Ilomilo!

Polish + Cute + Platform/Puzzler. Coming to XBLA. Looks awesome. This and Monday Night Combat are all I'm really excited for... esp since hearing that Joe Danger isn't coming to the platform :-(

Vintage Book Win!

Score!, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

I got this awesome book via ebay. "Inside the Personal Computer" is a somewhat dated but still useful and highly intuitive pop-up book on how computers work. Great for the kids

Thanks to Margaret Robinson for the pointer. Someone else has captured pics of the inside here:

http://jonathanryan.org/2009/04/28/pop-up-guide-to-the-personal-computer/

Sigh. Games as Art (again)

So Roger Ebert has gone curmudgeon on games again, this time using Kelly Santiago's TED talk as fodder. She posts a good rebuttal here. Kotaku's Brian Ashcraft also chimes in with a good response.

If you were following, you might have missed this really good response from the esteemed Scott McCloud. The whole thing is worth reading but here's an excerpt:

If you’re asking if videogames are art, I think you’re asking the wrong question. I don’t think art is an either/or proposition. Any medium can accommodate it, and there can be at least a little art in nearly everything we do.

Once in a while, someone makes a work in their chosen medium so driven by aesthetic concerns and so removed from any other consideration that we trot out the A-word, but even then it’s a matter of degrees, and for most creative endeavors you can find a full spectrum from the sublime to the mundane.

Book Review: The Invention of Air

Wow, was this a lucky surprise. I picked it up off the shelf at the library, randomly browsing their history section when another book I was looking for was out. Here' s a link to the book on Amazon:

The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America

The book is the story of Joseph Priestley, who though he is not nearly as well known as the founding fathers of the US, was friend to many of them, published over 150 works, and did no less than discover oxygen and the concept of biosystems.

It's a fascinating bit of history, and holds some interesting lessons for today. For example, after providing for his family for several years under patronage of a wealthy individual, that patronage was revoked. He then had the idea of crowd-sourcing that patronage, distributing among a collection of patrons to diversify risk. I couldn't help but think of many of the game projects being done on Kickstrarter.

Anyhow, fun bit of reading and illuminating from the standpoint of history, politics, and science

Book Review: The Audacity of Hope

OK, maybe I'm the late to the party, but we had a long car trip and brought it along as an audio book.

Obama reads it himself, which is nice. he's such a great speaker. I agree with most of his ideas and would have voted for him if I could have (still don't have citizenship).

One thing that did strike me though was how... formulaic, his prose is.

"When it comes to issue A, some people feel adjective A, adjective B, or even adjective C. Then again others feel adjective D, or E, or F." - Rinse, lather repeat.

I still think he's great, but he's more of a politician than most would have us beleive

Steve Jobs shows his REAL thoughts on iPhone development

I'm long overdue to write up a post on the iPhone, appstore and closed-vs-open platforms. This isn' t it.

In the meantime though, Dave wrote up some thoughts on the announcements from Apple recently, and *brilliantly* caught something Jobs said that most folks seem to have missed:

Jobs, in speaking of the addition to an advertising revenue model to the platform, said

“This is us helping our developers make money so they can survive and keep the prices of their apps reasonable,”

To which Dave asks:

Btw, was anyone else struck by Jobs’ use of the word “survive?” I think that’s the closest he’ll ever come to admitting that life for developers is rough in the world o’Apple.

Bravo! What a catch. Quelle choix de verbe! "Survive" indeed!

Pixels

Fun game-themed vid for those that haven't seen it plastered everywhere already:

Book Review: For The Win

After seeing my write-up of Makers, Cory was nice enough to send me an early copy of For the Win, his next novel due out in May.

I really loved it, proven by the fact that I had, for the first time in a long time, a late-night reading binge where I could not put the book down for the final third of it, staying up until the wee hours on a night that I really did need to get up early.

For The Win follows several characters, a so-cal high-school nerd, an Indian slum girl, a Chinese 20-something former factory worker, who share in common that they play MMOs, and do so for money - as gold farmers or similar. They share in common that they are tired of their rights being abused, in one case by parents, in others by mafioso-type bosses.

They then meet a mysterious figure online who proposes to organize them into a union. Postulating that while the MMO EULAs stipulate that anyone can get kicked off at any time for any reason, kicking EVERYONE off will be a nose-severed-to-spite-face thing, they team together to orchestrate a virtual walk-out.

From there the book takes off and becomes one part Halting State, one part Hoffa, one part Matrix and adds a pinch of Tarantino. If that wasn't enough, there's a parable about Wall Street and the mortgage crisis.

Here's the thing though. Cory is usually thought of as a science fiction author but I'm not sure For The Win counts as science fiction. The book is set in the near future and there are some passing references to tech that doesn't yet exist today, but most of the book is absolutely plausible today. The premise isn't based on tech getting to a certain point - its already there - but more on just the idea of a Hoffa-style union-forming organization happening online. Totally feasible, just difficult.

Just as Halting State provided us with some glimpse as to the future of games, For The Win provides with us with a glimpse of a near future where the one-sided EULA may come under scrutiny of the customer, and the customer may say "No."

Great entertainment, and a good perspective on the future of MMOs.

Class Acts at GDC

It's been a few days since GDC 2010 wrapped, and between the thoughts reeling in my head and the work that piled up at the office, I haven't had time to post much on what I learned.

Having thought about it though, I've decided what my favorite session was this year: the rant session. It's among my favorites every year, but this year's rant, "Fired and Fired Up: Jobless Developers Rant" had a couple of rants that I thought were worth calling out.

I had to dash out of the session halfway through in order to make my flight, so I missed a couple of the rants. However, the first half-hour had two sessions that shared a commn thread:

Justin Hall, former CEO of Gamelayers, now at NGMoco (disclosure: he's also a friend), presented on the rise and fall and eventual crash & burn, of Gamelayers. He talked about everything that happens when a graduate student takes on 1.5M in VC money and ramps a company rapidly up to a dozen-plus employees to build an innovative browser-based MMO. Raph koster has a detailed write-up of Justin's rant.

Paul Bettner, formerly of Ensemble Studios, spoke about the decline and eventual closure of Ensemble. Pretty different than Justin's case, where this was the decline of a well-funded studio with a long history of doing AAA titles. The rant centered on how the grind of crunch in trying to chase the high of hitting the top 10, over time wore away at quality, morale, and execution. At the end, Microsoft was shutting down a studio that was a shadow of its former self. Joystiq has a detailed write-up here.

So, given these very different stories, what did they have in common? Both Justin and Paul had one identical phrase in their presentations:

"It was my fault. I failed."

Justin could easily have blamed the gamers for not 'getting it', the VCs for not throwing more money at it, browser companies for lack of interoperability, or any number of things. Instead he blamed himself. He was at the helm and it was up to him to watch the bottom line. Raph's writeup has the details.

Paul could have blamed Microsoft for mis-management, the team for not crunching hard enough, HR for not hiring the right people, console vendors for their complex platforms, etc. Instead he pointed out that he failed by ignoring the wear of crunch on people and families and he apologized to the people who's years he stole.

Both talks were passionate and brutally honest.

I watched them and noted that we came out of 2008/2009 watching news coverage of a cavalcade of Wall street and Detroit CEOs shirking any responsibility for their companies tanking and taking out people's life savings and jobs in the process.

I think in an age where "The Buck Stops Here" has disappeared from the leadership vernacular, I think these guys deserve kudos for displaying leadership and, quite frankly, class.

Jane McGonigal's Epic Win at TED

Jane's TED Talk is fabulous:

Monday Night Combat teaser vid

It's like TF2, but with bacon. :-)

Seriously, these guys are super bright and have been working on this for a long time. It's going to be a fun title.

Thoughts from DICE 2010 (Dice-10-post1)

I got back from DICE Friday, and my head is still swimming a bit with all the information I soaked up.

Overall, the sentiment seemed cautiously upbeat, certainly more so than GDC. Studio closures are still happening, but there was a feel that a good deal of the blood-letting happened when publishers canned many of their 'B' titles last year.

Like with GDC, there was a good deal of noise about console downloadable, iPhone, Facebook, etc. Unlike GDC though, this conference is heavily slanted toward 'big game' pubs and devs. Many in the audience are clearly biased when it comes to all other platforms and business models. They may be keeping an open mind, but messages like that given in John Schappert's talk ("don't give up on shiny discs just yet") are both a voice of reason, and an indication of the skepticism about these new models. There's validity on both sides. The world is changing, but maybe not as fast as some would have us believe.

G4 has vids up of all the sessions. Some thoughts on a few of those I managed to attend:

Disney keynote. I wrote on facebook while it was happening: "The Disney keynote is an amazing concatenation of stereotypes, platitudes, and stock photo pablum. Several of us in the back are playing 'predict the next slide'. I'll take "old folks playing wii sports in a retirement home" for a thousand, Alex. We have a winner!" ' nuff said.

Designing Outside the Box. Best session of the conference. Lengthier post here. Best quote from it [while poo-pooing convergence] "The iphone is hte Pocket Exception: It's the Swiss army knife. Like a swiss army knife, it does everything (not necesarily perfectly) but fits in your pocket. However, if someone gave you a 24-inch swiss army knife that had a butcher clever, a spatula, knife, fork, spoon, etc, and said here is the ideal device for your kitchen, you would say bullshit. And THIS is why everyone hates the iPad."

EEDAR's Forces at Play. Another one of my favorites. Lots of analysis here. A couple interesting observations though:

• The "focus on quality" the point to as resulting in higher meta-critic scores I read as just "publishers cancelled a bunch of their B titles" - it's a focus on quality, but in a different way.
• The shift away from Q4-for-focused release calendar toward more distributed looked like it was actually cyclical - meaning that early in console life-cycle publishers focus more on Q4 releases - makes sense as the consoles will be big Xmas pushes

The one down-side of the above talk (and one would infer EEDAR's data as a whole) is that while they made a small reference to the fact that they have no data on PC downloadable, iphone, MMO subs, etc, they then didn't note that these things could have been part of what was impacting those trends noted in the presentation.

Randy Pitchford's talk. The talk was OK, strayed from the point in the middle a bit, but came together a bit. I love his historical example to back the main point of the talk, and the way his talk came full circle. Bravo.

The hot topics sessions were pretty good. I posted some thoughts on one of them here.

Lots of others worth checking out, a few of them, not so much. Still, they are posted and free so make a point of viewing them over the next week or two.

It's worth noting that this is a great move on the part of the organizers, putting their money where their mouth is, and showing that the real value in attending the conference is in the networking, so the session vids are just a sales tool. [GDC folk take note!]

Bonus: Best comment from the show, IMHO: At one point when Richard Garriott was speaking, a woman sitting next to me turned and said "Is that the same Richard Garriott that went into space?!".

I replied "Yes it is. However I'll bet that 9 out of 10 people in this room are remarking 'wow! that's the same Richard Garriott that created Ultima' and really aren't impressed with the whole getting shot into space thing!"

Design Outside the Box: Jesse Schell (DICE-10-Post2)

My favorite talk from Dice 2010. Getting lots of press around the blogosphere. It was really bold, and the Mitch-Headberg-esque delivery didn't hurt either.

Some of it was a bit out there, but the overall message was to have an open mind to how far we have to go, just how broad gaming is going to get, and to think outside the (console) box.

Here are some terse notes in case you prefer that to the video version or would like to read my commentary [in braces]

--

I want to look at Facebook and how that's only the start of how things are going to go broader than we can imagine, but first some basic facebook math [he really means some humorous facts but they get the point across]

"FV>T" - there are more Farmville players than total Twitter accounts - Facebook is BIG

"LG>DP" - Lead gen (credit card offers, netflix sub signups, etc) are bigger than direct payment. [Note there was no mention of the controversy around these] -Facebook is STRANGE

"EA - 1500 FTE + PF - 300M = WTF!?" - EA minus 1500 full time employees plus playfish acquisition for $300M all in the same day = WHAT THE HELL!? - Facebook is TERRIFYING

Facebook is Big, Strange, Terrifying. But Terrifying really means unexpected.

Lets step back and look what else was unexpected.

Mafia wars - Imagine hearing the proposal "I'm going to do a text-based Mafia game and make $100M"?!

Club Penguin - Kids subscription MMO?!

Wii - Majority of the room did not predict their MSS leadership

Wii Fit - A billion dollars alone!!!

Guitar hero - $70 ASP and a plastic guitar - Entire new genre

Webkinz - Stuffed animal subbed Virtual World

Xbox acheivements - metagame & social network (outside the game, bigger than any one game)

Lots of psychological tricks in the above:

Club Penguin: free to play - eventually kid asks parent for $6. Virtual currency accumulates but can be used so they 'stretch' the amount the kid nags parent for the $6 until in. I call this the 'elastic velvet rope'

WebKinz: Every stuffed animal has always -to a child- contained an imaginary "magical" version of that animal that talks and moves and does stuff. WK lets kids actually SEE that animal. [There's some validity to this assertion, but I think it's far simpler than that: Kids like VW's, and the stuffed animal moved the subscription into a physical format the parent understands (buy a stuffed animal at retail)]

Mafia wars: Text based mafia game - phsycology is that it uses your real friends. I am better than U and I'll spend money to prove it.

We all do game design, but how many people are Brainstorming and researching new psychological locks and keys like the ones above.

What else do all these have in common: THEY ARE ALL IN SOME WAY BUSTING THROUGH TO REALITY!!!! [This is a really good observation]

Taps into a bigger trend [references "Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want" - I'll have to read it]

TV has gone to 'reality TV', people value 'authentic' products (made with 'real' juice. organic food, etc). [While I think the organic food parallel was a stretch, he's onto something here. One could view the indie game trend through this lense and say "people like Braid partly because it came from Jon Blow's heart, not from Vivendi's management committee and focus group data]

We live in a bubble of fake bullshit. We are rebelling against that.

People are not looking at tech as the enemy here, but as a to how we can use to cut back into reality.

What about tech convergence?

Tech convergence is total bullshit. Every device everywhere will have games of all different kinds. Tech DIVERGENCE!

[I love this part]

BUT! I have an iphone. That breaks your divergence point! Bah! I claim it is the Pocket Exception Law

Pocket Exception: Swiss army knife.

Like a swiss army knife, it does everything (not necesarily perfectly) but fits in your pocket.

If someone gave you a 24" swiss army knife that had a butcher clever, a spatula, knife, fork, spoon, etc, and said here is the ideal device for your kitchen, you would say bullshit.

And THIS is why everyone hates the iPad.

[Fuck ya! Awesome]

Lots of examples of games pervading the real world:

fantasy football

geo caching

simpsons scavenger hunt on TV [clues embeded across different shows. TV Network metagame!]

darpa red balloon hunt

weight watchers

[HOLY BALLS! -->] Ford Hybrid dashboard display has a green leafy plant on it. The better you drive to conserve gas, teh more the plant grows. There's a f***ing tamagochi built into my Ford Hybrid!!!

Professor Lee Sheldon has built an RPG for his students where instead of giving out grades, he gives out XP and they level up through homework assignments, good test scores, etc.

Sensors are happening - DSi, Natal

We are on road toward disposable technology

[lengthy example of a fictional future where divergence leads to all devices connected to metagame...]

teeth brushing - +10

cornflakes +10

+45 take the bus to work

REM implant

+200 got to work on time

implant tattoo - tattoville adsense

lunch dr pepper - +500 for five in a week

shopping +100 for buying organic

did you practice your piano +50 points

kindle 3.0 - eye tracking

achievement unlocked for finishing 500 novels

However, when I realize my 500th novel was some piece of drivel... and that my grand-kids and their grand-kids will be able to look up what my 500th novel was... well, maybe I should change my behavior and read something more ambitious, something more worthy...

So while the examples I've run through thus far seem like escape into a game, may be possible that it will inspire us to be better people.

[Amen!]

Kim Defines "Independent" (Dice-10 Post3)

There was an interesting 'hot topics' session at DICE in which Chris Taylor (Gas Powered Games) and Michael Capps (Epic Games - standing in for Tim Schaeffer) debated "Independent" development and "Indie" development.

Chris at one point made the assertion that there are different tiers. For example, there might be "2 guys in a garage" independent", Gas Powered Games-esque "$5M title bankrolled ourselves" independent, and there's Epic/Valve "We're sitting on a fair pile o'cash" independent.

There were some bar conversations (the best kind at DICE, of course) about this and about the difference between "independent" and "indie". There was some degree of concensus that the former has to do with influence and decision making. Dependence on someone for putting food on the table, etc. The latter seemed to mean different things to different people. The type of game design to some, the aesthetic to others, the 'spirit' in which the game is created.

Anyhow, here are my definitions of the two based on the epiphany I had in Chris's/Michael's talk and on the subsequent conversations (and libations):

Independent Developer: One having funds at their disposal to cover payroll through the next one to two cycles of development. (This definition works if you are sleeping on your friends couch while working on your Flash game, or whether you are covering 150 heads through a 2 year dev cycle).

Indie Game: One who's development and/or design tells a story that goes against the convention of the time. (This definition works for a game design or aesthetic that is different or goes against the grain - it also works for someone that does a run-of-the-mill schmup but does it on their own terms and funds it through kickstartr)

Please iterate and refine (or refute) in the comments .

Margaret Wallace on Virtual Goods Economies

This presentation from Margaret Wallace is a good 'lay of the land' on virtual goods in core & casual games.

Inner Workings of Virtual Goods Economies

View more presentations from Margaret Wallace.

Plus ca change

“America has in fact transformed journalism from what it once was, the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life, into an agency for collecting, condensing and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence,” he moaned. “The frantic haste with which we bolt everything we take, seconded by the eager wish of the journalist not to be a day behind his competitor, abolishes deliberation from judgment and sound digestion from our mental constitutions. We have no time to go below surfaces, and as a general thing no disposition.”

- W.J. Stillman (Journalist)

The above quote is typical of the panic we hear today on the subject of how the Internet threatens to destroy journalism (first off by way of destroying the newspaper business, but more fundamentally by destroying our attention spans and focus).

If you haven't heard of Stillman before you can be forgiven as he uttered the above quote in 1891. The doomsday technology at that time was not the Internet, but the telegraph. News was turning from something that traveled over days and weeks by ship, mail and carrier pigeon to something that traveled by wire in minutes and hours. People's focus was diluted as suddenly they had all the world's news headlines, not just local.

This piece in The Economist is a nice bit of history and a reminder that the basic need is still there, despite turmoil as the industry struggles to find new footing. More importantly, it's a reminder that these arguments are seldom new.

Heavy Rain looks pretty bold

At CES, I got a chance to briefly play Heavy Rain, the much-anticipated PS3 title I've blogged about before (as far back as 4 years ago!).

The section I played reminded me of some of the 'detective' portions of Batman: Arkham Asylum, mixed with a Shenmue style big-world RPG. From what I gather, the clues assembled during these portions are sorted through in a 'Minority Report' style environment for the character, making a modernized version of the Impossible Mission solver (you youngsters may need to look that one up). The game looked very polished but in the section I played, not very remarkable beyond it's prettiness.

Today though, I got pointed this clip: Heavy Rain Video Game, Japanese Special Presentation Doc on GameTrailers and wow. I have to say I'm impressed even after four years of waiting.

I don't know if it's going to succeed where games like Shenmue fell short, but thank goodness someone's trying. Go Quantic Dream!

Book Review: Makers

I finished Cory Doctorow's Makers a few days back but haven't had time to post a review until just now, which has given me some time to mull it over a bit before doing so.

On the surface, Makers is Doctorow revisiting familiar territory: Distopian steampunk sci-fi, this time around the premise of the collision between personal fabrication and incumbent industry (something he already visited in short form in After the Siege).

The book has more to it than just this.

It's partly a parable of Lessig's Free Culture argument [Creativity and innovation always build on the past; The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it; Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past; Ours is less and less a free society].

It's also a story about Creative Destruction, and about how our legal and governmental systems impede it.

Mix in notes of Doctorow' attachment (and I'm guessing love-hate feelings) for Disney (which he also visited in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom), an opinion on working at large corporations (the passage on page 403 rang so true it was painful to read), a commentary about shanty towns and peoples ability to govern themselves, some thoughts on obesity, consumerism, and other facets of the decline of American society, and you have the makings of a fun and thought provoking novel.

[One note: As some of the Amazon reviews note, there's a couple of pretty graphic sex scenes in the book. Not a big deal for adults, but for those that might have read Little Brother and might think this suitable to give to kids for reading, well, buyer beware. Personally, I think it's fine for a writer to stretch his wings a little as I think he's done here. I was surprised by the vitriole in some of those Amazon reviews. On another related note: It's kind of weird reading really graphic stuff like that written by a guy I've had dinner with a couple times :-/. ]

Playfish's Smart Move in the Facebook Gold Rush

This is a good piece on why Playfish sold itself to EA.

New markets (for game makers or anyone else), the successful ones anyway, tend to turn into gold rushes. Someone takes a chance, stakes a claim, hits gold, and then in come the hordes of followers that heard about the guy that got rich with only a mule, a pan, and the clothes on his back.

In recent years we saw a casual games gold rush, a console downloadable (lead by XBLA) gold rush, an iPhone gold rush, and now it's "Wagons, Ho!" for the Facebook gold rush.

With each of them, the market achieves an equilibrium over time as competition increases faster than consumer spending does, and eventually you get to the same place as the rest of the games industry: A hit driven business in which a minority are profitable, a very small minority are extremely profitable, and the majority go bust trying to get to the top end of the curve.

What *differs* though, in how these markets evolve, is the tactics taken as the marketplace crowds. The strategies available are the same across all of these, but which is the right one, tactically, varies by platform.

They are:

1. Lowball on price: The PC casual download biz eventually went this way, and many are trying this tactic on the iPhone, but I believe it's a fools game, and some of the others below will turn out to be the real winners for that platform.
2. Out-Innovate: This one is easy. Go invent an awesome game mechanic/biz model/etc, that no one else has thought of, and that everyone loves and finds addictive. Oh, and make it hard to imitate. Easier said than done. The problem with this one is that there's no clear path.
3. Spend your way out of the clouds: Spend on development, spend on marketing, etc. Build a better looking title, get pretty screenshots, and then go pound the pavement to get more ink/photons than the other guy. (We saw many XBLA titles go this way as budgets went from $100k to $1M)
4. Out-Brand: This is another flavor of spending your way out of the clouds. Specifically, license IP/Brands, from games or elsewhere, can help your title stand out in a crowded space. This works especially well with a less scrutinous audience (doesn't necessarily mean hardcore, could mean just more price or time sensitive).

The interesting thing about the Playfish acquisition is that they pretty clearly are claiming that #4 is going to be the strategy of choice for Facebook, and I have to believe they are right.

Dropping price doesn't work because the FB games are mostly free/freemium. Innovation is risky everywhere (better to be 'fast follower'), and increasing the game budget... well that will happen, but it's not clear where it ends, or if FB games are ready for Unreal engine license.

So that leaves out-branding, and as the article points out, the EA acquisition gives Playfish the financial resources with which they can go do this, plus a great set of connections at EA with their own IP and licenses from other EA partners.

[note, of course you'll see ALL the above strategies employed in each of these markets, but there will be majority gravitation toward one or two at any given time]

What Amazon/Macmillan brawl means for games

Late last week, Amazon and book publisher Macmillan got in a scrap. Macmillan demanded higher prices for it's ebooks on Kindle, and Amazon responded by pulling all books (digital and posthumous tree varieties) from it's store.

BoingBoing has a post going with updates [in which the discuss the fact that Amazon caved eventually].

A more detailed post describing one view of the battle that is really at play, can be found on (awesome) author Charles Stross's blog, here.

In it, he describes what is going on is really a more significant chess game in which Amazon and Apple (and the publishers for that matter) are trying to re-define the supply chain as it shifts to digital, and hoping to capture a bigger share of the pie as that happens:

The agency model Apple proposed -- and that publishers like Macmillan enthusiastically endorse -- collapses the supply chain in a different direction, so it looks like: author -> publisher -> fixed-price distributor -> reader. In this model Amazon is shoved back into the box labelled 'fixed-price distributor' and get to take the retail cut only. Meanwhile: fewer supply chain links mean lower overheads and, ultimately, cheaper books without cutting into the authors or publishers profits.

Amazon are going to fight this one ruthlessly because if the publishers win, it destroys the profitability of their business and pushes prices down.

The way I see it, as I commented on Stross's blog, is that Amazon is trying to use their strengths to squeeze suppliers out of a greater share of margin, while Apple is instead going to give suppliers a decent margin to get them favorable terms which they can use to deliver better end user offerings. This in turn they can use to try and win market segment share.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out over time now that there is (real) competition in the ebook space.

What's interesting for anyone in the games business is that the same issues and tactics come into play in games, and you can see how people's positions shift over time. [e.g. MS offered 70 points to developers when they were trying to build a platform (XBLA) and win MSS (vs other consoles) but over time as the business stabilized and it was clear they had a winning platform, we saw the temptation to put the squeeze to that 70 point handover.]

It'll be worth watching what happens in the ebook space (as well that of music, movies, etc), as the same sorts of battles are being fought across all of them. Developers and publishers will do well to watch whether there are mistakes in other spaces they can perhaps avoid. For example should they make move to ensure competition, even at the expense of a more lucrative deal in exchange for exclusivity?