The Future of Games
Below you’ll find the the slides from the talk I gave at the Penny Arcade Expo last week.
I really enjoyed being at the show and giving the talk. Thanks again to everyone who came out.
If you do have any thoughts or questions feel free to post them in the comments. I’m happy to discuss them.
Are VideoGames Dead?
Interesting series on whether videogames are “dying”.
What’s interesting is that I think there’s lots of interesting information here about what’s going on in the core business, and I think there’s a major shift coming in the business models as we head to the next generation.
I’m also wondering if the term “budget title” is being used as a derogatory term for casual and social.
Also interesting that discussion about the developer/publisher relationship.
Are Social Games like newspapers?
As I’ve been reading more and more about the collapse of print newspapers, and what the real business of print news was behind the articles, the parallels to Social Gaming are becoming more and more obvious.
One thing that’s important to remember as the industry pushes forward is that while the actual game is the most obvious content, it’s not necessarily your actual business. In the end what makes your money is the real business that you’re in, and we’re giving the content away.
Newspapers have, for the better part of the last century at least, been using news as an effective way to deliver ads into their reader’s homes. That’s not to say that the reporting isn’t a key feature of the user experience, but in this article on why newspapers are failing, there’s a very interesting point:
Remember “shoppers,” the poorly designed throwaway publications filled with tacky little ads? Daily newspapers are high-end shoppers. They spent a lot of money on original content to class up the operation and give people a reason to ask for the ads to be delivered. Long before the web displayed the power and leverage of critical mass, newspapers benefited from it; once you got the franchise in your particular locale, you tried not to stir up trouble, because it just distracted you from time better spent cashing checks.
The newspapers had found that the could afford to lose money on distribution by making it up in ad-revenue, along with user subscriptions. Sound familiar?
Luckily for Social Games the user revenue portion of the model looks to be rapidly outpacing advertising as a key factor in monetization. That’s important because, like many things on the internet, the cost of generating a new, and more effectively targeted platform for advertising is so cheap that unless you can deliver a focused demographic in large numbers, ad revenue is always going to be minimal.
Games also have another advantage, which is that our relationship to our community is more explicit. News media is often disdainful of the fact that they were ever a “social media”. They think that they own their audience, and are pushing hard to get government to enforce what is, at it’s heart, a social relationship between the people who make media and the people who consume it. And once you think you’re speaking for your audience instead of to them, you’ve already begun to unravel the bond with your customer.
So why is gameplay imoportant? Because while gameplay may not be the core of your business, it is the heart of the relationship with your audience. The experience you are giving them is the reason that they engage with you each day, and are willing to give you their money.
And because we have such strong methods of tracking our users, we can more effectively streamline that relationship.
O’Reilly explains what may kill the Kindle in the long run.
There’s few people out there who have a better understanding of digital publishing than O’Reilly. He’s spent the better part of the last two decades publishing technical books that have given developers the information they need to make innovation happen, while being a driving force behind the rise of “Web 2.0″.
In this article for Forbeshe not only discusses why Amazon’s opaque DRM standards are eventually going to be the device’s biggest hurdle, but also the subtle, but important differences that have made the iPhone work even though it’s a locked down device.
Amazon’s Kindle file format doesn’t provide support for tables or for so-called monospaced fonts, two formatting features that we use heavily in our line of technical books. And there is a viable alternative: Epub, the open format from the International Digital Publishing Forum, is based on the Web’s native format, HTML, and provides full table and font support. This is the first “strategy tax” paid by those who embrace proprietary platforms: They can’t support the needs of every niche and must prioritize their support for mainstream needs.
The single point of purchase was also a non-starter for us, since my fundamental understanding of information marketplaces is that they grow bigger and more lucrative for everyone when there is a rich ecosystem of cooperating players.
If you’re interested in understanding why open standards work for business and growth, it’s worth a read.
Why the XBox 360 may already be the next generation’s winning console
It’s heresy among the gamers to say that any particular console may have “won” a particular round of the game wars, especially when you’re talking about features not directly related to the games themselves. Over at Offworld, Jim Rossignol posts an excellent article discussing how the XBox may already be a generation ahead.
All I have to do is consider that I already spend most of my time gaming on a PC. Partly that’s because I’m an old man with a fetish for humming boxes that I built myself, and partly it’s because I want all the other features that a PC offers: instant access to my email, Twitter, screen-grab software, and my own music to replace generic rock track X on racing game Y.
If the 360 does start to support all these things (there’s no confirmation as to whether Last.FM will be able to run in the background as a soundtrack to your games), it’ll become the kind of gaming machine that I want to spend my time with for more reasons than just because it has some games that my PC doesn’t.
It will become a device that has more of the networked infrastructure, and more of the media tweaks and toys that I take for granted as part of my desktop computer.
I think that there’s way more to it than just this. With the Natal Microsoft is planning to re-launch the XBox. And if I’m reading between the lines correctly, they’re essentially going to do what Nintendo did with the Wii, except they won’t even bother to beef up the hardware. They’ll simply bundle the new motion technology in and go on a media blitz. And I think that could work. After all the box will basically be able to do everything from downloading games to playing movies and music off of your home network.
It’s taken a while, but the 360 may finally be the “everything box”.
Latest Post on ISG: Social Games are a Constant Deployment Environment
My latest and greatest column is up over on ISG.
I’m concentrating on articles about social game development, including the opportunities and challenges of making games for social platforms. If that interests you definitely take a look.
Meanwhile, I’m still thinking about new entries for Mediashifters. I may talk about more general gaming trends, since no one seems to be following mainstream gaming in general, and I’m hearing too many people saying Sony “won” E3. Hint:They did not.
If you have any ideas about what you’d like me to be writing about here that I’m not covering over on ISG, please let me know.
Streaming Social Games?
Has it dawned on anyone else that the real game changer for social and portable media is going to be remote computing delivery systems like OnLive? Seems like it has…
“Through the VolleeX engine, we can take full PC games, MMOs or even virtual worlds and stream them to any 3G enabled handsets, “says Vollee’s head of business development, Julian Corbertt in an interview with Pocket Gamer. “This means that you can now access games or full persistent online worlds right from your mobile handset. It’s a real step forward for mobile games as you can now have meaningful connected experiences on your handset.”
But maybe they’re just aiming too high. Streaming games will never really deliver core game experiences to the degree that twitch players are going to find acceptable, at least not until we fix the speed of light. Still the idea of doing it with something like WOW makes infinite sense, and allows you to deliver relatively high end graphical experiences to relatively low-end platforms.
Applications on Facebook are already becoming more server driven, so why not pull the whole thing over and deliver rich, immersive experiences one click at a a time to audience that will be perfectly happy with lag and a low frame rate?
The animation industry was taken by surprise when Hanna Barbera starting delivering cartoons for television using less than a quarter of the frame-rate of features. Could history be about to repeat itself?
Casual Gaming Metrics Applied to Social Gaming
This is a talk I gave at the Facebook Developer’s Garage back in March.
ISG Column: Good ain’t always better
My latest column for ISG is up
Every time a new market opens up the first games to appear are built on traditional, time-tested play patterns. From the DS to the iPhone, from XBLA to browser games, it’s always rock-solid gameplay that shows up first, with the fancy stuff pulling up in a later bus. And it’s been true since the beginning of the medium. It wasn’t the gorgeous graphics that made pong a household name.
Sure, basic expectations have grown in the last thirty years. These days players expect a lot more from even the most basic games than just a sprinkling of pixels and some bloops and bleeps. But it’s not zero-sum either. In the wrong hands, or used in the wrong way, adding more graphical effects may just serve to confuse your audience, or make a game that has less mainstream appeal. More isn’t always better, and the audience for social games isn’t one that will necessarily appreciate a hardcore experience.
What’s up with instant messaging?
Internet Messaging has always been a bit of a red-headed step child. Everybody has it, but no one really seemed to like it all that much. Even the term "chat" made it all seem so inconsequential.
And that makes sense. It’s a relatively "hot" medium for the Internet, demanding that you pay attention to an ongoing conversation where anyone you’re chatting with can demand as much of your time as they like. And there’s no real filters. The person demanding a response can be anyone from your best friend to that "so h0t grl with sexxxxy pics" that would very much like you to click on the link to her site, please.
But spam or no, before the rise social media IM was the primary way to hang out with people online. These days, between Twitter, Facebook and SMS messages I almost never open up my chat client at all. And the times I do end up in a messaging session it’s usually inside of another website, like Google Mail, Skype orin Facebook.
But if the old-fashioned one to one style of IM is dying, or at least evolving beyond recognition, it’s doing it quietly, with no one even bothering to report on the disappearance of what was once a major method of communication on the web.