A veteran’s view on marketing games

I have started a new community forum for the area around where Codemasters is and where I live.

http://harbury.villagebuzz.co.uk/

You will find this stupid article on Boris Johnson’s own website. And, oh dear, how ignorant and uninformed he is. This is just another one of those typical articles you get when someone doesn’t have the faintest idea what they are talking about and just spouts their prejudices. His premise is that “computer games rot the brain” when it has been proven that the opposite is true. And now that he is in a position of political power this is important.

His main contention is that children prefer games to books and that this is bad: “surveys increasingly show that children (especially boys) regard reading as a chore, something that needs to be accomplished for the sake of passing tests, not as a joy in itself. It is a disaster, and I refuse to believe that these hypnotic little machines are innocent.” What he does not seem to realise is that gaming and reading are similar activities. They are popular culture. But games are better because they are interactive, non linear and social. He shows the prejudice of someone who is too old to grasp that thing have changed and that for today’s generation there is a better form of culture than the one he had.

His graphic description “while in some other room the nippers are bleeping and zapping in speechless rapture, their passive faces washed in explosions and gore. They sit for so long that their souls seem to have been sucked down the cathode ray tube. They become like blinking lizards, motionless, absorbed, only the twitching of their hands showing they are still conscious.” further shows his misunderstanding. He should really compare this with someone engrossed in a book, oblivious to the world. The difference being that the game player is at least interacting and is probably engaged socially with another person or people whilst they play. Reading a book is massively more anti social than gaming.

One point where is is partially right is: “ So I say now: stop just lying there in your post-Christmas state of crapulous indifference. Get up off the sofa. Can the DVD of Desperate Housewives, and go to where your children are sitting in auto-lobotomy in front of the console. Summon up all your strength, all your courage. Steel yourself for the screams and yank out that plug.” Here he implies that parents should take responsibility for their children’s upbringing. But how he equates this with depriving them of video gaming is totally beyond me.

It really looks like what Boris needs is a Nintendo DS and a copy of Brain Training.

• THQ have announced less than impressive financial results with a loss for the year of $33.5 million. With the market booming and consolidation the order of the day they must be pretty vulnerable as a takeover target. With global distribution system, 16 internal studios and a billion dollar plus turnover they are ripe for the picking.
• GTA IV breaks all entertainment sales records with a $500 million first week.Of course it did, and will continue to. It deserves to. More important is the perception of a game launch becoming an event for the mass market media in the way that a film release is. There is a lot of mileage to be had here by astute game marketing professionals.
• Electronics Arts launch new brand, EA Sports Freestyle, for casual sporting games. A clever move this, to capitalise on the huge growth in casual gaming with a strong brand that helps shape consumers’ visions of it’s offerings.
• Take Two is suing the Chicago Transit Authority for pulling it’s bus advertising campaign. Quite right too. All this because people at the Transit Authority were stupid enough to believe Fox News.
• Game Chairman sells £2.28 million of stock. You can’t blame him bailing out at the top of the market, other Game directors have. Boxed games are on their way out and the big names in downloads will almost certainly not be the current high street names.
• CNN presenter Glenn Beck displays amazing ignorance with an attack on GTA IV. He said it teaches: “sons to treat women like whores” and that it “is training our kids to be killers”. He goes on: “In Grand Theft Auto, your son, husband or boyfriend or whoever, can hire a prostitute, have sex with her and then beat her to death with a baseball bat. When a police officer comes after him, he can either light him on fire or cut him in half with chainsaw.” He ought to try reading books. Many of them are much worse.
• The EA/Take Two soap opera continues. Now, it seems, there is only a 50% chance of it going through. EA, obviously want to get their critical mass over the size where they are a takeover target. Maybe Take Two aren’t the best way of doing this, the premium seems excessive and the fit isn’t the best in the world. Maybe Take Two would be better merged with THQ. The combined company could shed itself of masses of overheads and use GTA revenue to finance lots of development at the Take Two studios.
• Infogrames recruit new CFO. Another piece of their jigsaw comes together. Maybe this brings them closer to having the management horsepower to buy Sci/EIDOS. A marriage that is just waiting to happen.

The bad news continues to pour in for PC gaming.

• Woe be the PC game developer these days, as various reports put piracy rates in the U.S. at approximately 70-85%. It’s no wonder that Epic Games is dumping PC games for the greener pastures of console gaming: piracy rates for the U.S. market alone are hovering around 80%.
• Rampant piracy threatens PC games. Rampant piracy is threatening the future of the PC games industry, Todd Hollenshead, head of Doom 3 creator Id software has said. He warned that unless the problem was tackled some companies could relegate the PC to a second tier platform. “Some developers are taking that approach,” he told the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
• Game piracy runs rampant on the Internet. Why pay for software when you don’t have to — particularly with retail prices edging up to $60 a pop? “Because it’s stealing,” says Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software. “If you’re unwilling to shoplift in a store, you shouldn’t be downloading illegally pirated versions of games.”
• Crytek To Abandon PC Exclusive Titles. Crytek president Cevat Yerli has indicated that the company will no longer produce any PC exclusive game titles - following relatively disappointing sales of the critically acclaimed Crysis. “We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis,” said Yerli. “We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that’s the core problem of PC gaming, piracy. To the degree PC gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more,” he added. “It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won’t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in the future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusively anymore.”

Quite simply most people will steal when there is no chance of getting caught. The good news is that there are still some good people out there with morals. Who refuse to steal and who believe in paying for the work of others. However this isn’t enough to sustain a market for boxed PC games.

The good news is that Valve have released Steamworks now with free to use copy protection that any PC developer can implement. I can see this becoming very popular.

So back to why the PC is the top gaming platform. The big reason is because there is no platform holder. No Nintendo, no Sony and no Microsoft. So game developers can do anything they want and there is nobody there to tell them not to. And they do. PC gaming is where all the innovation in the games industry comes from. You can make any game you want, anywhere you want, any time you want, with others or on your own. You can distribute it in any way you want and you don’t have to pay massive fees to a console manufacturer.

The next big PC advantage is the tools. Current generation console platforms have only been out for a few short years and, compared with PCs, there are very few of them in the world. So the engines and tools that you need to make games are not that good. In comparison the PC has been round for decades and all sorts of software is developed to run on it. So there is an amazing myriad of proven, powerful engines and tools available that allow you to do anything you want. A massive advantage.

The third big advantage of the PC is that it is not a fixed standard, it evolves. Whereas consoles are fixed standards that are stuck in old technology. This means that PCs can have more powerful graphics, stronger processing, incredible sound and massive, cheap hard disk storage. There is a price to pay for this, of course, but if you want to be at the forefront of gaming the PC is the place to be.

The fourth advantage is that most PCs are connected to the internet whilst most consoles aren’t. So the PC leads in social gaming, in co-ops, in clans, in mod groups and in every way you can think of where gaming involves more than one person. Consoles now are seeking to emulate this but they are still miles behind.

These fundemental advantages will see the PC continue to prosper despite the adversity forced on the industry by software thieves. 

Click here to read The PC is the top gaming platform #1.
 

We had this when the Byron report came out. Anne Diamond wrote a very silly piece in The Mail complete with badly photoshopped picture and had ridicule poured on her from all sides.

Now another woman, this time called Rosie Millard, has written an article in The Daily Mail that she bought her four children a really great toy. But they had to share it between them. And when this led to trouble she was surprised. She is obviously too busy writing articles to even vaguely understand how children work. The fact that the toy was a Nintendo DS has nothing to do with this. It is expecting four children to share what must be one of the best toys ever.

If she had wanted them to share she should have bought them a Wii.

Now to the serious bit. Rosie bought the DS from Hong Kong for £150 including “a ‘bundle’ of 20 games including Brain Trainer, Fifa 08, and Nintendogs.”  At this price one has to think that these are pirated. Which would make Rosie a thief. Which she has now pretty much owned up to on the pages of a national newspaper. Silly, like I keep saying.

And depriving her children of video games is not good for them. There is a huge amount of research that games benefit children in many ways. So by depriving hers, Rosie is losing these benefits.

It is a bit sad that The Daily Mail continue to repeatedly pay people to write about video games who haven’t the faintest idea what they are writing about. Because the majority of the population now do understand video games. So The Mail is increasingly distancing itself from it’s readership. Which isn’t too clever.

Meanwhile, in The Observer, Catherine Bennett proves that some newspapers know what is happening in the world and have credible journalists to report it. In an excellent, well thought out and informed article she says: “there appears to be no evidence to support the Clinton/Obama/Vaz line on game-enhanced violence or underachievement. On the contrary, this moral panic appears to owe much to myths about high-school killers, while plenty of research suggests, as a Commons select committee has just heard, that gaming can improve children’s ‘confidence, their sense of social standing, their ability to multitask, their ability to receive conflicting bits of information’.” Rosie Millard would do well to read this article, she could learn a lot.

I know I keep on about this subject, but when national newspapers like The Daily Mail are wantonly misleading their readers so badly it is an issue of public concern.

Gordon Brown has a long history of financial mistakes. Income tax credits, private finance initiatives and more than doubling health service spending in 5 years for little benefit for instance. But one of the silliest was selling off half of Britain’s gold reserves, some 400 tons, at a 20 year low price. Since when the value of gold has tripled to over $1,000 dollars an ounce. This represents a loss to the British taxpayer of some £2 billion.

Gold is a usually a bad investment, you have to pay for storage and it generates no income, so why has its value rocketed? Quite simply we live in turbulent times, currencies are going up and down as are company stock prices. Nobody knows what is going to happen next. So people are buying gold as a safe refuge for their wealth which is driving it’s value up. But they are wasting their time, they should be investing in the stock of video game industry companies. Just look at this:

• GAME Profits Hit Record High In Full Year Results. Record pre-tax profits were recorded of £75.5 million ($149.0m) – an increase of 156 percent on the previous year. Total sales growth for the year rose by 86 percent to £1.49 billion ($2.94bn), with like for like sales up by 41 percent.
• Record-Breaking UK Launch For Nintendo’s Wii Fit . Despite a higher than normal retail price, due to the inclusion of the “Balance Board” controller, Wii Fitwas bought by around 1 in 10 Wii console owners over its first two days on sale. The title recorded an estimated £16.3 million ($32.4m) in revenues, making it the third biggest launch ever in the UK, behind only Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (£24.2 million/$48.2m) and Halo 3 (£16.9 million/$33.6m).
• Gameloft Sales Rise 11% To $40 Million In Q1. Mobile games developer and publisher Gameloft is reporting consolidated sales of €25.3 million ($39.6 million) in its first quarter sales report for 2008, 11% higher than in the previous year.
• GTA IV sets UK day one records. According to Chart-Track estimates, GTA IV first day sales were 609,000 units - eclipsing the record of 501,000 units set by GTA: San Andreas in 2004. GTA IV also set a record for first day sales Xbox 360 software, with 335,000 units. The prior record, set last September by Halo 3, was 266,000 units.
• Microsoft’s Entertainment division revenues up 68%. Revenue from the Entertainment and Devices division grew 68 per cent over the comparable period last year which Microsoft attributes to demand for Xbox 360 consoles. Cumulative Xbox 360 console sales surpassed 19 million during the quarter, up 74 per cent from the prior year.
• Ubisoft 2007-08 sales up 43%. Ubisoft has reported Q4 sales of EUR 217 million (USD 340 million; GBP 172 million), up 20.3 per cent from the same period of the prior fiscal year at constant exchange rates. Fourth quarter sales were 31.5 per cent higher than the company’s initial guidance issued on January 23, 2008. This strong showing was driven by better-than-expected performances from Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2, the Games for Everyone brands and Assassin’s Creed. For the full fiscal 2007-08 year, sales were EUR 298 million, up 42.9 per cent at constant exchange rates (USD 466 million; GBP 236.6 million).
• Nintendo sales up 73% for the year. The company saw sales jump 73 per cent across the fiscal year, while operating income was up 115.6 per cent and profit up 47.7 per cent. Total sales therefore amounted to JPY 1.67 trillion (USD 16.1 billion), with profit hitting JPY 257 billion (USD 2.48 billion), fuelled by the sales of over 30 million Nintendo DS consoles, and almost 19 million Wii consoles.
• Logitech reports Q4 growth. The peripherals manufacturer reported sales results of USD 601 million (EUR 376.9 million), up 17 per cent from last year’s quarter result of USD 513 million (EUR321.7 million) . Operating income was USD 66.1 million (EUR 41.4 million), up 20 per cent from USD 55.3 million (EUR 34.6 million) a year ago.

The game industry is definitely the place to have your money. It is growing faster than anyone predicted and it will continue to grow through the economic downturn. Remember, this is entertainment, and Hollywood had some of it’s greatest successes during the great recession.

And the video game industry is still at it’s very beginning. It will continue to grow till it is bigger than television and film combined. This is inevitable as gaming has the powerful and fundamental advantages of interactivity, connectivity and non linearity.

GTA IV has been a massive popular cultural event and as such it has spun off all sorts of interesting stories.

• Well known sicko Jack Thompson stars in GTA IV special podcast. Jim Sterling speaks to Jack Thompson for the very first time. In this historic event, Jack Thompson actually makes good on his promise to appear on a videogames podcast.
• Games Radar produce a video of zany GTA IV tricks. They put a crack team of daredevils to work squeezing every ounce of madness out of GTA IV’s wide-open sandbox. They turned helicopters into people-blenders, stared down speeding trains and pulled off some of the sickest automotive stunts you’ll ever witness.
• Apple parody in GTA IV. If you browse the internet enough on GTA, you might come across an Apple ad parody. The not so subtle mockery of Apple consists of a computer ad for “Fruit”, that implores you to “THINK Simple. THINK Minimalism. THINK Overpriced.” Ouch. There’s also an ad for a banana shaped “iFruit Phone” with “No buttons. No Reception. No storage capacity. All ego.”
• GTA IV can physically make you sick. Drinking in GTA IV has a severe affect on your character in the game, the camera gets heavily affected and the graphics become blurred. Your character will have a very difficult time walking down the street without stumbling and losing health, let alone driving. During these scenes the effects on screen not only affect your onscreen avatar, but can also make you a bit nauseous or even dizzy from looking at your character stumble around.
• Liberty City Google Mapped. Google Maps in association with IGN has just added a Liberty City module to it’s reputua, with full location spotting and interactivity. Pretty neat little mod, and should help those getting accustomed to Liberty City’s majesty.
• Barack Obama talks GTA IV. Addressing citizens in Indiana, Obama made reference to the game’s popularity – before seeming to back the industry’s message of it being an ‘adult game for adults’.
• Mothers Against Drunk Driving get their knickers in a twist. MADD wants a stricter rating on “Grand Theft Auto IV.” The organization is calling on the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, the independent organization that assigns video-game ratings, to reclassify “GTA IV” as an Adults Only game. The action-driving game, which includes the ability to drive while intoxicated, is currently rated Mature.
• New York cops hate the game. New York City officials were outraged over the game taking place in a city resembling theirs. Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated that the city would not support a game where you were rewarded for killing police officers.
• Chicago bus advertising pulled. Due to complaining from a local Fox News associate, however, the ads were pulled by the Chicago Transit Authority, following nine shootings in the city (NOT related to the game).
• Top 5 Non-Violent Things You Can Do in Grand Theft Auto IV.  You can get your kicks in with GTA’s massive extracurricular sandbox worlds, too. But there’s always been more ways to spend your gangsterific time than running from the police and beating up strangers.
• GTA IV pedophiles - did Rockstar go too far?If players visit a particular website described as a site for child beauty pageants (www.Littlelacysurprisepageant.com) using the game’s in built fantasy Internet, they instantly become wanted by the in game police for viewing questionable material.
• GTA 4’s Production Budget Estimated at $100M. Rockstar North president Leslie Benzies revealed in an interview that the recently released Grand Theft Auto IV (PS3, X360) had a budget of roughly $100 million, marking the title as the most costly development of any game to date. GTA IV’s massive budget pins the title above the previous front-runner Shenmue, released for the Dreamcast in 2000 and costing an unprecedented $70 million to produce.
• Lady blogger gets knickers in twist about violence towards women. Not only can you pick up and have sex with prostitutes, but then you can kill them: with you car, a gun, or whatever you have lying around. The sex is graphic (the video game is realistically rendered), and the killings have great tag phrases.
• Keith Vaz Jumps on the bandwagon. No surprise here. Reacting to the falsely reported stabbing story. He said ” GTA is a violent and nasty video game and it doesn’t surprise me that some of those who play it behave in this way.” Idiot.
• Sad psychiatrist doesn’t understand why adults play GTA IV. “Why would adults even be playing them? I have no idea. You get rewarded for going to the prostitute. You get more health benefits, and then if you steal her money, beat her up and steal her money, you get more.” He need to go back to college.
• Video game veteran thinks that GTA IV is pornography. “If adults want to do it, that’s their choice. But that’s not where the problem is… Personally, I think it’s sick and twisted… They should be putting this stuff behind the counter so that the adults that want it can come in and ask for it, like they would an adult magazine…” So he got his three minutes of fame.

There are plenty more, but the above gives you an idea of the huge social resonance this game has. Which is brilliant for our industry. We really are becoming mainstream.