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WSJ: Google plans a 'digital newsstand' to unite all newspapers and magazines under Android's umbrella
The Wall Street Journal has rounded up its cabal of sources today to present another delicious new battlefield in the struggle between Google and Apple for mobile supremacy. Specifically, it reports that the Mountain View team has approached Time Warner, Condé Nast and Hearst -- three of the biggest publishers of periodicals in the US -- with a view to offering their content through a Google-operated "digital newsstand" for Android devices. The appeal for media companies will be an easier route to monetizing their content, apparently, including the possibility that Google could take a smaller slice of revenues than the 30 percent charged by Apple and Amazon. There's also word of developments behind the scenes at Cupertino, where "several changes in iTunes" are expected to improve the publisher's experience of using the service, including making it easier to offer long-term subscriptions and related discounts. Apple's had nothing to say on the matter, while Google's responded by noting it's always in discussions with publishers and has nothing to announce at this point.
Japanese publishers censure Apple over App Store violations
A group of Japanese publishers are censuring Apple after copyrighted material was reportedly scanned and distributed through the iOS App Store. The group points to numerous App Store applications that are illegally re-publishing the works of well-known Japanese authors, including Haruki Murakami and Keigo Higashino.The Japanese group, which includes book, e-book, digital comic and magazine publishers, is requesting a meeting with Apple's Japan unit to discuss this problem with piracy. Heightening the tension is Apple's response to these copyright violations. The Cupertino company says it does not have the resources to scan every app submission for copyright violations. Its current policy is to remove the app when a copyright violation is reported. This apparently is not sufficient for the Japanese publishers who claim this is "a wholly unconvincing explanation." This dispute is reminiscent of the ongoing legal between YouTube and Viacom over copyrighted material that appears on the popular video website. From the start, Viacom has pushed YouTube to improve its pre-approval screening process to detect and filter out copyrighted material before it is published. As the iPad and the iPhone continue to gain in popularity, look for this App Store copyright problem to continue. Right now the Japanese publishers are willing to talk, but other publishers may not be so amicable in the future. Let's hope Apple can work out any kinks before it's forced to duke it out in court.
Frogster acquires unnamed Shanda Games MMORPG
Frogster's online gaming portfolio just got a bit bigger, though details are scarce as to the name and the nature of the company's newest acquisition. The German publishing giant, most famous for bringing Runes of Magic to the masses, announced that it has secured the rights to a new fantasy MMORPG from Shanda Games, a Chinese developer. The unnamed title will reportedly distinguish itself by featuring a setting developed expressly for Western audiences, and Frogster plans to launch the game using a free-to-play business model some time in 2012. "This deal with Shanda Games adds yet another prominent MMORPG to our portfolio. By licensing the game for North America and Europe, we have taken another step in establishing Frogster as one of the leading MMO game publishers in the world," said Andreas Weidenhaupt, a Frogster executive board member.
Ntreev rebranding as SG Interactive
Ntreev USA, the publisher behind free-to-play titles Grand Chase, Pangya, and Trickster Online, has announced a corporate rebranding as well as new games and an online portal. In a press release made public earlier today, Ntreev revealed that it has changed its name to SG Interactive and will be expanding to offer new online games and services through a portal that is scheduled to launch early next year. The portal will focus on existing F2P titles as well as several new games, the details of which will be announced before the end of 2010. SG Interactive, originally founded as Ntreev in 2006 and located in Southern California, was recently acquired by SmileGate, the Korean publisher responsible for Cross Fire. Be on the lookout for a Massively interview with SG Interactive coming soon.
Crytek UK still shopping around new TimeSplitters title
The studio formerly known as Free Radical Design may now be called Crytek UK, but that doesn't mean it has abandoned its popular TimeSplitters franchise. Managing director Karl Hilton said the developer is still shopping around that IP to publishers to see if it's something they're interested in. We've known that Crytek UK has been working on both another TimeSplitters and some sort of original FPS IP for a while now, but Hilton says the coin flip hasn't landed yet. "If [publishers are] keen for a TS game," he says, "then we'd be happy to do one. If they'd like us to develop something new then we'd do that." Hilton also says that even if it is agreed that Crytek UK will create a new TimeSplitters game, it may not look like the old ones. Publishers are excited about the brand, he says, but they may need it to be updated or tweaked in some way. But Hilton guarantees players that no matter what personality a new TimeSplitters game might eventually bear, it will definitely be a strong one. Doesn't matter to us, either, Mr. Hilton -- just please make sure that we get to play as a monkey at some point.
Rovio Mobile passing on Chillingo in the future
Chillingo closed a huge deal with EA yesterday (becoming the second big iPhone publisher in as many weeks to be picked up), but the company's work with its biggest title apparently left a bad taste in the mouth of the developers, Rovio Mobile. That company tells TechCrunch that they'll never work with Chillingo, or any publisher, again. That's not so much a reflection on Chillingo, though, as it is on Rovio's success -- Peter Vesterbacka says that with the way the App Store is set up, you just "don't need publishers" any more. For a lot of iPhone developers, I would disagree -- Chillingo has put together a nice set of iPhone titles over the past few years, and seeing their name on an iPhone game can give a nice boost in profile to a developer just starting out. Obviously EA agrees -- while this doesn't mean we'll see EA start taking advantage of the Angry Birds license (necessarily -- I'm sure Rovio is poking around in as many places as possible to recreate the Angry Birds game on other platforms), it does mean that EA is getting access to a significant amount of experience in creating, publishing, and marketing iPhone games. Chillingo seems to have a talent for finding titles of solid quality that are willing to experiment a little bit, so this should bring us some more EA games that are outside of the standard Madden/Need for Speed/Tiger Woods ilk. As an iPhone user, I'm excited about both the Chillingo and the Ngmoco deals recently -- both will create more options for two iPhone publishers who have made a solid name for themselves, as well as bring a little more standing to the platform at large as a great place to publish and release great games. Rovio's done with iPhone publishers, but the rest of us are just getting started.
News publishers looking to the Galaxy Tab and BlackBerry PlayBook for refuge as well
In case you were worried that it was just Apple love that got major news outlets on the iPad so quickly, you should know that the general sense of desperation (or is it their never ending sense of adventure?) pervading the likes of the The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today has them building apps for the Galaxy Tab as well. The news comes courtesy of The Wall Street Journal, and has yet to be announced officially by the parties involved -- though we have a hard time doubting any of it. It makes sense, of course: the big cost is producing content for a tablet form factor, not building the reader app, and the Galaxy Tab naturally won't be the last of its Android kind. The WSJ and The Financial Times are also apparently some possible gets for RIM's PlayBook, though less is known about those deals. On the Tab, The New York Times is supposed to be pre-loaded with some carrier's versions of the device, and its app will be free until January of next year when The Times starts charging for its website.
The curious idea of ads in iBooks
Don't worry -- you won't start seeing ads for tattoo parlors while reading Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Not yet, anyway. But there's some interesting thinking going around the 'net (kicked off by this article in the Wall Street Journal) about how advertising may soon try to conquer the last bastion of entertainment: books. When you go to the movies, you see ads, when you watch TV and browse the Internet, there are ads everywhere. But why don't you see ads while reading a book? (I mean, besides the obvious conclusion that it's annoying and invasive?) In the past, it's been because the lead time for books is a wild card. Unlike newspapers and movies, books have a longer shelf life, and different readers could revisit the same material over a period of years rather than days or weeks. You'd have to dynamically deliver ads in some way, and you'd need publishers with know-how and insight about their customers in order to sell relevant ads regularly. In short, you'd need e-books, and you'd need a company (says Snarkmarket) like, say, Apple. Publishers may not have the ability to sell relevant ads to readers, but Apple surely does, especially since it seems to be sweeping up ad sales people as quickly as possible lately. And with prices becoming competitive in the e-book space, there's incentive for both Apple as an iBook publisher and even authors (who want to supplement e-book sale numbers with iAd sales) to bring advertising over to the iBookstore at some point.
Valve talks gaming on the Mac, says best is yet to come
Valve's Jason Holtman and Doug Lombardi recently sat down with GamesIndustry.biz to discuss their big release of Steam on the Mac, and not only do they reiterate that great stat that games released on the Mac see a nice bump in sales, but they say that the best days of Mac gaming are yet to come. They can't share numbers yet on just how many Mac vs. PC players there are (though they say the response has been great, and you can see Mac players in games often), but Holtman and Lombardi both say that from small game developers to big game publishers, Steam on Mac has helped everyone see just how active and important the Mac gaming scene is. There are international users on Macs, and the amount of player interest in games for the platform has made developers rethink their old plans of releasing a Mac port when they get to it rather than day and date with the PC title. That is, in a word, awesome. And Lombardi says now that publishers are interested in the platform as whole, we'll see some "different types of experiment on pricing and promotion and all that stuff on Mac titles," as companies try to figure out how to make the most of this market they've been neglecting for so long. Valve has already said that bringing Steam to the Mac was the most significant decision they've made with the service, but I'd argue that even this early in the process (even Valve admits that it doesn't have a lot of data yet on how people use the two platforms), it was a seismic event for Mac gaming as well.
Frogster responds to TERA fan backlash
The recent announcement by Bluehole Studios and Frogster Online Gaming that the latter had secured the European publishing rights to TERA brought about something akin to an outcry from portions of the forthcoming fantasy MMORPG's community. While it wasn't quite millions of voices crying out in terror (and then being suddenly silenced), there were a few indignant threads on the various TERA fan sites. Why the brouhaha? Apparently some fans have experienced everything from perceived shoddy customer service, to forum "censorship," to the wanton slaughter of helpless kittens in previous Frogster-published titles (the largest of which is free-to-play behemoth Runes of Magic). Frogster director of product management Daniel Ulrich has since extended an olive branch in the form of a post on the official TERA forums, laying out the first of what will be several rounds of Q&A posts over the next few days. Check out the thread for some answers to your burning TERA questions, including free-to-play vs. pay-to-play, support team specifics, and server hardware.
Runescape's Mark Gerhard talks self-publishing success
Jagex, makers of the successful browser-based MMORPG Runescape, went through a who's who listing of game publishers before ultimately deciding to fly solo and self-publish their free-to-play fantasy title. Company CEO Mark Gerhard minced few words when speaking about the trials and tribulations of securing a publishing deal during a talk at this week's Develop Conference. "We went to publishers like Activision and EA and said we've got an awesome browser game, and they said **** off. We went back and said we've got a million users and they said bull****. The necessity forced us to become a publisher," Gerhard said. Ultimately, Jagex was able to parlay their success into an investment deal with Sony, and is also releasing multiple additional titles including War of Legends, an iPhone game called Bouncedown, and numerous casual titles via the FunOrb gaming portal. Check out the original article at Game Politics for more details.
Dave Perry on the innovation of Gaikai
All of the questions about Gaikai and OnLive have revolved around whether the streaming technology actually works. Can a company actually process your games on a remote server, and then stream them to you in a playable format? For Gaikai's CEO Dave Perry, there's no question: It works. "Yeah. Yeah," he says. "Absolutely. No problem at all." The question that Gaikai is trying to answer, then, isn't about whether the cloud works, but how. OnLive has launched with a subscription model, but Perry's doing it differently. Rather than build a service for customers, he wants Gaikai to serve as a sort of distributor -- a go-between for game publishers (like EA and Activision), online content creators (like Joystiq), and game players. Gaikai's "secret sauce" isn't in the streaming technology itself, but in the business model that makes it possible and profitable for everyone. Perry explained his plan to us in detail at the company's headquarters in Southern California last week, and told us why and how Gaikai is different from all of the other streaming services out there.
Ebook publishers seek universal format, lament Apple and Amazon's closed ecosystems
You don't need to sit down, we're not about to hit you with any shocking news, but a recent BookExpo America convention has given publishers the chance to air out their laundry list of complaints. Seriously, do these guys ever have anything positive to say? Now they've managed to pinpoint a flaw in the Kindle and iPad's resounding success, identifying the two ebook reading platforms as closed, and expressing a yearning for a universal and open format that all books can be published and consumed on. Of course, they wouldn't be publishers if they didn't also lust after robust DRM measures, which might explain why they're not roundly supporting the readily available EPUB format. It has DRM options, but perhaps they're not gnarly enough for the dudes responsible for bringing us the psychological horror of the Twilight series. We still don't like the suggestion that the people, Amazon primarily, who popularized this market should just open it up out of the goodness of their own hearts -- maybe we would if publishers ever showed themselves capable of doing similarly noble things.
Google Editions said to have backing of 'almost all' US publishers
Well, it looks like Google will be kicking off its forthcoming Google Editions e-book service on a high note -- Japan Today is reporting that the company has managed to score the backing of "almost all" publishers in the United States. That apparently brings the total number of publishers and authors on board to over 25,000, and the total number of books set to be available to somewhere in the neighborhood of two million -- or over four million if you include the public domain books that Google already makes available for free. As far as we can tell, however, Google itself still isn't saying any more on the matter publicly than it did last week, when it confirmed that the service would be launching in late June or July. [Thanks, Legendary1022]
Current game network developers comment on Apple's Game Center
Way back in February at Macworld, one of my questions to Eros Remini of OpenFeint was pretty blunt: "Why," I asked a representative from the biggest third-party social gaming network on the iPhone, "haven't we seen an official platform-wide network?" Remini didn't have a good answer for Apple, but he did say that OpenFeint was happy to step up and fill the void. Apple answered for themselves this morning: They announced Game Center, which will be an official social gaming network for the iPhone and iPad, complete with friend lists, leaderboards, achievements, and everything else that third-party providers like OpenFeint have set up already. So what does OpenFeint think of Game Center? We contacted it for a statement and we are told that OpenFeint is welcoming Apple's Game Center. The company has recently released a virtual goods marketplace called OpenFeint X, and their statement about Game Center says that there's still a place for OpenFeint on top of Apple's official service. "OpenFeint X is currently built on top of OpenFeint and in the future it will also sit on Apple's Game Center social graph, achievements and leaderboards so developers and gamers don't miss a step," Jason Citron, CEO of Aurora Feint says. Current OpenFeint players (of which there are 19 million at last count) will automatically become OpenFeint X members, and it sounds like OpenFeint plans to move on to the virtual goods market, leaving their old social gaming realm behind for Apple. There were a few other reactions from various developers and publishers about the Game Center news -- read more information from PopCap and Ngmoco after the link below.
Amazon agrees to agency pricing model with two more publishers, Jobs prophecy coming to pass
Time to add HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster to the list of publishers who've managed to strongarm Amazon into acceding to their supposedly industry-saving agency pricing model. Under the new agreement, you might still see e-book versions of bestsellers priced at the familiar $9.99, but the majority will be jumping up to $12.99 and $14.99 price points, depending on the publisher's discretion. This is essentially the same deal that brought Macmillan books back to Amazon.com, and the e-tailer is believed to also be in advanced negotiations with Hatchette Book Group and Penguin Group to ensure that no book is left behind. This development was cryptically predicted by Steve Jobs mere hours after the iPad's launch and then reiterated by Rupert Murdoch with regard to HarperCollins, so we can't exactly act surprised now, but we can at least grimace a little at having to face a more expensive e-reading future.
ESTsoft to publish CABAL Online in the West
Fans of Cabal Online rejoice! ESTsoft's free-to-play fantasy MMORPG is alive and well in the Western market, and will not be put out to pasture as we initially reported. ESTsoft, the game's original developer, will be taking over for OGPlanet as the North American publisher, and is currently hard at work on the logistics involved in the transfer. A brief statement is available on their web site, and you can also follow their progress on the Cabal Online Facebook fan page as well as the ESTsoft Twitter feed. No official details have surfaced regarding the preservation of existing accounts and character assets, but we'll keep you informed as we learn more. For now, all current users should activate the sub-passwords on their accounts, as those passwords will be used to verify your ID in the coming service transition.
The Daily Grind: Would you want to work in the industry?
Working in the business of making games is the dream of many gamers -- it's a field we love, with a whole lot of obvious perks and the chance at making a permanent impact on the field. Of course, once you dig a little deeper it becomes clear that making games isn't necessarily a fun ride. The field is full of contentious personalities, greedy publishers, "fans" who frequently heckle your every step, and a high profit margin expected with little turnaround time. And let's not forget the very real possibility of having the rug yanked out from under you midway through development. Still, none of this stops people from being attracted to the field, and those in the thick of it generally wouldn't trade it away even if they had the option. For all the downsides, the rewards are... well... any time you see a game go live that you're proud to have worked on and all of the fans who genuinely like your work. So what about you? Do you want to take part in the up-and-down ride of the game industry, or would you rather just enjoy the end result?
GameStop: Used game buyers uninterested in free DLC
We're usually pretty competent parsers of corporate quotes, but we may need some help on this one. Referencing the publisher practice of putting free DLC in new copies of games, GameStop boss Dan DeMatteo said on an investor call today that "we have learned that the second-hand user is a value-oriented consumer ... we don't believe that a $10 add-on piece of DLC is compelling to a used game buyer." So, they care about getting the biggest bang for their buck, but they just don't care about missing out on free things? Here's another one: "Publishers can participate in our used business by offering add-on content for the most popular used titles, creating a win-win situation for publishers, retailers and consumers," he said, according to Gamasutra. Wouldn't the win for publishers and developers be to make money every time someone bought the game they made? It may be that the statements are unclear, but it's also possible that we're just so unfamiliar with GameStop trying to be a team player that our primitive minds can't process it. Hard to say.
More eBook trouble for Amazon
Amazon has run into more trouble with its pricing -- after Macmillan and HarperCollins, a third company has pressured the online book retailer to raise prices on their Kindle eBooks. This time it's the Hachette Book Group, and their CEO in an internal memo says that the company will switch to an "agency model" for eBook sales. What's an agency model? Why, it's the 70%/30% split between platform and content provider currently used in the App Store, and the same model that's planned to be used in iBooks on the iPad. And it's important to note that this is exactly what Jobs said would happen -- that publishers would move away from Amazon when they had another system to go with. What we don't yet know is where prices will end up on the iPad -- Jobs said that prices would be "the same," and it's looking more and more like the $9.99 bestseller price is going to be abandoned for $14.99 or even higher. But that's only because Amazon is fighting shadows with the iPad right now. If they can actually woo some content back to their side when the iPad actually releases, we may see prices get a little more competitive. Until then, the iPad hasn't even come out and it's already shaking up the ebook industry completely.
