Entries Tagged 'Practical information' ↓

Here I will list a whole pile of websites that are useful to the game industry professional. Some I have mentioned before, but putting them all in one place is pretty convenient. This is information overload.

• N4G is a game news aggregator. The stories can be submitted by anyone but are vetted for relevance, commented on and scored for popularity. This gives an excellent news snapshot with the added advantage of measuring the level of public interest.

• Gameindustry.biz is the online only competitor to MCV. They will send you a daily newsletter.

• Gamasutra is the American game industry website.

• Gamerankings, like the title says, is an amazing compendium of game information centred around their reviews. An essential tool.

• Metacritic is a more sophisticated game ranking with the individual scores weighted according to their credibility.

• VG Chartz, lots of useful guestimated facts and figures. The site is dragged down by a puerile fanboy forum.

• Some great development blogs. Find out what the people who actually make the games have to say. This is the gold standard for informed industry comment.

• ELSPA is the main UK trade industry organisation. Their main concern is political lobbying which is why the UK government is so good towards the game industry.

• How to get lots of money given to you for moving your video game business to Quebec. This site is much visited by European companies!!

• Popurls is a metasite of metasites so gives you a breathtaking overview of the internet on one page. So informative that it is addictive.

• Geekipedia is Wired magazines’ brilliant guide to our technology age. Essential education for many.

• Develop, the online site for the game development community magazine.

• Improving Game Marketing: The Game Purchase Process From A Consumer’s Point Of View. An interesting paper.

   

• Fascinating article on game marketing and the press.

• Some incredibly incisive commentary on game marketing and game quality.

• David Perry’s game industry map gives a geographical perspective to the whole industry.

• MMOGCHART is the standard industry reference for what is happening in the MMO world.

• The Chaos Engine, the private forum for game industry development professionals. Absolutely essential reading if you want to know what is going on.

• Videogame journos network. Does exactly what the name says.

• SoftPressRelease.com. Blast your press release out to the waiting press at low cost.

• Games Press, the resource for games journalists.

• A good list of game developers and publishers with links to their websites and product lists.

• Bruceongames. The game industry blog from a marketing and publishing perspective.

There is enough information there for even the keenest budding game industry professional. Please add any great industry sites you may know using comments.  Bloggers and journalists feel free to copy this anywhere you want.

Some people think that Wikipedia is the sum of all human knowledge. With 9.25 million articles it is certainly big and the fact that anyone (supposedly) can add to this store of knowledge should make the content exhaustive and authoritative. There are several articles in Wikipedia that I was a central player in. And from my expert position I can see the flaws in these articles:

• Liverpool Software Gazette. This was my idea. I published and funded it and edited several issues.
• Imagine Software Where I was Operations Director in charge of sales and marketing, inter alia.
• Codemasters. Where I was one of the first employees and was in charge of marketing, inter alia.
• Dizzy. The repeatedly chart topping game brand which I did the marketing for.

So I thought that it would be good to apply my intimate knowledge of these subjects by contributing to Wikipedia. I had already written articles involving all four subjects and those articles are on this blog. So the simplest thing was to add the permalink for those articles to the External Links section of the Wikipedia entries. Then anyone researching could drill down and get the extra knowledge. So:

• This article (perhaps the weakest) explains the context in the late 70s in Liverpool that led to me creating Liverpool Software Gazette.
• This article chronicles the story of the Megagames and the demise of Imagine. This adds very considerably to the weak Wikipedia entry.
• This article is about the early years at Codemasters and the budget games on which the company was founded. It contains much unique inside knowledge on what the market was like at the time and how Codemasters succeeded.
• Finally this article is all about the history of Dizzy and the events and people behind that history. It has been well received by the Olivers and the Dizzy community.

You would think this is what Wikipedia is all about. People who are experts on a subject adding their knowledge to the collected expertise of the encyclopedia. So you may be surprised to find that the editors deleted these entries. I wasn’t, though, I had already been warned that the Wikipedia editors are now a destructive force standing in the way of knowledge. That deletions of quality expert additions is now the norm and that a lot of people have given up trying.

Which is a great pity. The enormous problem that Wikipedia has is that it is a monopoly and like all monopolies it is deeply flawed. If they had to face up to competition they would have to get their act together. So it is good to hear on the grapevine that this is a project that Google is planning. In the interests of human knowledge let’s hope so.

For those that don’t know: “First Tuesday is a professional networking forum for established technology entrepreneurs and companies seeking venture capital, investors and related service providers. Founded in 1998, we now have 38,000 members and our 10 branches across Europe host meetings on the first Tuesday every month.”

On the first Tuesday this February the subject of the London seminar was “The Opportunities in 2008 for the UK Games Industry”, so I went along. It was very well attended with game industry, city and traditional media people, many of CXO level. There was social networking before and after the seminar which was very valuable.

The seminar itself was started by Phil Elliot of Gameindustry.biz with a look at the facts and figures of the industry. For anyone who likes this kind of stuff I can recommend VG CHARTZ which provides a wealth of up to date data. Not only that, it has a lively forum where this data is analysed. Unfortunately there is a low signal to noise ratio due to typical fanboyism, but if you filter that out there is much value.

Roger Walkden of AWOMO gave us an enthusiastic sales pitch for something that looks like a combination of Second Life and Steam, unfortunately he doesn’t have Counter Strike to launch it with. It looked good, I hope they have the stamina to see it to fruition.

Amongst the other talks a very brief presentation by Dick Davies of Ambient Performance caught my attention. They create private virtual worlds for business and the military. The possibilities here are, quite literally, infinite. It is when I see things like this that my faith is restored that video gaming is still at it’s very beginning, that it will become by far the biggest media in the world and that we have a huge amount of innovation to come.

Considering that the seminar was about this year’s opportunities it was a pity that there wasn’t a little more attention devoted to the emerging mobile platforms of nGage and iPod/iPhone, the effects of industry consolidation with the growth in big media investment and the convergence of social networking and gaming. But you can’t cover everything and what they did cover made the trip more than worthwhile.

And a little clue emerged about what Rupert Murdoch is up to, the guest list for this event included Corporate Development Director, News Corporation.

When I was at Codemasters I followed closely the announcement of Steam by Valve in 2002. The growing pains, the successes and the opening up of the platform to other publishers. Steam was so clever, so obvious and so clearly the future that I would have liked Codemasters to do a “me too”. Unfortunately the directors had other things on their minds. So I tried to get them to at least put our PC games on Steam. And they didn’t.

Since then Steam has gone from strength to strength and it is now one of the most important platforms in the whole video game industry. With 15 million active users, probably about the same number (or maybe more) as Xbox Live has. But every Microsoft Xbox 360 purchaser gets a month’s free membership of the Xbox Live gold service. So Steam is outperforming. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the spend per user is far higher on Steam than it is on Live.

Gabe Newell, the MD of Valve was one of the Microsoft millionaires and was the producer of the first three versions of Windows. He has said that he wants to have every PC game on Steam. Why not? Each one is just a bit of space on the server so the marginal cost of each extra game is minimal. However the utility this provides for a Steam user is fantastic. The ability to sit down and, on a whim, play any PC game. Outstanding stuff.

Now Valve have made a simply stunning announcement. They are making a whole pile of powerful and important development tools available to the development community. For free. Steamworks includes real-time stats, anti piracy, auto-updating, community and matchmaking utilities. This is an amazing gift and will save PC developers very many millions of dollars. But it is not altruism. The effect of this will be to make more and more PC development Steamcentric. And to raise industry standards for all the mechanics behind a PC game.

I have to admit that if I were a publisher of PC games I would not bother any more with the plastic and cardboard boxed game at retail business model. It is too much work and it opens you up to so much piracy that you are shooting yourself in the foot. It is a concept that has reached the end of it’s life. Now it is far better to give the game away for free like EA are doing with Battlefield Command. Or use Steam. It will be very interesting to see which of these two mechanisms works best.

So Steam has the potential to become the standard global platform for PC gaming. This is absolutely massive. There are a lot more PCs in the world than there are game consoles. Also the barrier to publishing is very low on Steam. So we would see all sorts of great, amazing, fantastic new stuff which otherwise would never see the light of day. This is the opposite of the console gaming model which has a massive barrier to publishing and which lays a dead hand of censorship on games, both of which contrive to stifle innovation and so hold the industry back.

Of course Valve could make Steam available for consoles. Now that would be interesting.

In the meantime the value of Valve as a company is immense. Gaming is growing to be mainstream entertainment and will become bigger than television and film combined. There is a very good chance that Steam will become one of the most important cornerstones of this immense industry. I wish I owned 0.001% of Valve!!!

Some readers may think that I have gone mad talking about outdoor recreation. But don’t worry, the above are the pseudonyms of two bloggers who publish secret inside information and gossip from the games industry. And they have often been correct with their stories. With growing notoriety they are both obviously getting anonymous tip offs from inside the companies (mainly from marketing?). But some of those tip offs are leading them up the garden path. So what they publish can be wrong. I am a member of a private forum for industry professionals, some of whom have admitted that secret stuff has leaked out this way. And others have pointed out where these blogs can be very mistaken. So don’t take them as gospel.

Surfer girl can be found here. And here is a sample of the inside “information” that she posts:

1) Next year’s Star Wars MMO, not being developed by BioWare or Sony Online Entertainment, will launch simultaneously for PC and consoles alongside the debut of the first Star WarsTV series in fall 2009, of which the storylines of the game will tie into. Those Artistic Lucases already have a second online title planned that I’ve heard has nothing to do with Star Wars.
2) Road to Sunday – football + Grand Theft Auto = one bizarre game called This Is Vegas
3) Yeah, Boom Bloxis not only as amazing as it looks, but is this year’s best third-party Wii game. If you have a Wii and like puzzle games, Mark Mothersbaugh, and/or content sharing, I recommend playing this.
4) That Shrek game is a music game, an absurd music game.

weissmuller.The title that Randy Pitchford was hyping today a video game adaptation of Willa Cather’s One of Ours featuring a science-fiction twist and is set in the Halo universe.
barker.For the Blu-Ray release of There Will Be Blood, Backbone Entertainment is working on “an epic milkshake drinking adventure” that will feature the likeness of Daniel Day-Lewis, it will take up an estimated 5GB and feature at least twenty hours of slurping action, plus multiplayer. A demo of this will be available on XBLA and PSN.
scott. Fox Searchlight, Crave Entertainment and 7 Studios are collaborating once again for Juno: The Video Game, the most realistic teenage pregnancy simulation to date, for Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC, and Wii. Crave could not get Ellen Page for the game, so in her place will be Jamie-Lynn Spears. For portable fans, a track-and-field title set in the Junoverse will hit DS and PSP.

Also, if you get the chance to interview Jamie-Lynn Spears, please ask the following:
“Hey Jamie-Lynn Spears, you’ve had a show on Nickelodeon, someone got you pregnant, what’s next?”
Regardless of her response, print the following as her response:
“A romantic comedy?”

UPDATE: Okay, so there’s apparently some truth to two of these stories, which proves I’m terrible at making up things.

UPDATE TWO: There is no Juno game, despite what people say.

She has a second blog here.

Skater boy has a much more professional looking site that can be found here. And here is a sample of his inside gossip:

- Someone told me that the Wii-exclusive Metal Gear title is somehow related to the Game Boy Color’s Metal Gear: Ghost Babel.

- Criterion’s Black 2 will feature a full compliment of online multiplayer modes (with co-op a possibility), unlike it’s predecessor.

- I don’t know the current status of the game, but during Rockstar Vancouver’s first brainstorming sessions for a follow-up to Bully, one of the ideas they came up with was a very similar title starring a female counterpart to Jimmy Hopkins. They (at least semi-seriously) referred to this game concept as, I kid you not, Tough Cookie.

- Luxoflux should be ready to show off their new game at E3 at the latest (it’s not another True Crime, thankfully).

- On a related note, Vigilante 8 Arcade is still coming to XBLA later this year.

- PROPE will be unveiling their original Wii game “before TGS.” Sega has optioned the publishing rights.

- Just Cause 2 looks much better than the first.

- Marvel Universe Online and Untitled Marvel Fighting Game may both be dead and buried in shallow graves, but Raven will still have Marvel: Even More Ultimater Alliance (tentative title) ready by next Spring.
 

The nature of these things is that they will eventually be found out and their real identity revealed. But in the meantime their sites can be mildly amusing. As long as it’s not your secrets being revealed to the world.

Uncle Clive has a lot to answer for. Stick your head into most game development teams around the world and you will hear the dulcet tones of a true English/Scottish/Welsh/Irish accent. This is the consequence of a whole generation of British schoolboys learning machine code on their Sinclair ZX home computers. Whilst the Americans were learning how to play Atari VCS 2600 games the British were learning how to assemble Z80 code. This is why so many of the greatest games ever have been coded by us Brits. It is a pity we didn’t develop game company management to the same high standard.

Until recently it was safe to say that the second language of video gaming was Japanese. After all Japan is home to two out of the three big platform holders. Nintendo and Sony. It is also the home of some of the big publishers. Konami, Capcom, Bandai and Namco for instance.

But the times they are a changing and French is very rapidly emerging as the second language of the gaming industry. The biggest game pubisher in the world is now a French company, Vivendi. The most impressive publisher of the last few years is a French company, Ubisoft. Let’s not forget Infogrames/Atari who will be swallowed up for their IP, presumably by Vivendi or Ubisoft.

There is the whole Canada thing as well, with them overtaking the UK in game development. Much of this is in Montreal, which is of course French speaking.

And when it comes to the current hot topic of free MMOs like Habbo and Runescape there is the French publisher Ankama Studio whose Dofus has three million players and which is now available in an English version.

There is more. To impress upon the industry that the French government is behind it, culture minister Christine Albanel visited Ubisoft in Paris in December. Here she told Yves Guillemot about the new tax credits for developing in France and how supportive they are of the French game industry. Remember that the French government give knighthoods to game developers.

Contrast that with an ignorant British government who think that video games are worse than paedophilia and you can see a good reason why a lot of Brits are now moving to French speaking Canada, to French companies and even to France.

In the world of the pirates copied games are called “backups”. The technique to allow your Xbox 360 to play backups is called “flash” and there is a very good tutorial of how to do it here. And obviously it gets discussed on the forums. There are even videos. Once you have flashed your 360 you no longer have to pay $60 per game which is a massive saving. It is really cool that Microsoft have made piracy so easy.

Piracy is also really easy on the Sony PSP which is one reason why hardly any games are sold despite a massive user base. You can download everything you want for free using Bit Torrents. The Nintendo DS is also very, very easy to use with pirated games. Using flash memory to hold a whole pile of games on the DS has rocketed in popularity in recent months. This is saving end users a fortune. There are companies out there who specialise in helping you make backups on any console.

Of course the grand daddy platform for piracy is the PC, where most games can be downloaded for free long before they are even available in the shops. Nobody in their right mind actually pays for a PC game. Which may explain why developers have largely stopped making boxed PC games.

The thing is that piracy, ultimately, leads to the death of the activity that the pirates crave after. The production of new games. They destroy what they love. Also they are ignorant enough not see themselves as the thieves that they really are.