Brand Confusion

There’s a phenomenon that seems to be emerging of late. I’ve never noticed this to happen earlier than a couple of years ago, but if anyone could point out an example of it, I’d appreciate it. This phenomenon is a scourge on the industry, and any gamer who’s interested in playing a certain type of game near release is liable to be sucker-punched by it.

Here’s what happens:

A developer licenses some Intellectual Property, which has a fixed cost.  They come to the conclusion that the best way to maximize their return on the investment of these fees is to distribute the title they’re working on across as many different platforms as possible.  Some developers (I’m looking at you, Ubisoft) have IP internally that is powerful enough to compel them to make games for many platforms as well, presumably to sell more titles and thus earn more income.  This is all well and good, certainly I don’t have any qualms with releasing titles on multiple platforms.  However, not all platforms are created equal.  We can therefore expect a certain level of negotiation with respect to things that are affected by the limitations of that particular platform.  Obviously a game coming out for PS3 or 360 would need to have its graphical capabilities, etc. scaled back if it were also being released for Xbox.  A game coming out for the Wii might need to have the interface modified somewhat to accommodate the Wii’s unique controller.

What should NOT change, however, is the overall game experience.   When a game is publisher and has a certain name, but is released on multiple platforms, customers assume that regardless of which platform they choose to purchase the game for, They are purchasing the same game.  When this fails to be the case, if the different versions of the game are significantly different from each other, but all have the same cover art, same name, same advertising campaign, you are creating brand confusion.  Perhaps some examples will better illustrate what I mean.

The year is 2004, Spider-man 2 comes out.  Despite the fact that most games based on commercial blockbusters are complete critical failures, everything I heard about this game is that it’s phenomenal.  Metacritic gives the PS2 (and Xbox) version of the game 80 out of 100, a reasonably good score.  The game is acclaimed for having the free roaming nature of GTA, but in three dimensions.  Swinging around Manhattan, freely exploring the city sounds like a great deal of fun.  I buy the game for PC, because at the time I was travelling and didn’t want to drag my consoles around when I could play on my laptop.  One would at this point assume I was buying the same game.  After all, there’s certainly nothing you can do on a console you can’t do on a PC.  If one wanders over to Metacritic and looks up the score on the PC version of this game, the score of 42 might come as a bit of a shock.  Why is the score for the PC version of the game nearly 40 points lower than the console versions?  Because it’s an entirely different game.  One is no longer free to explore the city at will (the major selling point of the first game), in fact, you’re restricted to where you shoot your webs by little floating web icons which hang inconspicuously in the air.  The entire PC game can be finished in two hours, and there is absolutely no reason to backtrack.  Why Activision decided to release a PC game which is entirely different from the console version (and much, much shittier), and throw it under the same brand, when it would have been much simpler just to port the console version over, is beyond me.

Case two.  Splinter Cell:  Double Agent.  I’m pretty sure this title is an inside joke, because there are actually two different versions of this game.  Version 1 was developed by Ubisoft Shanghai, the folks who brought you Splinter Cell 2, and was released for PC, 360, and PS3.  Version 2 was made in Montreal (Splinter Cell 1 and 3), and came out for Xbox, Gamecube, PS2, and Wii.  The general storyline is similar, but major sections of the game are changed.  A big feature in version 1 were levels where Sam is instructed to perform some menial task by the terrorists, who will return in a given timeframe.  In each of these levels, Sam must complete the task, but also use the remainder of his time to discover new plot information, and to perform covert tasks for the NSA.  Version 2 completely omits these levels, but instead has entirely new levels which are not present at all in version 1.  The plot in version 2 is also much more throughly fleshed-out, so many gamers playing version 1 may complete it and be left scratching their head.  Despite this, there’s no real indication that the PC version of the game might be significantly different from the PS2 version of the game.

I’m completely fine with having two studios create similar but not precisely the same game for different platforms, simultaneously, but please, brand the game differently.  Brand identity is the sole discriminating factor game developers have to identify their organizations and products.  By creating multiple products which are similar, but fundamentally different, and branding them identically creates confusion which erodes the value of your brand.  This is especially true when one of the products is extremely inferior to the other.  Understandably one would want to leverage the cost of their licenses to get the most profit out of the equation possible, but if you have to mess your brand up to do it, you’re selling a piece of your hard-earned soul that you may not be able to get back in the long term.

Stop making a game for 8 different systems, giving it the same name, but having it be a totally different game.

All that is good in the world

Yesterday I attended a recruiting session given by Denis Dyack and some of the team from Silicon Knights here at the University of Waterloo. I don’t think I made a complete fool of myself, but it was definitely one of the first times in my life I’ve managed to stutter and ramble in anxiety, so I guess I must have liked what they had to say. While I’m not interested in writing a plug for SK, I will say that many of the things they said over the course of that two hours resonated strongly with me. There’s a lot of issues with working the games industry that are hard to judge without actually working in it, despite the amount of blogs you read or development magazines you might subscribe to. SK strikes me as a place where they strongly and fundamentally understand a lot of these issues in a way I agree with, and I thought I’d go through a few of them.

Employee Recognition

Much of the games industry has a reputation for being essentially a meat grinder: taking fresh graduates, putting them into high-stress, long hour positions and running them until they burn out, at which time they’re replaced by fresh employees. I really believe that if you’re going to create great games, you need great people. Game design is an incredibly complex and sophisticated process, and much like any other medium that pushes the boundaries of what is possible, the people in the company are the ones that make it happen. If you don’t make those employees feel like what they do matters, and that they are valued, you’re going to lose them. You might be able to make money churning shit out the door, but nobody is going to celebrate it. Why not reach for the sky.

Lateral Movement

The baby boomer generation has been known for finding a company and sticking with them for their entire lives. Generation X is characterized by the opposite, hoping from company to company and job to job as suits their fancy. Generation Y, the current generation of new graduates and the one I happened to belong to is characterized by a mix of the two. Gen Y wants to stay with one company, but they want to do different things. Gen Y wants all the advantages of changing up your job, keeping it fresh, while retaining the benefits of staying in one organization long-term. Making it easy to move around in the company will attract Gen Y, help keep your employees interested in what they do, and at the same time groom people who are familiar with the whole of the game making process.

Continuing Education

Once upon a time, it was very rare to get a Bachelor’s Degree, much less a Bachelor’s Degree in a field such as Math or Engineering. In Canada, there are approximately 65,000 Professional Engineers. Presently, there are around 27,000 students in an accredited Engineering program. Clearly, the marginal value of the Bachelor’s degree declines significantly when the market is flooded, and a large number of us for these reasons, as well as the joy of learning, are interested in pursuing a Master’s or PhD. Supporting your employees in pursuing higher education, and arranging it so that their jobs are open when they finish can help infuse the organization with much more rare and sophisticated talent, and when your business is making compelling content and pushing hardware to its limits, there’s no way that can be a bad thing.

Games as High Art

It’s been said that games may one day be the dominant form of entertainment. Certainly as the generations who grew up with video games age, console systems will become as prevalent as cable subscriptions. However in order to truly bring video games into their own, developers will have to start making more games which are on par with Hollywood blockbusters, as well as classic critically acclaimed films. There’s a lot of mumbling about this going on right now. Certainly some developers have made piles of money and games which are really fun to play, while largely ignoring story. To me, this is similar to making movies like ‘The Wedding Crashers”. The movie made a lot of money, and was hilarious to watch, but you’re not really pushing the medium forward, it’s not the type of thing people will write about for years to come. If you want high art, you’re going to have to have solid writing. John Carmack once said that story in a video game is like story in porn, it’s expected to be there, but isn’t really important. I think Carmack has done incredible things for the Industry, and he deserves credit for that, but that quote definitely speaks to his games. They’re fun to look at, maybe even fun to play, but they don’t touch you on an emotional level the way something like Ragnar Tornquist’s The Longest Journey does. If we want games to be high art, they have to be more than eye-candy, you have to feel something when you play them, you should be left thinking about them while you’re falling asleep at night…

Anyway, these are all thoughts that popped into my mind while I was listening to the Silicon Knights team talk. I hope that they manage to drive in that direction.

Mobile Games Suck

I was going to write an article musing about why so little attention is given to developers who make games for mobile devices.  We get endlessly barraged with news story after news story about developers for high end console systems, and what the newest PC game of the week is, but the mobiles don’t get such lovin’.  That article is never to be though, because the answer is too simple.

Mobile games suck.

I’m sure there are those who disagree with me on this point, and that’s fine, you’re wrong.  Yes there’s the Nintendo DS, and the PSP, and even the now long-toothed Gameboy Advance.  I’m not talking about those systems, although it is a useful exersize to ask yourself “If I were sitting at home and had the choice between playing something for console system X, or playing on my handheld, is there a scenario where I would choose the handheld?”.  The systems I’m talking about are the true cesspools of mobile gaming in the form of the cell-phone.  

Think about some of the best Super NES games you ever played.  Chronotrigger, Final Fantasy, Super Mario World.  Mobile systems these days easily eclipse the raw power of the super nintendo, and yet it’s impossible to find a game as memorable as these classics on any of them. 

At the University of Waterloo’s 50th Anniversary Dinner, Mike Lazaridis remeniced about the “Red Room”, a room once present on campus which held what was at the time some of the most powerful computing equipment on the planet.  He then proceded to pull out his Blackberry and stated that these devices now have many times the computing power of that entire room.  I don’t think processing power is the issue here.

If you really want to hate yourself, spend some time looking through the pathetic offerings available to cell-phone customers.  What you will find is a large number of puzzle games, card games, and some form of billiards.  There are companies about who are spending relatively tidy sums of money to convert the code from 70s classic arcade games like Pac-man and Spade Invader into Java to run on cell-phones.  These games are thirty years old, and while there may be some nostolgia from those of us old enough to have cut our teeth in video arcades, very few such people have the time or inclination to play them on the way to work.

In an interview with Guardian’s Games Blog, Jon Hare of sensible soccer described the mobile games industry as follows:

“Mobile games are the most licence driven pile of shit you’ve ever seen. You can’t sell a mobile game unless it has a license attached. Mobile is the worst format for gaming. The DS and PSP have far more potential. The PC, certainly in online gaming. already offers original games. Live Arcade? It’s all about getting money out of them.”

So this is a call to the mobile games industry.  Stop making Pool simulators.  Stop making variations on Bejewelled and Hold em’ poker.  Stop porting games that, while good at the time, have no particular lasting appeal over the generations.  Stop making games that have no gameplay value whatsoever, but cost thousands in licensing costs from some brand (as a matter of fact, that goes for all game producers).  Start making new content, it doesn’t have to be on par with the best of the best in the PC and console world, but make something compelling that might actually interest me in buying your product.  The same principals of game design apply on mobiles just like everywhere else, and it’s a shame the world seems to have forgotten that.

Meta-metacritic

Many of you may be aware of a lovely little enterprise called Metacritic. Essentially what they do is compile reviews from sites they feel are respectable and speak with a certain level of knowledge regarding their particular subject matter, and aggregate these reviews into a single Metascore. This theoretically averages out any individual biases to get a better feel for what the general concensus is on any particular medium (the one we would be interested in being, of course, video games). They’ve been doing this for some time, and this will not be new to many people. Many organizations use Metacritic as their main scoring mechanism (most notably, Steam). While this is all good and wonderful for figuring out what the best games are, or how good any given game is, I propose a ‘more different’ use of the data.

Convieniently, Metacritic has a giant list of every game they’ve got reviews for, on each platform. Each game on the list links to a page about that game, which contains various information, such as the developer, publisher, release date, ESRB rating, and so on. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be interesting to know what the best Development shop in the world is. For PC. For PS3. Overall. If you only count games made in the last 4 years. If you count all games ever. Best Developer of the 80s. Best Developer who makes Mature titles.

Want to mash up those names with MobyGames? Best Developer based in Canada. Best Game Designer.

I think it would be a project of academic interest, and as far as I can tell, nobody has ever tried to come up with who the best studios or game designers are based on anything but personal opinion. Arguably using Metascores is also personal opinion, but it’s averaged out personal opinion based on the final product of their labors rather than any emotional opinion about the studios themselves. I’ll post a link on here when my Proof of Concept is done, and feel free to send me a line if you have any ideas about neat uses for this information, or good ideas about how it should be done.

Will Wright and Brian Eno

Whilst I was working down in California this summer, I had the opportunity to see a facinating talk/conversation between Will Wright and Brian Eno. This talk, hosted by the Long Now Foundation, was one of those times in your life where much of what they say haunted your mind on the train-ride home, and you would spend days thinking about it. Certainly an interesting experience. And now, due to the magic of the internet and FORA.tv, you too can share in that pleasure.

Enjoy,

View Will Wright and Brian Eno on FORA.tv

Apple Gaming

Introduction
Apple is certainly has in the last few years really taken off in terms of profitability and general consumer awareness of their products. There have been a number of radical and aggressive moves undertaken by the management, many of which have proved to be successful. Despite the surges in profit and market share in the last few years, and the popular marketing campaigns, Apple has failed to entrench itself as a serious competitor against PCs in terms of market share. Apple’s 2006 Year over Year market share increase of 16%, while massively out-weighing the industry average still only results in an increase from 4.4% to 4.8%, Hardly a major threat to the PC platform.[digg=http://digg.com/gaming_news/Why_Apple_Gaming_Sucks]

I had the fortunate privilege of working for Apple last summer as an intern, and I can tell you the company is just as phenomenal from the inside as they seem to be from the outside. Having never used a mac before working there, I was definitely a fan of the smooth interface and the elimination of the “Death by a thousand paper-cuts” experience that one often finds using Windows (or Linux, for that matter). Despite this, at the end of the summer I couldn’t bring myself to buy a Mac, even though I needed a new computer, and I could leverage employee discounts. The reason was simple. Gaming.

[Read more]

Digital Delivery

Forbes put out an article last December illustrating the breakdown the the price of next-gen console games, and why they carry that hefty $60 price tag. I think this article really serves to show why there’s so much hype about digital delivery systems. Under this breakdown scheme

Art/Design $15

Programming and Engineering $12

Retail $ 12

Console owner fee $7

Marketing $4

Market Development Fund $3

Manufacturing Costs, Packaging $3

Licensing $3

Publisher Profit $1

Distributor: $1

Corporate Costs: $.20

Hardware Development

The publisher profit is only $1 (1.5%) on each title sold. Many publishers claim that they need to sell 500k copies to even break even. With game piracy as rampant as it is these days on the PC, you can see why the scenario doesn’t significantly improve in that realm either. Digital Delivery, while coming aboard with many issues in its own right, at least solves the problem of many of these costs.

About 20% of the cost of the title is Retailer Profit. A digital delivery mechanism would allow publishers to move some of that money back into their own pockets. Another 5% of the cost is the Market Development Fund. This is the money the publisher pays the retailer to have premium location in their store, increasing the likelihood of sales. Digital Delivery could significantly reduce this cost as well. Another 5% is manufacturing cost. No Manufacturing, no cost.

Digital Delivery Mechanisms such as Xbox Live, GameTap, or Steam have the potential to turn a paltry 1.5% of total cost being publisher profit into 31.5%. Even with a reduced sales total, this is a mechanism that will definitely be exploited in the coming years to a much greater extent than it is now. There’s no challenging figures like that. Of course in my example I’ve neglected the distribution costs somewhat, making the assumption that the costs of distribution through mainstream retail channels is approximately equivalent to what one would have to pay to set up on Steam or XLA.

The Wikinomics of Video Game Assets

I’ve recently finished reading Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, and it got me thinking about a new approach to game assets. Game assets are the “things” that go into a game. For example, artwork (textures, 3D Models, Sprites), Sound Effects, Music, Voice, etc.

The primary job of the Artists, Sound Engineers, and Designers is to create this content. As gamers continue to demand higher quality games, one of the most straightforward ways to increase such an ineffable metric as ‘quality’ is to increase the amount of content, especially artwork, as well as the complexity. While the tools to create these assets continue to evolve in parallel with increasing demands (and to a certain extent, driving these demands), Content developers can still only make new assets so fast. Developing these works is a rather specialized skill which requires a large modicum of creativity as well. As such, developing these assets is one of the most expensive parts of creating games. These costs have risen to the degree that barriers to entry in the video game industry are now quite prohibitive. This makes it difficult for small commercial studios and independent developers who have difficulty drumming up the resources to hire content developers to get off the ground.

It also makes life difficult for large developers and publishing studios. The Games Publishing Business, much like the recording industry, is a difficult and stressful business to be in. In the music industry, you have no way of speeding up creativity. The artist will create music at his or her own pace, so you have no real way of knowing when it will be ready. When it is ready, you don’t know if it will be good, and if it is good, you don’t know if the public will go for it. The games industry has mitigated these factors somewhat by sticking to formats which are well established. Publishers are less willing to fork over cash for a completely new idea that doesn’t have established sales potential when they could spend the same money to create a new first-person shooter. If the cost case is the same, they’re in the business of risk management. At the same time, however, completely original ideas are the seeds from which new genres, and thus new profit centers grow. Without fostering an environment in which these new ideas can be fleshed out, Publishers are choking off their own future revenues. What Publishers need is a way to promote methods for independent developers to bring out their new ideas in an inexpensive way, so that they can publish these titles without taking on large risk. Microsoft is already doing this to a certain extent through XNA and XBox Live Arcade. This does not, however, address the issue of expensive assets.

To resolve this issue, enter Wikinomics. There are several large publishing studios who also act as in-house development studios (Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Nintendo). What this means is that they own large amounts of sound and art assets which they are not currently using. What these publishing houses should do is license a large portion of the assets from development studios they own to the public for free under some form of Creative Commons License. The license would allow for commercial works, including derivatives to be created, as long as the original artist and studio were credited in the final production. Access to large volumes of free and fully utilizable content would massively reduce the cost of developing new titles.

Okay, so you probably see why it would be of benefit to indies to have access to all the art assets owned by Microsoft Games (Lionhead, Rare, Ensemble, Bungie, FASA), Electronic Arts (Bullfrog, Origin, Maxis, Westwood, EA Sports), Nintendo, and Ubisoft for no cost, but why would they do this?

Simple. These warehouses of assets are not profit-centers for these companies, but they could be. By opening up these assets, at virtually no cost to themselves, they would stimulate significant growth in the independant games community. These indies would be able to take assets which were professionally developed, modify them to their own needs, and more easily deploy a marketable title. Many of these titles will be new and innovative, and employ gameplay that would be too risky for a major developer to secure funding for. These indies are then going to be looking for someone to publish their titles. And by providing them with all that content, that goes a long way for goodwill towards the publisher. Publishing these titles through more inexpensive mechanisms like Steam or Xbox Live is a low-risk cost to these publishers, and it’s more than likely that some of these new titles might be a major hit, allowing the publisher to thus have turned their old warehoused assets into major profit centers.

Merck did this with pharmacetuical prototypes, and encouraged other major players to join in. It resulted in a major cost savings for everyone involved, as much of the overhead being done simutaneously be each individual company was reduced. I don’t see why this tactic couldn’t work for major development studios as well.

Unfortunately, unless a CEO somewhere has a massive flash of inspiration and drives this initiative, we’re not likely to see it in the near future (Come on Reggie, we’re counting on you now).

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