Entries Tagged 'The platform holders' ↓

These are dark days for Sony and Playstation. Previous undisputed winner of the console wars through two generations they are now trailing third in the current generation with developers and publishers reallocating their resources to try and make better profits out of  Microsoft and Nintendo games. Unable to compete on games Sony have been forced to take a billion dollars of loss in one year in order to subsidise lower retail prices for the PS3.

So here is a suggestion to improve Sony’s fortunes.

One problem lies with Sony’s corporate structure which gives Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) a lot of autonomy. This results in them losing advantages of synergy that would come if they were better organisationally integrated. So it might be a good idea to split SCE into two. A hardware arm and a software arm.

The hardware arm of Playstation should be under the same overall top management as digital cameras and mobile phones. They have the same strategic generation wars and they have the same technology density. And increasingly they will be the same device. If these three areas of Sony were under unified control we would be far more likely to see an iPhone and DS killer. Together they have the resources to make a device that everyone on the planet would lust after. Just as they did with the original Walkman.

The software arm of Playstation should be under the same overall top management as television and film. Then they would unite all their corporate knowledge of managing and exploiting IP. The synergies and the resultant commercial potential are massive. Sony Pictures Entertainment is a $6.6 billion turnover organisation which includes Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures and 20% of MGM (which in turn includes United Artists). With this plan they would be able to maximise income out of every property from cinema, television and gaming. Something they are nowhere near doing at the moment.

Sir Howard Stringer is a lot more experienced than I am and is in possession of a lot more facts. So he would probably laugh at this. But still it seems that Sony does not make the best of it’s resources and that this reorganisation would go some way towards addressing this.

Codemasters released Colin McRae rally on the original playstation in 1998. It was a major hit, breathing new life into the genre. And benefiting Sony enormously with many millions of pounds in license fees and a great impetus to the value of the playstation brand. So how did Sony reward us for this? They went into direct competition! Releasing their World Rally Championship game. They could have chosen any other genre to invest in, but they chose instead to tread on the toes of a major customer.

So here are a few things that are wrong with the current platform holder publishing model:

• You can spend millions of pounds/dollars developing a game and they can refuse to publish it. You have no redress. I have seen this with a Codemasters title.
• They stylistically restrict games. I remember when one platform holder told us that they would no longer publish 2D games.
• They limit the content of games, holding back the whole industry. You are not allowed to do in games things that are commonplace in books and films. This is seriously bad.
• When they develop games themselves they don’t have to pay a license fee, giving them a huge and unfair competitive advantage.
• They have access to manufacturer’s technical information and tools, once again giving them an advantage.
• We should be in the transition to online distribution, which affords game publishers and developers huge advantages. PC gaming already is with services like Steam. Console gaming is sticking to the outdated plastic and cardboard model. Holding back the whole industry in yet another way.

All the above harm the game industry, preventing it realising it’s potential. However at the same time the platform holders benefit the industry with the billions they spend developing and launching new consoles, which require the current publishing model if they are to be paid for. So there is a balance of good against the evil that they do.

You can use the comments to say where you think the balance lies, or to add to the debate in any way you want.

You have read on here before that Sony try to conquer the world by creating media standards. It is a fixation for them. The idea is that like razors and razorblades they make far more profit on the media than on the player. Most famously they lost the video war to VHS when their own Betamax was a better standard.

But Betamax is only one of a litany of failures. Does anyone remember Mini-Disk from 1991? Sony Dynamic Digital Sound from 1993? The HiFD from 1998? MusicClip from 1999? Then there are the failed standards that they are still trying to foist on us like Memory Stick, Connect, eBook and the UMD drive on the PSP. Their last successful standard was the 3.5 inch diskette in 1983. Against this history you must wonder about the future of Blu-Ray.

And now another one of Sony’s standards has bitten the dust. When Sony re-engineered the PS3 to make it cheaper to manufacture (the 40Gb model) they took a lot out. Most famously backwards compatibility to PS2. It also lost it’s memory card reader and two USB ports. But quietly and almost un-noticed it lost the ability to play Super Audio CDs (SACD), Sony’s failed attempt at super HiFi audio disks. Not that anyone is going to notice.

So what do you think of the Sony business model of trying to create media standards?

Around a year ago the analysts were confidently predicting that the Wii would come a distant third in this generation. If you can count it as this generation as it really is GameCube V1.5 . So it is refreshing to see that the Nintendo ethos of entertaining people has proved so many people wrong. Including Nintendo themselves, which has led to them making two mistakes.

Their first mistake was to not make enough Wiis. At retail they are like hen’s teeth everywhere worldwide. And there are still many territories where it has not been released. I don’t know but I would guess that production is now between one and two million units a month and ramping up fast. They could easily sell three million. There are reports of Japanese sales dipping in August and September, but that is almost certainly supply constrained as they shipped stock into north America and Europe.

Their second mistake was to have insufficient numbers of the right kind of game title. The Wii is selling to just about everyone in the population, not just the core gamer of old. This is the reason for it’s amazing success. But it is confusing the games industry who continue to churn out gamer’s games for it. Wii Sport is the perfect Wii game and should be a lesson for everyone. Wii Fit will be massive and will prove that Nintendo know their own platform best. Meanwhile Metroid Prime 3, a superb gamer’s game, continues to underwhelm in the market.

So we are getting mixed messages. Nintendo cannot keep up with demand. Whilst reports say that 67% of Japanese Wii owners haven’t used them recently. So people are starting to talk about a bubble. But this is because they don’t understand. The mass market, who have bought the Wii, are not going to use it every day. Unlike core gamers they have got a life. So they are only going to fit Wii time into their busy lives when something comes along to pique their interest. Economists might call it something like marginal propensity to play.

There is an important lesson here for our industry. We cannot treat the Wii in the same way as we have ever treated any other gaming platform in the past. It is no good taking the existing catalogue and Wiifying it. It is no good even thinking about core gamers and gamer’s games. For the Wii you need to forget about everything that has gone before.

But has this important lesson been taken on board? By and large probably not. There is an immense number of titles under development for the Wii. Probably more than for the PS3 and 360 put together. It is a veritable publisher’s goldrush. And there are going to be a lot of disappointed people when the sales figures come through. However there will be gems that catch the public imagination, games that are entertainment for everyone. And these will make indecent amounts of money. And they will mostly be first party Nintendo games, simply because they understand the nature of their beast.

Nintendo is now making far more profit out of video gaming than any company has ever done before. Unlike their competitors they make a profit on every box that leaves their factory. They are now the third most valuable company in Japan behind Toyota and Mitsubishi UFJ. They are worth over 10 trillion yen ($85 billion) which is twice what the whole of Sony is worth, yet Nintendo have just one eighth of the sales revenue.

There is no danger of a short term Wii bubble but there may still be the potential of a medium term one. As Microsoft and Sony get their acts together. But Nintendo will be safe for some time. There is the sheer mass of new titles and the relative simplicity of the machine gives Nintendo a huge amount of room to price cut. Best of all it is Nintendo, so they will continue to innovate to entertain. The Balance Board, for instance, is a new gesture interface that opens a whole raft of new gaming possibilities.

So will the Wii go on forever? Of course not. Increasingly it’s GameCube V1.5 roots will betray it. As the capabilities of the 360 and the PS3 are realised they will eventually leave the Wii behind. Nintendo know this. So there must be a new, more powerful machine on the way. But this time Nintendo can run a two model policy, like Sony do. The Wii can be cheap and very cheerful as an entry level and third world product and the new machine can be positioned much higher. As technology has moved on it will be above the 360 and PS3 in every way.

So do you think Nintendo are set for a long run at number one or do you think it will all come crashing down?

“PS3 is a waste of everyone’s time”, so says Gabe Newell (co-founder of Valve) in an interview for the Edge blog. He goes on to say “I don’t think they’re going to make money off their box. I don’t think it’s a good solution”. Which ties in nicely with an earlier article on here: Will Sony ever make the Playstation 4?

This is not the first time Gabe has taken his gloves off over the PS3. In January this year he told Game Informer: ”The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels. I think it’s really clear that Sony lost track of what customers wanted”.  And here is this blog’s explanation as to what is going on.

The analysts say that PS3 will do well this generation, many in the industry don’t think so. And they are voting with their feet, switching development resources onto the 360 and even more on to the Wii. Commercial decisions made because the industry has to get the best commercial returns from it’s human assets. Capcom switching Monster Hunter from the PS3 to the Wii is just one example of what is going on.

It is looking more and more like PS3 is the GameCube (or even Dreamcast) all over again. I have used this graph before and it doesn’t look good:

So do you agree with Gabe or do you think the analysts are right and that the PS3 will win out?

Early attempts to mechanise text were fraught with jamming mechanisms. Moving the commonly moved keys apart from each other was a partial cure and in 1867 the QWERTY keyboard was patented. This seamlessly made the shift from typewriter to computer and still graces most desktops to this day.

Round about 1980 the very clever people at Xerox PARC in California realised that there must be a better way of managing the man/machine interface so they developed WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer). Ironically it was not Xerox who benefitted from the genius of their staff. It was an upstart computer company just down the road called Apple who used it in their Macintosh in 1984. Microsoft followed a year later with an add on for MS-DOS which evolved into the Windows we know and love today.

But technology continues to roll on and mankind has used it’s ingenuity to come up with a whole new sort of man/machine interface. It is called Gesture. And it is not an acronym, it really does mean interfacing by human gesture. And it is one of the hottest areas of technology just now.

Microsoft have just released their Surface computer, a step change in how the man/machine interface works. Apple have released their iPhone and iPod Touch. These are mainstream Gesture based devices. And of course the film Minority Report gave us a futuristic view of what a Gesture interface could do. It really is the future. Expect very many everyday devices to rapidly adopt this philosophy and technology.

Gaming started with the QWERTY keyboard on devices like the Sinclair Spectrum and Atari 400/800. This was supplanted by joysticks which evolved into joypads. These replaced the keyboard by putting a small number of switches and the joystick into one handheld unit. But now this is old technology, we are in the age of Gesture gaming.

The earliest Gesture gaming device to go mass market was probably the Power Glove for the NES in 1989, a device that was well ahead of it’s time but which maybe lived on in the Nintendo DNA. The Sony EyeToy  in 1992/3 is the Gesture device that most will now be familiar with. It is a pity that Sony did not realise what they had, otherwise the PlayStation Eye would have been built into the PS3.

Nintendo, however, did not miss this particular trick. They pretty much bet the company on it. Firstly with the touch screen on the DS in 2004. Then in 2005/6 by adding a motion sensing controller to a mildly updated Gamecube which they called the Wii. The rest is history and now Nintendo are the most profitable company in the history of video gaming.

And this is, without a doubt, the future of gaming. Every video gaming device from now on will incorporate a Gesture interface. It is just so much better than the alternative.

So where do you think the gaming man/machine interface is going? Add your comments below.

I was at E3 in 2004 when Sony launched the PSP. They were at the height of their PS2 pomp then, so there was close to mass hysteria for the new device, with multi-hour long queues just to see it. At the same show another manufacturer launched their new handheld gaming platform to far less hype and acclaim. I am of course talking about the Nintendo DS.

One evening, at the bar, after a long day at E3, I told some of the directors of Codemasters that I thought that the DS would be the more successful device. And they laughed at me. They went on to put several games on to the PSP, none of which sold very many copies.

So what did I see that was wrong with the PSP?:

• It was just too big to be a true portable device. I have a number of portable technology toys. A Nokia 6300, a Canon Ixus 950 IS, a video iPod and a DS lite. None of these are anything like the size of the PSP because their designers know what portable means.
• The Universal Media Disk (UMD). This was just Sony trying it on again. World domination through media standards. With precisely zero chance of it ever succeeding.
• Battery life. The big screen and rotating disk on a portable device are just not compatible with being able to use it for long. In the real world it seems to average out at about 4 hours when used as a games machine, which is more than I expected but nowhere near enough.
• The large unprotected screen. I thought that this would be fragile but it turned out not to be.
• Non compatability with PS1 or PS2. What were they thinking of? They could have had a huge body of games from day one. But in their arrogance they expected the world’s development community to do all the work of writing afresh for yet another platform.

Now you might say that I was wrong. That Sony have sold 25 million (or whatever, real figures are avoided) in less than three years. But this ignores the fact that this industry is like the shaving industry. The profit is not in the razor, it is in the blades. And on the PSP games just don’t sell. It was also meant to be a movie player but movies on UMD disks don’t sell either.

So what are PSPs used for? Well, I suspect that a lot of them aren’t. Used that is, they were bought as part of the hype and then consigned to a draw once the failing were exposed. And a lot of them are used as media players for films downloaded (pirated) over the internet then put onto the Memory Stick. A 256 Mbyte stick will easily hold a 100 minute movie.

Of course there are other PSP problems that I didn’t see at the launch:

• Over simple and limited web browser.
• Very slow game loading from the UMD.
• Old fashioned user interface (compared with DS). More on this in an article next tuesday.
• Only one analogue nub (and that very badly positioned) which complicates adapting games from their other platforms.
• A built in TV tuner would have been very nice.

So is the PSP doomed, dwindling away till Sony do the decent thing? Or will the new Slim and Lite mark a turning point and get this machine a lot of attention and success. Use the comments to let us know.