Entries Tagged 'The platform holders' ↓

We are heading into E3 with Apple firmly in the driving seat when it comes to mobile gaming. Their iPhone and App Store combination has been one of the biggest and fastest events ever in the history of video gaming. Very rapidly they have built themselves an entrenched position that you may think puts them a long way ahead of the competition. But maybe not.

Apple have a business plan of only using one airtime provider per territory. This has been fundamental to how they make money out of iPhone. However it is very limiting. So expect Apple to bring out new, different, iPhones with different features and benefits that can be sold through a different airtime provider in each territory. They need to do this to expand their use base.

Another area that Apple need to address is netbooks. These are taking the world by storm and Apple are being left out. Apple have two possible answers to the market need. They can make a very small MacBook. They have done this to an extent with the new 13 inch model but it is three times the price it needs to be in order to compete. The second answer is to make a big iPhone/iPod, something tablet sized that uses touch screen and has the functionality of an Atom netbook. This is very strongly rumoured to be imminent.

Of course Microsoft want to change this situation and the combination of Zune and Xbox Live will be their weapon of choice. Everyone is getting very excited about a couple of Tweets that have emerged recently from Microsoft. “June 2009 will be an important month for Zune lovers.” and “New product launch, that’s all I’m allowed to say. Hold off from buying an iPhone/Pre.” I bet that has got you excited. It would be extremely foolish to underestimate Microsoft who traditionally win in new markets they enter after an initial slow start. So I think this new Zune really could be very special indeed.

But the big threat to Apple does not appear to be coming from Microsoft at the moment, it is coming from Google. In Android Google have created their best product yet in that it integrates all their other products and a whole lot more in your pocket. And because Android handsets are manufactured by third parties and sold by third parties they are not blighted by Google’s abysmal lack of marketing culture. Expect a flood of Android handsets from a wide range of manufacturers, it will take a lot to stop them dominating the market. And just as with Apple there is the potential to build a netbook beater, all they need to do is increase the form factor. Such a device will be a lot cheaper than the Apple equivalent and on current performance it will be a lot better too. It is coming.

This whole product area could have been owned by Sony. They were uniquely positioned to exploit it with a rich back groung in mobile video games, MP3 players and mobile phones. Yet they screwed up with their different corporate divisions not talking to each other. And still they seem to have lost the plot. The new Sony X series Walkman has some nice features but it completely misses the target. If the new PSP is not a phone then Sony might as well give up.

Finally we have Nokia and Nintendo. Two massive players who seem to be peripheral to what is happening out there. They are both too big and too successful to see this whole market pass them by. So they both need to come up with big announcements soon.

So the whole pocket device landscape is in extreme flux. It will be massively different three months from now and even more different six months from now.

Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of action films and television shows such as Top Gun, Pirates of the Caribbean and C.S.I. is creating a new development studio based in Santa Monica. They are going to create new big project IP that can be published as videogames, movies, TV and anything else that works.

Because Jerry Bruckheimer knows nothing about games and the games industry he has recruited two industry veterans to help him. Jim Veevaert will be president of production, he was at Microsoft for 8 years as executive producer on titles including  Halo 3, and managed the relationships with Rare, Epic Games and Bungie. Jay Cohen will be president of development and comes from Ubisoft, being involved in Splinter Cell Assassin’s Creed, Prince of Persia and Ghost Recon.

This business will be very Hollywood, concentrating on creativity and finance. Actually publishing them and distributing them will be contracted out to MTV games. With outside contract studios doing the game development. This could be an example of the way the industry is going. Or it could fizz out like several previous attempts to combine the two industries.

What is for certain is that a lot of Hollywood is going to sit up and take serious notice of this, so we may well see similar stories cropping up again.

Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony, has just given this very perceptive interview and I highly recommend reading it. Here are a few highlights.

“A crisis is also an opportunity.” This is brilliantly incisive. When things are going well there is little for a manager to do. When things get very bad a good manager can make a big difference. I have always said that when all you have is lemons you can still make lemonade.

“It’s clear that customer preferences are changing, and I think this fact indicates what the next steps in TV evolution are likely to be.” This has to be making televisions smarter so they become interactive and handle a wider range of content. The dumb television we have today is a dinosaur.

“We developed brand new, absolutely incredible technology for the PlayStation 3 (PS3), but the cost was high. We’ve adopted a slightly different approach now, and are evolving the PS3 into a platform for Web services.” Yep, the PS3 is coming third this generation, partly because it was too costly to make. And as for Web services, they have the example of the brilliant success that Microsoft have had with Xbox Live.

“Right now is an excellent opportunity for consumer electronics companies to improve their understanding of consumers. Five years ago content companies were regarded as king in our industry, but that was wrong: the customer is king.” He is not wrong here. I am amazed at the number of company bosses who go round with their eyes closed because they haven’t the faintest idea about the realities of what their customers are doing. Every business needs a robust mechanism for putting the customer at the heart of decision making.

“The spread of the Internet has given them the power to dictate how products are used, and an increasing number of people are discovering new ways to have fun, such as by creating their own content.” Something that seems to have passed a lot of bosses by. Just look at rFactor to see how much work customers are prepared to do to create content.

“Understanding customers will also help us uncover hidden customers. The Wii from Nintendo Co Ltd of Japan is an excellent example. They didn’t develop any unique technology; they just realized that there was potential demand out there for something different from conventional games, and thought about how to satisfy different demands from different age groups. They attained results that the PS3 hasn’t; namely, generating profit from hardware sales.” Howard Stringer learns a hard lesson from Nintendo and eats humble pie.

“Sony hasn’t taken open technology very seriously in the past.” Obviously Howard Stringer has been reading this blog! One of the biggest failings of Sony, a failing that has cost billions and repeatedly lost them market position is their historic obsession with trying to create media standards. Let’s hope that they have finally learned.

“Next we will be expanding the PlayStation Network to hardware other than the PS3, because the number of PS3 units sold puts a limit on the scale of the network possible.”  So that means smart televisions and smart phones connected to PSN. Microsoft will be doing the same with Live. So PSN and Live could evolve to be the two most important products in the whole of entertainment.

“Sony has a vertical structure for each product line, an organizational structure that resists change.” Sony’s biggest corporate weakness and one I have pointed out before. We should have seen a PSP phone years ago. And the movie division and the gaming division content should have long since been integrated. Howard Stringer needs to break down walls.

“It was pretty simple, with the manufacturer providing products and the customer either buying them if they liked the goods, or not. The Internet and information technology have changed all that.” Oh yes, the internet allows a company to have a real time two way dialogue with every single customer. Something I love. Yet something that scares a lot of old school managers.

“All content is useless without hardware. Conversely, though, no matter how good the hardware, it can never realize its true value without content. Both hardware and content have to be there for the customer to receive that value.” And there we have it, the conundrum of the modern age. The big problem that Apple, Microsoft, Nintendo, Nokia, Sony and Google all face. The only way is with third party relationships, but they are difficult to manage.

You really need to read the whole article with great care. It is packed with detail that is open to a lot of analysis.

• Video games can improve contrast sensitivity in adult eyesight. Yet another way in which video games are good for you. In fact video games have been found to be so beneficial in so many ways that I am amazed that someone hasn’t made a definitive list.
• Windows 7 to have multi touch screen. This is a big jump in PC capabilities and the first major PC interface update since the mouse arrived. Of massive importance to gaming. Interestingly Microsoft have a user interface evangelist, Chris Bernard. He has an interesting job.
• V.Tech update the V.Smile game console with the new V.Motion, which has a gesture interface. With platform proliferation it is getting difficult to keep up with how many different ways video games can be delivered these days. Even some SCUBA diving computers have video games on them to make decompression stops less boring.
• Xbox sells over a million units in Japan. A year ago nobody would have believed that this was possible. And Microsoft have done it with the simplest of tactics, giving the customer what the customer wants. Something Sony seem to have forgotten.
• World of Warcraft exceeds 8.5 billion quests and is running at 16 million quests per day. Another factoid to put on your makeup/shaving mirror. To remind you every day about just what can be achieved with a video game.
• Sony Playstation PS2 cut to $99, announced on April fool’s day. This is a really great attack on Nintendo and the Wii, you wonder why they didn’t do it sooner. Maybe Sony are getting their act together again, let’s hope so. They have been missed.
• Lots of rumours and speculation that OnLive will be bought by someone. Maybe Microsoft or Google. Makes lots of sense. Onlive can make a quick killing on the tech without doing all the hard graft to make it a global reality. The buyer gets a leg up into what I have repeatedly said is the future of gaming platforms.
• Greenpeace are April fools with this story. A desperate attempt at self publicity. Again. If a company does not co-operate with Greenpeace it doesn’t make them less green. It makes them more sensible.

I think I should start this be saying that I have always admired Sony. Their combination of quality, technology and design has been spot on for decades. So I have bought a lot of Sony kit: hi fi, TVs, digital cameras, walkmen, diskmen, video etc etc. Not only that I have also worked on many Playstation games, helping to get a number of titles to number one.

So it has not been good that on this blog I have had no option but to document the slow motion train crash that is the Sony Playstation PS3. Sony have got just about everything they can wrong, they have lost sight of their customers and in doing so they have thrown away their previous dominance of the home console market. The simple fact is that the PS3 is a far less good ownership proposition than its main rival, the Microsoft Xbox 360. Even if they were the same price, which they are not.

And now we have the worst possible news. We are right in the middle of this console cycle so sales volumes should be ramping up considerably. They certainly are for Microsoft and the Xbox 360. So it came as a shock, even to me, that Q4 ’08 PS3 sales were 440,000 down on the same period in 2007. This is an unmitigated disaster and will take a huge amount to recover from if it is not going to be terminal for the Playstation brand.

Sony have their back against the wall in that the PS3 is too expensive to make, it has an uncompetetive software catalogue, its online offering is second best by a long way and Sony have no money to buy the manoevering room they need to fix things.

2009 will be a long and very hard year for the PS3 and I just hope that Sony find some way, against the odds, to get back in the game.

• Sony launch Home to much criticism, it has been hacked and features sexual harassment. Overall it is a disaster for Sony and needs much work before it begins to become a credible product. This debacle shows Sony’s weakness, they are a consumer electronics manufacturer. Microsoft, by comparison, are a software company, which is why Live is still the best gaming portal, with no competition in sight.
• Midway get rid of 25% of global workforce. This is the result of bad management in the past, as at so many game companies. I hope they are flattening their management structure and not just getting rid of developers, as seems to be the industry solution when cutting costs. Midway are far too small to prosper as a global publisher and need to do a bit of M&A quickly, merging with another, similar sized publisher would be a good start, but needs one half of the combined management to be sacked.
• Employers don’t want World of Warcraft players. And they do have a point. I have written about game addiction in the past and can see why you wouldn’t want to employ someone who puts a big chunk of their emotional commitment into an online existence. This applies not just to WoW, but to any MMORPG.
• Warner increases stake in EIDOS to 20%, we can all see where this is going. And it isn’t costing them much, at 17p per share each 10% of the company costs them less than £4.5 million. I can see why Warners are being so cautious, because of historic awful management EIDOS is a mess that is being sorted out. So it is best just to establish a position and a relationship at the moment without taking on the risk and problems that would come from a full takeover.
• Little big planet has terrible sales. And this was the platform exclusive that was going to put Sony back on top. It is a disaster, the Playstation 3 is losing position by the day. It is more expensive than an Xbox 360 and offers a far inferior ownership proposition. There is very little in the way of reasons for buying one. It is very sad that Sony have screwed up this generation so comprehensively and in so many ways. But they have.
• Scrabulous is coming back to Facebook. This is brilliant news, Hasbro seeing sense at last. Obviously they read the article on here about their actions.
• Rockstar to stick with Take Two and not go independent. Seems to make eminent sense, Take Two have done a brilliant job with the GTA franchise. To the point where it would be difficult to see anyone doing it better.
• Microsoft say that much less than 1% of Xbox 360s suffered from scratched disks. But in litigation crazy America they suffer another class action as a lawyer tries to get even richer and a bunch of people look for a windfall. People who lose actions like this should pay the person they sued an equivalent amount to what they were seeking to win.

I have written about Metacritic on here before. It has become the standard industry measure of game quality. So in this article I am comparing the overall game quality (according to Metacritic) of the Playstation PS3, The Microsoft 360 and the Nintendo Wii.

Firstly lets look at the total number of games for each platform covered by Metacritic. The Xbox 360 leads the way with 532 games followed by the Wii with 324 and finally the Playstation 360 PS3 with 264. This is pretty much the order you would expect as Microsoft was first to market, the Wii is exceptionally easy to develop for and the PS3 was late to market and difficult to develop for. What you wouldn’t expect is for the difference to be so great. Over twice as many Xbox 360 games as PS3 games. This just shows how much effort Microsoft have put into supporting development on their platform and also how the commercial realities have made it the preferred platform for publishers.

For game quality I first looked at the score of the 20th highest scoring game for each platform. For the 360 this is a 89 (for Portal: Still Alive) for the PS3 87 (WipEout HD) and for the Wii 83 (WarioWare: Smooth Moves). So the quality of Wii games falls away very sharply compared with the others, even in the top 20.

So lets look at how many games on each platform scored over 75. It is 211 for the 360, 125 for the PS3 and only 66 for the Wii. So if you compare with the total number of games reviewed you can see that the PS3 is doing proportionately better even though the 360 has far more games over 75. The disaster is the Wii where the quality has fallen away massively. That there are over three times as many games for the 360 scoring over 75 as there are for the Wii is, quite frankly, shocking. As, perhaps, is the fact that the 360 has more games with a score of over 75 than the PS3 and Wii put together.

So, to look deeper into this lets look at the number of games scoring over 50 on Metacritic. For the Xbox 360 this is 447 (out of a total of 532 games). The PS3 does proportionately better with 247 (out of 264). The Wii is proportionately worst of all with 259 games (out of 324) scoring over 50.

To put this more starkly the number of games scoring 50 or less are 85 for the Xbox 360, 65 for the Wii and just 17 for the Playstation 3.

So lets look at this platform by platform. The PS3 has the smallest total quantity of games with 264 but has the highest overall quality with very little rubbish published on the platform. The Wii is very weak overall with a massive 193 games (out of 324) scoring between 50 and 75 and a fifth of all games scoring less than 50. This is the shovelware problem of the Wii platform. The Xbox 360 has by far the most games with a big scattering of quality. However the sheer volume of games published for it mean that at every quality level it has far more games than the other two platforms.

Well that was interesting. The two shockers for me are that there are over twice as many reviewed 360 games as there are PS3 games. And that the Wii only managed to score over 75 with just 66 games out of 324.

So I think I will revisit Metacritic for another look sometime, thus the #1 in the article title.