This is very interesting. Games like Runescape, Habbo, Free Realms, Maple Story etc each employ many dozens of people, even hundreds. To administer and develop a game with millions of players takes a lot of work. Yet there is no address for Evony, no building or location full of Evony staff. Not that I can find. Not in the West.

A clue to their staffing requirements is their own advert from back in April for 16 different job titles (and payment partially with in game credits!), some of which they needed multiple people for.

Benefits:

• Specialists will receive competitive compensation, according to their skill set, at an hourly pay rate.
• Specialists will also receive in-game credit for their work.

Specialists Needed:

Game Design Specialist

Graphics Designer -3D and UI.

We want to continue to improve Evony’s graphics and user interface. We need specialists with skills in one or more of the following: 3D architecture, short movies/animations and Flash-based user interface design.

Game Music and Sound
We will be adding music and sound effects to Evony and need specialists with experience creating music and sound.

Game Design, Planning and Rules

We are adding a great deal of new content into Evony ?Age Two, including thousands of famous historical figures and cities, equipment systems and PvP and PvE battleground instance systems. We need developers and planners to create avatars, provide historical information and expertise, as well as background data to keep the game both accurate and immersive.

Game Economists and Data Analysts

A properly balanced and tuned economy and data system is of key importance to the long-term success of the game. Professionals with experience in this field would help adjust finances and other data to promote a robust economy and game structure.

Web Design

We need an accomplished web designer with knowledge of Javascript, Flash and CSS to improve and maintain the official website. Experience with Google Website Optimizer is a plus.

Promotion Team

Web Ad Design

We want to draw more users to Evony with ads. We need excellent ads to generate more impressions and higher CTRs and conversion rates. Candidates should be experienced, creative and enthusiastic.

Advertising Networks

We want to advertise through as many channels as possible, including rich media advertising networks. We are looking for people with connections to such networks to get our ads as much visibility as possible.

Player Promotion

We would like to not only promote Evony ourselves through advertisements, but find creative ways of encouraging our players to promote it as well, to their friends. We are looking for a qualified candidate with a solid understanding of both the game and internet social networking to generate and manage player promotion programs.

Technical Team

Email Architecture

We presently send users a welcome email and password recovery feature via email, but we would like to expand this by giving users the option of receiving emails for certain in-game events such as being attacked. We also need to correct problems in the current system which prevent some users from receiving email. A specialist in this field should have ideas and solutions for these types of issues.

Payment Processing

We want to expand payment options to include receiving payments through mobile SMS, phone billing, credit cards and other methods to meet customer demand, and we need a specialist with experience in this field.

IDC and CDN Experts

We are continuing to add new servers and upgrade bandwidth to improve the player’s experience and need experts in the field to recommend and coordinate these centers and networks.

Community Team

Community Liaison

We need customer-oriented individuals with strong communication skills to act as representatives to the Evony community. With strong community bases in the US, Europe and Australia, we would like community managers to represent our interests in each of these areas. We presently need liaisons for Europe and Australia.
Duties include: interacting with the community on behalf the developers, carrying concerns from the community to developers and helping to address player questions and concerns.

Forum Moderator

We need customer-oriented individuals with strong communication skills to moderate the community forums. Moderators should be conscientious and professional with an understanding of game forums. A mod’s job is to steer discussion away from harmful/destructive topics while fostering useful, helpful and informative topics.

In-game Moderator

We need customer-oriented individuals with good attention to detail to foster a healthy and productive in-game environment. Specialists would moderate in-game chat as necessary, as well as generate plans and methods to best encourage a positive environment for Evony players.

Wiki & Answers Administrator

We need an experienced, professional, customer-oriented individual with strong communication skills to oversee and assist the customer service team, ensure quality customer service and address customer service issues as they arise.

We need to an expert to set up and administer a Wiki/Answers system. The goal of this individual would be to encourage its use and make it as helpful as possible to users.

Customer Service Supervisor

English-Language Specialists

We need individuals with very strong English language skills and an in-depth understanding of the game to help correct language flaws and increase the usefulness of tooltips and language within the game and website. Candidates should exhibit strong written communication skills and a careful eye for detail.

This gives some idea of the range of skills need to run a global browser MMO.

So how many people do you think work for Evony and where do you think that they are?

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I have written a number of articles on here telling the truth about what Chinese gold farmers are doing with the game Evony. What I wrote was the truth and is supported by massive evidence from elsewhere. They are just trying to bully me, for instance threatening to sue in Australia in order to make things as difficult as possible. And it is ironic that they try to use the legal system against me when they blatantly stole other people’s game mechanics and graphics in order to make Evony. Also I wonder if they are trying to be so heavy handed against the Guardian? And cheek of all cheeks they are trying to deny comment spamming this blog.

Here are the articles about Evony:

• Don’t play Evony.
• More about Evony.
• Is Evony malware?
• Evony advert ridiculed by PopCap.
• Queen of Evony competition.

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The game Ashes Cricket 2009 is overall, all formats, number one in the UK, having removed Nintendo’s Wii Sports Resort from that position. A great achievement. But as is so common in video games the people behind it don’t get the credit.

Justin Forrest is the key here. He played divisional cricket in South Africa, which is the equivalent of our county cricket. And he is a top game designer and external producer and was at Codies for 7 years, during the good days! He was the driving force behind Brian Lara ‘05. Then he went to EA Canada for two and a half years and was responsible for their Cricket ‘07. So Brian Lara Cricket ‘07 was made by Codemasters without him.

But now he is back at Codemasters as we can all see with this great chart success.

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Sony have reduced the manufacturing cost of the PS3 by 70% according to Nobuyuki Oneda, Sony CEO and EVP: “The cost reduction since we introduced the PS3 is very substantial and this is on schedule. We don’t disclose how much of the PS3, specifically the cost deduction was achieved during the past two years.  But that is on schedule.” Pushed further he admitted:  “About 70%, roughly speaking,”

Obviously this gives Sony room for a price reduction and thus make the PS3 less uncompetitive.

The 70% reduction is nothing special here. Firstly Sony were forced to rip a lot out of the original machine, including hardware backwards compatibility, to reduce costs. Secondly Moores Law reduces semiconductor costs by half every two years. And thirdly the Bluray drive was new and expensive at PS3 launch, now it is a mass production part which must be costing them a tenth as much to make.

And the PS3 Slim is in production now.

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I just thought that I would share this great video with you. Very Minority Report. And a good example of a gesture interface used in gaming.

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So, as predicted, Sony have removed the UMD drive from the PSP and replaced it with 16 Gbytes of internal flash memory with the option of adding Memory Stick Micros. Content will be downloadable from the Playstation Network (PSN) and will include films, TV and games.

Online discuss has centred on the lack of a touch screen, lack of a second analogue nub and what looks like difficult ergonomics. So there isn’t really a wow factor out there.

It is ironic that Sony, who are championing physical content distribution using Blueray, have abandoned it with the PSP. Also this is another arrow in the back of high street game retail, who are becoming increasingly redundant. The writing is well and truly on the wall that their business model is on the way out.

What will make this device will be the available games. Developers and publishers don’t like PSP because of the immense piracy rate. For the PSP Go launch Sony have rustled up Gran Turismo, Little Big Planet, Metal Gear Solid and Jack and Daxter. A good start, but is it sustainable?

Personally I think that this is too little, too late. Just like the Zune HD. The world has moved on since these devices were thought up. Now an iPhone or an Android phone like the Samsung i7500 has these previous generation devices for breakfast.

And, also ironically, Sony, from a different division, have Android phones on the way. So the PSP Go is yet another example of the lack of joined up management at Sony. Their right hand doesn’t know what their left hand is doing.

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• Seven Hollywood studios including Paramount, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Warner Bros and Disney have teamed up to sue iiNet, Australia’s third largest ISP. iiNet is accused of doing little to stop its subscribers from sharing copyright works via BitTorrent. We are going to see a lot more of this if the film, music and gaming industries are going to survive. We are currently experiencing the biggest glut of stealing in the history of mankind and the ISPs are the only people who could possibly reduce it. It’s not nice to see that the Hollywood studios understand this better than the gaming industry.
• Microsoft fail in their attempt to reach a broader demographic. Lips just isn’t any good. Eurogamer give it 5 out of 10 because of flawed game play. There is no excuse for this, Nintendo have taught us just how polished games need to be these days.
• Oh the sweet serendipity of two widely diverse articles on here coming together. Ann Diamond is a z list celebrity who was paid by the Daily Mail to say how bad video games are. Now she is being paid by Popcap, a dynamic publisher, to say how good their games are. “PopCap is working with one of videogaming’s toughest critics to see if casual gaming can aid weight loss.” This is excellent marketing all round. Ann Diamond gets the chance to restore some credibility to her image whilst PopCap ride on her notoriety in this area.
• Future publishing is now worth only £30 million after reporting minisculey improved results. They are reaping what they sowed here with a disastrous historic lack of an internet strategy. Basically they didn’t see how chopping down trees as a communication medium would fall away so quickly. The new management are obviously correcting this but from a long way back. They should do it which makes these shares a bargain. Unless they get taken over first.
• Developer whinges that XNA game prices are too low. Maybe in comparison with boxed retail console games, but these are vastly overpriced. I don’t see how he can complain when he knew what he was getting into. If he doesn’t like the way XNA is run he can always develop for the iPod or nGage.
• Chris Lewis, VP of the Interactive Entertainment Business for Microsoft EMEA drops some  hints about the next generation (phoenix) and how important scaling is to Microsoft: “I think this generation will be longer, because there is so much scalability. When you look at NXE, that is a complete revision of the interface and the look and feel and every aspect of the system. That’s not predicated by new hardware. We have fundamentally done that through software and services. So if you think of that scalability and the opportunity to enhance and develop what we do with this platform, then I think it’s very, very possible–and indeed appropriate–that this generation will be longer. But we’re not specific about when that will happen, and we don’t have a particular timeline that we share right now.”
• The game addictiveness debate rumbles on, fuelled by Wrath of Lich King. We have to accept and allow for the fact that games can definitely be addictive. But that there are far worse addictions and vastly worse things in life. Dr Richard Graham, a child psychiatrist at London’s Tavistock Centre, told the BBC: “The problem with World of Warcraft is the degree it can impact and create a socially withdrawn figure who may be connecting with people in the game and is largely dropping out of education, social opportunities.” I don’t see anything massively wrong with people preferring to live a virtual reality, they are lucky to have the choice.
• Carphone Warehouse, a UK retailer, is giving away free PS3s with new phones. How the mighty have fallen. That Sony need to resort to this sort of marketing in peak season tells you exactly how well they are competing in the market.

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Plenty of them this year.

Surfer girl did an open letter, supposedly from John Riccitiello full of such delights as: “all physical products published by EA will see two editions, one that is free of advertisements and one that features advertisements, which will have $10 below the advertisement free edition.”

Bungie came up with this visual Halo 3 spoof.

ThinkGeek put a lot of work into this one. It involves a new Wii peripheral and a game called Super Pii Pii Brothers. Very well crafted, it took people in.

World of Warcraft coming to console with Molten Core is another that a lot of work went into and which some believed.

Microsoft put four seperate Xbox jokers into theirs. Once again very well crafted but less believable than some.

PS3 Addict photoshopped a CBR 600 motorcycle into Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Nicely done.

PSXExtreme have Sony launching a $150 PS3 with no BluRay drive.

GTA IV to feature masturbation and intercourse. Yep, sure.

There were more, but some have already been taken down, so the links above may not last too long.

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Will the tabloid newspapers ever grow up and realise that games are just another form of popular media? Judging by this story it seems to be unlikely to be any time soon. What we have is a casting website called StarNow which is used by all sorts of performers and their customers. It is also used by television and print media to find people for their stories.

So to anyone interested in games the following advert is a bit disturbing:

Did computer games make you turn to a life of crime?

Listing no. 63806 – All regions, UK
A national newspaper wants your story and will pay hundreds of pounds to the right person. Write a few lines about how computer games turned you to crime and if it’s something we like, we’ll call you straight back.

Payment details: paid role

Created: 27 March 2008
Applications accepted for at least another month
Application criteria: Males & Females aged 0 to 60 from UK

So there you have it, a national newspaper will pay you hundreds of pounds if you help them stitch up the games industry. This is the standards of the British gutter press today. I can even have a good guess as to which newspaper this is.

Many thanks to willc for finding this.

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On November 29, at the Reuter’s Media Summit John Riccitiello said: “Is it ripe (for mergers), or has it already been picked? I would argue that it’s been largely picked.” So he was telling the world that consolidation in the video games industry was pretty much all done.

Then on December 2 Vivendi bought Activision. Which relegated EA to the position of number two global games publisher. And confirmed the trend that big global media companies need to be in gaming and are buying the industry out.

So on December 10 this blog asked the obvious question, who is going to buy Electronic Arts? Because it really does look like a juicy target for one of those massive media companies like News Corporation. How to acquire a powerful worldwide gaming presence in just one purchase. A typical Rupert Murdoch move.

Then on February 7 there were rumours that Viacom was going to buy Take 2 for $1.5 billion. Which made sense in the overall scheme of things. But it turned out to be so much hot air. Nevertheless, with these things there is rarely smoke without fire so Viacom were probably thinking about something.

If they were they have had a shock because on February 15 Electronic Arts put in a near $2 billion bid for Take Two. This was rejected so EA upped the bid slightly only to be rejected again. EA even have a special website to explain what they are doing. The proposed merger would bring the classical consolidation advantages of removing duplication, especially in sales, marketing and distribution. They would also be able to get rid of wasteful competition in sporting games. Best of all it would make EA the number one publisher again and make them so big that even the biggest predator would have to think twice before trying to gobble them up.

As the December 10 article here said: “The main way to remain independent is to rapidly become a lot bigger.” So, does John Riccitiello read this blog? 

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