No Pax for me :-(

The forces of the universe continue to conspire against me, and I'm not making it to Pax again.

Sounds like it's really exploding in size, and it looks that way too. Jason's posted some pix showing just that, plus goat spotting!

Friends Mark, Jane, Andre and Rob were all speaking on a cool panel I'd like to have chimed in on, about whether casual is 'killing' core games. Sorry I missed it.

Meanwhile, I've got to get back Mother of All Spreadsheets... [grumble]

Zero Punctuation takes on Braid

Jon suffer's Yatzee's wrath:

Evolution of retail

photo.jpg, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Having not set foot in a retail game store for some time, I found myself at Target recently.

Holy balls! Look at the PC game shelf! Approx 1/3 traditional PC hardcore fare (not shown), 1/3 kids & adventure (e.g. Dora, Nancy Drew, etc - also not shown) and 1/3 $20 casual download titles.

Once the domain of Mumbo Jumbo and a couple others, now every downloadable title to have proven itself beyond a given threshold (not sure what that might be - 100k units? half that maybe?) graduates to physical retail.

I wonder whether this is a nice secondary market or whether it's "the big leagues". I'm guessing the former, but who knows!?

As an aside, it's interesting to see their box designs. Most of these games had to sell themselves on a name and a 60x60 thumbnail. The luxury of a big cardboard box lets them mix it up a bit.

It's Bizarro Internetz time!

The Internet is a conundrum of opposites!

• Competing Loanwords! GD Mag's Brandon Sheffield argues we've reached a Graphics Plateau. On the other hand, Crytek's Cevat Yerli argues we're at the beginning of a Graphics Renaissance! While both make some valid points, I'll side with Yerli. I've heard the 'mips fatigue' argument for 15 years, and it's graphics variant for at least the last 5. We still have *very* far to go in graphics, and in computing for that matter.
  
• I posted yesterday about Cliff Harris' concluding that DRM was bad for business. Id's Todd Hollenshead apparently thinks the evil lies with platform vendors, who won't bake DRM into their platforms. Do we really have to learn the painful lessons that the music biz did, for ourselves?
• Apparently we do. Hey, we can NOT learn from those lessons even better by hiring on RIAA legal beagles. Ugh. No opposites there, just bone-headed behavior on both sides of the pond.

It's all too much to ponder. Probably best pondered while sweating in a sauna, cause that's where all tech talk happens, right. Warning. Footage of pudgy nerds talkin' mobile gaming. You have bene warned. (seriously though. I like that it's pretty out of the box approach to pitching. Then I like nothing else about it. shudder. Those guys should seriously check their image)

One way to get to the root of a problem...

Awesome post up by Positech Games' Cliff Harris, in which he, when trying to figure out why people pirate his games, decided to ASK THEM, via his blog.

The comments back were detailed, thoughtful and enlightening. Cliff also outlines a plan to take action based on the feedback received. Put another check in the 'DRM does more harm than good' column:

1) No more DRM

I only used DRM for one game (Democracy 2) and it's trivial. It's a one-time only internet code lookup for the full version. I've read enough otherwise honest people complain about DRM to see that its probably hurting more than it help's. I had planned on using the same system for Kudos 2, but I've changed my mind on that. I have also removed it from Democracy 2 today. I now use no DRM at all."

It's a cool read for a bunch of reasons. Check it out.

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.