Tabloid Emotions: UK Games Censorship
The Soft Target
After almost a decade of watching with thinly-concealed smugness as
America's conservatives tore into the videogames industry, confident
that Britain's more liberal society would protect the medium on these
shores, the worm has finally turned. The alarm bells are ringing, and
an unpleasant awakening is upon us - Britain now faces exactly the same
kind of backlash against games that has blighted the United States for
years.
It is not, as yet, at the kind of fever pitch which anti-videogames
sentiments have reached on occasion in the USA. Britain fundamentally
lacks the sort of high profile youth crimes, such as school shootings,
which have focused attention in the United States - and when high
profile cases do come along, the UK seems more willing to condemn the
failures in society which have caused them, rather than trying to pin
everything on an easy scapegoat like videogames.
However, the atmosphere around games is shifting slowly and
unpleasantly, and nowhere is that to be seen more clearly than in
Westminster, the administrative heart of the United Kingdom. Here,
there's a certain measure of desperation in the air. Gordon Brown has
transpired to be a deeply unlikeable and unpopular Prime Minister, and
his Labour government faces the possibility of a humiliating defeat in
the next general election if a slide in popularity cannot be halted
promptly. Every straw in sight is being grasped at, and videogames, it
seems, are well within arms reach.
A "hard line" on videogames certainly seems to be one of the options
on the table for Brown's strategists, who know that the government
needs some kind of answer to questions of law and order, and especially
regarding youth crime.
The government's problem is that telling the truth - that Britain's
crime figures have been falling steadily for some time, and that we're
safer now than we've been for a long, long time - doesn't seem to work.
A vicious campaign of lies, half-truths and insinuations on the part of
the UK's vile tabloid newspapers (and, shamefully, some of our
broadsheets too) has convinced the population that UK society is in
meltdown. Faced with a population who believe that they're in danger of
being stabbed by a feral youth at any minute, the government can't
simply tell them to stop being so bloody stupid; it is forced into a
position of Being Seen To Do Something.
The something in question, I increasingly fear, will be the imposition
of restrictions, regulations and censures on the videogames industry.
This will come as part of a wider package of measures against the
creative industries. The BBFC, which has moved with the times and now
reflects Britain's largely liberal views on media, has also been
slammed in the right-wing press in recent weeks for allowing the
release of movies formerly classed as "video nasties" in the 1980s, and
it seems eminently likely that government will move to grant itself a
veto over the BBFC's decisions.
Admittedly, thus far much of the noise in Parliament on this front has
been made by Keith Vaz, an MP whose contributions to the videogames
debate are so frequent and so consistently ignorant and uninformed that
even his fellow parliamentarians have become sick of him. His shocking
and utterly false assertion this week that games are available in which
the player can rape women was challenged by Ed Vaizey MP, while his
ongoing promotion of the tragic Stefan Pakeerah murder case as an
example of videogame inspired violence (both the police and the court
system having ruled out any possible link) has been dismissed by the
minister responsible, Margaret Hodge.
Vaz' one-man quest against the videogames industry continues, however
- and indeed, it seems that it's not entirely a one-man quest any more.
While the headlines were stolen by Vaz' statements to the House, it
transpires today that Gordon Brown himself is to meet Stefan Pakeerah's
mother to discuss the question of violent videogames.
A triumph for Vaz, then, and a sad defeat for any modicum of common
sense. While Giselle Pakeerah's loss is truly tragic and saddening, her
claim that her son's murder was inspired by Rockstar's Manhunt is
patently and provably false. It was her son, not his killer, who owned
the game. The game doesn't even feature the type of murder weapon used
in the killing - and moreover, the killer was clearly inspired not by
playing a game, but by the debt he owed to a drug-related gang.
Giselle Pakeerah, in her grief, has been coldly and cruelly
manipulated, becoming a tragic champion in the battle against a medium
that had nothing whatsoever to do with her son's murder. Who, after
all, is going to argue with a grieving mother? What possible response
can Gordon Brown have to her statements - however ill-informed they may
be - than to nod sympathetically?
Moreover, I suspect that Brown - and those who have set up this
meeting, Keith Vaz himself undoubtedly among them - knows this
perfectly well. Gordon Brown doesn't want to be advised on his media
policy by Giselle Pakeerah. He wants to meet her so that when he
announces his already well-laid plans in this regard, he appears to
have consulted the grieving mother - which will play well for the
tabloid press who are hounding him to Do Something about the country's
allegedly rising crime levels.
It's a desperately worrying time for anyone with an interest in
freedom of expression, but more so for anyone involved in the creative
industries in the United Kingdom. One point of light at the end of the
tunnel may be the Byron Report, which is due out in the coming weeks. I
suspect that the report's author, Tanya Byron, is not likely to be a
willing patsy for the Labour government's preferred policies. This
report, with any luck, will actually set the facts straight. Whether
that will be enough to get videogames off the hook as Labour
desperately seeks to rebuild its public image, however, remains to be
seen.
(gamesindustry.biz)
No Hollow Victory
It's been a long time since any industry pundit was willing to bet on
the success of Toshiba's HD-DVD, but the protracted war over the future
of high-definition content delivery continued regardless. Staggering
and limping its way through a litany of awful sales figures and
high-profile studio defections, HD-DVD was the zombie format - struck
with lethal blows from all sides, but refusing to fall down and stop
twitching all the same.
This week brought merciful respite, and the end, when it came, was
swift. Months of horrible news for HD-DVD snowballed into an
unstoppable force after its studio support crumbled just before
January's Consumer Entertainment Show. A month and a half later,
Toshiba has finally pulled the plug - cutting the format's life support
off and consigning it to history's gallery of noble technological
failures.
The reason for HD-DVD's continued staggering across the battlefield,
mortal wounds notwithstanding, has been well aired by now. Although
ostensibly a Toshiba-backed format, HD-DVD's most staunch ally in the
past year has been Microsoft. Its HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360
accounts for around a third of total sales of HD-DVD players, and there
have been credible reports that the format's studio support was being
propped up by co-marketing deals funded from Microsoft's expansive
purse.
Microsoft's objective in all of this was simply to prolong the agony
of the high-definition format war. Divide and conquer has been a
strategy that has served Microsoft well over the years, and its
ambitions with regard to high definition content are very clear.
Although it sells technology used by both the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD
formats, Microsoft's hope is that consumers will ultimately spurn both
formats in favour of downloading HD content - preferably through
Microsoft's own services, like Xbox Live. If achieving that means
fermenting a format war that damages consumer confidence in both sides,
so be it.
So just how much damage has HD-DVD's zombie act done to the prospects
for high definition disc formats? Has it bought enough time for HD
downloads to become a realistic prospect for consumers, or even for the
concept to start to take root in their imaginations?
I'm not convinced that it has. Blu-Ray's victory comes early enough
not to be a pyrrhic one - and there are strong signs to suggest that
although downloads are beginning to earn their place in the HD content
market, there will be at least another healthy generation of disc-based
distribution before the world is ready to go entirely digital.
The problem which HD downloads face is simply that the market is not
yet ready for them. Broadband connections even in relatively developed
countries like the United Kingdom simply aren't up to the speeds
required for multi-gigabyte downloads of movie content. Although speeds
of 25 and even 50 megabits are advertised by some providers, the
reality for UK consumers is that their broadband probably runs at
somewhere between 2 and 5 megabits - and much, much lower in certain
areas. With some notable exceptions, much of the rest of the world is
in the same boat; the reality of broadband lags behind its promise.
Consumers, too, aren't quite ready for download content. I don't doubt
that they will be, and sooner than many pundits believe - the
attachment to physical products is not remotely as strong as some high
street retailers and content publishers would like to think, as the
incredibly fast transition from CD to music downloads is proving.
However, we're simply not quite there yet, and it certainly doesn't
help that few consumers are sporting home networks and properly
configured media servers, replete with large hard drives, in their
living rooms. Equally, it doesn't help that while consumers may be
prepared to shed their attachment to physical products, they're still
not going to give much ground on the question of ownership - and rental
models where movies "time out" after a certain period, or can only be
watched a certain number of times, are likely to prove to have very
narrow appeal.
This isn't to say that HD downloads won't form a part of the video
content market going forward - indeed, I suspect that the landscape of
the next ten years will be much more varied than the DVD-dominated
market of the last decade. Downloads, existing DVDs and Blu-Ray will
all have roles to play in this market - but the important news for
Sony, and arguably for the games industry as a whole, is that Blu-Ray
certainly does have a role in this landscape, and a very important one
at that.
Challenges remain, of course; Blu-Ray's prices need to come down, both
for hardware and software, before it can seriously start challenging
sales of DVDs, but already figures for the uptake of key Blu-Ray titles
are encouraging. Most of all, it's clear that Sony's "trojan horse"
strategy has worked. With over ten million PS3s sold through, Blu-Ray's
installed base from that console alone was more than ten times the
total HD-DVD installed base - and even if many of those users don't buy
too many Blu-Ray films, it still represents a very healthy potential
market for the format.
It's not fair, perhaps, to say that Microsoft's gambit has failed. If
Blu-Ray had become established a year earlier, it would have been a
serious blow to the Xbox 360, and to Microsoft's ambitions both in
downloads and in videogames. On the other hand, Sony can heave a sigh
of relief that the damage done has been fairly limited - and can
undoubtedly expect a major boost both for PS3 sales and for its share
price off the back of Toshiba's capitulation.
It's also worth noting that for the media market as a whole - from
consumer electronics through movies to games - the final end of HD-DVD
means the end of a major source of confusion over high definition.
Spurred on by strong sales of HD television, 2008 can at last become
what every year since 2005 has been predicted to be by various analysts
and commentators; the long-delayed year when high definition finally
takes its place at the head of the table.
(gamesindustry.biz)
A Question of Size
It's not terribly long since THQ looked like one of the best growth
prospects in the publishing sector. With a new commitment to quality, a
determination to build new IP and a strong pool of publishing and
management talent, the company's stock was cautiously tipped as a
grower - and it's certainly not an assessment I'd have disagreed with.
The acrimonious divisions that developed between the publisher and the
WWE wrestling body from whom many of its successful franchises had been
licensed seemed to have been a wake-up call for THQ regarding its
reliance on externally owned IP, and the future looked bright.
Now, I remain a firm believer in THQ's abilities as a publisher - and
I think that games like STALKER and Company of Heroes have done a great
deal to boost the value of the brand among gamers. By no means is it
time to start writing obituaries for the firm. However, it's tough to
spin this week's news in a positive light.
THQ has been forced to can a pair of racing franchises - Juiced and
Stuntman, both of which the firm acquired from other publishers with a
view to expanding its market share in racing - alongside a pair of
unannounced titles, the PS3 SKU of the upcoming Frontlines title, and
the PS2 SKU of the new Destroy All Humans game. In total, the firm
expects to suck in around $27 million in charges related to the
cancellations - and to close an entire studio, Concrete Games, which
was working on an unannounced title.
It's tempting to see this as a crisis for THQ, which has also just
downgraded its Q4 expectations due to game delays, and reported the
underperformance of licensed titles Ratatouille and Conan. However, a
wider view reveals that it's not just THQ that's facing trouble. This
malaise extends to almost every mid-range publisher in the market.
Tomb Raider publisher Eidos is perhaps the most high profile victim in
recent weeks. Talks with a takeover suitor collapsed, and with it the
firm's value on the stock market - followed promptly by the resignation
of the company's top management. It's worth noting that the management
themselves only arrived at Eidos after a takeover, having manoeuvred
plucky British publisher SCi into position to take over its larger
rival only a few years ago.
One company regularly mentioned as a potential Eidos suitor is Midway
- another mid-level publisher, big enough to run franchises like Unreal
Tournament and John Woo's Stranglehold, but unlikely to give the big
boys of the market any headaches in the near future. Midway, too, is
struggling to some extent; it hasn't posted a profit since 1999, and
has had to rethink its publishing strategy for 2008 in the face of the
weak reception for its titles this year.
These companies are the publishing B-list - they sit somewhere behind
Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and their ilk, but have well-established
sales, distribution and marketing operations, strong relationships with
buyers and media, and enough muscle to sign promising titles from top
developers. So what's going wrong?
Well, in each instance, there's a rather different set of factors
contributing to the individual problems of that publisher - but I think
those problems may, to some extent, be symptomatic of a change which is
being forced into the industry by the next generation transition. Put
simply, as games get more expensive for developers, publishers and
consumers alike, the challenges of managing huge teams and huge budgets
mount up - and it gets increasingly hard for a mid-level company to
compete with the industry's giants on a level playing field.
This happens to every media sector at some point in their history. How
many big film distributors are there? Break it down by removing the
child companies (such as Columbia Tristar and MGM, both of which belong
to Sony Pictures) and you end up with about five or six corporations
controlling the lion's share of the market. Music is even more
centralised - what was once a thriving market of small publishers has
been centralised into four major corporations.
The cost and risk of being involved in the games business took a huge
step up when the Xbox 360 and PS3 arrived, and the problems faced by
mid-level publishers could be the early symptoms of a major storm that
will only be weathered by firms with sufficient scale to survive.
Big companies face problems with being nimble and able to react, and
they often have difficulty controlling their costs - just ask EA, whose
development costs have grown at a rate far faster than its revenues in
recent years. However, they can also offer better deals for developers,
better incentives for distributors and retailers, and more lavish PR to
attract media coverage. They can better afford to take risks, can more
readily absorb losses from unsuccessful products, and their promise of
higher salaries, better benefits and more job security often attracts
the cream of the crop in terms of staff.
Such advantages spell problems for mid-level companies - and they
certainly make it foolhardy to try and compete on a level playing field
against them. Witness how badly Take Two was stung when it tried to
challenge EA's dominance of sports titles a couple of years ago. THQ's
attempt to hurl its racing franchises against the might of Burnout and
Need for Speed hasn't resulted in such a public defeat, but it's
unlikely to sting any less for that.
What can smaller firms do, faced with this situation? They have, I
suspect, two options in front of them. They can do what small companies
in music and movies do, and focus their efforts on original IP and
niche markets - taking risks on artistic products that could win a
discerning audience, or focusing on titles with a proven market that's
too small for EA to bother with.
The second option is, perhaps, more attractive - but might be even
harder to implement. That option is to get bigger, and the only way to
do that quickly is through mergers and acquisitions. Activision
Blizzard isn't the first merged firm to be created to try and achieve
scale in this market, and we doubt it'll be the last - and for the
likes of THQ, Midway and Eidos, deals like that could be crucial to
their future survival.
It's unlikely that any of the people who run mid-range publishers are
unaware of these pressures. Backroom discussions about mergers or
direction changes are undoubtedly ongoing at most of them right now.
The questions I'm wondering about is whether 2008 will be the year of
industry mergers and acquisitions; and if not, whether 2009 will be too
little, too late.
(gamesindustry.biz)
Six of One...
Retailers across Britain have been piling up tinsel, trees and
selection boxes in their stores since late September - earlier, I'm
told by complaining Scrooges, than any other year before, and certainly
early enough that many of us have tried stoically to ignore them for
over a month now. However, we've reached the point where even the most
festive-averse among us can't deny it. Christmas is, indubitably,
coming.
Oxford Street and Regent Street, the prime shopping streets of London
and hence of the British Isles, told the tale last weekend. Not yet
December, and already the streets were packed like sardines on a Sunday
afternoon, as hapless consumers ventured out in the mistaken belief
that they'd be early enough to avoid the crowds. Christmas is coming -
and while I can only take the word of the old nursery rhyme that the
geese are getting fat, the loud ringing of tills up and down the
country provides assurance that the pockets of retailers, distributors
and publishers alike are certainly piling on the pounds.
In the last half-decade, there has been a welcome rebalancing of the
games industry's financial years, which have finally stopped being
quite so ludicrously heavily focused on the October to December quarter
at the expense of long, barren months around summer time. Despite this,
the Christmas season is still a vitally important time. The incredible
pace of weekly releases since late September is evidence of this; the
long waiting lists for Wii hardware, and dwindling stocks of other
consoles such as the PSP, are further proof.
Therefore this is a timely moment to look through the releases of the
present quarter and consider just what impact they're going to have on
the marketplace - be that on the success of retail sales in the coming
weeks, or simply on the bottom lines of their publishers.
As such, GamesIndustry.biz has created a shortlist of the most
important titles on retail shelves in Britain this holiday season. Over
the space of two columns, I'll be talking through a dozen of those
titles - starting today with the first six, the more hardcore titles
which will be pulling in the key gaming demographic between now and
Christmas Eve.
Crossing the Divide
It won't come as a surprise to anyone that this shortlist is dominated
by cross-platform titles. While the last generation was a clear victory
for Sony's PlayStation 2, the emergence of cross-platform releases as
the industry's default was one of the most important trends to come out
of that era. It was always certain that this would be the case in the
present generation as well; it's only Sony's laggardly movement out of
the starting blocks which has slightly delayed the re-establishment of
cross-platform releases.
As such, there are only two platform exclusives in the six core
audience titles identified for this Christmas. Crysis, of course, is a
PC exclusive - and while its high system requirements will certainly
damage the overall sales potential of the game, that's not the whole
story here. Many PC gamers will see Crysis as a reason to upgrade their
hardware, and the amount of revenue it generates for specialist
retailers will be enormous as a result - with graphics cards, memory,
and even processors and full systems being sold off the back of the
title. After Vista's lacklustre showing on the gaming front, this will
be a welcome boost for retailers who stock hardware components
alongside software.
The other exclusive on the schedule is the Xbox 360 title Mass Effect,
which has had a positive critical reception and looks set to be the
360's last huge title of the year. It ends a stunning run of software
for Microsoft's machine which has cemented its place as the console of
choice for the core gaming audience. Carrying that reputation into a
second Christmas will be a major boon for Microsoft, and Mass Effect's
sales certainly won't suffer from coming in the wake of huge titles
such as Bioshock and Halo 3 which have helped to drive adoption of, and
interest in, the 360 platform.
Actually, there is a third exclusive on our list, albeit not one which
is exclusive out of choice. Epic's Unreal Tournament 3 will not be
launching on the PS3 in Europe this side of Christmas, leaving it to be
released only on the PC in that timeframe. Like Crysis, it may well
help to drive adoption of PC hardware upgrades; however, it is not as
high profile as Crysis in the PC market, not least because it has been
so heavily promoted as a PS3 title. Its delay is disappointing;
however, its appearance on Sony's console next year will probably be
popular with those who have picked up a PS3 over the Christmas season
and are keen for new games.
That leaves three huge, third-party, cross-platform titles which will
appeal to the core gaming audience - each of which seems set to be a
major hit in the extremely tough, but vastly rewarding, pre-Christmas
market. Activision's Call of Duty 4 has attracted rave reviews, and is
picking up extremely good word of mouth recommendations - the only
concern over its performance being the possibility of "first person
shooter fatigue" in the market after Bioshock, Halo 3 and Valve's Half
Life 2: Orange Box.
Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed, however, hasn't fared quite so well
critically. There have been mixed responses to the game among reviewers
- and its major audience, core gamers in their twenties, is the
audience arguably most likely to pay attention to specialist press
coverage. However, it's tough to see Assassin's Creed suffering
terribly from reviewing poorly in the coming weeks - not least because
Ubisoft's extremely high profile advertising campaign for the title is
certain to drive high sales.
Finally, it's perhaps the dark horse of this list - but Eidos' Kane
and Lynch: Dead Men, which arrives this week alongside Mass Effect,
could be the other core gamer title that really flies off the shelves
in the next four weeks. Developers IO have shown their ability to
create enduring franchises in the past, and Kane and Lynch's mature,
cinematic style - backed up, undoubtedly, with a strong marketing
campaign - could press all the right buttons. It will help, of course,
that this Christmas is unexpectedly lacking Grand Theft Auto IV - a
title which should have appeared last month, and whose pent-up demand
Kane and Lynch is perfectly positioned to tap into.
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
Teach Those Who Can't
Anyone who has ever wasted a significant amount of time on the
Internet - and this being the games industry, it's a safe bet that most
if not all of our readers are well within that demographic - has
probably encountered a simple quiz called the Political Compass.
It's a popular web application which poses a number of key political
statements, and asks you to mark whether you agree or disagree with
them. Your answers are then plotted on a two-axis graph, which in
theory tells you whether you're more Mahatma Ghandi or Margaret
Thatcher in your thinking.
One aspect of the quiz which has struck me on a number of occasions is
the following, presumably contentious, statement: "There is now a
worrying fusion of information and entertainment."
The statement is presumably there because it represents a point on
which opinions diverge significantly - but from the point of view of
those embroiled with the videogames industry and its products, it's
tough to see how anyone could see the union of information and
entertainment as a negative, worrying thing.
However, that proposition came back to me upon reading comments from
esteemed film producer and politician Lord Puttnam to the Virtual
Worlds Forum this week. Speaking about the potential for developers to
successfully lobby the government for state aid, Puttnam highlighted
educational and cultural value as being key to this campaign.
"Build education capacity into the function of your games and you
might get state aids," he told the Forum. "Otherwise you don't stand a
snowball's chance in hell."
His comments aren't hugely controversial, for the most part. After
all, one of the key things which has separated television and film
(both relatively heavily state-aided) from videogames over the years is
the fact that Westminster is sold on the concept that TV and movies can
be educational. The debate over the cultural value of those media is
long-over; art, expression and common sense won a resounding victory.
Videogames are still halfway through that struggle - if even that. The
medium is still fighting a rearguard action against ill-informed,
sensationalist attempts to turn it into a scapegoat for crime and
violence. That's a battle which will probably only be won when Rupert
Murdoch finally bites the bullet and buys a game publisher, a move
which will undoubtedly silence the shrill hackery of outlets such as
Sky News, Fox News and The Sun on this topic.
Only once that particular battle has been consigned to the graveyard
of history will the industry be able to start the process of convincing
government - and, indeed, society at large - of the educational and
cultural value of its products.
That process in itself may be a slow one. This goes back to the
Political Compass statement I mentioned earlier; the idea that the
fusion of information and entertainment is seen as "worrying" by many
people. Indeed, I'd go somewhat further than that - I believe that
there are a great many people who simply don't believe that information
(and by extension, education) and entertainment make for good
bedfellows at all.
Much of this is down to a simple misunderstanding. To address Lord
Puttnam's comments directly, I'd argue that many virtual worlds and
massively multiplayer environments are actually very educational - just
not in a straightforward manner which is easily presented to committees
of people who have never experienced this kind of environment.
Be it a world overtly focused on creativity and commerce like Second
Life, or one ostensibly focused on role-playing and combat like World
of Warcraft, virtual worlds offer their players an opportunity to
interact socially and commercially in a relatively safe, enclosed
space.
These worlds feature intricate economic models in which players buy,
sell and trade, where markets fluctuate and investment values can fall
as well as rise.
They demand that players develop and demonstrate the ability to
interact socially to accomplish goals with large groups of others,
building the kind of diplomacy, leadership and teamwork skills that
corporations pour countless millions into paintball venues to nurture
later in life.
As virtual worlds develop and evolve, they will continue to add vastly
more such opportunities to the mix. Worlds set in historical
environments will educate users as they play; worlds with more advanced
economic models will allow people to experiment with businesses and
entrepreneurial ventures in a low-risk environment.
We will even see worlds with advanced enough content tools to allow
creators to build art of many different forms in virtual environments.
None of this is blue-sky, far-future thinking. All of these things
exist in forms that are far from rudimentary already, and will continue
to evolve at a rapid pace in the coming years. Will this be recognised
as educational, though? Will the immense cultural and social value of
such progress be identified by those who make such judgements on behalf
of the nation's purse-string holders?
Perhaps they will - but I confess to a degree of pessimism here. The
breakneck pace of progress has smashed information, education and
entertainment together, and the shape of things to come is only now
emerging from the wreckage - held together with high technology,
networked environments and advanced interactivity.
Given how long it has taken to convince the world that comparatively
simple, linear gaming experiences are not a tool of Satan, can we
really expect that virtual, networked worlds will be embraced with open
arms without a massive fuss?
In other words, I think Lord Puttnam's comments, perhaps, make more
sense the other way around. MMOG and virtual world creators should not
be scrambling to make their games more "educational"; they are doing a
fine job of that already, without even knowing it. However, they should
not count too heavily on the idea of state support, either.
The state is a conservative and slow-moving beast - the job the market
faces is not to make their products more educational or culturally
valuable, but to demonstrate that value to people to whom these ideas
might as well be in a science fiction novel.
I feel fairly strongly that the idea of state aid for a sector such as
this is a bit of a white elephant. Cutting edge online and games
technology is a front that moves far faster than the public sector can
keep up; the focus now, as ever, must be on the pace of progress,
rather than on trying to bring the mandarins of Westminster along for
the ride.
(Gamesindustry.biz)
There's almost a sense of festival around the launch of Bungie's
long-awaited Xbox 360 iteration of the Halo franchise. We won't see
official sales figures for the UK (or, indeed, most other territories)
until next week, but Microsoft's Shane Kim already seems on the verge
of exploding with joy over $170 million first day sales in the USA,
with various retailers also being rolled out to express how ecstatic
they are over the figures.
Suffice it to say, then, that Halo 3 has done really rather well -
critically, it has scored over 90% from almost every specialist
publication in the Western world, and commercially, it seems certain
that its launch day is the biggest ever recorded by a videogame.
Consequentially, it may well be the biggest launch day for any media
product in history - although the caveat here is that this applies only
to the dollar figure. Halo 3's comparisons with other videogame
products are eminently valid, but the success of the game in comparison
with products in other mediums is inflated by the high price-tag of
videogames.
Bring it back to actual unit sales, or the basic number of people who
engage with the product on day one, and the figures don't hold up. It's
wonderful that so many people are willing to go out and pay a large
amount of money for a great game - but while back-slapping is certainly
in order, let's not kid ourselves that this represents a "mass-market"
phenomenon on the same scale as a huge movie or music release.
This is where the Halo message gets slightly confused. The game sits
on a peculiar middle ground between Microsoft's two key ambitions for
the Xbox platform. On one hand, the game itself is quite clearly a
hardcore gamer's dream - wonderfully polished, crafted and presented it
may be, but at heart it is still a heavily multiplayer focused
first-person shooter where you play a space marine taking on an alien
invasion. For the core audience of Xbox 360 owners, there couldn't be a
finer product.
On the other hand, the "media event" status which Microsoft has
carefully crafted for Halo 3 speaks volumes about the firm's
desperation to break out to a more mainstream audience. Months of
forward planning by the company's PR and marketing divisions has seen
Halo 3 being widely reported upon in the mainstream press, with
television, radio and newspaper reports focusing on launch events
around the world.
In London and elsewhere, launch parties were arranged with a coterie
of "celebrities" for the tabloid papers to take pictures of. The queues
outside retailers were the subject of news reports, and major news
outlets cast the net far and wide to try and find anyone who could
explain something about the game on air. My own Halo 3 launch day
started at 5am with an interview on the BBC's World Business Report -
which ended with the rather bemused presenter asking earnestly (and,
frankly, somewhat hopefully) whether videogames were "just a fad".
That, in a nutshell, is where the cracks start to show in the Halo 3
phenomenon. This is not a game for the mass market; it's not the kind
of game that will encourage casual players or non-gamers to engage with
the Xbox 360 or even with gaming in general. In fact, fantastic though
it may be, it's not even really a game that will appeal to anyone who
doesn't specifically enjoy the first-person shooter genre.
It is annoying, certainly, the much of the mass media has approached
the launch of such an anticipated game with a "look at the crazy
gamers!" tone in its coverage. It is frustrating to see features on the
London launch which focus on the fact that Pharrell Williams looked
"bored" rather than on the excitement of the gamers who turned up,
referring to them only in condescending terms.
However, it's not surprising to see this reaction. Unlike last year's
media frenzy around the Wii, the Halo 3 launch isn't something that can
be easily expressed to the non-gamers who cover this subject for the
mass media. The Wii is a genuinely mass-appeal product, simply because
its appeal can be summed up in simple anecdotes that easily sell the
features of the system to a wide audience. Halo 3, however, is a
gamers' game; a refinement of a genre whose appeal is almost
exclusively to existing players.
We fully understand Microsoft's desire to push the Xbox 360 into the
mainstream - after all, this very column has been advocating for years
the idea that the firm needs to broaden its appeal if the 360 is to
break out of the market segment which the original Xbox carved.
However, Halo 3 is the wrong product for the job. It is a game which
will bring core gamers more firmly onto Microsoft's side than ever, but
whose vast public exposure risks painting the 360 further into the
"hardcore only need apply" corner.
What Microsoft needs is not more widespread exposure for an
established, core gamer franchise like Halo 3. It needs a wider range
of gaming experiences to engage with a wider audience - the kind of
breadth and depth of software library which ultimately drove the
PlayStation 2 to its immense sales in the last generation. On a
positive note, we're seeing mounting evidence that this kind of
software is on the way - but it remains to be seen how Microsoft plans
to inform the public of this fact. Much will hinge on its ability to
project a PR message effectively beyond its core audience.
In the meanwhile, none of this should detract from the undoubted
enjoyment that hundreds of thousands of gamers will be experiencing
this week from Halo 3. Whatever about the mixed media response or the
Xbox 360's place in the market, the game itself is a triumph for
Bungie, for Microsoft and for the core gaming public.
Anecdotally, we've never seen so many of our friends on Xbox Live at
the same time, and all playing the same game (bar the occasional weird
refusenik, of course). Gamers' enthusiasm for the franchise may leave
the mainstream media cold - but that won't stop us from taking great
pleasure in Finishing the Fight.
(Gamesindustry.biz)
We've discussed Sony's next-gen strategy at some length in this column
before, but with each press conference, it seems that the firm's
attitude to the market becomes more confusing.
In the wake of yesterday's conference in Leipzig, for instance, it's
as obvious as ever that Sony's main focus at present remains firmly on
the PS2 and the PSP - profitable platforms with healthy installed bases
and thriving software sales.
This isn't surprising - indeed, we've previously attributed many of
Sony's more unusual decisions with the PS3 (such as the ludicrous dance
it played around the "value proposition" at E3) to a desperate need to
avoid rolling over and crushing the PS2 by pushing consumers to
next-gen too quickly.
As such, it wasn't a surprise to see SCEE boss David Reeves devoting a
fair bit of time to talking up the PS2 in Germany - and noting along
the way that the venerable console continues to outsell the Xbox 360 by
a large margin.
That's an uncharitable stab at a rival, certainly, but also an
important and sobering factor to consider in any discussion about the
next-gen battle. Like the current spat between HD-DVD and Blu-ray, it's
still a format war which has no relevance to the vast, vast majority of
consumers, as they remain perfectly satisfied with their existing
platforms.
Equally, plenty of time was devoted to the PlayStation Portable, a
system whose sales have been rather eclipsed by Nintendo's DS, but
which has been reasonably successful in its own right - and is almost
certainly very profitable for Sony.
The big deal for the PSP in Leipzig, however, wasn't new games - or
even the new PSP Slim And Lite hardware, which launches here in a few
weeks' time. Instead, the likes of God of War, WipEout Pulse and
Pursuit Force were given short shrift in favour of new "services" for
the system - non-games software which Sony hopes will push the console
out into new markets.
So now you'll be able to use instant messenger and voice chat over
wireless networks using Go! Messenger, work out travel plans and find
local services on the GPS-enabled Go! Explore, and view television
content from Sky on the move using yet another Go! branded service.
None of this is in any way a Bad Thing, but it's an unusually
scattergun approach to take with a product. Sony's strategy here, it
seems, is to add functionality until a tipping point is reached where
the device has enough desirable elements that consumers can use to
justify the purchase to themselves.
That's logical enough, but leaves very unsettled feelings about the
future of the platform. The concern is that the PlayStation brand is
becoming very diluted by Sony's determination to focus on things that
aren't, well, Play.
A similar issue exists with the PlayStation 3, and it's here that
there's real confusion about Sony's intent in the market. The addition
of a digital tuner and Freeview function to the console is a logical
step, which allows it to act as a hard disc recorder for television -
not exactly earth-shattering, since such devices can be bought for
under a hundred pounds, but certainly a nice addition to the console's
value.
However, the focus in Leipzig zoomed in tightly on this announcement -
and, curiously, on social gaming, with strong focus on next-gen
iterations of Singstar and Buzz. Both of those are fantastic
franchises, but it's not apparent where Sony thinks they're going on
the PlayStation 3.
That area of social gaming, pioneered by SCEE over the last few years,
has largely been enabled by the enormous market penetration and low
price point of the PlayStation 2. On the PS3, with a small installed
base that hasn't even reached most of the "hardcore" market yet, such
products just look out of place - and it's downright confusing as to
why Sony would even want casual game fans to switch to the
(loss-making) PS3 right now, ditching the (profitable) PS2 in the
process.
The problem here, then, isn't a million miles away from the issue
perceived with the PSP. Both platforms find themselves being advertised
as something that isn't a videogames console; instead, they're being
pushed harder than ever as multi-function entertainment and media
devices, systems which have "something for everyone" regardless of
whether you're into games or not.
Because of this, there's a very real risk that Sony's message will
find itself trapped between a rock and a hard place.
On one side, you have the traditional early adopters of PlayStation
hardware - the millions of gamers who formed the core audience for the
PS2, and whose influence and advocacy should not be underestimated when
considering the reasons for the success of that console. If not
actually neglected, those people certainly feel unloved right now, and
worse, they feel that they're being asked to pay above the odds for
non-gaming functions when they just want a games console.
On the other side, you have the more casual, mainstream audience who
adopted the PS2 late in its life - or who haven't previously owned a
games console. This is a rich vein indeed, as Nintendo could attest -
but Sony's mistake here is that it is attempting to leap straight into
this market without first winning over the early adopters.
By doing so, it is missing out on the crucial word of mouth and
advocacy which it gained from the early adopter market in the last
couple of generations - indeed, it is actually generating negative word
of mouth, which is damaging its prospects immensely. Without that
positive advocacy at a grass-roots level, the firm's products face a
daunting prospect - trying to sell a hugely expensive PlayStation to
people who don't want a PlayStation, and aren't even sure if they want
an integrated, all-singing, all-dancing media centre.
With the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray taking another awkward
twist this week as Paramount and Dreamworks hopped back on the HD-DVD
wagon (assisted ably by around USD 150 million of inducement from
Microsoft, if industry scuttlebutt is considered trustworthy), Sony
cannot rely on an early victory in the next-gen DVD battle to lift it
out of its sales slump.
Instead, it needs to focus its efforts on retaking what it foolishly
assumed was its home territory - the core market of gamers who make up
the bulk of sales for any console (except, perhaps, the Wii) in its
first two years on the market.
This week saw Microsoft drop its price points and begin the first of
the massive software launches which will carry it through to Christmas.
Certainly, there is a question mark over Microsoft's ability to
continue the momentum of the Xbox 360 past the hardcore market. But
ironically, while Sony demonstrates a great understanding of how to
break out from hardcore adulation to mass-market success, right now the
firm seems to have forgotten how to accomplish Step One.
The software and services are, arguably, on the way - but the message
needs to be fixed. It's time for Sony to get back to basics, and sell
us again on what the PlayStation does best - Play.
(Gamesindustry.biz)
There has been quite a commotion in the UK about Rock Star's
Manhunt 2 being banned - the first computer game to be so.
Mstation's stance is simple - let adults make their own
choices. In other words, we don't like censorship. We also
believe kids should be protected against what feral adults
might like, and so there needs to be a classification system
and there need to be responsible adults.
In the UK, at least, there seem to be plenty of completely
irresponsible adults and, in addition to that, there's plenty
of evidence to suggest that the 18+ classification is widely
ignored in shops.
It's a problem - a societal problem. Clearly some people
need a little more education about looking after their
children for one thing. And as for Rockstar, they've been
playing this bottom-of-the-barrel game for ages now and
deserved the very expensive lesson dished out to them in both
USA and the UK.
But wait, there's more! ...
Sick Filth?
You'll have to forgive the British tabloid press for seeming a little
bit out of sorts this week. Normally slavering at the mouth at the
first sign of a violent videogame being condemned, the low brow red
tops have had their noses put out of joint after being utterly
pre-empted by the British Board of Film Classification.
After all, "Ban This Sick Filth" makes for a wonderful headline. "Some
Sick Filth Has Been Banned", however, looks a touch limp, no matter how
big you make the letters.
Tuesday's announcement that the BBFC has denied a rating to Rockstar
Games' Manhunt 2 represents a new stage in the debate over violence in
videogames. It is the first time that a videogame has been denied a
rating since Carmageddon suffered a similar fate ten years ago -
although Carmageddon's publisher, SCi, successfully appealed that
decision.
I ought to say, at this point, that I am deeply uncomfortable with the
fact that the BBFC - an organisation whose very name suggests
classification, rather than censorship - should be in a position to
make a decision like this.
British consumers and commentators have regularly noted that Germany
has a particularly censorious regime surrounding videogames, and that
the United States has an astonishing tendency to outrage over even the
mildest sexual content. The irony is that neither of those countries
actually censor videogames, in the strict sense of the word.
The German authorities can refuse a rating, which prevents a game from
being advertised but doesn't stop it from being sold. In the US, an
outcry over a game may cause some large retailers, such as Wal-Mart, to
withdraw it from shelves. However, in neither country can a game
actually be banned.
In the UK, however, despite a generally liberal attitude to media and
all forms of artistic expression, free speech does not enjoy the same
legal protections which it is afforded across the Atlantic. The result
is that the BBFC's refusal to certify Manhunt 2 means that it is now
entirely illegal to sell the game in this country.
Concerns over the mechanism of censorship, however, are secondary in
this instance. In the US, after all, Manhunt 2 has been "banned" just
as effectively by the actions of the videogames industry itself. The
ESRB, a voluntary ratings board, has classified the game as Adults
Only, and Sony and Nintendo have therefore refused to license it for
sale on their systems.
This is a voluntary, internal industry process of self-censorship
which is far more laudable than externally imposed censorship - but
nonetheless, the effect for consumers is the same. Manhunt 2 is banned,
on both sides of the Atlantic.
What's more important, if somewhat less comfortable a topic for
discussion, is the question of why this game has been banned. The BBFC,
after all, has not exactly been the most censorious of organisations in
the last decade.
The organisation has largely kept pace with changing social mores and
an increasingly liberal view of art and media in the UK, and has in
fact been a staunch supporter of the right of videogames to move into
areas of mature, adult content more commonly associated with older
mediums like film.
In the case of the Hot Coffee scandal, for example, a ridiculous storm
which threatened to shatter teacups across the USA, the BBFC rather
sensibly opined that the tame sexual content revealed by the Hot Coffee
mod did nothing to change their view that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
was perfectly fit for consumption with an 18 rating.
Indeed, comparing the BBFC of now with the BBFC which reacted so
strongly to Carmageddon in 1997 clearly displays the progress made in
attitudes within the organisation. It seems almost certain that were
Carmageddon to come before the BBFC censors today, it would pass,
uncut, without the blink of an eye. We even suspect that it wouldn't
garner an 18 rating in today's vastly more accepting climate.
The point here is this; Manhunt 2 is not merely the first game to be
banned by the BBFC in a decade. It is also the only game to be banned
by the organisation since its liberalisation.
It is a game which has been judged as being simply too cruel, callous,
unpleasant and disgusting to be granted a classification, in an era
when films like James Wan's Saw series and Eli Roth's Hostel make it
into cinemas without even a ripple of attention - either from censors
or from the tabloids.
This isn't a case of knee-jerk reaction to the controversy surrounding
the first game; it's well known by now that the links made between
Manhunt and the murder of a teenager in Leicestershire were tenuous at
best, and weren't supported by police investigating the case.
Besides which, the BBFC doesn't succumb to knee-jerk reactions. Nor is
this a case of videogames being discriminated against in classification
due to being a "new" medium, and the whipping boy du jour of the
conservative media. Time and time again, the BBFC has shown that it
understands and respects videogames.
Our discomfort at the fact that the board has the capacity to censor
at all has been allayed, for the most part, by the incredibly sparing,
informed and judicious use of that capability which it has exercised in
recent years.
In other words, with Manhunt 2, Rockstar has crossed the line - and
crossed it at a full tilt run, it would seem, since the BBFC was unable
to suggest any cuts that would bring the game in line with its
guidelines.
"Unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone in an overall game
context which constantly encourages visceral killing with exceptionally
little alleviation or distancing" is the key reason given for the ban;
we would encourage readers to recall that this is judgement of a
classification board which has happily classified Hostel and Saw, and
indeed, the first Manhunt game.
One commonly heard argument is that being a Wii, PSP and PS2 title,
it's impossible that Manhunt 2 could have the same level of realistic
gore and violence seen in live-action movies like the aforementioned
Hostel. However, this is an excessively simplistic way of looking at
the violence contained in games like this.
It's crucial to consider that in gory films like Saw and Hostel, the
viewer is placed at best in the role of an outside observer; at worst,
they are given the viewpoint of the victim, a technique used by
filmmakers to heighten the discomfort and reactions of the audience.
In a game like Manhunt 2, however, the player is in the role not of
the hunted, or of the victim (as they are in, for example, survival
horror type games); instead, they take on the role of the predator, of
the serial killer, of the murderer who enjoys inflicting pain and
torture.
There are certain parallels for this in literature, of course - Brett
Easton Ellis' American Psycho and Iain Banks' Complicity both deal, in
very different ways, with murderers portrayed in the first person.
However, the clear opinion of the BBFC - and presumably of the ESRB -
is that Manhunt 2 doesn't represent the sort of insightful commentary
represented by those works. This is killing, maiming and torturing for
the sake of it; this may, in fact, be the game which lives up to the
shrill claims of the conservative wing that games are "murder
simulators".
In making such a game Rockstar has been juvenile, shameful and
irresponsible. The right of creators to push the boundaries of media
and society must be balanced out against a simple sense of social
responsibility - something with Rockstar seems to entirely lack.
This will be seen in some quarters as a question of being the enfant
terrible of the games industry, a reputation which the firm seems to
relish; however, I disagree with that assessment.
At several points along the line, during the development of Manhunt 2,
people in management at Rockstar and Take Two have surveyed this
product and made a decision, based on pure financial logic, to continue
funding its development. This is not a question of art; this is a game
which, it was decided, would sell well as a commercial product.
That decision has now backfired spectacularly on Rockstar and its
parent company - and while we may be uncomfortable with the way in
which the game has been censored in the UK, the rapid and effective
self-censorship applied by the industry in the United States is
laudable.
Videogames are not murder simulators; the vast, vast bulk of the
attacks by the conservative right on the videogame medium have
absolutely no merit, and are based simply in a pathetic attempt to find
a scapegoat for wider societal problems.
Unfortunately, Rockstar seemed to view the accusations levelled at
this industry, and at this medium, as a challenge. With even the mostly
liberal minds in the BBFC apparently horrified, the message here should
be clear; the videogames industry as a whole doesn't condone the
overreactions we've witnessed in the media and among politicians in
recent years, but it fully understands where lines must be drawn.
The fact that videogames are not murder simulators is a solid defence
against the attacks of the conservative right; it is not an indication
of a gap in the market. Perhaps now, with an entire development budget
down the drain, Rockstar will be receptive to that lesson.
(gamesindustry.biz)
Microsoft's Xbox 360: seeing red
Rings of Red
Microsoft needs to act now on hardware failures - or risk losing
consumer support.
With all the accolades presently being paid to Nintendo for the
astonishing success of the DS and the Wii, it's understandable that
Microsoft occasionally seems a bit put out by the whole situation.
After all, the Xbox 360 sailed through the seemingly ambitious 10
million unit goal which was set for its first year or so on the market,
and is outdoing Sony's PS3 in most markets - a situation which few
would have dared to predict only a few years ago.
Given the circumstances, it's not hard to see why some more
ill-advised comments from Microsoft executives regarding the Wii have
seemed... Well, a touch bitter. Right now, Microsoft must feel like the
kid who stayed up all night learning all the best combos in Street
Fighter, only to arrive in school the next day and discover that
everyone else in the class has decided to play marbles instead.
Nintendo's resurgence, however, doesn't really detract from
Microsoft's success in real terms. Right now, the Xbox 360 is winning
the battle which it set out to win - namely, the battle with Sony's PS3
- and is showing no sign of relinquishing its dominance of the "real"
next-gen market.
I have always argued that this fight was Sony's to lose, and that
remains the case; what's happened here is that Sony has slipped up
badly enough, and fallen hard enough, to give Microsoft a clear shot at
goal. The problematic PR, delayed launch and presently weak software
line-up for PS3 are all fairly major concerns; the enormous price
point, however, is the most serious issue.
Prior to launch, plenty of people questioned whether the market would
support that pricing level - Blu-ray drive or not. The answer has
returned, loud and clear; no, the market will not support this price
point. Every day that Sony leaves the PS3 on the shelves with this
unattractive price tag attached gives its rivals more of a head start.
With flawless execution, Microsoft could sail into the space which is
being left by Sony's failures and build an Xbox 360 market share which
would be practically unassailable. In some regards, that's exactly what
it has done. Nobody can downplay the company's astonishing achievements
with regard to software; the Xbox 360 has a compelling line-up of
software on shelves, and an even more compelling line-up of exclusive
titles in the pipeline.
Games like Halo 3, Bioshock and Mass Effect make Xbox 360 owners feel
good about their purchase, and provide compelling reasons for Xbox and
PlayStation 2 owners to upgrade. Indeed, in the top ten Most Wanted
games chart compiled from user data on GamesIndustry.biz's sister site,
Eurogamer.net, seven of the top ten titles are Xbox 360 games. Two Wii
titles (Super Mario Galaxy and Super Paper Mario) make it into the
ranking; only one PS3 title, Metal Gear Solid 4, appears.
It's obvious, then, that Microsoft is doing more than just making
headway with the hardcore audience. Frankly, that battle is all but
won, and the onus is now on Sony to demonstrate that it is capable of
creating an offering for hardcore gamers that is as attractive as the
one Microsoft has crafted.
The obvious criticism - which is no less true for being so obvious -
is that there's precious little evidence of Microsoft's software
line-up managing to break out of that hardcore market. The company
still lacks not only the kind of Singstar, Eye Toy and Buzz titles
which drive casual market adoption, but also the Final Fantasies and
Tekkens which appeal to the vast mass of "average" gamers who lie
outside the hardcore market Xbox 360 has so far exploited.
This is, at least, a well-understood problem, and one which is widely
commented upon. It has, of course, done nothing to slow down
Microsoft's race to ten million; but it may make the next ten million a
lot harder to sell, and the following ten million almost impossible, if
the issue is not addressed.
However, there is another problem which Microsoft faces at the moment
- one which the company has shown even less sign of understanding, or
addressing. It is the problem of hardware reliability and customer
service, an area in which the Xbox 360 has a track record that is
nothing short of utterly appalling - and an area which Microsoft
absolutely must address, or risk handing the goodwill of the market
back to its rivals.
Of course, this too is not a new problem. Microsoft has been slammed
over the failure rate of Xbox 360 consoles, and its own poor customer
service in dealing with that matter, many times before - British
readers will undoubtedly recall that the firm was hauled over the coals
on the Watchdog programme here only a few months ago.
This problem hasn't gone away; in fact, from a consumer point of view,
Microsoft appears to have done precisely nothing to address it. While
the attention of the media may have turned to scrutiny of Sony's
failings, the vast numbers of Xbox 360 owners who have been let down
first by Microsoft's shoddy manufacturing, and subsequently by the
company's arrogant and unfair policies with regard to customer service,
have increased. Their voices are contributing to a groundswell of
unrest and negative buzz which will hurt Microsoft very badly indeed if
it is not addressed.
The problem is clear. A large number of Xbox 360 consoles from launch
onwards have shipped with manufacturing problems which have manifested
themselves in the dreaded "three red lights" - an error code displayed
on the front panel which means that the console has died, and needs to
be returned to Microsoft for service.
The number of systems which shipped with these problems is a matter of
some debate, but it's clear that it is a far, far higher proportion
than the company originally admitted. Early claims suggested that Xbox
360 consoles were only failing as often as you would expect from any
piece of consumer hardware - a figure generally agreed to be around 3
per cent. However, entire batches of consoles at launch were failing en
masse - and the reliability, although it improved, continued to be poor
for months afterwards.
Has this been fixed? Who can say - Microsoft has certainly made no
promises regarding enhanced reliability for the Xbox 360 Elite console,
so it's simply impossible to judge whether new machines rolling off the
production line will be any better than their predecessors. Even giving
the benefit of the doubt, that still means that millions of machines
from the "unreliable" period of the console's manufacturing are sitting
under televisions around the world.
This, however, is only half of the problem. For a new piece of
consumer hardware to display a high failure rate is damaging, but not
seriously so, as long as the company has a good system in place to
ensure that customers' systems are being repaired, and goodwill is
being maintained.
Unfortunately, Microsoft has made two massive blunders in this regard.
Firstly, it has taken to shipping refurbished systems to customers
whose consoles have died - not a huge problem in itself, but the
reliability of these refurbished machines is also vastly suspect, which
results in anecdotal cases where gamers have returned their consoles to
Microsoft three or even four times, with each subsequent console
suffering the same fault after a few months. These cases make
compelling "horror stories" for consumers, and have been widely
disseminated.
Secondly, despite its shameful appearance on Watchdog, and being
lambasted by the press over its behaviour, Microsoft continues to
insist that British consumers whose consoles have failed after its 12
month warranty period must pay GBP 85 (around 125 Euro) to have the
system repaired. Its customer service representatives are adamant on
this point, refusing to budge even when it is pointed out that these
manufacturing flaws are clearly Microsoft's responsibility under
consumer law, regardless of the terms of the firm's own warranty.
For Microsoft to rectify these problems will, of course, be painful
and expensive for the firm. It is also absolutely essential if its head
start over Sony, and the market goodwill it has built around its brand,
are to be even remotely meaningful over the coming years.
To hardcore gamers, consoles are "special case" items; they are early
adopters, generally have a large disposable income, and are willing to
accept all manner of problems and flaws in order to enjoy the games
they want to play. However, they are a small - if vocal - market. To
everyone else, to the vast ocean of consumers to whom Microsoft must
now appeal, if the PlayStation brand is to be unseated, a console is
just another piece of consumer electronics, and it is subject to the
same standards you would expect from your DVD player, your digital
camera or your toaster.
You wouldn't buy a specific DVD player, no matter how nice the
feature-set, if a friend had told you that he bought one last year and
had to return it to the manufacturer three times. You wouldn't buy a
certain digital camera if you heard that they routinely break down
after 13 months, and you have to pay around a third of the original
purchase cost to have them repaired. You wouldn't buy a toaster if your
friend had that model of toaster, said it made lovely toast, but every
couple of months it burns the bread and has to be replaced.
Silly examples? Not in the slightest; this is exactly the thought
process with which the average consumer, considering a next-gen
purchase, is presented. The Xbox 360 may be a magical box of wonders to
the hardcore gamers enjoying the likes of Gears of War and Crackdown,
but to the rest of the world, it's just another piece of consumer
electronics. If they hear horror stories about reliability and customer
service, they won't buy it - end of story.
Right now, those horror stories are proliferating; the word of mouth
about Xbox 360 is that the games are great, but the hardware is a
nightmare. If Microsoft is serious about reaching an audience with Xbox
360 which is bigger than the 20 million units achieved by Xbox, then
that simply isn't good enough. It's time for Redmond to stop burying
its head in the sand over this problem, and start coming up with
solutions - before its unhappy customers become one of Sony's best
assets.
(Gamesindustry.biz)
Do the death throes of music DRM mean anything for games?
It's not exactly been the loudest revolution of all time - in fact,
it's been so quiet that you might have missed it - but there has been a
genuine revolution in the music industry in the last fortnight. The old
order has been overthrown, and it isn't happy; a new, upstart approach,
widely lauded by the public and the grass-roots, is taking its place.
So far, it's been a bloodless coup, although it's hard to say how long
that will last once the financial results start filtering through in
the coming quarters.
Actually, it's not entirely true to say that this coup has been
bloodless. There's one head rolling in the basket beneath the
guillotine blade; it's ugly, unloved, and it's called DRM.
DRM, of course, is something most people in the videogames market will
be familiar with at this stage. At its most basic level, DRM is just a
concept - it's the idea of using encryption software to control what a
user can do with a piece of media they've bought from you.
For companies treading out into the great unknown of downloadable
content, DRM is a comforting safety blanket to clutch at; without it,
you're giving someone a file which they could easily just pass on to
one of their friends.
Needless to say, that scares companies involved in digital downloads
witless - and a plethora of DRM solutions have popped up to reassure
them that they're not just handing their whole business over to
pirates. That's the first problem; none of those DRM solutions actually
work with one another properly. You can't download music from the
iTunes store and play it on a Microsoft-compatible music player, or
vice versa.
That feeds into the second problem - a great, whopping, huge problem
with DRM and indeed, with a lot of ham-fisted copyright protection
efforts in general. Quite simply, DRM takes rights away from consumers
which they are used to having with other products.
A CD has no DRM; you can sell it to someone else, you can copy it to
your PC and play it on any media playing software, you can rip it to
any portable music device, you can copy tracks from it to make a mix-CD
for a friend.
Now, some of those uses aren't legal, and some of them even the courts
seem unsure about in some jurisdictions, but that doesn't actually
matter. From a real-world, grass-roots user perspective, those are the
things you can do, and do easily, with a CD. You can do the same
things, of course, with pirate MP3s which you download illegally.
Herein lies the rub - you can't do those things with legal,
DRM-protected music. Which means that, in a bizarre twist, legal music
has less actual value to consumers than illegal music.
Which is why, to a large extent, this old order had to fall. EMI was
the first of the big four music companies to buckle; it's launching its
music catalogue, without DRM, on stores like iTunes in the near future.
Now Universal looks like it's falling in line, with a deal with Amazon
to do likewise. The remaining firms, Sony and Warner, simply cannot
resist the trend which their two competitors have started. Music DRM
will inevitably collapse like a row of dominoes.
Why? Because eventually, it had to sink in that DRM wasn't just
angering geeks with blogs - it was hurting customers, and it was
providing them with a clear, logical and genuinely sensible reason not
to buy legal music. All of the threats of legal action and cajoling
appeals to people's better nature are meaningless if, at the end of the
day, your legal product is significantly crippled compared to the
illegal (but easily obtainable) alternative.
And as to the relevance of this decision to the videogames market?
Well, it's both more and less relevant than it appears at first glance.
A number of commentators - mostly out in the blogosphere - have opined
that this decision must, logically, have a knock-on effect on games and
movies. That's not necessarily true, because those mediums (and games
especially) actually come with very different consumer expectations to
music.
The average consumer is very used to the idea of being able to rip his
music, listen to it on multiple devices, copy it between formats and
even shuffle it around to create personal playlists. Those
expectations, however, don't exist for games, and only exist for a very
small (but growing) number of movie consumers.
Games, in particular, are seen as products which only work on one
device, which cannot be copied and cannot be modified. Under those
circumstances, DRM is far less of an issue than it is with music, and
the same pressures which have forced the hands of EMI and Universal
simply don't exist.
However, the revolution in music DRM still has important lessons for
the videogames market. All too often, videogames companies have
displayed a willingness to impose copy protection measures on their
software which actually seriously disadvantage or inconvenience
legitimate purchasers of the product.
On the PC, in particular, copy protection has often been mismanaged to
the point where playing a pirate version of a game can sometimes be a
better experience - and the advent of networked consoles opens up the
potential for similar mistakes to be made.
The core lesson to take away from the failure of music DRM is simple.
Copy protection should inconvenience pirates - but never, ever at the
expense of also inconveniencing legitimate, paying customers.
Failing at that key test is what drove the groundswell of dislike
against music DRM and the companies who imposed it. Their failures
should be foremost in the mind of games industry professionals as the
market pushes increasingly into digital downloads and concerns over IP
protection grow louder than ever.
(Gamesindustry.biz)
More than two years since Microsoft's erstwhile gaming evangelist, J
Allard, announced that the next generation of consoles would arrive
at the head of a technology and media transition he termed the "HD
Era", you might be forgiven for thinking that the transition is a
done deal.
HDTV sets fill the windows of electronics retailers around the
world, enticing customers with their sleek, shiny looks. Consumers
on web forums debate the relative merits not of HD versus SD
screens, but of different HD resolutions. And the press is sold on
the concept, throwing around formerly alien phrases like HDMI, HDCP
and 1080p with wild abandon.
The HD transition, you might think, is in full swing. What seemed
like a risky gamble two years ago - betting the farm on the idea
that consumers would be prepared to upgrade their TV equipment - has
been gradually turned around to look like a well-informed choice.
2007, we are told, is the Year of High Definition - the year that
Xbox 360 and PS3, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, 720p and 1080p, will become
the basic standards for the content we eyeball on a daily basis.
It's a lovely piece of spin, and I'm sure that PR bosses around the
globe have been burning the midnight oil on that one - but the real
picture, I suspect, is very different. For a vast number of
consumers - almost certainly a majority - HD remains an almost
meaningless buzzword, a confusing high-end technology whose purpose,
requirements and cost have been badly communicated.
The real-world example of a friend whose apartment I visited last
week is a useful eye-opener. He's in his mid-20s, professional and
fairly affluent - a perfect example, actually, of the casual gamer
demographic most games firms are so keen on winning over.
He's also the proud owner of a 46-inch Samsung high definition TV,
which takes pride of place in his living room. It wasn't cheap; he's
perfectly happy to spend on his home entertainment kit. As a
consumer, he is slap bang in the middle of the road along which the
HD juggernaut is supposedly steaming.
Here's the catch. In the five months since acquiring his delightful,
shiny Samsung HDTV, he has not watched one single second of high
definition content on the set - and he had absolutely no idea that
this was the case. He knew that he had a "HD" television; he knew,
quite specifically, that they have sharper pictures, and thus he
wanted a "HD" set. What he didn't know, and what the HD lobby
completely failed to educate him about, was that having acquired a
HD set, he also needed HD content and HD players and receivers for
the experience to actually work.
The conversation with him on this matter was almost farcical - and
this was only an attempt to explain the need for a fully HD
throughput from start to finish to actually take advantage of his
kit, never mind messing around with geeky technical nonsense like
720p or 1080p.
The press and the hardcore consumers can pretend all they like that
multiple HD resolutions are a perfectly simple matter; to the
average consumer still struggling to get his head around what's "HD"
and what isn't (mentioning that even a HD TV and a HD-DVD player
connected up with an old-fashioned SCART cable won't actually give
you a HD picture got a particularly long-suffering look), such
points are utter gibberish.
This was, of course, an isolated incident - but a quick trawl of
electronics retailers reveals that these scenes are repeated across
the country, countless times each day. Consumers, frankly, don't
know what HD is aside from being "a bit sharper". They plug their
new HDTVs into existing, non-upscaling DVD players and standard
definition game consoles, using old analogue video cables, and think
that everything is working (albeit disappointing) because the
picture looks a bit sharper than it did on their old CRT
televisions.
Industry insiders, AV nuts and hardcore gamers can roll their eyes
all they like at such behaviour; this is the reality of public
uptake of HD right now, and it's not doing anyone trying to sell a
product on the promise of high-definition wonder-visuals any good.
Of course, it's no surprise that consumers are so confused when the
companies behind the HD lobby can't seem to get their message
straight either. Sony threw a spanner into the works with the
decision to start calling 1080p "True HD", and more than one
electronics store employee I spoke to had tales to relate of
consumers who had already bought a 720p television, coming into the
store angry and annoyed at the idea of having to upgrade to 1080p so
they would have "real" high definition... Despite not having a
Blu-Ray player or any other kind of device actually capable of
outputting HD, let alone 1080p HD.
Sony aren't solely to blame, though. Microsoft can't get its message
straight either; it vacillates wildly from claiming that HD isn't
really that important (mostly when downplaying the market for high
definition movie discs) to claiming that it's absolutely vital
(mostly when talking about high definition games, presumably keenly
aware that most consumers still aren't convinced that their trusty
PS2 needs an upgrade).
The HD disc format war doesn't help; consumer uncertainty over the
desperately ill-conceived HDCP standards doesn't do much for the
education of the masses about the joys of HD either. Under such
confused circumstances, it's no surprise that Nintendo has found the
lack of HD support in the Wii - lambasted as a disastrous decision
by its critics - to be no barrier at all to selling consoles.
The HD juggernaut will, of course, roll onwards relentlessly. There
is no doubt that standard definition will be replaced by high
definition in time - but at present, serious questions need to be
asked over how much time we're actually talking about.
Until consumers at large are much, much more educated about HD - and
much more comfortable in their understanding of the benefits of the
technology - then standard definition will continue to be incredibly
common, even in homes which own a HD set. At a time when the
videogames industry wants to sell its new range of products on the
strength of stunning HD visuals, that's a worrying and unhealthy
possibility.
After all, we all know how damaging a console hardware transition
can be to the bottom lines of everyone involved. The prospect of
adding a mismanaged display technology transition to the mix is not
a pretty one; and if the roll-out of HD technology continues to be
botched in this way, the public perception of the value of next-gen
videogames will be one of the main victims.
The HD lobby needs to start scoring better grades in communication -
or risk losing the fickle enthusiasm of consumers, and dragging this
transition out for years longer than it needs to take.
(gamesindustry.biz)
Every few years, the videogames sector gives birth to a new
sub-sector which rapidly develops its own buzzwords, figureheads and
key players - while much of the traditional industry continues to
look on with a cocked eyebrow and an unconvinced air.
You can identify the emergence of such sectors by the proliferation
of conferences and events which will spring up to service the
nascent market. Mobile gaming was one such sector; the seemingly
paradoxical serious gaming another. One might consider in-game
advertising to be a sub-sector in its own right, of course, and to
complete the set, there's casual gaming.
Of course, the irony of casual gaming is that it's a sector which
has always existed, to some extent, and whose growth has proceeded
along a path largely undetermined by the worthies who discuss it at
conferences. Any commuter on a London-bound train in the past decade
could have told you that casual gaming existed simply by pointing to
the office workers in their carriage busily playing Tetris on their
Game Boys or Solitaire on their laptops to while away the journey.
The advent of the Internet saw countless people around the world
being entranced by small web-based games, mostly created by amateurs
in their free time and played by bored desk jockeys during quiet
moments in the office. The growth has been steady, organic, and
largely removed from the world of expensive consoles - not least
because so little money was changing hands.
Wake-up call
In recent years, the entertainment industry at large has been
sitting up and taking notice of casual games. The primary revelation
is that any medium which is getting office workers with Internet
access (read: reasonably well salaried) and some level of technical
competence and interest in games (read: probably relatively young)
to sit in front of it willingly for well over ten minutes a day is,
of course, an incredibly valuable marketing medium.
The second revelation is that even existing console and PC gamers -
generally considered to be a relatively hardcore bunch - don't
always want game experiences that cost upwards of 30 pounds and take
40 hours to complete. Sometimes, a snack between meals is what's
desired, not a four course dinner.
These two core factors have led to an explosion in casual gaming in
the last few years, with the sector branching out in a number of
different directions. On one hand, marketing firms have successfully
employed free casual games as viral tools to promote movies, games
and consumer brands. At the other end of the spectrum, the next-gen
consoles give gamers the option to download and play cheap, high
quality casual games from services such as Xbox Live Arcade and the
PlayStation Store.
Nintendo's Wii takes the concept even further, with leading titles
on the system being composed of a collection of casual games - while
on the Nintendo DS, it could be argued that many of the top games
(such as Brain Age and Nintendogs) are, in effect, casual.
Somewhere in the middle ground of all of this, organisations such as
RealNetworks and MSN have launched successful casual game download
sites for PC users, while companies such as PopCap and sites such as
NewGrounds have emerged as new names from the seemingly fertile soil
of the sector.
The name game
In other words, casual gaming is booming - and the irony is that the
success of the sector also means that the writing is on the wall for
the whole concept. "Casual games" is an awkward and disingenuous
label which implies that it is truly a sector distinct from the
existing videogames market. The growth of this part of the market
has led to a broadening of the definition which is now blurring the
lines between "casual games" and "videogames" to the extent where
those lines no longer exist.
It's all just "games" now, and if anything, the insistence on using
the term "casual games" (and occasionally, wheeling out unpleasant
rhetoric about how casual games are the real mass market
proposition, thus attempting to dismiss the vast market enjoyed by
existing videogames as though it were a hardcore niche) does little
other than devalue the enormous contribution which the pioneers of
this sector have made to the growth of the market as a whole.
This is not, however, to say that serious challenges do not await
the ongoing push to make small, accessible games into a primary
leisure time pursuit for the mass market. For one thing, there are
still question marks over how the revenue models for the sector
should work - and worse, the only answers to those questions
available right now suggest that multiple different models will be
required.
The reason for that is the other huge challenge faced by casual
games and the reach into the mass-market - the challenge to become
truly ubiquitious.
Multi-tasking
For traditional games, being ubiquitous means being present on
perhaps seven platforms - PS2, Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, PSP, DS and PC.
For casual games, however, it means far more - it means being
available on multiple platforms with entirely different
functionality and interfaces, through a variety of different
distribution systems and allowing for countless different play
environments.
Casual games extend their tendrils into every platform from mobile
phones (a key market, and one which alone accounts for hundreds of
individual platforms) to web-browsers, from the Wii Virtual Console
to Xbox Live Arcade, from the Nintendo DS to the iPod Video. Of
course, not every casual game must be available on every platform;
but the sector as a whole is represented across all of these
platforms, and at its most successful; it's this ubiquity which will
drive acceptance by the mass market.
This in itself reveals the difficulty of setting out a business
model for this rapidly expanding end of the games market. Titles for
the Wii and DS follow a traditional games business model, but other
parts of the spectrum are vastly more complex.
Market forces
The web browser based game market looks set to be fully
advertising-supported, as do parts of the PC download market; the
mobile phone game market has settled on a game purchase model, but
may yet find itself forced to consider pay-per-play, rental and
advertising supported models.
Games on Xbox Live Arcade, the PlayStation Store and the Wii Virtual
Console follow yet another business model, and in the wings are
entirely different models such as episodic content or sponsored
content.
In a sense, it's a good challenge for mass market gaming to face -
it's clear that there is an audience, but the question now is which
combination of business models and content will provide the
healthiest business ecosystem to allow these titles to thrive.
This may well be the second huge gift of "casual gaming" to the
overall videogames market; having challenged it to extend the reach
of its content and encompass a far wider selection of audiences and
leisure times, the gauntlet is now being laid down to re-evaluate
how content is priced, delivered and supported.
No longer a sub-sector, but rather a crucial part of the videogames
business, casual games may well be the biggest driver for change in
the industry as a whole over the coming years.
(Gamesindustry.biz)
Bully: a saga of stupid and/or dishonest people
'The saga of Rockstar's latest controversial videogame, Canis Canem Edit
(or "Bully" to readers in North America), has been well-reported. The
game has the unusual distinction of being a poster child for two opposed
causes; on one hand, advocates of censorship and the eternally morally
outraged present the game as an example of the depravity to which the
videogames industry has stooped, while on the other hand, the industry
itself and advocates of creative freedom point to it as a perfect
example of the blind and ignorant hyperbole to which the self-styled
"moral majority" has stooped.
This dichotomy has come about for one simple reason - namely that in
their over-zealous pursuit of videogames as the latest scapegoat for
society's ills, advocates of censorship or control managed to make a lot
of noise about Bully before actually finding out the facts about the
game. Extensive campaigns protesting the release of the game were
coordinated before anyone had actually seen anything other than a few
screenshots, and speculation about the nature of its content was
presented widely as being fact. If this speculation had turned out to be
true, Bully would unquestionably have been one of the most shocking and
unpleasant games ever made - featuring, as its critics were fond of
wildly claiming, a level of cruelty and violence directed towards minors
previously unseen in the interactive medium.
Unfortunately for the campaigners against Bully, that actually isn't
what the game turns out to be like at all. Instead, Bully is a
surprisingly intelligent, entertaining and indeed nostalgic game which,
although it certainly incorporates a certain level of violence, is
ultimately no worse than the likes of Grange Hill or any number of other
stylised representations of school days. In direct contradiction of the
claims of campaigners, the game actually punishes you for acting in an
irresponsible or, indeed, bullying manner, and while it's certainly not
the chronicle of academic life that teachers or politicians might want
to see, nor is it the seeds of society's downfall encapsulated on a DVD
and waiting to be implanted into fragile young minds. Those seeking
portents of impending apocalypse will have to look elsewhere.
None of this matters to the most fervent critics of videogames, of
course, because few of them are of a mind to let the facts get in the
way of a good story. Even faced with a resounding courtroom defeat in
Florida, where he had attempted to get the game banned, increasingly
shrill lawyer Jack Thompson continued to pontificate against the game -
going so far as to compare the court's deliberations to the misleading
of weapons inspectors in rogue states.
The gutter press is, of course, not known for worrying too much about
whether they're reporting the truth or not (after all, as Karl
Pilkington once wisely observed, you can prove anything with facts) -
and in a particularly shocking example of their willingness to carry
right ahead in the face of factual adversity, a British tabloid (the
Daily Star) last week published a full-page article condemning Bully,
including a screenshot which had been edited to show an act of violence
which isn't even possible in the game. To add insult to injury, it
wasn't even a good edit - it showed the main character of the game
swinging a baseball bat... At himself. A picture caption claimed that
this showed a boy beating up a smaller boy with a baseball bat -
suggesting that whoever does the PhotoShop work on the Star's lying
pictures needs a quick lesson in perspective, and the differences
between "smaller" and "further away".
However, while the loony fringe of anti-games campaigning - from
Thompson to the tabloids - seems unperturbed at being proved wrong, and
perfectly prepared to continue spewing bile regardless, some of their
fair-weather allies emerge from this ordeal looking rather worse for
wear. Various perfectly respectable anti-bullying agencies, and even
some politicians who should really have known better (and, admittedly,
some who have never shown any sign of "knowing better" on pretty much
any issue, such as the continually astonishingly ignorant British MP
Keith Vaz), joined the crusade against Bully without doing their
homework - and with the game now turning out to be so utterly
inoffensive, now have a significant amount of egg on their faces as a
result.
However, worst of all out of this sorry lot - and perhaps most
inexcusable of all - is British retailer Currys, which this week took
the astonishing decision to publicly refuse to stock the game, a clear
bending to tabloid will in the face of perfectly clear facts about the
product. This kind of spineless pandering to the tabloid mentality is
rife among US retailers, of course - and as such, US readers accustomed
to the behaviour of chains such as Wal-Mart will probably not even raise
an eyebrow at Currys' decision, just as UK observers find the debate in
the US over the enforcement of age ratings to be such a non-issue.
However, in the UK, retailers do not customarily pander to tabloid
outrage, and Currys' decision to do so is a disgustingly simpering
attempt to hop onto a PR bandwagon which, we hope, is rolling inexorably
over a cliff.
There are a few possible scenarios which arise from Currys' decision.
The first is that the firm gets the PR it wants from the decision,
appeals to the narrow cross-section of middle England which is prepared
to get its hackles up over lunch about videogames they've never even
seen, and loses only a tiny amount of revenue from lost sales of the
game. In this instance, we start to slide down a slippery slope towards
the US situation, where retailers routinely refuse to stock anything
that the newspapers, or the moral moronity, might have a whinge about.
This is not a situation we'd like to see mirrored in Britain.
Another scenario, however, is that people who are sick and tired of this
treatment of the videogames medium decide to take matters into their own
hands, rather than simply rolling their eyes at the media's ignorant
reporting or at the antics of ludicrous characters such as Keith Vaz and
Jack Thompson.
Currys is a major home electronics retailer. They sell videogame
consoles, televisions, speaker systems, cables, and a host of other
related devices - and with HDTV being rolled out at increasing pace in
Britain, they will be expecting a bumper Christmas as people, many of
them gamers, walk through the doors of the store to upgrade their home
entertainment systems. Wouldn't it be quite a message to send, if a
significant proportion of gamers were to decide to boycott the Currys
chain - and to let them know that their appalling behaviour over Canis
Canem Edit was the reason for this boycott?
After all, there are many places to buy high definition TV sets and so
on; and only one of them has chosen to take the side of the tabloids
over this issue, when simply doing their job and stocking the product
without such judgments would have been perfectly acceptable. As a member
of the games industry, or simply as a gamer, this is certainly worth
bearing in mind if you find yourself pondering a home entertainment
system upgrade in the next few months. When our opponents have reached
the point of lying about products to push their agenda forward, perhaps
it's time to make our voices as consumers heard.
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A f e w y e a r s a g o - n o t l o n g a f t e r w e l a u n c h e d G a m e s I n d u s t r y . b i z , i n f a c t - t h e r e w a s a s m a l l , b u t v o c a l a n d d e t e r m i n e d , c a m p a i g n i n t h e U K a i m e d a t b r i n g i n g d o w n t h e p r i c e p o i n t o f n e w v i d e o g a m e s . D e s c r i b i n g i t s e l f a s a g r a s s r o o t s c a m p a i g n b y g a m e r s , i t w o n a n u m b e r o f h e a d l i n e s ( a n d e v e n s o m e m a i n s t r e a m p r e s s c o v e r a g e ) b u t v e r y f e w f r i e n d s o r a l l i e s , t h a n k s t o a c o m b a t i v e a p p r o a c h w h i c h c u l m i n a t e d i n a n a b o r t i v e a t t e m p t t o o r c h e s t r a t e a w i d e s p r e a d b o y c o t t o f g a m e p u r c h a s e s o v e r a c r u c i a l p r e - C h r i s t m a s w e e k e n d .
A t t h e t i m e , t h e c a m p a i g n w a s d o o m e d t o f a i l u r e n o t o n l y d u e t o i t s o w n a g g r e s s i v e t a c t i c s , b u t b e c a u s e t h e e c o n o m i c s w e r e a l l w r o n g . T h e P S 2 g e n e r a t i o n o f h a r d w a r e w a s a t t h e m i d - p o i n t o f i t s l i f e s p a n , g a m e s a l e s w e r e s o a r i n g , a n d f u l l p r i c e g a m e s w e r e s t i l l e m e r g i n g a t b e t w e e n 3 0 a n d 3 5 p o u n d s f o r t h e m o s t p a r t . M o r e o v e r , t h e f o l l o w i n g m o n t h s a n d y e a r s w o u l d s e e t h e m a s s m a r k e t b e i n g a t t r a c t e d t o g a m e s a s n e v e r b e f o r e t h a n k s t o p r o d u c t s l i k e S i n g s t a r a n d E y e T o y - a n e x p a n s i o n o f t h e i n d u s t r y ' s d e m o g r a p h i c b a s e w h i c h s e e m e d t o c o n f i r m t h a t t h e p r i c e p o i n t s w e r e r i g h t , a s l o n g a s t h e p r o d u c t s w e r e r i g h t .
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T o t r o t o u t a t i r e d o l d c h r o n o l o g i c a l c l i c h e ; t h a t w a s t h e n , a n d t h i s i s n o w . G a m e s I n d u s t r y . b i z s t r o n g l y c r i t i c i s e d t h e p r i c e c a m p a i g n a t t h e t i m e - a s e d i t o r a t t h a t p o i n t , I f e l t t h a t t h e e c o n o m i c a l a r g u m e n t s w e r e w e a k , b o i l i n g d o w n t o a f a i r l y o v e r - s i m p l i f i e d " i f y o u d r o p t h e p r i c e X p e r c e n t , y o u s e l l X p e r c e n t m o r e u n i t s . " M o r e o v e r , t h e a p p r o a c h t a k e n b y t h e c a m p a i g n e r s w a s w r o n g ; t h e a g g r e s s i v e n a t u r e o f t h e i r c o m m e n t s e n c o u r a g e d a n i n d u s t r y s e e i n g r a p i d l y g r o w i n g r e v e n u e s n o t o n l y t o d i s m i s s t h e a r g u m e n t s o f t h e c a m p a i g n , b u t t o e n t r e n c h b e h i n d i t s o r i g i n a l v i e w p o i n t .
N o w , w i t h t h e t r a n s i t i o n t o t h e n e x t g e n e r a t i o n o f h o m e c o n s o l e s w e l l u n d e r w a y , i t ' s w o r t h r e - e v a l u a t i n g w h e r e t h e i n d u s t r y s t a n d s o n p r i c e - b e c a u s e a l o t h a s c h a n g e d i n t h e l a s t f e w y e a r s . M o s t n o t a b l y , t h e u p p e r e n d o f t h e p r i c e s p e c t r u m h a s j u m p e d s i g n i f i c a n t l y - w i t h p u b l i s h e r s a n d p l a t f o r m h o l d e r s a l i k e t a k i n g t h e m o v e t o n e x t - g e n c o n s o l e s a s a n o p p o r t u n i t y t o r a i s e t h e l a u n c h p r i c e o f s o f t w a r e t o 5 0 p o u n d s .
< p >
T h i s p r i c e p o i n t i s a s t e p t o o f a r . T w e n t y p o u n d s , t h e l e v e l s o f t w a r e h i t s o n b u d g e t r e - r e l e a s e , i s o f t e n c i t e d a s t h e " i m p u l s e p u r c h a s e " l e v e l f o r U K c o n s u m e r s - a n d a s i m i l a r p r i c i n g l e v e l a p p l i e s i n o t h e r t e r r i t o r i e s a r o u n d E u r o p e a n d N o r t h A m e r i c a . T h i r t y p o u n d s , e v e n t h i r t y - f i v e a t a s t r e t c h , i s a p r i c e a n a f f l u e n t c o n s u m e r w i l l p a y f o r a g a m e w h i c h t h e y s p o t o n t h e s h e l v e s w h i l e i d l y b r o w s i n g . B e y o n d t h a t l e v e l , y o u ' r e i n t o t h e r e a l m s o f p u r c h a s e s w h i c h a r e s e r i o u s m o n e y , e v e n t o y o u n g p r o f e s s i o n a l s w i t h a l o t o f d i s p o s a b l e i n c o m e - a n d o n c e y o u h i t f i f t y p o u n d s , c o n s u m e r s a r e g o i n g t o b e a s k i n g v e r y t o u g h q u e s t i o n s a b o u t t h e a c t u a l v a l u e o f t h e e n t e r t a i n m e n t e x p e r i e n c e t h e y ' r e b u y i n g .
< p >
T h o s e a r e q u e s t i o n s f o r w h i c h t h e v i d e o g a m e s i n d u s t r y c u r r e n t l y h a s a b s o l u t e l y n o a n s w e r s . T h e t e n t o f i f t e e n p o u n d p r e m i u m b e i n g l e v i e d f o r n e x t - g e n e r a t i o n s o f t w a r e h a s n o j u s t i f i c a t i o n f o r t h e a v e r a g e c o n s u m e r - a n d e v e n t h e o l d a r g u m e n t a b o u t t h e l e n g t h o f t i m e s p e n t e n j o y i n g g a m e s b y c o m p a r i s o n t o D V D m o v i e s f a l l s d o w n a t t h i s p r i c e p o i n t , s i n c e e n t i r e D V D b o x - s e t s o f h i g h b u d g e t t e l e v i s i o n s h o w s c a n b e p u r c h a s e d f o r l e s s t h a n 5 0 p o u n d s o n t h e U K h i g h s t r e e t . A t t h a t p o i n t , n e x t - g e n g a m e s s t a r t l o o k i n g l i k e a s t o n i s h i n g l y p o o r v a l u e .
< p >
T h e j u s t i f i c a t i o n w h e e l e d o u t b y t h e i n d u s t r y , o f c o u r s e , i s t h a t n e x t - g e n g a m e s o f f e r a s i g n i f i c a n t l y b e t t e r e x p e r i e n c e t h a n c u r r e n t - g e n t i t l e s , a n d t h a t t h e y c o s t f a r m o r e t o d e v e l o p t h a n t h e i r c u r r e n t - g e n e q u i v a l e n t s . I n s o m e c a s e s , t h i s a l m o s t r i n g s t r u e - b u t i n t h e v a s t m a j o r i t y o f X b o x 3 6 0 g a m e s c u r r e n t l y l i n i n g s h e l v e s a t r e t a i l , t h e s e a r g u m e n t s a r e h o l l o w a n d b l a t a n t l y f a l s e . M a n y p u b l i s h e r s i n t h e l a s t n i n e m o n t h s h a v e r e l e a s e d g a m e s s i m u l t a n e o u s l y o n X b o x 3 6 0 , P l a y S t a t i o n 2 , P C a n d o t h e r p l a t f o r m s , w i t h t h e X b o x 3 6 0 v e r s i o n c o s t i n g s i g n i f i c a n t l y m o r e t h a n i t s p e e r s - a n d i t h a s b e e n b l a t a n t l y a p p a r e n t t o e v e n t h e l e a s t t e c h n i c a l o f g a m e r s t h a t t h e X b o x 3 6 0 v e r s i o n i s a t a r t e d - u p p o r t o f t h e P S 2 v e r s i o n . B y n o m e a n s d o e s t h e g a m e p l a y e x p e r i e n c e o r t h e d e v e l o p m e n t c o s t j u s t i f y t h e p r i c e p r e m i u m .
< p >
E v e n f o r n e x t - g e n e x c l u s i v e t i t l e s , t h e c o n c e p t t h a t a p r e m i u m s h o u l d b e p a i d f o r t h e s o f t w a r e i s f a i n t l y l u d i c r o u s . F r o m a c o n s u m e r p e r s p e c t i v e , i t a s s u m e s t h a t c o n s u m e r s a r e p r e p a r e d t o a c c e p t p a y i n g a b o v e t h e o d d s f o r g a m e s o n n e x t - g e n c o n s o l e s , h a v i n g a l r e a d y p a i d h u n d r e d s o f p o u n d s t o b u y t h e c o n s o l e i t s e l f . T h e a r g u m e n t i s s i m p l e ; t h e c o n s u m e r h a s p a i d f o r t h e c o n s o l e h a r d w a r e i n o r d e r t o i n c r e a s e t h e f i d e l i t y o f t h e i r g a m i n g e x p e r i e n c e . T h e y s h o u l d n o t t h e n h a v e t o p a y e x t r a f o r t h e s o f t w a r e o n t h e s a m e g r o u n d s , a n y m o r e t h a n t h e y w o u l d e x p e c t t o p a y a b o v e t h e o d d s f o r a w i d e s c r e e n v e r s i o n o f a D V D h a v i n g j u s t b o u g h t a w i d e s c r e e n t e l e v i s i o n .
U l t i m a t e l y , t h i s i s a f o o l i s h a n d s h o r t - s i g h t e d m o v e b y t h e i n d u s t r y w h i c h s t a n d s t o s e r i o u s l y d a m a g e t h e e a r l y g r o w t h o f t h e n e x t - g e n c o n s o l e m a r k e t . P r i c i n g n e x t - g e n s o f t w a r e a t 5 0 p o u n d s w i l l n o t l e a d t o i n c r e a s e d r e v e n u e ; i t w i l l d i s s u a d e c o n s u m e r s f r o m b u y i n g i n t o n e x t - g e n h a r d w a r e e a r l y i n t h e c y c l e , w i l l d e p r e s s t h e a t t a c h r a t e o f t h e c o n s o l e s , a n d w o r s t o f a l l , w i l l a c c e l e r a t e t h e d a m a g i n g t r e n d o f k n o c k i n g p r i c e s d o w n e a r l y i n t h e l i f e s p a n o f a s o f t w a r e p r o d u c t . T h i s c y c l e i s a l r e a d y f r i g h t e n i n g l y f a s t , w i t h f u l l p r i c e g a m e s h i t t i n g t e n p o u n d s w i t h i n a m a t t e r o f m e r e m o n t h s , w h e r e a s p r o d u c t s s u c h a s D V D s a n d a u d i o C D s c a n h o l d t h e i r v a l u e , o r a s i g n i f i c a n t p a r t o f i t , f o r w e l l o v e r a y e a r . P r i c i n g a t 5 0 p o u n d s w i l l s i m p l y i n c r e a s e c o n s u m e r r e s i s t a n c e t o b u y i n g a t f u l l p r i c e , f o r c i n g g a m e s t o d r o p m o r e o f t h e i r v a l u e e v e n f a s t e r t h a n b e f o r e - a n d i n c r e a s i n g t h e c o n s u m e r e x p e c t a t i o n t h a t s o f t w a r e w i l l b e a v a i l a b l e m o r e c h e a p l y m o n t h s a f t e r l a u n c h , w h i c h f e e d s t h e v i c i o u s c i r
Mstation Games Review
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