The Sandbox

The au courant love to dish on the PS3: sales have been less than hoped for, Sony's losing money on each console, Kutaragi was moved out as CEO and chairman, and the vaunted performance over its rivals hasn't been as much of a differentiation as hoped. It has produced insecure fanboys, and fanboys who mock them.

But what's the real problem?

Wow. According to a blurb in NextGen, advertising in videogames is expected to grow by 440 percent in the next five years, hitting $2 billion in 2012. This covers everything from standard in-game ads - like billboards you drive by in a racing game, or ads on the walls of virtual subways - to dynamic ones that refresh/update on the fly (like the stuff you see on the sidelines in NFL games).

If I were an engineer, I'd find this incredibly encouraging. The videogame business is offering all kinds of new opportunities and revenue models.

There's an interesting profile in the NY Times (registration required) of the new head of the Entertainment Software Association, Michael D. Gallagher.

I followed the previous ESA president, Doug Lowenstein, over the course of his many years in that position. He was a tireless defender of the business during some of its most trying episodes - such as Columbine and Grand Theft Auto's Hot Coffee controversy. It's a surprisingly tough job to be the vidgame industry's chief lobbyist in D.C. Despite the fact that this industry brings in more than $10 billion domestically a year, it's still viewed as some sort of sordid underground business for kids. Maybe Gallagher can help change that.

I made a post over at Tech Talk, comparing Sony and Apple, and how Sony falters in delivering cool gadgets, while Apple tends to not do so. It's mostly techy and not gamey, but has liberal mentions of the PS3 and PSP, so there's some gaming info there, if you want to check it out.

I may as well describe what I would have hoped for from the new PSP, and why I would think it would be better than what Sony has delivered.

It's a nice idea, episodic games: developers love the notion of low-investment, fast-turnaround, high-upside games. Crank something small and polished out every 3-4 months, and it will eventually be an unstoppable juggernaut of cash that keeps building, as you keep churning out small highly-polished little gems, without killing yourselves with crunch-schedules and Mountain Dew.

Why doesn't it work out that way?

Often, players cannot understand why game companies seem to move at a glacial pace with updates. A bug hangs around for months before being fixed, and the question is why?

Because we know what we're doing.

Someone named Tuncer has a blog on Inside Mac Games, and he has entered an opinion in the recent, very minor dustup between Valve and the Mac gaming community over HL2. Gabe made some comment to the effect of, "Apple is hard to work with," to which Tuncer says that Valve made an "outrageous" demand of $1m upfront for taking the project on, that the only thing here is greed greed greed.

Um, yeah. Tuncer, the clue phone is ringing, and I think it's for you.

So yeah the writers are on strike in Hollywood. Part of the dispute is over money from digital distribution. No one knows where the cash, if any, is going to come from in the future: downloads? webisodes? ads?

Meanwhile, there's one entertainment industry that continues to clean up: games. Revenues are heading towards a record breaking $18 billion in sales nationwide. Today, the Entertainment Software Association points out that the industry's 17% growth between 2003 and 2006 dwarfs the US economy's sheepish 4% growth. Maybe the Hollywood writers should start writing more games.

Apparently recessions don't affect game sales. NextGeneration quotes a videogame industry analyst who predicts software sales to jump past $10 billion this year - a record-breaking number, and nearly 15% increase over last year. And last year was a record year in and of itself, with sales topping $8.64 billion, a 34% increase from the year before.

What gives? Partly the runaway success of new consoles like the Nintendo Wii. Also, word comes that the revolutionary play-by-numbers game, Guitar Hero, has sold more than $1 billion - yes billion - worth of games in the United States alone.

So what will gamers be shelling out for this year? Look for Will Wright's new simulation game, Spore, to top charts along with Grand Theft Auto IV, which was just announced today for an April release.

"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.

The Grammys may be the talk of the day, but the videogame industry had its big night on Saturday. That's when the annual Interactive Achievement Awards were doled out to the biggest and best titles of the year. The big winner: Call of Duty 4, the deservedly awesome first person shooter that, unlike a lot of sequels, keeps getting better with each new number. It took home Game of the Year, and Console Game of the Year.

The big loser: Halo 3, which despite selling plenty of copies was a Spider-Man 3 style ho-hum disappointment - and got clocked at the awards. But word has it from Halo's creators, Bungie, that the acclaimed company's next title will be "totally different."

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.

The other day, I blogged about EA's interest in buying videogame publisher Take Two Interactive, makers of Grand Theft Auto. Apparently I wasn't the only one wondering what would happen to GTA if EA did - or didn't - close the deal.

Here's an interesting write-up in NextGen about one analyst's thoughts on the topic. At one point, the analyst discuss the idea of EA creating a mature-themed gaming world - but I wonder if anyone can ever improve on GTA. To me, it seems a better ploy would be to go in an entirely new/different direction - give us something we have never played before. A game doesn't have to earn an M rating to take over GTA's crown.

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.