brings them back to being market leaders in several areas. Or the public may not think that the advantages are sufficient.

One thing that is of note for the video game side of this is that 3D eats into the system resources of any platform it is on. So, assuming that the system is running close to it’s capabilities, there has to be a trade off. There could well be a reduction in other elements of the game. Remember too that a gesture interface (motion controller) also eats into resources and you can see that there is a problem here. Using 3D with a gesture interface will be massively immersive, but we may have to wait for the PS4 generation versions to see the full realisation of the capabilities.

It is really good news for everyone in the video game industry to see Sony going for it again, we need the enterprise and innovation that they have brought to previous platform generations.

This makes absolute complete and utter sense. People buy perceptions, not reality. And people are far more concerned about peer pressure than they are concerned about their own judgement.

There is a make of car that is distinctly average. In fact some of the smaller models are not very good at all. Yet it manages to sell extremely well despite selling at a premium price. Because people want to be seen behind the badge. They will pay thousands of dollars in premium to buy just a few dollars worth of chrome and enamel badge. And most people buy silver and grey ones, because that is what everyone else does. All due to the power of marketing. The brand is presented as sporty which is just the image every housewife wants when she does the school run. Customers just don’t realise when they are victims.

If you are a game developer and you tell your mum about the game you are working on then that is marketing. Marketing is any communication. So it is a fact that a game with zero marketing will have zero sales.

Over the years I  have never seen a game get the sales that it deserved just for its quality. Yet I have many times seen a game get far more sales than it deserves because of its marketing. And I have also seen many good games fail because of bad marketing.

Just look at the five games I was writing about yesterday. They are virtually identical yet they have massively different numbers of players. The difference is just the marketing. Marketing is more important than the game, this is a self evident truth.

Yet still there are very many game publishers who do not understand this. Many self and small publishers on the iPhone App Store, for instance. There you can see that marketed games sell well, non marketed games sell badly. It has precious little to do with the quality of the game. (Unless it is a total dog).

Now EEDAR has done research in the game marketplace from which they say “Marketing influences game revenue three times more than quality scores”. And actually the difference is even bigger than that, because the scores form part of the marketing!

So there you have it. If you want to sell more games and make more money then send me an email and I will come and sort it out for you!

We have at least five games originating in China now that are remarkably similar to each other. Evony you know about, Kingory I have written about before. Fog of War, Napoleonic War (Nap War) and Lords Online are pretty much the same game again. OK the maps and story are different each time, but much of the rest remains the same. Empire Craft has also been written about here.

Evony, earlier this year, claimed the following provenance: “Evony is owned by UMGE (Universal Multiplayer Game Entertainment). Founded by a small group of avid Chinese game developers, UMGE is based in Guangzhou, China and develops online multiplayer games.” Here is a summary of  some of the Evony articles on this site.

Kingory’s provenance seems to be that it is an English language version of the immensely popular Chinese language game ReXueSanguo . Whilst it is virtually identical to Evony the management attitudes are completely different so whist the two games obviously came from the same place they seem to be run by different people. It’s stated ownership is: © 2008 – 2009 JoyPort UUYX (China). P.R. China Internet Culture Business License Permit: 2005-075

Nap War “is owned and operated by SOHO Union International Ltd (SOHO Union)”. “We started our business as a small enterprise in HongKong, making our first product called Fog of War: Napoleonic War. Now SOHO has approximately 100 employees worldwide with each one showing great passion, remarkable creativity and efficient teamwork in their efforts to achieve our goal.”

Empire Craft is also a very similar game. It has the addition of 3 races and allows you to queue buildings up. In a letter to this site they said they were owned by: Oak Pacific Interactive, No.8 North Third Ring Road East, Chao Yang District, Beijing.

Lords Online is an announced and reviewed game from IGG Inc (I Got Games) who are well established and already publish a range of games. And once again it is pretty much the same game. IGG are substantial, well established and well funded and seem to have offices in China, Hong Kong and the West.

So that is five iterations of pretty much the same game that I know about. So there are probably more, with even more to come. All come from China. All allow you to buy game achievements instead of earning them by playing the game. And several of them are marketing by using the high profile, high cost, Google advertising route.

One wonders where these games are coming from. Who actually wrote what is the original game and how it ended up in what seem to be so many different hands. Also the business model they seem to be all adopting. Is that imitation or are they working to a template?

And what are their chances of success? People are not stupid and the internet allows a flow of information so the gaming world will quickly realise that these are all pretty much the same game. At Evony most players have deserted the game once they have sussed it out, after this will they even bother with the others? And then there is the small number of players willing to pay a considerable amount of money to play these games. Are there enough of them to go round and so finance the high risk Google advertising strategy?

Last week we had the USA October sales statistics from NPD showing game sales of $573 million, down from $698 million last year. So are we in trouble? Is gaming on a downwards spiral? Are people finding better things to do with their time and money?

The answer is no, and here’s why:

• The industry has moved online and away from paper and cardboard massively during the last year. There is a plethora of new MMOs, for instance. Even the game consoles are moving increasingly to downloaded content. And the iPhone has grown from nothing to become a major gaming platform. NPD only measures the high street retail spend.
• Over the last year there has been a massive rise in secondhand game sales. So people are still buying games, but the same physical units are often sold multiple times and only the first time shows up on NPD.
• The game industry turnover at retail revolves around a small number of blockbusters. October this year was very light on these, as is the whole of Q4 this year. A lot of this can be put down to the industry running scared of Modern Warfare 2. People don’t even want to launch in the same quarter as this.
• Music/dance games were largely a fad and that is now over. Sales have more than halved in this sector.
• Another high value sku, Wii Fit, is tapering off in sales compared with the craze that it was last year.
• The games industry has structural and management problems. These will be worked through, but there is no doubt that the industry is not making the most of the opportunities open to it.

So there we have it, the whole industry doesn’t need to go on a burger flipping course just yet.

I would like to say a big thank you to all the many people who have contributed to this fund, I have been more than pleasantly surprised by the response. Every amount, no matter small, will help, it all adds up. And whilst I am truly appreciative of everyone’s generosity I have actually been shocked at how much some people are willing to donate to this cause.

There are several issues at stake here. The first is libel tourism. Earlier this year Evony were very pleased to repeatedly post this (I have the screen grabs as evidence): “Evony is owned by UMGE (Universal Multiplayer Game Entertainment). Founded by a small group of avid Chinese game developers, UMGE is based in Guangzhou, China and develops online multiplayer games.” Then on July 22 this year (after I wrote the articles they object to) they formed a Delaware company, Evony LLC. This company is now suing me for libel in Sydney, Australia whilst I live in Coventry, England.

If this case is allowed to proceed it will create a precedent and open the floodgates for anyone to litigate anywhere against anyone they don’t like. It will stifle all our freedoms because the rich guy will always have the upper hand and will be able to choose the country with the most punitive laws.

The second issue is reputation management. Unlike the print media, that our libel laws were designed for, online content can be unpublished, ie removed. So now a huge legal industry has sprung up where authors are threatened with libel action unless they remove content that the person paying the solicitor objects to, whether it is the truth or not. Obviously the authors invariably remove the content, such is the massive cost of defending a libel action. So the internet is being massively censored, usually by the people who have something to hide that we should know about.

The third issue is just plain freedom of speech, the foundation of our democratic society. What I wrote about Evony was the truth and fair comment. This supposedly American company has not acted against me in America, they would be laughed out of court because of the Constitutional protection of free speech. However British libel law was designed to protect the rich from the gossip of their servants. And it is an extension of this British law that is in force in Australia. What this means is that Evony can make many strange and outrageous claims against me and I have to go to great lengths to disprove every single one in court, to the satisfaction of a jury. This obviously puts me at a massive disadvantage in the case.

The fourth issue is Evony itself. I don’t like the way that you can buy in game achievements, the way they are constantly badgering players for money, that the game exposes young people to online gambling,  the fact that this blog (and others) were comment spammed repeatedly and I don’t like their risque bait and switch advertising. There is much more not to like but I don’t want to add to the list of things that I have to prove in court!

And the amazing thing is that I have actually caused them no harm whatsoever. When I wrote my article less than a million people had joined the game. In the few short months since that has risen to over ten million. Admittedly most of those have since left the game, for obvious reasons. So it looks like the old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity is true. It seems very likely that my writing has driven more people to go and try the game. In other words I have had the opposite effect that they are claiming.

Here Keith Vaz is in the House of Commons whingeing about Modern Warfare 2. It is amazing that he is not applying the same standards to books and films. Books have far, far worse content yet they have no age rating whatsoever. Why doesn’t he do something about that?