Latest post on ISG: Social Optimism
I’m still writing pieces for Inside Social Games, although you might not know it from reading this site…
My latest piece is on the bright future for Social Games. I’m currently working on something a little less optimistic.
Here’s the excerpt to whet your appetite:
I’m actually beginning to wonder if the future for social platform gaming may turn out to be so rosy that our dogs and cats will indeed be a target market for social entertainment in the next few years.
There have been a few concrete events in the last couple of weeks that have given me a reason to have some genuine optimism. First is Facebook Connect, which strikes me as proof positive that Facebook is, for the present at least, genuinely committed to supporting application developers in a (mostly) open manner that will everyone to continue to make a decent profit for the (foreseeable) future. (There’s that conservative side speaking again.) Allowing everyone to win may seem like an obvious strategy, but the history of games is one where the person providing you with the platform is also one of your biggest competitors. Sony, Nintendo, Sega, and even Microsoft, all had divisions making “first party” games that were trying to eat as much of the market as possible even while they were charging everyone else for the privilege of publishing on their platform. Even the Wii, last year’s great mainstream hope of the living room, is utterly dominated by titles made by Nintendo.
What the Newspapers gave away (and what they have left)
Scoble posts a nice rundown on why he thinks print news missed the boat (again) by letting Twitter own crowd-sourced news.
I’ve been pretending in my head that I’m a newspaper exec. When I do that I keep beating myself around the face. Why? Because the newspaper industry keeps giving the geeks free meals. Let’s study the free meals:
Free meal #1. Giving away classified advertising to Craig’s List.
Free meal #2. Giving away photography to Flickr (look at the photos from the Chinese Earthquake, why didn’t this happen on a newspaper branded site?).
Free meal #3. Giving away front page news to blogs like Huffington Post.
Free meal #4. Giving away “small” community news like births, deaths, birthdays, etc to Facebook.
Free meal #5. Giving away real-time news to Twitter.
Free meal #6. Giving away news distribution to Google News and Amazon Kindle, among others. With new sites like Kosmix coming on strong (hundreds of percent of growth month over month).
Free meal #7. Giving away restaurant reviews to Yelp.
Free meal #8. Giving away traffic information to Google Maps.
Free meal #9. Giving away celebrity news to Facebook and Twitter. (Why is Oprah on both of those, and why didn’t the newspaper industry lock up Oprah and keep her on a newspaper brand?)
Free meal #10. Giving away local news to Topix (at least that was funded by a newspaper brand).
Free meal #11. Giving away business news to Yahoo Finance and Google Finance (and something new that will get announced tomorrow).
Free meal #12. Giving away news ranking to Memeorandum.
Free meal #13. Giving away astrology to Astrology.com.
Free meal #14. Giving away comics to Comics.com.What is their latest giveaway? Crowd-sourced news. I visit Twitter Search every day to find out what is “hot news.” That’s something I used to look at newspapers and older media for (radio, TV) but Twitter is just plain better at telling me what is trending.
There’s some breathless enthusiasm here that I think is wishful thinking, but ultimately it’s about being intelligent enough to recognize the value of what you actually have in the new media landscape, and the papers do seem to be, once again, trying to save something that doesn’t have any value by pretending it does, and hoping the can convince others to legislate that for them.
Speaking tonight at The Facebook Developers Garage
I’ll be giving a talk in San Francisco tonight on casual gaming metrics applied to social gaming. If you’re in town for GDC and looking for something to do tonight, this may be the meetup for you!
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
6:30pm – 9:30pm
Hyatt Regency San Francisco
5 Embarcadero Center
San Francisco, CA
There’s more info here.
I’ve posted the slides here.
Your Game is a Service Business
My latest opinion piece is up over at Inside Social Games.
Here’s a taste:
But whether it’s what we play, or how we play it, some companies are beginning to figure out that even though they are now directly responsible for dealing with their irate customers, that relationship is becoming as important as the product itself, and that if you treat them with respect, and give them what you want, it’s possible to thrive, even while other people are claiming that the apocalypse is just around the corner.
Businesses as diverse as Netflix, Vivendi, Steam, and iTunes all managing to make a tidy profit by defining their core of what they do around an ongoing relationship with the customer rather than simply focusing on the end profit, or trying to use DRM to redefine their software so that they can get back the control they’ve “lost”
Are used games a missed opportunity for Publishers?
There aren’t many companies that sell games that aren’t in the used game business these days. Gamefly jumped in last year, and now Amazon is getting on-board.
That’s clearly an issue for publishers and developers since games aren’t a tiered business like movies, so there is no point in the business that they can be guaranteed a sale, unlike movies.
That said, it’s hard to deny that some of this is the publishers fault. At $60 AAA retail games are probably overpriced compared to actual perceived value, so consumers are going to look for ways to bring down the cost to a level that’s more in line with their expectations.
It’s clear that first-user-free content, such as the extra maps that were provided with Gears of War, are a good way to get your fans to buy your product new. It also creates a sense of value for your content.
But I have to wonder if it wouldn’t make sense to simply decrease the cost of the product at retail and add some of the features a la carte as DLC. Sure, they’d still lose some sales to used copies, but more consumers might also pick up the product at retail. It also means that you might see games appearing in more places than just GameStop, Big Box, and online stores.
Microsoft did end up releasing those Gears of Wars maps as a separate purchasable download. I’m curious how that did for them.
Ultimately DLC helps turning your product from a single event to an ongoing platform that can has some legs beyond the initial sale. And as the flexibility of the type and pricing of downloadable content grows, you can also bundle together that content at a later date for a lower price.
And one day you might even have a tiered business…
Microsoft Office to go Ad Supported?
I’m always interested in how products transition from old to new models (hence the name of this site), but I have to say that I’m surprised by this quote from an MS executive that Office 14 will have an ad-supported component.
There will be ad-based revenue streams. There’s an opportunity to draw those pirate customers into the revenue stream. We want to draw them into the Windows family and maybe there’s an upsell opportunity later.
I’m not sure how you can offer a "pirate version" without upsetting the paying customers, and/or limiting/breaking features when the software becomes aware that its not a legitimate copy, but it may be possible they’ve come up with something original here.
That would be exciting because I’m sure an elegant solution to having multiple versions and revenue streams would be something that a lot of people would be interested in. However, most of the time it ends up being just another flavor of brute force.
Obviously there’s going to need to be a strong integrated web component in the next version, so maybe this somehow ties into that.
Anyone have any other ideas on how this might work?
DRM hurts publishers as well as users.
Having won a minor battle with the Kindle, publishers are now free to request that digital reading can be disabled on any individual book that is downloaded.
That may be bad news fhe book industry.
So far the transition to digital media has been filled with different industries practicing radical nose removal, absolutely convinced that the face they are removing is not their own.
But if you take a look at the history of iTunes it turns out there is a hidden cost to DRM, and it can hurt the person that loves it most, the publisher: That’s because it locks your content to a device that you don’t own. The better that device does the more the distributor rather owns your customer. Every purchase they make locks the customer deeper into a relationship that they can’t escape, and that means they get to dictate the rules.
There’s currently a great article about this over on Slate, and it does a good job of showing the possible non-obvious consequences:
But the Kindle’s restrictions are more worrying than those associated with the iPhone, the iPod, and other gizmos. For one thing, if you objected to the iTunes Store’s policies, there was always another way to legally buy music for your iPod—you could buy CDs (from Amazon, perhaps) and rip the tracks to MP3. That’s not an option for books; there’s no easy way to turn dead trees into electrons. Moreover, books are important. As a culture, we’ve somehow determined that it’s OK for a video-game console maker to demand licensing fees and exercise complete control over the titles that get on to their systems. Sure, this restricts creativity and free expression, but if that’s the business model that keeps the game business alive, so be it.
These aren’t easy issues to deal with, especially since to accept them you need to get over the usual impulses of "obvious" and "right and wrong" arguments that people cling to.
But digital media really isn’t analogous to what’s come before, because at the end of every chain of logic is the daunting realization that owning something on a computer allows you to be a distributor as well as a customer.
Moral Panic hits Social Gaming
Seems that the inevitable moral panic that comes with every new media is turning it’s ugly gaze at Social Gaming.
Here’s some newly minted "experts" explaining why our children are, once again, doomed.
You’d think they’d know better than to suggest unverifiable causality, but:
‘It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations,’ she said.
She pointed out that autistic people, who usually find it hard to communicate, were particularly comfortable using computers.
‘Of course, we do not know whether the current increase in autism is due more to increased awareness and diagnosis of autism, or whether it can – if there is a true increase – be in any way linked to an increased prevalence among people of spending time in screen relationships. Surely it is a point worth considering,’ she added.
I believe it was the ancient sage, James Tiberius Kirk, that once said "Too much of anything, even love, isn’t necessarily a good thing."
Dollhouse: A TV show that’s made for the Internet
Dollhouse, the new show from Joss Whedon, debuted to less than stellar number on traditional TV on Friday.
But it also turns out it’s a huge hit on iTunes and Hulu.
And Joss is thinking that he’ll just quit television entirely.
Looking at his fan base and the kind of work he does it makes a lot sense. He also brings with him an "old school" celebrity that should allow him to have a huge impact on the web, at least initially.
The transition is going to be a bumpy ride across a number of different kinds of media, but television may have the most difficult transition since most people still don’t have an easy way to stream content into the living room, and the broadcasters are terrified of the brave new world.
Why MicroPayments Won’t Save the Newspapers
Clay Shirky gives a short lesson in the dos and don’ts of MicroPayments:
Such systems solve no problem the user has, and offer no service we want. As a result, conversations about small payments take place entirely among content providers, never involving us, the people who will ostensibly be funding these transactions. The conversation about small payments is also not a normal part of the conversation among publishers. Instead, the word ‘micropayment’ is a trope for desperation, entering the vernacular of a given media market only after threats to older models become visibly dire (as with the failed attempts to adopt small payments for webzines in the late ’90s, or for solo content like web comics and blogs earlier in this decade.)
The invocation of micropayments involves a displaced fantasy that the publishers of digital content can re-assert control over we unruly users in a media environment with low barriers to entry for competition.
It’s worth noting that his issues are distinct from virtual goods, and payments for objects in closed environments. But the idea that paying a little bit here and there fixes problems is just a fantasy.
It may be that the term itself just causes confusion and does more harm than good.