Entries Tagged 'Practical information' ↓

I have written on here before about the Dizzy brand. It is one of the biggest ever video game brands in Europe and especially in the UK. There is a whole generation out there who are aware of the Dizzy brand. I am especially proud because I did the marketing that created the sales and built the brand. Though this was made a lot easier by the fantastic games the Oliver twins created. I am less pleased about the silly feuding that killed the brand off in its prime and the lack of vision to bring it back.

There is still a big and active Dizzy community out there, 20ish years after the event. A testament to the enduring quality of this brand. And the purpose of this little article is to publicise this by letting you see an email I received:

Hello Bruce,

I’m Alexandru Simion, author of the DizzyAGE engine. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a set of tools designed to create classic Dizzy adventure games:

www.yolkfolk.com/dizzyage

Every year we have an Easter competition bringing in new and wonderful fan made Dizzy games. This year we’re happy to have The Oliver Twins among the sponsors. As in 2008, they offering three invitations to their Blitz Games Studios.

I saw your blog post about how you tried to put The Olivers and Code Masters together to bring Dizzy back and I’m sorry it didn’t work. When we visited them last year, Philip and Andrew told us how much they wanted to reach an agreement with Code Masters. Well, maybe one day we’ll see it done.

I was also wondering if, considering your interest in Dizzy games, you are willing to have a post in your blog, about DizzyAGE and our competition. It will probably bring in more people and who knows maybe some of them are going to create some great Dizzy games. If you need more details, please let me know.

Thank you!
Alex

Gaming in education is a subject I have written about frequently on here. It will grow to be bigger than recreational gaming, there is no doubt of this. Now there is a conference about it in London on March 19th and 20th. I will be there and so should you if you want to be up to speed on this amazing area of opportunity.

Here is some of their blurb:

The Game Based Learning Conference is the only event of its kind currently in existence that deals with all aspects of games in learning.

The huge surge of interest amongst education professionals, game companies, learners, employers, parents, public sector agencies and technology providers over the last 5 years has been demonstrated by the overwhelming success of the gaming strands in the Handheld Learning Conference.

Game Based Learning builds on this success whilst providing more depth by creating stimulating, challenging and provocative dialogue spaces at the intersection between the education, gaming, social media and consumer electronics sectors. Here, policy makers, thought leaders, innovators and key practitioners meet to exchange ideas, knowledge and experiences as part of a unique ongoing conversation.

Speakers include:

• Tom Watson, MP, UK Cabinet Minister for Transformational Government
• Nolan Bushnell, Founder of Atari, father of the video game industry
• Ian Livingstone, Co-founder, Eidos, Chair, Computer Games Skills Council, Skillset
• Alice Taylor, Commissioning Editor, Education, Channel 4
• Dr Richard Graham, Clinical Director of Adolescent Directorate, Tavistock Centre
• Marco Minoli, Director, Slitherine
• Sean Dromgoole, CEO, Some Research & GameVision
• Derek Robertson, Learning & Teaching Scotland
• Terry Deary, Author, Horrible Histories

The focus of this vital exploration is the impact that commercial off the shelf video games, “serious” games, virtual worlds and social networks are having on new learning and teaching practice in and out of formal education environments.

Game Based Learning 2009 will:

• Examine practical examples of how games and other entertainment software are being embraced in schools, universities and other establishments.
• Present and discuss latest market data, trends and behaviors.
• Debate the implications of video game and Internet rating systems in the context of learning and teaching.
• Provide valuable social and networking opportunities for all delegates.
• Create, capture and make available unique reference material for the interactive entertainment industry, policy makers, education professionals and the public.

The rest is up to you.

More than anything else, the Game Based Learning 2009 Conference will be an important, highly stimulating and engaging conversation between traditionally disparate sectors that must now recognize their intrinsic value to one another.

See you there!

I am looking for a challenge. I love the idea of marketing and managing during a recession to build a business and make profits. I have done it before and would love to do it again.

What we are looking at here is getting the maximum marketing impact for the minimum budget using the marketing mix creatively. Just as I did at Codemasters when we achieved over 27% of the total UK games market on a minimum budget. Or once again a few years later when we got Operation Flashpoint to number one in most world markets on a very small spend.

Now you might be looking for someone who understands the internet. Well the online community marketing department at Codemasters was my innovation, something that has now been widely imitated. And I run a successful forum and a successful blog. But I still have plenty of real word advertising and PR experience.

In this work I am your flexible friend. I could two two jobs for 2 or 3 days a week each. Or even fill an interim post for a few months. Just don’t expect me to burn through budgets spending by rote, lazy marketing like this annoys me. Expect instead creativity in reaching the right person with the right message.

One project that would be ideal would be setting up the UK or European office for an American or Asian company. I have a lot of successful startup experience so this would be right up my street.

If you are interested you can find my CV on Linkedin and more information here.

Just now tens of thousands of highly educated and commercially savvy people are losing their jobs in the financial sector and are looking for a job. (Some say they cannot be too clever because of the mess they got us all into). There are very few jobs going for them anywhere in the economy, everywhere is hurting. Except for gaming, which is booming.

So here are some little tips and hints to help them with their future careers.

1. The game industry is about entertainment, it is a good idea to remember this as even some who work in the industry seem to have forgotten.
2. Management ability and management structures are often little evolved from lemonade stands. You will be shocked when you see just how bad it can be. And how many people there are in organisations who are not needed.
3. Marketing is mostly very poor, by rote with little innovation and excitement. They usually just burn through the budget.
4. Development is incredibly inefficient. Every studio continually re-invents the wheel. Too much time is spent on technology and too little on creativity. It is as if the movie industry had to design and build new cameras for every movie they make.
5. Big budget console games mostly lose money. It is the occasional hit that pays for the rest. Maybe 7 out of ten are losers.  And these days the budgets are not dissimilar to the movie industry.
6. The big growth areas of iPhone, XNA/XLA, Flash etc are crowded because of low barriers to entry. This crowding can often lead to low quality and poor marketing. So it is obvious how to differentiate your offering.
7. High street game retail is dying, do not go there. Unless what you are doing is online you will have a very bleak future.
8. MMORPG games are all the fashion. The rate of failiure is even higher than for boxed console games. And to create one vaguely competetive game costs a lot more than making a Hollywood blockbuster.
9. The industry is incredibly fickle and fashionable. Guitar games are all the rage this week. They weren’t two years ago and they won’t be in two year’s time. Which is fine till you remember that two years is about how long it takes to develop a mainstream game.
10. No matter how good and clever and hard working you are piracy can just suddenly appear and wipe you out. This has happened many times and will happen many more times.
11. The route to success is product quality and looking after your customers. This has been proven repeatedly yet most in the industry still ignore the lesson.
12. Here are a big pile of really good industry resources. With these you should have no problem getting up to speed.

Don’t be put off. If anything be encouraged. If the industry is booming now, imagine how it would be with an influx of competent talent.

The video game industry tends to be pretty interweb literate so, with the popularity of social networking, there is bound to be a fair bit of this going on.

Facebook is the mother of all social networks with more members than the population of the planet. Because it is Balkanised geographically it is difficult to search thoroughly. However there are some interesting groups.

• PC and Video Game Industry Professionals. 5,339 members. It features:
  • Articles, white papers and research
  • Links to helpful websites/books/community resources
  • Websites and companies of note
  • Features and interviews
  • Job listings
  • Message boards
  • Career-building tips
  • Videos, podcasts and more
• The International Game Developers Association (IGDA). 6,141 members. “The IGDA is a non-profit professional society that is committed to advancing the careers and enhancing the lives of game developers by connecting members with their peers, promoting professional development, and advocating on issues that affect the developer community.”
• Game Development. 1,751 members. “This is a group dedicated to the art of video game development. We encourage discussion of views on the industry and we are aiming to provide support for any questions people may have.”
• Video Game Developers. 1,318 members. “A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual) that creates video games. A developer may specialize in a certain video game system, such as the Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, or the Sony PlayStation 3, or may develop for a variety of systems, including PCs.”
• UK Games Industry Massive. 1,239 members. “The folks of the very fine UK games industry.”
• GameDev and friends. 307 members. “A group for everyone who’s interested in developing video games and exploring the relevant technologies.”
• People who have had their souls broken working in the games industry. 515 members. “For people who have seen one too many sunrises, slept under one too many desks, eaten one too many takeout pizzas, been in one too many last-minute-design-change meetings, faced down one too many retarded publisher decisions, had their bonuses mysteriously vanish one too many times, had one too many WNF bugs bounced back to them… all in the name of a 6/10 review in Edge and bargain-bucket status two weeks after launch… this is for you.”
• Indie Game Developers. 361 members. “Independent Game Developers group for small companies and individuals designing and publishing their own games. Come join us and support and independent game community- get help creating and marketing.”
• Ex-Codies. 182 members. “A place for the haunted souls who were once a cog in the machine we know as Codemasters.”
• Bruceongames.19 members!. For industry professionals who read this blog. Please join.

Linkedin is social networking for professionals from all sorts of businesses. If you work in the games industry please link to me there. I am a member of four game industry groups on Linkedin.

• Electronic Entertainment Industry Network. 2,933 members.
• Game Developers. 11,696 members.
• Uk Games Developers. 516 members.
• Video Gaming Industry Executives. 2,925 members.

So there we have it. If you work in the industry and want to relate to other like minded souls there are plenty of options. And one obvious big daddy, Game Developers on Linkedin.

So I put my money where my mouth is and spent some of my own hard earned money buying a netbook. I put a lot of research into this, reading reviews, blogs, forums etc to work out which brand and which model best suited my needs. I chose the Acer Aspire One. In fact at the end of the day it looked like by far the best choice for me. So I bought it from Amazon at a good price and after a couple of working days it arrived, even at this busy time of year.

I had tried previously to use a notebook and bought myself a top end Dell. And it never got used. It is still gathering dust somewhere. It was just too big and unwieldy for the amount of utility it afforded me. The fact that I am writing this article on the Aspire means that it has already been used more than the Dell was. The size is absolutely perfect, any smaller and the keyboard would become a pain, any bigger and it would lose its fantastic portability.

When buying these things selecting Windows XP adds about £50 more to the price than using Linux. But for my needs XP is still the best operating system in the world, so I had to bite this bullet. And having specified XP it made sense to have a hard drive. So now I have this small 1Kg device that has similar power to my desktop machine and puts the sum of all human knowledge in my hand anywhere I go. Remarkable.

The Aspire came with minimum documentation, which is admirable. Looking for a wireless connection from my house it found a total of 8 of my neighbours’ setups, compared with a desktop PC with an aerial on the back which could only find 3. The first thing I did was to remove Exploder and replace it with Firefox 3. Next I will have to remove McAfee, which is a pain of pop up madness, and replace it with AVG Free.

Now I can travel the world and run my online empire exactly as if I was at home, so long as I can find a hotspot. So the next move will be a 3G telephone dongle to use anywhere in the UK, especially on trains. These are free with a 12 to 15 month account which costs £10 to £15 per month for all the capacity you are going to need. In fact some companies are giving the netbook itself away for free when you take out an airtime contract, just like they do with mobile phones. All I still need is the for the Logitech wireless optical mouse, on order from Amazon, to be delivered and I will be in clover.

Regular readers of my articles will be very familiar with gaming in virtual worlds, who the players are and what the issues are. So it is hardly surprising that next week I will be at the Virtual Worlds Forum in London where many of the key players in the industry worldwide will be speaking on most of theses issues.

Mel Guymon will be there from Google. He is Head of 3D Operations and Product Manager for Lively and is giving the opening keynote talk. It is excellent that he is out and about explaining Lively because with Google’s weak marketing this must be one of the most misunderstood products out there.

Geoff Iddison from Jagex is giving a talk on day two titled “Choosing the right business model-experiences in adapting a business to embrace technology”. He will be coming to the forum on a high as the Guinness Book of Records has just accepted RuneScape as the world’s largest free MMORPG.

Timo Soininen from Sulake Corporation will be presenting a case study “Habbo-the continuously evolving teen virtual world”. Which, with their experience, should contain many gems of wisdom.

There is an interesting panel discussion on “Harnessing social networks, virtual worlds and MMOs to create community”. With, amongst others, Raph Coster from Metaplace. He then goes into the closing plenary discussion with, amongst others, Ginsu Yoon from Linden Lab.

So far I have just mentioned companies that have featured in articles here. Other speakers are from so many of the world’s leading players. The BBC, Electronic Arts, Endemol, NC Soft, Walt Disney and Dizzywood amongst others.

The congress is over two days, the 6th and 7th of October and is pretty much essential for anyone with any management responsibility in this space. If you see me there don’t be shy, please come over and have a chat.