Michael Grade is the executive chairman of ITVplc, a huge British broadcasting conglomerate formed by merging Carlton with Granada. They own 11 out of 15 regional television broadcasters. And his job is similar to re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I have written about him before on here.
ITVplc has five and a half thousand employees and in 2008 had revenue of over two billion pounds. But first half sales this year were about ten percent down on the same period last year and they lost £105 million. All part of the inevitable decline of linear, non interactive media.
Some people say that when radio came along it didn’t destroy books and newspapers and that when TV came along it didn’t destroy radio and the print media. So the lesson of history is that the advent of interactive media will be the same again and we will all live happily together. They are wrong. Interactive media will do to TV and print what the internal combustion engine did to the horse. The paradigm shift is so great that all the older media are obsolete, with the exception of radio (which can work as a background to other activities).
New media has the enormous technical advantages of interactivity, connectivity and non linearity. Gaming adds to that the powerful reward mechanism for the successful completion of tasks. Old media looks truly pathetic compared to this. So whilst new media grows from strength to strength they are doing so at the expense of old media. Old media is in big trouble and it is getting worse for them by the day.
But there is hope. The only thing that ITVplc have that is of any real value is their brands. They own a big pile of IP that is extremely well known in Britain. These brands can be scrubbed down, rejuvenated and adapted for the new media. It really isn’t rocket science. Gaming and social networking are the two obvious mechanics that are just sitting there waiting to be applied.
So here is the recipe. ITVplc need to set up a game publishing division. A small budget of perhaps £100 million should be enough to get this off the ground. Then they need to make a variety of games centred on their brands. All sorts of games. Social games, self development games, educational games, MMOs, casual games, telephone games. And across different platforms. Very rapidly indeed they would become Britain’s biggest game publisher. And more, because unlike broadcast, games are not constrained by geographic boundaries. With games the whole world becomes their oyster.
So the potential is there to make ITVplc far bigger as a new media company than it ever was as an old media company.
According to the Merriam Webster dictionary propaganda is: the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person. Which is a pretty broad net to cast and covers quite a lot of what I think of as marketing! However we tend to think of propaganda more as when media is used to promote a political viewpoint which we disagree with. Such as Lord Haw Haw in World War 2, who annoyed us so much that we over reacted and executed him when we won. A fate that Hanoi Hannah avoided.
The traditional, non interactive, media are massively used for propaganda. In World War 2, and subsequent wars, both sides frequently used their bomber aircraft to drop propaganda leaflets. Which in some circumstances may have been more effective than using them to drop bombs. Many of the world’s newspapers are set up to promote a particular viewpoint. And huge swathes of the world’s media are government owned and used to promote the cause of the ruling administrations.
Yet in this world of people trying to persuade other people of the rights or wrongs of a particular cause, video games have largely been left alone, which, when you think about it, is very strange indeed. Video games are played by hundreds of millions of people of all ages, with a concentration of 20+ year olds. Yet the actual content has been dictated more by the needs to entertain or educate than the desire to promote a certain agenda. So far.
The reason we have been left alone is quite obvious. Games are just another media, albeit a technically superior media. But the people with all the power, the politicians and journalists, don’t realise this because mostly they just don’t understand video games at all. We see this in the way they blame video games for violence in society when the opposite is true. And now that ignorance is protecting video game players from propaganda.
However we haven’t avoided politics in games completely. Here are a few that sneaked through:
The Global Islamic Media Front released a first person shooter called Quest for Bush, something that perhaps a lot of Americans would have been very pleased to play!
Rendition: Guantanamo is a game that has been cancelled because of pressure from journalists.
Left Behind: Eternal Forces is a nutty extremist christian propaganda piece, that is probably the most distasteful of the lot. Far worse than any game that politicians and journalists complain about.
Kuma\War is a first person shooter. Where it is different is that its frequent new episodes are drawn from current events, but from an American perspective.
America’s Army is the big one. A series of games designed to foster the American Army view of the world on an unsuspecting public and also to work as a recruitment tool. This has been a remarkable success at promoting gung ho American militarism.
And just now the Iran National Foundation of Computer Games revealed several new games at Gamescom in Cologne. Which will reflect opinions and views refreshingly different from the usual American propaganda that the conventional media force down our throats. According to the BBC one is “an adventure game where you play the role of a girl called Sara; a young student caught up in events during the early stages of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.” Exciting stuff.
Finally we have a pathetic British attempt which, as far as I am aware, nobody played. This involved taxpayers money being spent on a number ten Downing Street game. This now seems to have died off and of all the propaganda games I have found it is the only complete failure. Which is just so typical of anything Gordon Brown does.
As you can see, with the exception of the pathetic Gordon Brown effort, all these propaganda attempts have been a success. They have been incredibly cost effective at getting the attention of the world’s press and of game players. So it is inevitable that we will see a massive increase in video games designed to promote or rubbish different political, military and religious agendas. Up till now games have been largely living in an age of innocence. This has been a false dawn.
One thing that has struck me is how little more the current generation consoles, the Sony PS3, Nintendo Wii and the Xbox 360, give the average consumer, for a huge amount more money, than what the Sony PS2 gives them. In fact, in many ways the PS2 gives them more! Which is probably why it is the best selling console ever, with about 140 million happy customers, with more still buying it every day.
You buy a game console to play games. And when it comes to games the PS2 is a long way ahead of the current generation consoles. There are nearly 2,000 games available for the PS2 and they include some of the greatest games ever produced. Metal Gear Solid 2 & 3, GTA3 & San Andreas & Vice City, GT3, RE4, Devil May Cry, Gods of War, Okami, Ico, the list just goes on and on. And they are cheap! New games are about £20 but you can buy the classics secondhand for £5 each or less.
And the machine itself is also very cheap compared with the current generation. £70 for a new one, £40 for a secondhand one. And they are simple, proven and reliable.
The main thing the current generation give you (PS3 and 360) is HDTV, but is that such a big step in gaming? The 360 also gives you an amazing online experience, at a price. Only the Wii is standout in offering something more with its innovative gesture interface and the fantastic family oriented games that go with it. Hardly surprising then that the Wii has sold nearly as many units as the PS3 and 360 combined, it is the only one with solid reasons for purchase.
So there you have it, if you don’t already have a PS2 then you should get one.
I remember back in the late 1990s at Codemasters when as a publisher we had just two platforms we could develop for. The PC and the Playstation. By then Sega and Nintendo had both pretty much screwed up.
So now we have platform proliferation. Which means that the public can vote with their feet by deciding which platform to play on. And game developers have to choose where to direct their efforts. Initially the public were choosing between the Wii, the PS3 and the Xbox 360 and fanboyism became rife. But now people are making far wider choices.
At the same time the PC came back to ascendancy as a gaming platform but with completely different kinds of games. In the late 90s the PC market was mainly boxed, retail, plastic and cardboard. These are all but gone now, wiped out by piracy. Instead the PC has emerged as a platform for online casual games and for MMOs. These have proliferated so that there are now hundreds of MMOs running, many with “free” business models. And they are being played by many tens of millions of people.
So any fool can see what is happening here. People are playing PC online and smartphone games in preference to console games. The PS3 and the Xbox 360 are probably selling at about half the rate that they should be at this stage in the cycle. The Wii has reached the inevitable point where its sales have collapsed and by not bringing the price down sooner Nintendo have lost impetus. Just at the same time that DS game sales have fallen off a cliff.
So you can see what is going to happen here. The home console platform holders, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, have a business model that is rapidly becoming obsolete. They are being completely outflanked. So they have no option but to change their business model to match. They have to go to server based games and also to the App Store business model. If they don’t their customers will leave them in ever bigger numbers.
Of course if I know this then the platform holders know it too, so it is not a matter of if they do it, it is a matter of when. And they are already making small moves in the right direction, Free Realms coming to the PS3 and full games being sold for download on Xbox Live, for instance. Another thing is very much for sure, high street game retailing is now going to die off far faster than anyone was expecting.
Game capable smartphones, and their application stores, are one of the hottest and fastest growing areas of technology at the moment. And the growth potential is pretty close to infinite. They are a perfect synergy of abilities that will bring as yet unimaginable capabilities to huge swathes of the human race.
There are two ways to be a platform holder in this market. You can manufacture a device yourself, as Apple do with the iPhone. Or you can license the platform to others, as Google do with Android. Microsoft do both and they do them both badly.
So Microsoft are making excuses. Shane Kim, Microsoft Corporate VP, says: “For us, it’s a matter of focusing on ‘when’, because if we chased after a mobile or handheld opportunity, we would not have the resources and ability to do things like..Project Natal. So we’ve chosen to focus on the living room experience from a hardware standpoint, if you will, but we’re building a service in Live that will… will extend to other platforms. No question about it.”
This is pathetic. Microsoft has about 90,000 employees. And they can’t develop a decent mobile platform because they are all too busy with Natal. When a decent mobile platform is worth billions in profits. Just ask Apple.
What makes this doubly pathetic is that Microsoft, above every other company on planet earth, are sitting on the technology to do this. The have the Surface gesture interface, the Xbox Live portal, the Office applications, the Explorer browser, Outlook for email and the Windows Mobile operating system. What more do they want?
So the mobile device train is leaving the station and Microsoft aren’t on it. But their fiercest competitors, Apple, Sony and Google are. What is even more surprising, Nintendo, who have dominated mobile platforms for years, are missing the very same train.
Keith Vaz (Leicester, East) (Lab):What recent discussions he has had with pan-European game information on the age classification of video games.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr. Siôn Simon): I have spoken to the Video Standards Council—the current UK agents for the PEGI system—about the classification of video games and have another meeting scheduled with it very soon. I have also had discussions with the British Board of Film Classification. Both organisations are working hard to ensure the success of the new system.
Keith Vaz: I thank the Minister for his answer and welcome the steps that the Government are taking on this issue. However, it is still a matter of concern that a game such as “RapeLay”, which shows extreme violence against women, can be downloaded from the internet. What steps are the Government taking to ensure that such games are not accessed from the internet, so that children and young people are properly protected?
Mr. Simon: We should be clear that the game was not classified, but was briefly available on Amazon and then was banned. The point that my right hon. Friend is making is about games that, like other brutal, unpleasant, illegal content, can be available on the internet. All steps that apply to any other content on the internet will apply to games. Specifically, as part of the Byron review we set up the UK Council for Child Internet Safety to work with content providers, internet service providers and all aspects of Government to make sure that such content cannot be accessed, particularly by children.
Why pick on video games? There is plenty of rape on television, in the theatre, in films and in books. Yet he bursts a blood vessel when rape is in a Japanese language game that was only very briefly available on Amazon. Why not a balanced view from Keith Vaz across all the media that features rape? There is lots of rape in the bible, for instance, so when is Keith Vaz going to seek the ban of this evil book that has no age restriction on it and that is widely available to children?
RapeLay is not a nice game. However if adults are exposed to rape in all the other media then why not in games? Obviously children need to be protected, but that is no excuse for Keith Vaz to be allowed to take our basic human freedoms away from us. What he is doing is exactly the same as burning books.
The Cultural Olympiad is a four year event based around the London Olympic games of 2012.
The aims of the Cultural Olympiad are to:
encourage and welcome involvement from communities across the UK, including London;
leave a lasting legacy that improves cultural life;
showcase excellence in the performing arts and creative industries as well as sport;
introduce young people to the UK’s many artistic communities and those from around the world;
promote London as a major cultural capital;
heighten economic regeneration and encourage tourism in the UK through the work of the creative industries;
incorporate the Olympic values of ‘excellence, respect and friendship’ and the Paralympic vision to ‘empower, achieve, inspire’.
The Olympiad is “one of the reasons why London won the 2012 Games”, has a budget of £16 million of our money and has a board chaired by Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House.
Now it just so happens that video games are art and they are culture. They are popular culture just as opera, theatre, orchestra and ballet are popular cultures. The difference is that video games are in ascendancy, they are the popular culture of our age and they are more popular than all the others I listed put together. So you would expect video games to have a massive presence in the Cultural Olympiad 2012. And you would be wrong.
Video gaming has two trade bodies so is ineffective at presenting a unified face to the world.
There is no video game council to promote the art of video games. There is an Arts Council, a Music Council and a Film Council. They all get government money, we don’t.
The failure of the video game industry, especially the publishers, to present video games as art. Which is strange when the video game industry employs such a huge number of artists.
Video gaming is too new to be entrenched in the establishment. Too often old culture is seen by them as being better than new culture.
I cannot see the 2016 Olympics being so out of touch, four years will make a big difference. And if Tokyo win the bid I can see video games having a massive presence on the cultural side, they would put London to shame.
