The Sandbox

The big news, broken on the weekend I assume to be digested for the market on Monday, is that Vivendi and Activision have merged, and will be known as Activision Blizzard, leveraging the two names in this transaction that mean anything good at all to gamers.

Eighteen billion dollar deal. Are you ready for Guitar Hero: Eurovision Song Contest? Me neither.

The other day, I blogged about the impressive revenues of the game industry - and suggested that Hollywood, currently embroiled in a strike over digital distribution, could have something to learn.

Seems I'm not alone. Today, the bloggers over at Spong hip us to a story in Variety, which details just this point. Spong makes an interesting case for why the game industry consistently cashes in on sequels, which are sometimes such a dicey, and expensive, proposition for movie studios: "While sequels are a pricey business for Hollywood, they're efficient for games. This is borne out by nine out of 10 of this year's top games in the US being sequels, compared to only five out of ten films being follow-ups. While as gamers we might find that depressing, studios clearly see this as profitable."

Just reading about the iDGA (not to be confused with the IGDA) which stands for internalDrive Gaming Academy recently at their site a friend turned me on to.

This organization offers short camp experiences with courses ranging from Game Design to Game Modding to Game Programming. Indeed, they recently received copies of Unreal Tournament 3 for their students to learn from and explore.

Target students range from 10 years old to 17. Indeed, it's a whole new era. If this educational trend continues to catch on, upcoming generations are going to know a lot more about how digital games get made than oldsters like me ever had the chance to.

Found on Kotaku, Fox News is the source of the latest media scare story on games, but Electronic Arts is not taking it laying down. In a strongly worded "no, pot, you're black" reply, EA's Jeff Brown reminds Fox News of the existence of Family Guy and The O.C., contrasting them against the M-rated Mass Effect, a game on the console with the most comprehensive parental controls ever.

Meanwhile, gamers have searched out Cooper Lawrence, the psychologist Fox called upon to comment on the game, with which she had apparently no familiarity, but who nevertheless commented extensively on the content she imagined was in the game. Never ones to actually demonstrate the collective maturity they stridently claim to possess during these situations, they have taken it upon themselves to rate her latest book on Amazon. But many are very funny.

As a relatively hard-core gamer (for some liberal value of "hard-core", as I don't have a lot of time to play these days), I am constantly surprised at the odd successes in the casual game market. I would think that among the most played games on the Web these days are Slayers, Werewolves, Vampires, & Zombies, and Scrabulous. I mean, I know, personally, only a handful of people playing. But none of those people are hard-core gamers, and the number of people in the world that are not hard-core gamers is counted in billions. And they're all apparently on Facebook, making Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire.

Meanwhile, I still grind away at more "important" games. Something's not right.

Blizzard is proving quite the investment for Vivendi Games, bringing in over one billion dollars last year. This figure emphatically punctuates the theory that most of us have been jabbering about for three years: World of Warcraft is, indeed, a cash cow.

"Gold farming", for those that don't know, is the sweatshop business of this new century. It is the selling of virtual assets, usually virtual gold, in MMOs for real money. As an MMO developer, I know how pernicious it is: sellers are hard to track down, because they create disposable accounts faster than you ban them. Ban one, and they already have a lineup of other accounts ready to go. They spam chat channels, they spam players with the in-game mail system, they farm resources with a ruthless efficiency, which makes legitimate players angry.

And now Blizzard has won an injunction against one company, in what one hope is the first blow that kills the whole gold farming industry.

More categories for this article than I thought possible... it's about everything.

Leigh Alexander is very much worth reading, when you're in search of thoughts on the game industry. Two recent articles are the case For and the case Against this new world of entertainment media convergence. Is this intertwining of games, web, movies, television, cell phones, GPS, fresh baked bread, and the fat pipe connecting your checking account to media producers' coffers, is this good for games?

Leigh gives the definitive maybe. I mostly agree.

Videogame publisher Take-Two Interactive has one of this year's biggest games - Grand Theft Auto IV - coming out this April. But a more compelling meta-game is already underway as the industry's largest publisher, Electronic Arts, vies to buy the company. Word has it that EA's bid $2 billion for Take-Two, but was turned down. A hostile takeover may be next.

Take-Two, of course, has been at the heart of some of the most notorious controversies in game history - mainly centered around the GTA franchise. But the publisher has recently gained critical attention for its surprise hit, BioShock. How would T2's fare change - if at all - under EA's roof? Maybe we'd see a tighter-run ship and the jettisoning of sensational but dull franchises like Manhunt.

Need more proof that everyone wants a piece of the videogame business?

Today, news comes from MCV that Paramount, the blockbuster film company, has an eye on interactive entertainment. Here's my question: why wouldn't Paramount be interested? The future is going to be all about convergence between film/tv/web/gaming properties, and that means motherships like Paramount need to touch down on planet Game.

From Gamasutra.com: for the second month in a row, the PS3 has outsold the XBox360 in North America. The interesting thing is that I'm guessing this has a lot more to do with the fact that it's pretty much the cheapest Blu-Ray player out there, or at least the cheapest that anyone knows about, because as you can see on the software chart at Gamasutra, there's only one PS3 game in the top ten, compared to six XBox titles. And the PS3 title, Devil May Cry 4, is behind the XBox version.

This says folks aren't seriously gaming on the PS3s they're buying, they're finally buying hi-def DVDs players, now that the format war is over.

Game companies have a hard life, no matter their size. Games are a hit-driven business, and it's hard to exist on merely "good" sales. The makes companies buy each other, or merge. EA bought BioWare/Pandemic, Activision and Vivendi merged, Rockstar just bought Mad Doc, and on and on. Companies want security in this fickle, unpredictable business.

Ever wonder how much you might get to sit around all day making videogames? The latest salary survey from Game Developer magazine is sparking a lot of conversation in the blogosphere. Average pay: $73,600.

And of those gamers, who makes the most: coders. According to Game Daily, "In terms of game making talent, programmers were the best compensated with an average annual salary of $83,383. They were also found to be among the highest educated group (50 percent earned bachelor's degrees and about 26 percent completed some graduate work)."

Primarily because of this post, I think, a gold farming site has discovered this blog, and daily posts 30+ comments advertising their site. Or at least, they try to do so, but they get moderated out. I'm not going to link them or mention their name, for obvious reasons, but I do of course hope they die in a fire.

Gold farmers are a plague in all MMOs: they log in bots using free account keys, and stand in the middle of populated areas to spam the chat channels, advertising their services. They get banned quickly, but they have an army of new bots to come on the scene immediately, to replace their fallen bretheren. They're like roaches, and they make legitimate players really mad. Which hurts the game experience, which can cause people to quit, which reduces the demand for their services, so one wonders why they do what they do.

In any case, please, do, die unpleasantly, you spamming jerks.

...your little niche in the world starts sprouting dubious "industry groups" of indeterminate purpose and imperceptible utility. Thus was my happy discovery of the Association of Virtual Worlds. Found while perusing Terra Nova, they appear to aspire to relevance while not apparently offering anything of value to the industry they target.

I did like the Blue Book Consumer Guide to Virtual Worlds. Nothing quite like adding value through compiling a list of easy-to-find information.

The gaming world is rejoicing in yet another victory over Jack Thompson, who has been recommended by the reviewing judge to be found guilty of 27 misconduct charges. The weird thing here is how a process like this points out the disconnect between the reality of the law, and a lay person's understanding of the law, because really, it seemed like it was incontrovertible, that Jack Thompson is a fruitbat.

Check out this interesting report from Moneycontrol, a financial site in India. It details how/why Microsoft is pulling back on its ambitious plans for game development in India.

As I noted in a previous blog, India has been an increasing focus of attention in the industry over the past couple years. This includes a studio from Sony Online Entertainment, as well as projected revenues of $125.4 million in 2010 - up from $13.3 million in 2006.

Here is the summarized list of judgments against old Jack. As an overall, "let's strip this guy of his right to practice law in Florida" motion, the layperson would say, "Um, obviously?" So why this stuff goes on for review after review, with appeals and so forth, it's beyond my non-lawyerly mind to understand. Obviously the accused need protection against abuse by the state, but there is always a situation like this that makes one wish that you could just cut to the chase, because it's so apparent that this person is abusing the system.

The good news here, one hopes, is that Jack will be able to free his time up from his busy ambulance chasing schedule, and devote himself full-time to promoting games. Stirring up controversy around games is the main service he provides me, and that he can spend more time on it, that will help me and my colleagues immensely.

Found on Kotaku, Disbarment with Extreme Prejudice, that's the recommendation by the Florida Bar, for Jack Thompson. OK, "enhanced disbarment" is the term, but whatever, I'm a violent game designer, and I am trying to immolate your very soul with my overtly destructive vocabulary. Rawr!

So it goes to the Florida Supreme Court, for review on September 2nd: mark your calendars, I'm sure it will be a colorful countdown come late August. It doesn't look good for Thompson, who declared that the reviewing judge did not have the authority to rule over him and walked out on the hearing. "Do too," she said, unecclesiastically.

DFC predicts that game sales worldwide will hit a record $57 billion in 2009, up from around $40 billion last year. But here's what's really interesting:

Guess what the leading machine for games was in 2007. Xbox? No. Wii, nope. PS3, un unh. The PC. That's right, while consoles get much of the press and attention, the home computer topped them. The top platform for games last year was the PC with over $7 billion - a number expected to hit $19 billion by 2013. Why the boom? Credit online games like World of Warcraft with sucking wallets into the ether.

Today begins the E3 - Electronic Entertainment Expo - in Los Angeles. This is the videogame industry's annual soiree. Here's a few things to watch for:

Bungie's new game: a new iteration of the Halo universe, rumored to be team-based.

WiiMotionPlus: an add-on for Nintendo's motion sensing controller that will improve precision.

QuakeLive: id Software's seminal multiplayer shooter, Quake III Arena, goes online in a free Web-based shooter.

Rock Band 2: The next chapter in the hit music game packs cymbals.

Stay tuned for more.

That's what game developer Cliff Harris wants to know: why do people pirate games? As a developer, he is honest about wanting to know what he can do to change the situation, to turn pirates into customers. The hoopla over the cost of Braid on XBLA, a great game by Jonathan Blow that everyone should go get, has helped inspire this quest by Harris. And I have to admit that I think I understand why folks don't pay, and it's fairly banal.

People en masse behave more like a fluid than they do intelligent agents, and the Path of No Cost is often consanguineous with the Path of Least Resistance.

What do the creators of Doom and Gears of War - some of the most acclaimed shooter franchises - have in common? Electronic Arts. Seems the game industry's biggest publisher has been striking a bunch of deals including ones with indie darlings, id Software and Epic. What does it mean? Check out Edge's take here.

A comment that I would like to call out on the pirating entry:

"I think people copy games and the like is because the price is simply too much. Consider that if we paid $10-15 for the games instead of $90... The cost to produce a CD, would only be a couple of bucks, the companies that make the game would still make a heafty profit,<...>"

Seriously? So, in charging for a game, we're actually just recouping the cost of the CD blanks? I had no idea.

With all this talk about game piracy - which I was once told adds up to $3 billion in annual losses (a number that seems high to me, but...) - news comes that the big five game publishers are on the case.

They've reportedly asked ISPs for the IP addresses of 25000 suspected pirates. More here.

Last year, I wrote a feature for Spectrum magazine about Richard Thurman, a 35-year-old guy who made a lot of money in videogame gold. His business: creating auto-playing bots that would win - or "farm" - gold from massively multiplayer online games.

Now comes a study (87 pages!) estimating that this gold farming business is as big as a billion dollars. That sounds high to me, but maybe not that far off. And certainly this will only get bigger in the years to come as more (all?) games move online.

We've all heard how Americans spend more money on videogames than movie tickets. But now there's noise that games are set to out sell music too.

This week, SPOnG quotes a honcho at HMV, the mega-retailer, who predicts that games - which now constitute 19% of the companies sales - could easily surpass music - currently 30% of sales - in the next two years.

I predict something else: That music games like Rock Band will continue to eat away at the music industry, so that you'll be able to play - and buy! - your music within the Rock Band world. It won't just supplant MTV, it will challenge iTunes.

EA is dealing with a class-action lawsuit over Spore, and its inclusion of SecuROM copy-protection software. SecuROM is a separate program that is installed without telling the user, which prevents the game from being reinstalled more than N times, and it prevents perfect CDR copies. Many games, like Bioshock, Hellgate: London, Command & Conquer 3, Mass Effect, and Crysis Warhead all use SecuROM, although Spore appears to be getting a stronger backlash than the others.

As a developer, I can understand the desire for using SecuROM: piracy is rampant, and there is a huge problem with lost sales as a result. But really, these days, there are enough folks out there trying to install their "helpful" software on my computer. The cruft that comes with a new OEM machine, the various media players out there that are ever more required for web surfing, all of the Internet Explorer toolbars that I apparently cannot browse without, download helpers, yadda yadda yadda. People have to protect their machines, and the last thing they need is yet another secret program that is doing Bog-knows-what in the background, contributing to overall system stability and speed in a negative fashion.

There are better ways to handle this. I'll be interested to see how the suit comes out.