Hey EA! Your innards are showing.

I was pointed to this article in adweek about how EA Sports is launching a new "Freestyle" brand aimed at delivering more casual sports fare, for the Wii as well as other platforms.

While it makes sense to target that as a market, does it make sense for a new brand? Couldn't EA Sports Freestyle titles compete equally well under the EA Casual heading?

Perhaps it does, but I'd wager that there was also some internal politicking at work, and that what we're seeing is the creation of a casual brand that doesn't have to reside in Kathy Vrabeck's EA Casual shop. If they are going to create answers to Wii Sports, etc, then will the expertise really come from the Madden team or the Casual team or from Blueprint?

Anyhow, I could be off base, but the announcement smelled a little of office politics to me.

Look at the unit(s) on that guy!

photo.jpg, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Funny button seen at Siggraph. Auteur will remain anonymouse :-)

If you get it, you get it. If you don't, well, keep surfin'. Nothing to see here.

Armored Core Floor

photo.jpg, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Long-time readers of my blog may remember our trials and tribulations with moles destroying our lawn when I last lived in Portland.

We had sod put into the back yard of the new place and decided not to mess around. This is a pic of the 1/2-inch metal cloth mesh I laid down before having the sod put in.

Lets see the little buggers chew through that!

Braid & Indie 'Escape Velocity'

[OK. Last Braid post for a while, I promise.]

I checked out the Metacritic score as of this morning, and it's weighing in at 92, which makes it the top rated XBLA title, and the #10 ranked title of all time, just nudging ahead of Mass Effect, a multi-million dollar title from a large team. Braid cost under a quarter million.

[Update: A few people picked up on this post, and the WSJ one saying Jon invested $180k of his own money into Braid, as concrete evidence of the development cost of the game. I should clarify: Although I had some involvement with Jon, I have no idea what it cost to make the title. That's his business, and up to him whether to disclose. Secondly, my *estimate*, having given it some thought, are that its much higher in total. Likely more like $300k-$400k. Jon's $180, plus an unspecified amount borrowed, but let's assume it's a significant amount, plus the costs that MS covered as advances on royalties for localizations, ratings, etc. Jon talks about some of these here. Anyhow, if you look at it as a $400k dev cost, that's still about 40k unit break-even. More if you consider the tax issue that Jon mentions. And let's not forget that 'break even' isn't the goal, or at least it shouldn't be.]

Now Metacritic is useless in many ways (e.g. there are interweb thoughts on MC scores of Wii not being indicators of sales; or MC scores being too harsh on XBLA titles, etc), but it's still followed closely by console manufacturers and publishers as an indication of what does well and what to aim for.

Which means that people are going to be looking at Braid and trying to emulate it/follow it. This is not unlike how Geowars inspired a publisher/platform vendor thirst for small two-stick shooters (e.g. I courted Everyday Shooter for some time as a more 'arty'/indie title, but Sony wanted the title far more than I did. There are a ton of other examples, both good and bad).

I think there'll be a few misguided publisher/developer/console companies that look at Braid's success and say "we need painterly-rendered platformers with time mechanics!", but I think they'll be small in number. They'll also be wrong in pursuing those as root causes of Braid's success.

What I think is shining through, and what I think the majority of the industry *will* get, is that Braid's success comes from the delivery of a game containing an undiluted form of its creator's passion and vision. Which is, IMHO, what the overused "Indie" moniker is really all about. It's not about small teams, small budgets, or "wackiness". It's about artists taking the vision in their minds eye, and wringing it out in blood, sweat and code.

And if you think about what might happen if the companies in the industry actually take that to heart, well, that's interesting.

If it were to mean a willingness to fund, pubisher or otherwise support titles, while acknowledging that their success will come from completely relinquishing control to those with the original vision, well, that'd be good for 'indie' games now wouldn't it? It would mean 'escape velocity' for indie games, where the metaphor refers to the gravitational pull of the mainstream and the dollars that fund it.

Of course, at some point, those converations within those companies will start to include words like "risk aversion", "focus group", "market trends", etc, and then it'll be hard to stay hands-off, but one can always dream.

Braid mention in Wall Street Journal

In addition to the glowing reviews of the game, WSJ has a nice write-up here with some background on the game's development.

Braid is out!

Braid has *finally* released on XBLA.


I only had a few minutes to play at 5am this morning before heading out, but was so happy to see the final product.

I believe it's one of the most beautiful things on xbox360, and I also believe it's THE most beautiful thing to happen TO xbox360. (Metacritic scores up so far seem to agree)

Congrats to Jon for seeing his vision through, and for keeping nose to the grindstone for SO long (I first talked to Jon about it at IGF 2006, so he started 2005?2004?). I stand in awe of his passion for the art.

Peek inside Larrabee

A Siggraph paper on the Larrabee architecture went live today, so there's press aplenty about the details we've given.

Still lots is hush hush, but those curious can read the paper here.

Scrabble/Scrabulous Scrap Specifics

GamePolitics has a scan of the court docs up.

For those curious about the details, here's a summary:

Case is over trademark and copyright infrigement (not patent infringement as some have stated)

Trademark in that the Scrabulous name rides the coattails of the Scrabble name brand (trademarked several times since 1954, and in 2002 wrt video game versions).

Copyright in that, the rules were copyrighted in 1948, the board design was copyrighted in 1948, the OSPDictionary was copyrighted in 1978, and included things like. These copyrights include things like:

- The board is similar in size, color, multipliers (indeed, the doubles and triples in Scrabulous are color coded and the player assumes what they are worth)
- The tilecount (total and per-letter) is identical
- letter point values are similar.

There's an interesting element to this in that the docs seem to outline a strategy to take what I guess were tactics RJ Software used to obfuscate the copyright infringement, and then uses them as the lynch rope. For example, the fact that there are no rules published for Scrabulous, that the multipliers on the board don't reference the x2 or x3 values, etc. How do people know how to play? Well, it must be assumed they know how to play Scrabble.

"Lawyers" for 63 points!

Well, they finally did it, Scrabulous is down. The following message gives a hint:

"Scrabulous is disabled for US and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here."

US & Canada is of course the territory covered by Hasbro's copyright on the Scrabble game. EA licensed that property and launched Scrabble for Facebook earlier this month. My guess is that someone had a "pull it down by end of July, please" notice and well, it's the end of the month.

LATimes has more detail here.

Mattel, who has Scrabble rights for rest of world, is suing the Scrabulous developers in India (where they hail from) and has launched their own game for folks in their territories.

They will of course win, and we'll be stuck with two versions of scrabble for different regions, and an inability to play with friends overseas.

Hasbro, Mattel and EA win. RJ Software loses. However, there are other casualties. The end user loses, and Facebook loses. However small a stain on their service this might be, it's still a loss: A social network app that bifurcates the members of the network. It's unfortunate there couldn't be a more win-for-all solution that came out of this.

A wave of original XBLA content

Looks like the XBLA team has been queuing up a wave of original titles for a burst of July/August goodness. Given some of the flak XBLA has taken over the past year (over everything from changes in royalty structure to mediocre content), it's nice to see all this original content coming out, and I hope and expect some of it will fare really well both in terms of sales and critical review.

A few of the recent and upcoming titles:

Go Go Break Steady

OK, it's not faring so well sales-wise, and suffers from meta-critic averaging of what seems like polarization of it's reception. Still, I bought it and am rather enjoying it. I'm generally not a fan of beat-match games on a controller, but this one's ok. Plus, the mix of genre with match-3 is unique, and the theming and music are sweet.

Geowars: Retro Evolved 2

XBLA's monster hit, second in sales only to Uno (an aptly named game), it'll be interesting if the game (debuting at $10) can be the must-have that it's predecesor was.

When I worked at MS, there was a photoshop job someone had done (or downloaded?) that was hanging up in the hallway, entitled "missing GeoWars features" and it showed the player ship in a mucho-crowded scene, with a speech bubble captioned "Where the F*** is Co-op?!?" or something along those lines. See above screenshot. That is all.

Braid

Finally! Braid's slated to release the week after Geowars 2, and it's been a long time coming. I first played it at the IGF (when? 3 years ago?) where it *hurt my brain*. So when I joined MS's XBLA bizdev team, Jon was the first person I approached about getting his title on XBLA. I'm glad to have played a part, and I really hope the Xbox customers have a thirst for such an original brain-bending platformer.

Also coming:

Castle Crashers (go go The Behemoth!), and Galaga Legions (which promises to be a complete remake of the original in the same way Pac Man CE was; a game I play almost every day). Also looks like N+'s add-on pack of 200 levels boosted sales of the game. Go Indies!

Player Created Content: Industry Created Glut

Man, things sure seem to be shaping up for a mighty crowded playfield on the user-generated-content (or the better 'player created content' name) landscape.

The basic premise of '99% of everything is crap, but in a long-tail world, there's enough content for some cream to float to the top' seems sound. However, creating content takes time, and one has to wonder what the intersection of sets looks like between gamers and would-be-creators, and then how big that pool is, vis a vis it's dilution across so many venues for content creation & sharing.

An incomplete inventory off the top of my head:

Games centered around UGC
- Spore
- Little Big Planet*
- others

Games with UGC as non-core feature
- Many many first person shooters (e.g. Unreal)
- Race games allowing for custom cars/tracks (e.g. Forza)
- etc

Virtual worlds with UGC-element
- Second Life
- Google's Lively
- Habbo and a thousand would-be Habbo's
- Sony Home

Game creation middleware/systems
- MS's XNA
- Torque

Hosted game creation services
- Playcrafter
- Raph's Metaplace (my personal fave)

The good news is that there's plenty of variety, and they run the gammut from writing cod to drag-n-drop.

I do worry, however, that many will fall by the wayside for lack of sufficient user-base to generate the content.

And yes, I realize I *totally* sound like one of those "there'll never be more than a million MMO players!" cronies of 7-8 year ago. I was one of them! :-)

* BTW, this may point to it being a smart idea Sony's hinted at, allowing users to sell their content, to provide additional incentive beyond the rest of the fray. I beleive Raph's system is going to allow such things as well.

Here comes Google...

Google pulls the covers back on Lively!



Looks like cartoony 3D space social network, with limited user creation tools (I'm going off other's posts - will give it a go when I get some time).

no content creation tools at the level that Metaplace is doing (i.e. not sure you can actually MAKE GAMES with it), but I might worry if I was someone like Habbo, etc.

As one of the commenters on Alice's blog points out, it's a vehicle for advertising, so that may turn off some users and limit how much people can do with it (because most people don't want their banner ads popping up on the sides of flying penii.

As Casey once put it, 'now the dancing turns German'.

(via Wonderland)

Rein Myopic on Stereoscopic?

Epic's Mark Rein is interviewed on GamesIndustry.biz this morning, and among the juicier quotes they latched onto is this one:

Q: Ubisoft has said that their going to be using 3D - or stereoscopic - technology in games...

Rein: That's dumb.

Q: So there's not going to be an Unreal Engine that supports it then?

Rein: It does already. I have a 3D Monitor sitting in my office and stereoscopic has worked on Unreal for a long time. [snip] So unreal works fine on stereoscopic, it's just that you've got to change out your screens to use it - that's a big accessory.

I really like Mark, but I think he's missed the point on this one. I don't believe that 3D monitors are going to be what the console manufacturers latch onto, if in fact they decide to differentiate via stereoscopic 3D. It'll be via LCD shutter glasses with the TV you've already got.

LCD shutter glasses have the downside that (a) they are glasses, so you have to wear them and look dorky, with which I am well acquainted, and (b) you need a pair for each person in the room.

The upside, however, is that they are cheap (e.g. sub-$100 products exist with 2 pairs of glasses, so within range of a pack-in peripheral with a high-end title if MS or Sony were to do in real volume), you can ship them as a peripheral along with a USB dongle to drive the shutter (or maybe can be done via the existing IR on the 360 or PS3?).

You can drive existing HDTVs at 30hz per left/right field, which works, but will make your retinas bleed. The more interesting way to drive it is at 60hz per field, on 120Hz LCDs. Anyone who's shopped recently for an HDTV knows that 120Hz refresh is one of those differentiator features that is rapidly becoming a checklist item that will exist across all products in the near future.

Another cool think you can do is two-player games where each player has a full-screen view.

As an aside: You could probably do some other cool social/family games where you flash stuff intermittently on the screen in a way that everyone can see it except the person with the glasses on. Kind of like the 'isolation booth' in old game shows.

Anyhow, it means that adding stereo to a console is probably more of a $25-ish peripheral, not a 'buy a new TV' option as Mark interpreted it.

That being said, I'm not bullish on a feature like this being anything other than a science project mid-console-lifecycle (note that some science projects actually do ship). It's more like something they might go big with in the next cycle.

In-game PPT: Raising the bar on presentations

Just back from Paris GDC, and while there was a number of cool things there, my favorite was the keynote given by the guys at Media Molecule, makers of Little Big Planet.

You can find plenty of summaries of their talk online. No need to rehash here.

What I did want to note though, is that they seriously raised the bar for those of us looking to given good, unique, presentations.

Rather than using Powerpoint, their entire presentation was done as an in-game level, which they "played through" as they gave their talk. Different videos and pix were brought up by leaping onto trigger switches, levers and buttons were used to trigger animated actions supporting the talk, etc.

It was just beautiful.

Maybe I'll give my next talk in Line Rider!

Kindle(ing) for Games Industry?

Seth Godin has an interesting post up about the Amazon's e-book device, the Kindle.

I must first fault his post for one thing. For all the pros and cons he discusses, there's not one mention of the device's use of DRM. While he's correct in citing some of it's limitations, he fails to note what is by far the most significant one. Surprising, given that he talks about his own affection for 'buying books to give to someone else', something you can't do with DRM'ed e-books.

This one complaint aside, he offers some intriguing ideas about how the Kindle could be improved, and many of which I beleive apply equally to games. Most of them fall under the umbrella of viewing the 'connected device' as a social platform, and not just a distribution platform.

Much of the talk about Kindle has centered around the convenience of having all your books on one device and purchasing them over the internet, and also around digital distribution, and what this *could* mean in terms of savings to consumers and/or increased royalties to authors. (In fact, much of complaint-camp posting has been about how this has not yet translated into such savings, but that may just be a matter of time as existing books are still paper - and thus publisher - dependant).

Seth instead talks about how the device falls short of it's opportunity to capitalize on it's connected nature. How books should ship with/connect to the readership's commentary. How I should be able to see what books my friends are reading and what htey thought of them. How I should be able to see (if desired) notes in margins, highlighted paragraphs, stickies, disputed facts, links to corroborating or conflicting points of view. How I should be able to link to any word in the text to get a dictionary definition, wikipedia entry, etc. All fantastic points.

I think there's a parallel here with digital distribution as it pertains to games.

Much of the discussion around digital distribution has been about how it might (or might not) translate to increased savings to consumers and/or increased revenue share to developers. Also discussed is how it's allowing for feasibility of certain formats/genres/etc that might not otherwise be feasible, as they wouldn't acheive the revenue needed to justify retail shelf space allocation.

While all of that's true, Seth's comments bring to mind some ideas about how the connectivity of game platforms could enhance the social aspect of games. We are seeing the beginnings of this with Wii's service allowing user rating of game titles, Xbox Live letting you see what your friends are playing, and Steam letting you see what your friends have purchased and commented on.

However, I beleive these things might only be the beginning.

Connecting user ratings & recommendations with a social network allows for networks of trust, as well as 'networks of taste' (not the 'people who liked this also liked' amazon thing, but letting you develop networks of people who've enjoyed games similarly). Connecting the online distribution with the social network potentially could allow for gifting of games, friend discounts, etc.

The idea of annotation is also intriguing. Note how the video I linked to in this post, uses Viddler and someone's commented on a particular point in the stream. We've also seen how games like Portal have shipped with 'Director Commentary' features in the game where they've annotated the game with facts about it's design and development. I find the idea of user-contributed commentary intriguing. Players could opt to play through with commentary on, and could do so with comments from a given person or group. This could be their friends, from a group like the reviewers at JayIsGames, or a favorite blogger/designer/luminary, etc.

In any case, there's a lot of room for innovation as these platforms connect. It will be interesting to see where it takes place. In general, the PC is the place that has the most rapid churn and innovation, but it's often a closed vertical model that allows for consistency of experience (e.g. annotation of games would need some kind of API to allow for linking to a particular object or event, and usage of that API would need to exist across all games on that platform). My bet is that we'll see the first instance of this on somehting like Raph's Metaplace system, though someone like Sony or Microsoft could chose to drive it across theirs (not likely, as Sony's been hands off with theirs, and Microsoft's been letting others catch up as of late, it seems). Other potentials could be Flash or Silverlight, or perhaps whatever secret-sauce gaming thing Google's working on.

The cake is a meme

From UK's Times Online article about a group targeting the Church of Scientology's tactics of targeting individuals that critique their religion. The group does so anonymously, wearing masks and borrowing heavily from web memes:

One of their placards reads: “We have cake, they have lies.”

Game Design and Architecture

Everyone is going to link to this. It's just too awesome not to.

Wealthy guy in NY has his apartment remodeled, and wants to have puzzle elements built in, that his kids have to solve to get to the end prize, a poem he's written for them. The architect (game designer?) outdid himself, to say the least.

Snippet:

"In any case, the finale involved, in part, removing decorative door knockers from two hallway panels, which fit together to make a crank, which in turn opened hidden panels in a credenza in the dining room, which displayed multiple keys and keyholes, which, when the correct ones were used, yielded drawers containing acrylic letters and a table-size cloth imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle, the answers to which led to one of the rectangular panels lining the tiny den, which concealed a chamfered magnetic cube, which could be used to open the 24 remaining panels, revealing, in large type, the poem written by Mr. Klinsky."

Be sure to look at the slideshow as well. The craftsmanship looks awesome.


via Raph.

Go Go Break Steady trailer

The latest trailer for upcoming XBLA title Go Go Break Steady is looking awesome.



A peer of mine signed this title while I worked there, and it has been under development for a LONG time. I haven't seen many XBLA titles go through this much iteration (except maybe Braid, the game I'm most looking forward to), and change so much during that process. Last I played it, it was a beatmatch game with a kind of match-3 twist to it, and was cool then. I can only assume it's gotten even better. Really looking forward to it.

Almost makes up for stuff like Frogger 2, doesn't it? ;-)

Portmanteaux du jour

Two recently heard portmanteau(x? - never sure how to pluralize), one good, one bad:

• Clowd: (via Seth Godin). Meant to refer to the idea of combining crowd-sourcing with cloud-computing. i.e. send execution out there to the 'cloud', but maybe it's crowdsourced and it's actually this amorphous human engine that executes it. I like the idea, but as a portmanteau, it's almost impossible to audibly differentiate 'clowd' from 'cloud', not to mention the confusion when it's someone with a Canadian accent pronouncing it. Visually, looks too much like 'clown'. Is it a portmanteau form of a snide jeer? If so, then it's a little too clever!

This next one I love so much more.

• Psychogylcimic: A clever combination that clearly indicates the behavior exhibited by some when their blood sugar gets low. My wife started using this one immediately upon hearing it.
  

That's "Mister" to you.

Like all parents, I want to ensure my kids get a proper education. I believe that starts with a solid foundation based on the classics.

Which is why we took a break the other day from the never-ending Lego Star Wars gaming to introduce Thomas and Jennifer, aged four and a half apiece, to the classic Pac Man franchise. This way I could show them what games were like when I was their age (actually about 3 times their age when Pac Man came out, but I digress).

We started with Ms Pac Man because it's more forgiving. Then we moved on to the original Pac Man, at which point my daughter corrected me.

"Daddy, it's not Pac Man. It's MISTER Pac Man."

Tom likes eating ghosts. Jenny is interested in the part (on 360) when she is presented with a tally of which fruit she has eaten, citing that fruit is very healthy and that both Ms and Mr Pac Man will avoid getting sick as a result.

...and speaking of games as art

...Clint casually mentions that Ubidays (Ubi's big press rollout of the year's coming catalog) is being held at the Louvre.

Rented venue or not, I think that says something, no?

Sex in Games: The Lecture

Alice points us to this awesome lecture-turned-flash-movie by Daniel Floyd.



Well worth the few minutes to watch!

Game mini-reviews: GTA4, Penny Arcade Adventures

I'd been meaning to post some thoughts on GTA4, but have been busy and have only played a couple hours into it. Since "anonymous" seemed to think my pointer to a flickr set of game screens was an endorsment, I guess I'd better do a short review/commentary now.

While I'm at it, I spent an hour or so playing the Penny Arcade Game, so let's throw that into the mix, shall we?

GTA4

Pros: It's like GTA3, but bigger, badder and better. The world is huge, the content is racy, they've added a ton of stuff to the proven formula.

Cons: It's like GTA3, but bigger, badder and better. The game, like many, is TOO BIG. Multiple hours before you even get to the moderately interesting stuff. Racy content is ok, but its gratuitous and they missed out on many opportunities to treat it more as gameplay rather than fluff. 'Better' as a con in that it's largely many incremental improvements over the proven formula of GTA3, but nothing revolutionary, and certainly not deserving of the over the top review scores.

Other thoughts:

• As many have noted, the metacritic scores are *out* *of* *control*. It's a good game, but it is not the perfect game by any means. There's a whole other post to write about the group think and pre-launch hype and resultant salivation that helps drive this behavior.
• As 'anon' commented, the game appears to push the DVD drive pretty hard, and some xbox's are having problems, something to do with dusty lenses? I saw the issue once, but then swapped Xbox360's (one of my had RROD'd and it came back from the fix-it shop) and haven't seen the issue since.
• The 'score with your girlfriend' potential achievement (ahem) is such a lost opportunity. Could have made a fantastic mini-game that you interact with through the game. Should you attempt to kiss her, take her upstairs, etc, with her reacting based on how long you've dated, what she thinks you'll think of her in the morning, how passive or aggressive you are being, how the current date was going, etc. Instead it's a little bit of gratuitous content and that's about it. Shame.
• The GPS and in-game phone are ok, but sometimes I think that games go too far to mask the HUD. I mean, really, are we all really fooling ourselves?
• I havent played multiplayer yet, but the multiplayer modes look like a riot. Waiting until I finish single player game.

Penny Arcade Adventures

I've only played an hour or so this evening, but I was privvy to a little of the background while I worked at MS. There was a lot of heated discussion about whether the more-family-friendly XBLA channel was a good place for a game with a character that copulates with produce, but I guess we can see how that worked out, and I'm glad that it did.

The game is best described as comic-book-point-n-click-adventure-meets-turn-based-RPG. Some thoughts on it:

• I fucking hate turn-based RPG's, and yet I like this game, so I guess that says something. I'm not even that much of a Penny Arcade fan (I like the comic, but am much more of an XKCD guy, and confess that I have a guilty pleasure in reading Questionable Content.)
• It's the closest I've seen to the reincarnation of Lucasarts point-n-click glory days. If you liked those games (I did), you'll be willing to put up with the turn-based-combat crap.
• As a comic put in motion, it's brilliant. Scott McCloud would be proud, I think. I love the treatment of fixed camera views as "panels", breaking the fourth wall. The toon rendering is well done, as is the panel treatment. Best comic-in-motion since Ubi's 'XIII'.

Go try the demo, decide if it's for you, and buy it if it is. Its definitely worth downloading the demo.

It's Nau or Never

Crap.

A while ago, I discovered Nau, a clothing store whose clothes I really liked and who's mission was pretty cool. Then the other day I discovered they were going out of business despite being less than a year old. Crappy crap.

The unique thing about their business seemed pretty well timed, "style with meaning" I guess you'd call it. Things like a portion of your purchase going to a non-profit group which you chose at time of purchase, clothes made from sustainable or reclaimed materials, low-impact biz practices, etc. See here for more detail.

The (somewhat bitter sounding) statement on their website claims investor reluctance, but I can't beleive that's the whole story. There's a ton of VC interest in other environment-related companies right now. Maybe it's the direction the economy is taking that has them reluctant about boutique clothing? I dunno.

Anyhow, rest of inventory is on sale on their website. I went and busted the bank, you should too. They'll be rareties soon enough!

Sightseeing in Liberty City

Awesome flickr set of side-by-sides of GTA4 screens and NYC pics.

Shippin' stuff

Man, People are *shippin* stuff!

Dave's book is done. Congrats Dave. I remember finishing GPG5 and handing off the huge printed stack. Fun.

Robin (and a cast of others) shipped Boom Blox, and it's rockin' 85 on metacritic. I guess I'll finally have to buy that Wii.

Justin & Merci (who's game has been in beta for a while), shipped PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game.

Mary Jo shipped Iron Man. Congrats to her to, even though she's since left to do consulting. (BTW, the story's cuter coming from her S.O.)

Meanwhile, work on Industry's worst-kept secret will have me not shipping stuff for.... a while :-)

Back on the horse...

Man... over 2 weeks without posting. Very unlike me. (VGVC is lagging even more. Really ought to do something about that...)

Things have been busy between work & settling into the new house. Work's also involved some travel. Did a few days in San Fran for work-related meetings, dinner with Chris, lunch with... well, no one talks about Fight Club.

Montreal last week for 3 days which was fun, but tightly packed. Work related meetings and dinners, tons of work to do in small gaps of time between, and then one afternoon of visits with mom, dad, friends. Flew back 6:00am Saturday to attend Adam & Stacey's wedding party.

Hopefully should catch up now that I am stationary (I think?) until GDC Paris.

How many repetitive stress injuries per minute?

OK, I just discovered TypeRacer.

Typershark meets Kung Fu Chess. Typing of the Damned meets Deathmatch.

Yes, it's multiplayer touchtyping deathmatch. If you wake up in the morning and notice the world's awesome is missing, well it's all collapsed into here. It is a singularity of awesome.

Gamers steamed over Steam? Distilling some learnings

There's an interesting thread over on the Escapist Magazine forums in which someone is raising a bit of a fuss about game prices on Steam. Specifically, their complaint is that many of the games listed, including some of Valve's, can be found cheaper at physical retail locations.

Having higher prices for comparable product isn't normally perceived well, but it's additionally aggravating in this case because (a) so much has been said about the efficiency of digital distribution, and (b) there's a perception that the customer is 'buying direct', and therefore should be given a better deal.

Now, I'm not faulting Valve. I think they have a great service. The issue here, is in the difficulty of keeping up with the aggressive discounting and/or promotion that retailers will do as they manage their inventory and shelfspace.

To some extent, Valve is between a rock and a hard place. Just keeping up with the pricing and promotions that all the retailers have going on would be daunting (I'd argue impossible). Even if they did that, then matching one retailer's price drop would be seen by another retailer as undercutting their channel partners. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

So what can we learn from this?

1) Be careful about message you send about the value of your service. I'm not sure that Valve has ever said that digital distribution would result in lower prices (I'm fairly certain they didn't). Still if the value was in the dynamic updates, or in the feel-good value of a larger share getting back to developers, or whatever, they should have made that the top talking points in all marketing efforts.

2) If people are comparing apples to oranges, make sure to point out that you are a pineapple. If customers ignore the above, and insist on making comparisions like the above, bring the discussions back to your product/service's value and to why the comparison is moot. In this case, it's not buying a product, it's entering into a service relationship with Valve, and that does more than get you the one game.

3) Prevent the upset from happening to begin with. This might seem a little schizophrenic at first, but I think that Valve should point people away from Steam. By this I mean they should clearly point out that some retailers might offer the game for cheaper, and that if all a customer wants is to buy the game, they are welcome to check prices at places A,B,C. They should then point out what the advantages are of buying through Steam. Customer doesn't feel they were duped, and you've reinforced your messages.

Long story short, I think this is a good lesson in how the customer doesn't always get your marketing pitch. Sometimes they write it for you. You have to plan for that and know how to address it.

Time Sink...

photo.jpg, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Spent a surprising amount of time this weekend getting my media room in order. Assembed new IKEA entertainment center (centers actually, I bought two to put side by side, and reversed the shelves/drawers on one of them which required some IKEA-hacking), routed cables (HDMI, audio, component, power, etc) through the wall. The latter was a pain because it's an outside wall so I had to route a bulk of cables in the narrow space between the wallboard and the vapor barrier.

I'm still trying to get wireless to work well throughout the house with HD video, etc. Was much easier in the old house where I'd routed CAT6 cable everywhere.

[oh, and the room isn't orange. iPhone camera did that for some reason)

Centennial Middle School Talk

I gave a talk yesterday at Centennial, a middle school out east of Portland, about careers in the games industry. I'd given a talk at the same school when I last lived here, and it was once again a blast.

The format changed some. Last time, they rotated 5 groups of 25-ish through for a 15 minute presentation each. This time, we got the whole group of 150 kids in one room, and did a 30 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of Q&A.

[BTW, if you are one of the kids I spoke to, you here's the list of resources I posted last time on 'game development for beginners'. It's a little out of date, and I'll be updating it later today, but if you are eager, that should get you started.]

Now for everyone else, here's some observations from the talk:
- Number of kids out of 150 that play games: 148. There were two outliers, both girls, for what that's worth.
- Number of teachers that play games: 3 of 6.
- Number of students that even *heard* of Space Invaders (I'd been asked what the first game I played was): ~1/3.
- Games about which I was asked the most questions: Grand Theft Auto (3,4), Halo. Remember, these are 12-13 year olds. ESRB, you still have work to do!

It's worth noting that the socio-economic split between the students is pretty big. Some are from newer development areas and are lower-middle class or slightly better off than that. On the other hand, 50% of the kids in the room are on free or subsidized lunches. The teacher I was working with pointed out that while many have computers at home, most are very old, and many are not connected to the Internet (as she put it, "many of them are used to having the phone cut off in the last week of the month").

As well, the school reflects this. "Non-essential" courses (e.g. computer science, *ahem*) have been cut from the curriculum. They have computers in the school, but they are almost exclusively used to administer standardized testing. Kids get very little time on PC's to actually explore/create/experiment. The school has one Smartboard which was paid for via a grant. Contrast this with the public school I saw in an affluent part of Redmond and blogged about here.

Despite this, I was getting some awesome questions. Some examples:
- How does the Wii do motion tracking?
- How do the chips in a game console differ from the ones in my computer?
- How does a game being connected to the Internet (cited Live as example) change the process of creating it?
- How do motion-capture rigs work? (was phrased as "those suits with the ping-pong balls on them")

Also lots of pragmatic questions about how much money will you make in job X or job Y.

A few questions were a little more basic. My fave was this three-part question from a young lady in the audience:

"How long have you been in this business?" (My answer: "15 years")
"How old were you when you started?" (My answer: "24")
"How old are you now?" (My answer: "You just wrote a math problem!")
Another kid then cried out "You're 40!?!".
*sigh* "Close."

Other favorite moment: A number of kids were asking for autographs afterward (why? I don't get it either). The last kid that came up as I was packing up asked for one as well and I asked why on earth he wanted it. His answer? "I've never met anybody OLD before... that plays games, and I want to prove to my parents that you exist!".

Anyhow, it was a blast and I'd highly recommend to others that they do similar things in their community.

A book so remarkable, it has it's own trailer

Can't wait for this to arrive from Amazon. Cool style, plus it's own trailer.


Johnny Bunko trailer from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

Way to stand out!

How the Allies won the war

We decorated the kids' rooms in the new house.

The boys are sharing a room and we put up some stickers of WWII-era planes. As part of that, Tom and I went to the hobby shop to pick out some models to put together and hang from the ceiling. I told Tom to pick some out that were similar to those in the stickers we put up. He did a pretty good job as you can see from the bomber below.


He also is a pretty good history buff for a four year old. He was aware of the little-known secret weapon that garnered the Allies a real advantage over the Germans: The Millennium Falcon!

What was I going to do? Turn down a chance to work on the Millennium Falcon with my kid? C'mon!

Nerd Bird

photo.jpg, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

One of the nice perks at Intel that I was definitely glad to have coming back was the Intel chartered airline, aka the Nerd Bird.

Not nearly as lavish as it sounds, this is really a cost savings because the company sends so many people back and forth between OR, CA, AZ, etc.

What it means though, is that I can show up for a 6am flight at 5:50 and make it to an 8am meeting in Santa Clara on time. Sweet.

[Above, San Jose tarmac early morning]

Viral marketing or new usage model?

photo.jpg, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Viral marketing or new usage model?

Or just a stock-boy's sense of humor? Or Freudian slip?

Walking through the grocery store the other day, this M&M's "Get Wild!" endcap right next to the condoms.

Portal-inspired trends & heroism

Portal incited a lot of conversation about whether it would inspire shorter games with high-quality production.

I ask instead; will it inspire games with brilliant closing-sequence songs?

And as an answer, I give you "You Have To Burn The Rope".

Sheer Brilliance.

[Update: Am I the only one that finds this reminiscent of The The? (check Soul Mining, tracks 2, 3)]

A Laptop from God

There's been a huge amount of talk around the "$100 laptop" idea. One Laptop Per Child, has gotten the most press and there are similar efforts from Intel's Classmate (note: I work for Intel but have no affiliation with the Classmate product or team), Asus' Eee PC and others.

I'm quite surprised at how much press there is on the feasibility of the price point, and how little press there is about what business models could sustain such a price point.

As pointed out in this CNET piece, Gartner analyst Annette Jump beleive's that the $100 is still too high, and that it's also not feasible due to a bunch of other TCO type costs (Internet access, servicing, etc).

Whether $100 or a few hundred more, it seems some sort of subsidy is necesary. There's been a lot of talk about government subsidy, and some talk of 'charitable organizations' providing subsidy.

There's a precedent for the subsidy of providing educational equipment and other basic infrastructure to third world countries: Religious groups, via missionary work.

It's been long understood that basic quality of life improvement can be a powerful persuader, and religous groups* often provide such services out of charitable motivation, but not without association to their beleifs (e.g. lots of Christian mission groups helped out after the Tsunami in Asia a few years back, but I don't think any did so anonymosly.)

[*Political groups aren't unaware of this. My own grandmother lived in a very rural area of Quebec, and whenever anyone bad-mouthed the oft-bad-mouthed Maurice Duplessis, she countered with "C'est lui qui a apporte l'electricite" ("It was him who brought the electricity") and thus he could do no wrong in her eyes, despite his other doings.]

Anyhow, I'm surprised more religious groups haven't latched onto this opportunity. Seems a pretty powerful motivator.

"Why do I follow Jesus? He's the one that brought the Internet!"

[Note: Since some may question my motives in this post. I'm atheist, and am not advocating for or against the above, just pointing out what seems like an opportunity. Personally, I don't worry too much about education or technology with religious strings attached, since educated people are better equiped to question their faith anyway.]

Note to IP holders: My friendships matter, your boundaries don't.

I've blogged plenty about the ongoing Scrabulous debacle (e.g. here, here, and here), but have to comment on the latest.

RealNetworks (who hold the PC rights to Scrabble for outside US & Canada) have released Scrabble for Facebook, but only for users outside US & Canada).

Let's ignore for a second that Scrabulous is still available on Facebook, and has the momentum of being the incumbent.

There's a really good example here of how the IP issue is going to poison the property's chance of success.

There have already been examples of online games where players were unhappy about being unable to play on the same overseas servers as friends. This however, is much worse. Here we are talking about a social network and applications that are looking to complement (and leverage) existing connections between people. Connections that previously haven't had to worry about distinctions like what country they may reside in.

If EA (the US rights-holder) ships Scrabble for US & Canada Facebook users, and Hasbro manages to shut down Scrabulous, users will be the loser here, having to figure out with whom they can play, out of their friends list.

Hasbro has the opportunity here to offer a superior offering (see my last post on the subject) to the incumbent, and possibly acquire their user-base in the process. Instead, they'll have partners offer two crippled versions because they did their licensing with an antiquated view of the world.

[Update: I was reminded that the rift goes beyond the digital world, as Hasbro has rights in the US, and Mattel in rest of world. Still the point still holds, their IP rights are going to restrict adoption and push users toward another game entirely.]

Ugh. Just seems so broken.

Ooma update

I blogged a while back about the Ooma that I picked up (for free!) at an entrepreneurial event that I attended. Having moved into the new house, I finally got around to setting it all up, so here's the mini-review:

Ooma is a VOIP device that offers free long distance in the US (unlimited) along with call-waiting, voice-mail, and a bunch of other services, with no monthly service fee. The cost absorbed in buying the device. Long-distance outside the US is extra, but relatively cheap (to call Canada is a little over a penny a minute).

OK, so first, the good:

• It's a sexy device. Definitely designed by (and for?) mac-lover types.
• Setup was a snap. I'll caveat this below, but for the most part, plug in and go, and it guides you through the process relatively problem free. Considering that it plugs into your broadband, your phone line, requires a credit card for long-distance billing, and your phone number & service provider to switch off other services (like call waiting) with your land-line, it's surprising it all worked at all, let alone problem free.
• Customer service (I had to email about my change of account info from Seattle to Portland), responded in minutes, even on a sunday morning.
• Nifty features. Things like SMS'ing you or emailing you with info about new voicemail messages, are pretty cool.

The bad (the only downside I can think of):

• I'd wager that the thing was designed by a group of people that live in the bay area, or another similarly congested place. It's definitely designed with a compressed living area in mind. They suggest placing the device between your cable modem and your router (if you have one), they require that it be plugged into your land-line, and the 'hub' device (in the photo above) is designed to be in an accessible location (having the main buttons and indicator lights on it). This might be fine in most San Francisco appartments, but for those of us in suburbia, it's less than ideal. Right now I have it in the living room, but I plan on re-working things so that the modem and router are in the garage, so my sexy device will live in there, I guess, and I'll have to route a phone cable over to where it's going to be located. ANyhow, I'd like to see an option where the main 'guts' are available in a small unit to put in my network closet, and the 'UI' portion is then available anywhere else in the house. Would also like to see support for a wireless version of the scout (maybe one exists?)

I've only used it for a few local calls and one long distance call so far (20 minutes to mom -> 29c!), but so far, so good!

Bartle's Indie MMO Conference Keynote

Here's an Indie MMO conference going on in Minnesota (?) and it looks like Richard Bartle's keynote was really good.

Gamasutra has a good synopsis, and Bartle has posted slides.

His keynote looks back 20 years, from the year 2028, and paints three alternate portraits of the future: One in which game designers and other creatives thrive (the good), one in which lawyers and accountants stifle development (the bad), and one in which business and academia drive VW's to practical usage - and thus make them mundane in the process (the ugly).

On the front of the second of those possible futures, Congress recently held hearings on Virtual Worlds.

GTA IV sucks...

...sucks me in that is.

I have to admit. Watching this TV spot has me ready to pony up money for my copy.



A couple thoughts while on the subject:

- GTA 3 did a good job of populating a large city with ambient characters/content. Crackdown & Saints Row took it further, but GTA 3 was quite a bit earlier. GTA4 looks from early footage that it does an event better job on this front.

- In terms of "realism", camera work/effects/automation seems a WAY bigger bang for the buck than things like animation or shader effects. Madden and Ace Combat 6 are great examples. Footage of the latter here:

Robots suck!

They don't of course. They are the coolest thing in the world, especially to my four year old son, who thinks that robots, Lego, and Star Wars are all the coolest things in his world.

So Lego Star Wars, which has Lego R3D2 and C3PO robots in it, is a perfect storm of coolness.

My wife got him a Star Wars toy the other day and didn't realize she was buying a Star Wars *Tansformer* toy... which meant it *turns into* a robot. Coolness intensifies.

Tom was pointing out all the parts of the robot to me, saying "these are his guns, these are his wings, and this is the part that sucks up the dirt".

Of course, these are the types of things one might infer if you grow up around robots.

Promotion, or new distribution channel?

A few people (eg Raph) have pointed to Target's 'promotion' of some indie games by selling them bundled with t-shirts.

It's a cool idea, but I'm not sure I'd view this as only a promotion. Seems like its a viable distribution channel. The target promotion seems to just be the first instantiation of just that, as seen on the EGP Apparel here. No different than the toy-with-virtual-world examples I've been ranting about for some time. i.e. Buy a physical product that includes a game in it's 'feature set'.

It moves the transaction to the well-understood retail model, it helps combat piracy (pirates don't get the shirt, don't get to 'make the statement'/exhibit their gamer cred), and there's likely still a healthy margin for the developer.

[Back of the envelope on that last point: $12 SRP. Assume 30 points for target, and that since it's one retailer, that its done direct with their buyer, so $8.50 to EGP. Let's assume $1.50 for shipping and other middlemen/administrivia, we're down to $7.00. Maybe $3.00 for the shirt (bulk t's can be had for under $2, so I'm assuming this is reasonable with the print added) and $1.00 for the game CD and insert. Another $2.00 for EGP Apparel and you are down to $1/unit for the developer. Actually a reasonable amount, as I've seen retail games distributed for comparable prices if the bundle unit commit is high enough.]

Settling in...

Lots of unpacking this weekend. At least a hundred boxes worth, with many still to go.

Did a big Ikea run. New desk (assembly not yet started) for the office, and new bunk bed for Son #1 (many hours of frustrating assembly).

Did big Fry's run. New TV (46" Sony LCD), two LCD wall mounts, HD antenna (yay for over-the-air digital), cables, etc. Mounted the LCD but left running cables through walls for another day.

We've Moved

We did our move this week. Exhausted, and still half living out of boxes, but we are in the new place:

Busines Model Culture Clash

Kotaku has a post up about the rumored addition of a item-sales/microtransaction model being added to Battlefield: Bad Company, and it's going over about as well as a fart in a space suit.

The rumor is based on the beta test of B:BC displaying some weapons that are locked and labelled as 'available for purchase on Xbox Live Marketplace'. It's not going over well because the Kotakians beleive this is going to lead to people with oodles of spare spending money thrashing the lowly struggling gamer.

The impetus to do this is clear. EA's been talking (as everyone else has) about the popularity of this business model in asia, and are dipping several of their many toes in the water to see if it works over here. However, what is an accepted business model in Asia may not go over so well with traditional core gamer audiences here.

This won't be the last backlash we'll see, and EA will almost certainly botch a few attempts before getting it right. However, they'll likely get some right, and that just means more choice for consumers in the long run. More paths to the cash register is always a good thing in the end.

A precendant:

The B:BC example, and the Kotaku post's jab about 'paying for ammo' reminded me of a precendent that has already been set in the real world: Paintball.

When I used to go semi-regularly with the crew at Matrox (how long ago was that? Yeesh), we set house rules that limited the type of weapons so that everyone was on equal footing, but also allowed for flexibility on ammo. Competing in a round with only 100 rounds, when others might opt for up to 400, became a bit of a personal challenge within the multiplayer game.

On the other hand, I have a buddy that went with a bunch of stockbrokers on a regular basis and they were full-on, buy what you want, so some guys had stock guns, others full automatic, some guys had paint grenades, etc. And for them, that was OK.

Taking this back to B:BC, sounds like EA just has to allow for limiting some matches to 'stock items only', etc.

Good interview on Braid

Jon did a good interview with IGN on Braid:

Build-a-Bear building a head of steam

Build-a-Bear's online virtual world, buildabearville, which I wrote about here and on Gamasutra, hit 1 million users it's first month, and recently 2 million (it's less than 3 months old). They are also adding celeb appearances with kids from High School Musical and the like.

Phenomenal. How many other MMO/VW's are going to sneak up and surpass the traditional games industry?

The "We See Farther" ad

A while back, I'd posted that I was looking for a high(er) res image scan of the famous We See Farther ad from EA from 25 years back.

Found!

If you can resist the temptation to do the standard "Now EA is The Man"-bashing, just read it and admit that it's so fucking ahead of its time. Amazingly visionary. Moving, really.

Teaching the Teachers

In response to the Canadian Teacher's Federation call for a ban on the release of Rockstar's 'Bully: Scholarship Edition', Clint Hocking has issued a pretty compelling challenge. He's offering to buy Emily Noble, the head of the Teacher's Association, an Xbox360 or Wii system, along with a copy of the game, if she commits to entering a critical discussion of the games merits rather than call for it's ban out of ignorance..

Let's give this enough linkage that Ms Noble and her collegues will have to accept the challenge!

Cult of Personali-tea

Several folks linked last week to this story about a woman in the middle east arrested for joining a cult that worships a giant teapot.

While the lack of religious freedom is sad, I have to feel that the majority of folks linking to it were doing so more because they found the idea of a cult of people paying worship to a teapot to be shockingly newsworthy.

Evidently, none of these people have been to Siggraph. :-)

XKCD on Gygax's passing

Very sad that Gary Gygax passed away. How much of the video game world owes its roots to his creation?

XKCD, my fave web comic, has a nice strip on it:

What a great time to be alive!

Every once in a while I read or see something that makes me think "what a great time to be alive!". Here's one of those.

Cory Doctorow has posted notes on Elan Lee's ARG presentation at the O'Reilly emerging tech conference.

I read this part, twice, and it gave me shivers both times.

ARG: Nine Inch Nails Year Zero (Charge)
* Trent Reznor wrote an album wanted it to be the soundtrack for an experience
* Hid songs on flash drives hidden in concerts, clues in spectographic analysis of songs
* Secret underground concert -- fans were brought to a secret location where NIN played, halfway through the wall fell down and they were invaded by a SWAT team
* The album and game was a dystopian commentary on the increased trend to authority

How awesome is that!?! Also nicely makes the points from the last post about artist/audience relationships.

Can Seth Godin predict the Game Business' Future?

Seth Godin (who I link to a little too frequently, I think) has posted an awesome transcript of his talk given to music business executives. You can get to it here.

Go read it before continuing. It's short and entertaining. Time well spent over a coffee. Really. Go on! Kthxbai!

You're back? Good.

Now a while ago I had a post picked up and re-posted on Gamasutra about how those of us in the games business might re-think customer relationships and how customized content (as an expression or artifact of that relationship) might be a better solution to piracy than customer-punishing DRM. Over on GamesIndustry.biz, Rob Fahey echoes the sentiment, though looking more at the negative side ("if you treat your customers like criminals, they become criminals").

When reading the transcript of Seth's music biz talk, I was struck by the parallels. Let's recap:

Music (games) business was a good business, why?
- Entire medium devoted to promoting your product. He's talking about radio here, but one could argue that a good chunk of the internet is the parallel for games.
- Oligopoly He's talking about labels, but let's list how many publishers can fund $30M game titles en masse.
- Key part of our lives. For gamers, they can be as nostalgic about their first experience with Ultima Underworld or Doom as they can about their first album or the song playing at their wedding.
- Entire chain of retailers devoted to selling your product for you. Check
- 'God' on your side He's talking about the regard for Clapton, Madonna, etc. I give you Carmack, Wright, Molyneux, Miyamoto.
- Printing LPs was cheap .CD's and cardboard - check.
- Magazines devoted to promoting your product Check. He even mentions a bunch on page 7.
- Used to cost a lot of money to make a record. Check.
- Top 40 really mattered because people bought stuff just because their friends did. Check (another ranting post on this subject coming soon)

So, what happened?
- Key customers got old and buying patterns changed - new customers may want different things. Check.
- Piracy became easy because everything was digital. Check.
- Top 40 doesn't matter as much because of long tail. Here we have a difference, because games cost a lot to make compared to records, and so you only go so far down the tail as your starting point before it doesn't make sense - at least for big budget titles. Once you get to small titles, indies, etc, this applies here too.
- Digital distribution enables long tail and disrupts retail. Check.
- Suing customers is a bad idea. Oh man, I really hope we don't go down this road!

So, what's next?
- Good news, more people listening to music than ever before. Check for us too.
- Bad news, every one of the above bits of good news is no longer true. Now, here a number of them still apply to games - but there's writing on the wall. Games still cost a lot, but some types of games are getting way cheaper (XNA, Raph's company, etc), and while the Oligopoly is still intact, it's fraying around the edges a little.

OK, I'm going to stop drawing parallels here, but I think the analogy is pretty clear. Seth's advice to the music business is that timid transition won't work, you need to leap whole heartedly to a new model, and that this model is in selling & servicing relationships. The relationship is between customer and artist, and the label is now in the relationship services business. And THAT is what I was trying to say in my Gamasutra piece. The fact that Seth talks about 'tribe management business' gives us a clue that the MMO folk get it, as do a few of the studios, but that bulk of this business clearly doesn't.

I think it would behoove us to make the leap before we enter the catastrophic phase that the music business is in, but its hard to beleive that'll happen. Often it takes pain to inspire change.

Rent-a-world

Raph once again finds time out from his startup presidency to find interesting things in MMO-space.

This time it's Tommorrow Space, a VW offering Second-Life-esque virtual meeting spaces for social or business/conference purposes. Pretty unique business model: Rent the space by the day. $5.99 per day.

Wealth vs Religiosity

Fascinating Graph

from this flickr page.

There's of course an interesting "religious" argument about whether X causes Y (I'm in this camp), Y causes X (a VERY dangerous argument), or whether its just coincidental.

Outliers (like USA) are interesting. Would be interesting to see the outliers (Kuwait, USA, etc) further expanded among their populations.

Quote of the month

From the Berkshire Hathaway 2007 annual report:

...just about all Americans came to believe that house prices would forever rise. That conviction made a borrower’s income and cash equity seem unimportant to lenders, who shoveled out money, confident that HPA – house price appreciation – would cure all problems. Today, our country is experiencing widespread pain because of that erroneous belief. As house prices fall, a huge amount of financial folly is being exposed. You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out – and what we are witnessing at some of our largest financial institutions is an ugly sight.

thanks to Feld Thoughts for the pointer.

Goin' hardcore metrosexual

For the few readers that cared to follow my slow spiral into metrosexual shaving hell (Mark, this means you), you may be interested in knowing that I finally bit the bullet and went straight-razor.

On the positive side, the shave is super fantastico smooth.

On the other hand, getting it just right is a bit of an art, and the first time I did it (while at a hotel while travelling), I left the hotel bathroom looking like a crime scene in a Tarantino flick. Seriously, housekeeping probably considered calling the cops.

I definitely recommend going with the double edge safety razor as a compromise. I'm going to give the straight razor a few more goes (second time not as sanguineous as the first).

Seer

My friend Dean forwarded me this:

I was jazzed when I got Lasik, but now I'm itching to upgrade!

Futurebunny! How I envy thee!

Death by GDC

I. Am. Finished.

I love the GDC. This was my 15th. The first I attended was in 94. Ugh. I'm old.

Anyhow, as fun as it is, the show is incredibly draining. I was in meetings until 6:30 Friday, and then my 10pm flight was delayed until 12:30. I landed about 2:30, and finally made it home and to bed about 4:00AM.

Today is Alisa's birthday so I wanted to let her sleep in, which meant getting up at 7. Like I didn't get enough 3-4hr sleep nights this week.

I'll post some more thoughts and take-aways from GDC after I feel a bit more human.

Permission-Based Marketing and The 3 Rules of Facebook Game Design

I had a moderately-cocktail-infused epiphany during a dinner discussion at the game developers conference today that I wanted to jot down before it fades from memory.

The conference has had its share of discussions about Facebook as a game platform, whether the opportunity will crystallize to a business worthy of the hype, and about how design for Facebook as a platform would differ from games on other platforms.

During said dinner discussion, lots of examples - a few good, many bad - were cited and discussed. Out of that discussion, I extracted what I'll claim here to be the Three Rules of Facebook Game Design.

Rule #1: Facebook games must engage the player at two levels: Peripheral Notification and Invitation, and Directly Engaged Gameplay.

Directly Engaged Gameplay is the player playing your game. It might be in a flash window, it might be scattered about the facebook users page, it might be elsewhere. The point is that the player is directly spending time doing the various things you want him/her to do. All your traditional game design rules apply here.

Peripheral Notification and Invitation is all of the various feeds that the game spits into their updates (and that of their friends! More on this in a moment).

The main point here, is that there are TWO distinctly different levels of engagement. In the former, they are spending time playing your game. In the latter, they are spending time "checking Facebook" and may want to know what's going on, but that's it. Which brings me to Rule #2.

Rule #2) Peripheral Notification and Invitation == Permission Based Marketing.

If you don't get this, go read a required amount of Seth Godin and come back when you are done.

When the player is not engaged directly in gameplay, then EVERY interaction your game has with them via feeds and the like, is textbook permission-based marketing. Before they've signed up for the game, you are asking permission to have them engage with your game for the first time. Upon install, you should be asking permission to have them spam their friends (and assume the answer is no), when they are players and you feed them news about goings on in the game, you are asking their permission to have them come play your game.

ASKING not INSISTING.

Consider the two following hypothetical feed snippets:

JoeShmo just assailed your castle. Click here to defend it before all your villagers die.

vs

JoeShmo just assailed your castle. It survived but several villagers did not. Click here to survey the damage, and to stealthily plot your revenge.

The former tells someone who's logged on that they MUST go play now, whether or not they have time. The latter invites them to play, but doesn't insist on it. To someone taking a 10 minute break at work, the latter is far friendlier.

3) The game doesn't need to live on Facebook.

Perhaps the more controversion of the 3 rules during tonights discussion, I postulated that if you observe rules 1 and 2, then there's really nothing necesarily better about the "game" itself being in a window on the Facebook page of that user than in a separate window, a downloadable EXE, etc. there are certainly issues around what kind of data you are trying to export or whether you can export it, what the client tech is and whether it's as ubiquitous as Flash, etc. The point though is that there isn't anything inherently BETTER about it being on the users Facebook page. The value in the facebook element resides in the opportunity to do permission based marketing to engage with the player outside the core game, and in being able to exploit the friend relationships between friends, provided that 'exploit' still respects the permission-asking element. Once you come to that conclusion, then you can have the Facebook-game-design discussion about ANY game title (Assassin's Creed, The Sims, WoW, etc)

UI: The next frontier in game innovation?

Holy Hell! How did I miss Crayon Physics until now?!



This looks just awesome. As a fan of The Incredible Machine, Bridge Builder, and other physics puzzle type games, I can't wait to play it. Love the aesthetic too.

More importantly though, I wonder whether games like Crayon Physics, Little Big Planet, and applications like SketchUp are pointers to a whole new area of innovation for games: UI.

The challenge with any games aiming to support "user generated content", or for that matter, just letting people manipulate the world in less constrained ways - is that controlling stuff, let alone creating stuff, especially in 3D, is HARD.

So how do you make it easy? These apps are pointing the way. I think a great opportunity and challenge in front of developers today is in letting users accomplish unlimited, complicated, beautiful things, and doing so quickly and easily. Easier said than done!

Should VCs invest in casual game developers?

I wrote a rather lengthy piece on my other blog, melding some thoughts on Casual Connect opinions and some observations at DICE.

Rather than cut and paste, I'll just point you there.

Internet reports shortage of [255,166,166]

Hello Kitty Online, the spectacularly pink virtual world, has opened for business. Millions of girls (and some boys) the world round are as excited as the girl standing next to Hello Kitty herself (himself?) below.

While I'm not an MMO player, I'm willing to give to give it a shot if it will make me feel like that girl does. Who wouldn't? :-)




Thanks to Raph for the link.

Felt tables and MMOs, and Match-3's of a different kind

One of the sessions at DICE that I found particularly interesting, if only because it was from a another 'games industry' all together, was one from Roger Snow, a VP at ShuffleMaster, a company supplying the casino industry with all kinds of game products. Among them, licensed table games, which is what this session was about.

The market for table games is $50M worldwide. Small compared to our industry, but then I'm not sure how it would compare to, say, the licensing of IP in the casual games industry, which is perhaps something it's more comparable to.

Snow explained how the bulk of table games on casino floors are public domain games (Blackjack, Poker, etc). In an effort to make games more interesting, people have come up with variants that are more engaging. Things like side-bets, progressive pots, etc, and cross-cultural game mashups are added to come up with things like Ultimate Draw Poker, Four Card Poker, Pai Gow Poker, Carribean Stud, etc.

These games are then, provided the IP is properly protected, licensed to casinos for a flat fee. They then operate them hoping they'll yield more revenue than the public domain fare they are replacing.

I was surprised a little that the flat-fee licensing model was the only model used (at least that he discussed). Wouldn't a royalty make more sense? Pay for performance and all that. I'm guessing that the casinos aren't enthused about sharing revenue numbers with partners and making themselves auditable, etc, and that's likely the reason.

Anyhow. He went on to speak a little about the games in this business and made the following points:

- The business is relatively young. The first licensed game only emerged in the 80's.

- About 50 new games are introduced every year. Only ONE will be successful, and when it does, it will last a long time.

- Acheiving critical mass is important. People need to recognize the game when going from one casion to the other.

- In the past 15 years or so, there have been 10 hits. That's it.

So the epiphany that I had was that this sounded an awful lot like MMOs. How many successful MMOs has our industry seen in the past decade? Maybe a dozen? The critical mass element applies too.

Contrast that to the points Snow made about the slot machine business:

- There's a glut of content, with hundreds or even thousands of games introduced every year.

- Games are given at best a couple months to succeed, and if they don't perform they are pulled from the floor.

- In cases where they do succeed, imitators soon follow, copying whatever the latest twist is on the match-3 mechanic.

- While there's a little technical innovation (bigger screens, better graphics, etc), a far surer path to money is to license a piece of well known IP and wrap a traditional game mechanic around it. Plenty of Wheel of Fortune, Tabasco, Alien, Adams Family, Price is Right, Beverly Hillbillies are just a few examples.

Sounds just a little like the casual games business doesn't it? Right down to the oft-seen match-3 mechanic.

There are of course many differences. Development budgets between felt table games ("some rules and a piece of felt with some circles on it" was how Snow put it) and MMOs, are just one example.

Still, I feel there must be some lessons to be learned here.

Maybe that's why EA's Louis Castle is on Shufflemaster's board?

The (repeatedly false) reports of the death of PC Games

Over the past five years, I've read what have to amount to hundreds of articles, blog posts, analyst reports, etc, on the future of PC games, declaring them either dead, or alive and well.

The reality, of course, lies somewhere in between, or that they are both true, depending how you look at it.

This article by Rob Fahey on GamesIndustry.Biz, is the best article I've read on the subject in a long time. Rather than go for the sensationalist tactic of taking one side or the other, he paints a more accurate, nuanced view of reality:

For once, this isn't the cyclical question of whether consoles will kill the PC market - a question asked so often, and answered with such an emphatic negative, that it finally seems to have fallen out of the industry's discourse, and good riddance. Rather, it is a genuine desire, both on the creative and financial sides of the business, to understand just what shape PC gaming is going to take in the coming years.

For a long time, it was simple to categorise PC games as "hardcore", with console titles seen as more casual. It wasn't a division that was entirely accurate, but it was close enough to the mark to be useful - for a while, at least.

That's simply no longer the case. While the PC still plays host to some of the most hardcore gaming genres, such as massively multiplayer games, realistic flight simulators and real-time strategy titles, a huge new market of ultra-casual games has also opened up on the platform.

It's a good read, especially for those that aren't close enough to the business to get a sense of both side of the story.

Deal(s) with the Devil

So, long after giving other folks crap about it, I cracked and bought an iPhone this week.

My windows mobile phone had died, I'd gone back to and old phone, and was shopping around for something new. In the meantime, I went to DICE and watched people using theirs and realized that I was willing to trade off my complaint about 'sub-optimal phone' in order to get 'Internet in your Pocket'.

Phone's not as bad as I thought, though still far from perfect. But the device is fantastic. Really fun and useful.

Of course, going with it meant that I had to click through no less than FOUR separate EULA's (thus the title of this post) with Apple and AT&T.

To top it off, when all that was done, I got a message asking (paraphrasing, I forget the exact words): "Would you like to go to iTunes and see what songs the record companies have granted permission for using as ringtones". Excuse me? Ummm, no thanks!

NPD's track game subs: Please don't get it wrong!

GamesIndustry.biz reports that NPD is going to track subscription data around games.

This addresses a long-unaddressed market demand for data around online games. Many have asked if the PC game business is as unhealthy as retail game sales indicates, or whether the market is in fact just changing. (Whether all of PC gaming's revenues are being sucked into a giant WoW crater and whether that is healthy for the ecosystem or not is another matter entirely).

I applaud NPD's efforts, but I do worry that they are going to mess it up. A couple of things that make this space complicated to cover:

• Game service subscriptions vs individual game subscriptions. e.g. GameTap vs World of Warcraft.
• Revenue from non-subscription sources. e.g. Advertising, In-game item sales, etc.
• Where the consumers are located. e.g. US consumers subscribing to/playing Korean games and vice versa.
• Hardcore vs Casual. I'm sure they'll cover World of Warcraft. Will they cover Pogo? Likely. Will they cover casual game subscriptions on MSN Messenger? Less likely. Club Penguin?
• Platforms. Does an Xbox Live subscription count? Is that game revenue or platform revenue?

According to their press release, they are polling "thousands of gamers ages 13 and older who are members of NPD’s online panel of 3 million consumers", which seems like a prescription to messing up a couple of the areas above (e.g. just missed most of Club Penguin's user base, most of the casual audience, etc)

Anyhow. Steps in the right direction, but still I worry.

Back from DICE

Back from DICE and my brain is reeling. Lots to post about, but I have to pack and head back out again to Portland. Will post once I get a chance to get through my notes.

In the meantime, Poker Smash is out, and it rocks, according to critics. Go buy it and give the boys at Voidstar the kudos they've earned.

Ignite Portland

I attended the second Ignite Portland tonight. Adam and I went down to the beautiful Bagdad Theatre and just barely made it in to the standing-room only (750+ capacity) venue before the locked it down and turned a ton of people away.

I hadn't been to an Ignite event before but was turned onto it by my friend Rob when he gave a talk at Ignite Seattle. From previous event agendas, I expected more tech & entrepreneurial stuff. There was some of that, but there was a mix of everything from that to explanations of why Germans love David Hasselhoff.

It was very entertaining. I'll definitely try to attend again. I'm also going to try to present there as well. I find the restrictive format (20 slides, 15 seconds each, auto-timed) to be an interesting constraint to work in.

A good thing about the event was that while the presentations varied in quality, none of them was very poor. They ranged from fair to excellent - which is far better than I expected.

The only complaint I have is that the intros and housekeeping - done by those that put the event together - were just crap. (A) They should have been done in the same 15-slide Ignite format, (B) they spent too much time stating the obvious (e.g. the 15-slide/5 minute format was stated multiple times, "They sell beer here" - ya we get it), and (c) most important of all - it should have been HIGH ENERGY!

Anyhow, forgive the venting. I really think they did a good job of pulling the event together, but it was disappointing on the kickoff and quickly recovered.