Counting-Rupees
Latest
Counting Rupees: Oh, magazine
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: With the end of the holidays came the news that EGM is being shuttered. These are disappointing days for many people, not least the hard-working staff that contributed to the respected magazine. I think that the occasion probably merits a mention as much for its inevitability as its sadness.In days in which even large, mainstream print publications are facing severe financial difficulties, it seems all too obvious that smaller, niche publications are going to face similar pressures. And gaming magazines seem to me to be among the most vulnerable, for several reasons.
Counting Rupees: The Network is the Platform
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: "The Network is the Computer" - John Gage, Sun Microsystems, 1984 When John Gage said this in 1984 it was a fairly controversial statement. Computers were getting smarter and more powerful and seemed to be moving away from the DUMB terminals of the past to more application-oriented, personal computing. At the time, most people probably weren't considering that an incredibly powerful, pervasive, interconnected web of servers and computers allowing for petabytes of data all over the world to be stored, accessed, manipulated and interacted with, would be used by more than 20% of the world's population, and nearly 75% of the US population. Looking at where we are today, his words seem fairly prescient. Not that the technology and power in computers hasn't also been improving at an astonishing rate, but there's certainly been a shift in how people use computers as internet penetration has increased. After all, would things like the iPhone or EeePC or Mini 12s or email terminals really serve much of a purpose if not for their ability to connect to a network? So, what does this really have to do with gaming? Well, there's certainly been some interest in creating web games, ranging from incredibly simple but fun diversions like Desktop Tower Defense, to more complex first-person shooters like Fallen Empire: Legions or the Quake 3: Arena remake, Quake Live. But this is really just the start. Recently, people have been mostly puzzled as to why Microsoft would continue to try and keep "Games for Windows Live" alive when it was so unpopular when it launched. Indeed, people were not very interested in paying for services that they were already used to getting for free. A few months ago, Microsoft had to scrap the idea of making people pay for the service and now, more recently, it has launched a new client for it. Judging from the response, it doesn't seem like most people care about the service. What's Microsoft thinking here?
Counting Rupees: Once bitten, twice shy
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: This past week, my 360 finally gave up the ghost. It began with an occasional hard freeze, and a day later was freezing every two or three minutes – a tell-tale symptom of impending red rings of death. Unfortunately, my Xbox exhibited all of the symptoms except an actual series of red rings: a problem that, as the Microsoft support agent informed me, meant that my device was no longer covered by the extended warranty. There goes $99. A series of problems sending me e-mails (and later the actual shipping box) have cost me at least a month of playing time ... during the busiest gaming season of the year. The point is not to complain about my problems per se – I'm hardly the first gamer to have experienced these issues and I'm sure that I won't be the last. But since I haven't been playing, I've had a lot of time to think about the implications of these issues on hardware manufacturers, publishers, developers, and even retailers. Do my problems matter to the businesses that care about me?
Counting Rupees: Gaming the economic crisis
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: The markets have plunged thousands of points, credit is tight, unemployment is skyrocketing, and all you want to think about is what's going on with the gaming industry? Don't worry, I understand. After all, people need something to do when they're not looking for a new job, right? So, with that (depressing thought) in mind, I've decided to speculate a little on how the current economic conditions are going to affect each aspect of the industry, from the publisher to the developer and, of course, the gamer.
Counting Rupees: The Importance of Innovation
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: One of the most prominent words in game journalism and discussion today is "innovation" – how can companies innovate successfully, and how come there isn't more of it in the industry? Implicit in this conversation are three assumptions that don't generally get examined with the same thoroughness: that "innovation" is per se important for gaming, that all innovation is essentially the same in content and value, and that companies promote profitability over innovation. I'd like to talk about these unspoken assumptions in light of the banner few years that we've had as gamers. I think most people would concede that innovation is important, whether to gaming or to consumer packaged goods. But why? At least in gaming, it's largely because our interest tends to dissipate along with challenge; if you're not being shown something interesting, why pay attention to it? Familiarity may not breed contempt, but it definitely doesn't breed excitement (nor sales) either.
Counting Rupees: Feeling used
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: Bungie audio director Marty O'Donnell recently made some controversial remarks regarding used game sales. To quote, "It seems to me that the folks who create and publish a game shouldn't stop receiving income from further sales." Of course, this seems laughable to all of us who have bought and sold used games for years. It's my property, I can do what I want with it, right? This doesn't have any place in the industry, does it? Legally, perhaps not. According to the first sale doctrine in copyright law, copyright holders are expected "to obtain all financial benefit for the article or product embodying the intellectual property at the time of the sale, and prohibits placing limitations on purchased items." This basically means that, once you purchase an item, the intellectual property cannot prevent you from doing whatever you want with the item so long as you don't violate copyright (by, say, copying it and then selling it -- otherwise known as pirating).
Counting Rupees: Day of Crisis
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: One of the issues I've been talking a lot about recently has been the concept of crisis management – how companies respond to problems that may impact their relationship with consumers. Crises don't need to be big to matter; even relatively minor issues can grow big enough to cause headaches. And so it was instructive to see the brouhaha over Spore's DRM, and how EA responded. For those who don't remember the issue, the basic problem was that Spore limited the number of installations allowed per user as well as the number of user accounts per game copy. I'm not particularly interested in debating whether or not this was a good idea (I'm opposed), but am very interested in talking about how EA responded as concerns began to bubble up from the internet. So, how did EA do?
Counting Rupees: Does controversy sell?
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: Another day, another video game banning controversy. Proponents of the ban, unsurprisingly, argue that eliminating the sale of controversial games prevents them from harmful exposure. Yet one of the main arguments against banning games is that they make them even more popular, causing people to take notice of the title and thus spurring more sales than if it had been ignored in the first place. So, what exactly is the impact of game bans on sales in the first place?Ideally, we'd be able to compare the sales of games pre- and post-ban and see how the regulation impacted them ... after accounting for all the other factors that might have also influenced sales at that time. The data we have don't really let us do that, though, so this is a slightly less scientific attempt to answer the same question, using some of the most controversial games of the past few years.
Counting Rupees: Sustainable Indies
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: Braid was released just over two weeks ago to critical raves and a few complaints regarding its slightly higher than "standard" price of $15. Despite Jonathan Blow, the creator of the game, having to defend the price for essentially a full week bracketing its release, Blow has now confirmed via his blog that his Braid will probably make back enough money to allow him to work on his next game. This is certainly great news, as Braid is one of the best games to be released on Xbox Live Arcade, or if you use Metacritic, the 8th best game to be released so far on the Xbox 360. Jonathan Blow certainly deserves the chance to follow up his brilliant effort, but something about his post regarding the success of his game actually revealed a warning sign to me for indie games overall.
Counting Rupees: E3 lives!
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: Last week GamePolitics editor Dennis McCauley declared in his weekly Joystiq column that E3 was dead. He is certainly not alone in his opinion. IGN's Craig Harris also pronounced the show dead on his blog, and EA CEO John Riccitiello said that he "hates E3 like this," vaguely threatening to simply have the publisher put on its own show in the future. And of course, the always reliable 3D Realms said that it wasn't attending E3 this year because it was "irrelevant". A lot of people were disappointed with this year's E3, perhaps even more so than what most considered a horribly executed 2007 E3. As someone who has never been to E3, I suppose I don't have any personal experience to draw from to tell you how much worse this year's E3 was than the ones from 2006 and before. However, as someone who has anxiously awaited and followed E3 for many years, I wonder whether a lot of this reaction is overblown.
Counting Rupees: Korea bangs
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: I've temporarily relocated to Seoul for the summer to work for a consumer electronics firm, so I thought I'd spend a little time detailing some of the differences in gaming culture here in South Korea, and the impact that infrastructure has on the gaming business. In short, there are two notable differences in the Korean gaming industry relative to the United States. First, PC games are significantly more popular than console games; and second, gaming is much more mainstream in Korean culture than it is even now in the States. These differences have created structural factors in the country that have profoundly shaped the nature of the industry from a business perspective. Perhaps the most salient factor is cultural - there is, as far as I can tell, almost no stigma attached to gaming in the country (at the least, it's viewed as a mainstream activity). A number of Korean acquaintances have commented on the Korean fascination with the new and fashionable: when one co-worker went apartment-hunting with a real estate agent, the agent refused to show him any houses that had been previously occupied, on the assumption that they would be of little interest. And part of that fascination seems to be technological, indicating a possible cause of Koreans' embrace of gaming as a form of entertainment. Indeed, I've seen countless people using a DS or PSP on the subway... and my cheap, used cell phone has more free games on it than I've played on any phone since I began using them in the first place.
Counting Rupees: Bust Blox
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: Boom Blox seemed to have everything going for it. EA, one of the biggest and most successful developers and publishers, was creating it. The massively famous and successful director Steven Spielberg was directly involved with both the concept and the design of the game on an ongoing basis, and his name was featured on the cover art. Its simple and intuitive family-oriented concept seemed like a perfect match for the wildly popular Wii, where simple and intuitive family-oriented games thrived. And in the end, it debuted to relatively good reviews (and even a few outstanding ones) which should have ensured at least a positive word of mouth. Apparently, there were not enough word-spreading mouths to begin with, as it only sold 60k copies in its debut month (which includes almost all of May, since it launched May 6th). Despite what EA's CEO said, this was probably not what EA had hoped for with a game it had collaborated on with the most profitable director in the world. So, what happened?
Counting Rupees: The MMO-TV hybrid
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: Can a game spin off into a successful TV series? Many of us still remember waking up early on Saturday mornings to catch the latest episode of "Captain N: The Game Master" or rushing home after school to watch "The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!" (or if we were lucky enough to be watching on a Friday, "The Legend of Zelda"). While these shows weren't exactly something to write home about, it was certainly exciting to see some of our favorite Nintendo characters come alive in the form of a cartoon. In the last few years the wildly popular Pokemon games have spawned a long-lasting TV show and more recently, a Viva Piñata TV series was launched side-by-side with the game, in what was a moderately successful cross-marketing strategy (the kid's show is still running today and the game posted slow but steady sales, developing somewhat of a cult following). Clearly, there's some precedence for games to become the basis for a TV series, but these have all lacked one basic element that all the games required: interactivity.So it is with some interest that the LA Times reports that Sci-Fi channel is teaming up with Trion World Network to create (simultaneously!) an MMO and a TV show based on it. Sci-Fi channel president Dave Howe says that it's the "Holy Grail". A subscription-based MMO and a successful television series that are able to successfully leverage each other could certainly be a potential windfall. However, while the details are somewhat scarce at the moment, from what I can glean, there are some major hurdles that this joint venture will need to overcome.
Counting Rupees: You drink their milkshake
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: Guitar Hero IV is on its way, and with it are coming individual games themed around Metallica, Aerosmith, and others. This follows the strategy highlighted by Activision CEO Robert Kotick last year, in which the executive promised shareholders to fully "exploit" the company's franchises on an annual basis. The immediate response of gamers was almost exclusively negative, not least because the prospect has connotations of poor quality and high pricing. Although Activision may be the only company to announce its strategy so publicly, it's hardly the only adopting these kinds of tactics. If it irritates gamers so much, why do companies in the industry do this? And is it as bad as it seems?
Counting Rupees: Digital Rights Madness
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: When EA announced that Spore and Mass Effect (PC) would have a DRM program that did performed online verification every 10 days, it generated a massive backlash amongst the gaming community. Many people, who were originally excited about Spore and Mass Effect, now claimed that they would not purchase the games, solely because of the DRM. To be honest, I'm no fan of DRM either. It basically treats all legal customers as potential criminals, and seems futile anyway, as anyone with an internet connection can typically find ways around the DRM. The only people it probably deters are those with little technical savvy and who just want to share a game they bought with their friends and family. The amount of actual sales that would be lost to this is probably pretty limited. With all that said, I'm glad that EA has backed off this new DRM and scaled it back to just an initial online verification. Given the current state of PC gaming as well as the traditionally more "accepted" versions of DRM (like the initial online verification), however, I didn't find this new DRM to be all THAT much worse, particularly with some slight improvements to it, such as allowing a manual verification and extending the timeframe for re-verification slightly (say, to 30-60 days instead of every 10). The reason for this has a lot to do with what's been going on with PC gaming in the last few years. While the "death" of PC gaming has been talked about for years, it isn't quite here. The landscape is just shifting. While the total NPD sales for each year has been decreasing, other avenues of making money have been developed. For instance, subscription-based games (mostly MMOs, but also games available on GameTap), cheaper more casual downloadable games (eg, PopCap Games), and even free, ad- or feature-driven games (eg, Dungeon Runners, Battlefield Heroes, Quake Zero) make up an ever increasing portion of PC-based revenue. Thus, the actual retail sales are taken up mostly by a few casual games, MMO starter kits or expansions, and maybe the occasional shooter or RTS game. Take, for example, the most recent NPD PC numbers for the week of May 4-10:
Counting Rupees: The Job System
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: It's not unreasonable for a gamer to look at their console and wonder how it might help them professionally. Being financially rewarded for doing something we love has been the holy grail of gaming (and indeed, most hobbies) since well before talk of gaming leagues and Wizard-style competitions. But despite our best intentions, it's rare to find a cubicle-dweller whose carpal tunnel syndrome is caused by a controller rather than Microsoft Office. And this is why I was interested to read a recent post from Massively on the benefits of putting MMO experience on your resume. Job hunting is something that almost everyone needs to do at least once, and since government statistics suggest that new workers are now likely to switch jobs 7-10 times in their lives, doing it well is a key skill set. So, can games help you here? My answer is a qualified "maybe."
Counting Rupees: GTA IV vs. Iron Man
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: According to several "analysts" last week, the successful launch of Grand Theft Auto IV threatened to sink the box office returns for Iron Man. The thinking went that since the game and the movie both target primarily the same demographic (males 18-29), that demographic would stay home and play the game instead of going to see the movie. While it's impossible to declare with complete certainty, as Variety did, that GTA IV had absolutely no effect on Iron Man's opening (with $104.2M in domestic receipts, $201M worldwide, and a release date for a sequel already announced), whatever effect it may have had was clearly not enough to significantly impact the movie. But clearly, many had predicted that the game could adversely affect box office receipts. It makes me wonder -- have we ever seen this sort of effect before?
Counting Rupees: Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and the Prisoner's Dilemma
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: Much as many people expected, Activision public relations recently confirmed that (one song aside) Aerosmith's catalogue will remain a Guitar Hero-exclusive for the foreseeable future. There's a considerable amount of public speculation as to whether or not this will spark future fights over exclusive content, and I'm inclined to assume that it will. The incentives are just too strong to avoid future conflict – the battle between Guitar Hero and Rock Band is a great example of the prisoner's dilemma.The prisoner's dilemma is a common building block of game theory, which is often used in business strategy to describe potential competitive responses or explain company actions. It's so named because of the story that was used to illustrate its problem. Imagine two fugitives that have robbed a bank and were just picked up by the police. Each man is taken into a separate room, and the police make the following offer to each: if they confess to the crime and help to implicate their partner, they'll receive an extremely lenient sentence. However, if they stay quiet and their partner implicates them, they'll receive the maximum penalty - while their partner gets off scot-free. Of course, if both confess, the evidence they provide isn't particularly useful, and they'll each go to trial, ending up with a sentence somewhere in the middle. What should each man do?
Counting Rupees: The WiiCube
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: In my last column I suggested that, if Microsoft is to make a Wii-like controller, it should still continue to focus on the "traditional" types of games that have so far made the 360 a success, because Nintendo had already basically wrapped up the "casual" crowd. I also mentioned that the only Wii games that are apparently selling are Nintendo games and some casual games. And with that in mind, the New York Times published an article on Monday detailing that, while the Wii hardware is selling well, even seemingly popular Wii software still has some trouble continuing to sell to the Wii audience.
Counting Rupees: Selling out without selling out
Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming: Earlier this week, Next Generation published a list of the top 100 selling games of last year. Some sites used the list as an opportunity to analyze the impact of review scores on video games, or to alternately lament or exalt the state of gamers' sophistication, but I'd like to address one of the more perennial issues of the gaming community: Whether artistic and financial success are ultimately incompatible in this industry. This isn't a new debate for most of us. The conventional wisdom is that, with few exceptions, the market rewards the common denominator: Cheap, quick, and easy games will beat sophisticated titles any day of the week and twice on Sunday. You can see variations on this theme throughout the gaming media; the notion that indie games can't make money, that gamers are violence- and sex-obsessed children, that stories and ideas just don't matter. Yet I'd argue that this conventional wisdom is wrong, and getting more so by the day.
