A Tree Falling in the Forest

You thought I was going to write about West and Zampella. If I did, I would probably say something positive, like “it is great the guys were recognized and like Activision's hire of the Visceral guys without a specific team or project in mind, EA is putting its money where its mouth is and truly recognizing talent.” If I were to say something negative I would say “this was EA's tat for Activision's tit in hiring the Visceral guys and we are all merely pawns in a giant pissing match between two over grown adolescent companies.” I could also reference Activision's complaint, and if true, wonder what kind of numb nuts representative would fly his client up to meet with a competitor while the client is still employed and in line to receive a very large bonus? But everyone else is talking about these things and its been analyzed and interpreted by more people in more directions and than an Allan Greenspan speech. While it is always fun to provide commentary on the wil...

The New York Times is the official newspaper of record of the United States. If I knew how to make an underline in blogger you would see this by the underline under the name The New York Times. In the second grade I learned it is the only newspaper title I am supposed to underline in a sentence. This past Sunday the Magazine's cover story was about The Beatles: Rock Band , and it was the greatest game coverage I have ever seen. For the first time, not a single one of the thousand words disparaged gamers, the game's creator was given credit and people like Paul McCartney explained to about 2 million mainstream readers, and a bunch more on line, why they would really like the game. The article also explained how the game is actually contributing to the music business and consumers were willing to pay twice as much for the twice as many copies of Motley Crue's latest release - "twice" is of course relative and not absolute. All in all, a game with mainstream...

It's been a while since my last game related post. Every time I sat down to write something it felt like groundhog day. Another developer shut down, take a look at these. Governor Schwarzennegger is trying to get the Supreme Court to review his video game bill even though his movies are worse than the game he is trying to block, look here. It just felt like I had written all the way through the news cycle and I would just be re writing myself in a new flavor. Then I saw this article in the LA Times http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-games-moguls1-2009jun01,0,4429125,full.story around E3 and it led me to like it was 1993 all over again: THE HOT TICKET two weeks ago was to Francis Ford Coppola's hacienda in Napa. Fred Fuchs, head of Coppola's American Zoetrope, pulled 50 people to the 1,600 -acre estate for a weekend summit on multimedia, complete with five meals and a tour of the vineyard. After Saturday morning intros, the afternoon was taken up with demos from...

[ Let me apologize in advance for the length of the large gaseous stream of consciousness belch which follows, it's been a while since I wrote anything and I guess some pent up stuff started flow .] Another Q4 is behind us and the publishers are locked down in the deep, dark, musty bowels of their fortress like edifices surveying the seasonal lucre. The piles are not quite as high as year’s past and when they reemerge into the sunlight from their Morlock existence in the counting and analysis rooms, they will not be happy. Contrary to the mainstream media reports, sales for most publishers were less than stellar. Gamasutra’s story highlighting what they characterized as low numbers for Mirror's Edge and Dead Space (for the sake of argument let's not mention they did not apply the NPD multiplier to determine real US sales, nor did they add in PC sales or sales in foreign territories which are not reflected in NPD) reflects the norm rather than the exception. The point ...

I remember sitting at a DICE conference listening to Seamus Blackley talk about the launch of CEG. The new group was going to change the game industry by making great games. It seemed the market had changed to be marketing driven and Seamus was confident that if he built it, people would come. One portion in particular stood out. His strategy, he explained, was to get the fans to pull the games in. If the press saw the games were great, and the fans demanded them in the forums, EB, Gamestop (they were separate then) and Wal-Mart would certainly stock them and put them in the end caps. Having just left my position at a publisher I couldn't help believing Seamus was overly idealistic, delusional, ignorant or a combination of the three. The friction in the information flow and market inequities were too great for consumer demand to have any impact on end caps. Braid shows Live to be a much more egalitarian market. Seamus assumed perfect information in the market. He may also...

Do you want these folks playing your game? You should! Attendance for this year's San Diego Comic Con was somewhere between 30 and 40 times larger than E3. The show floor was orders of magnitude larger, and the comic industry is about 400 times smaller than video games - by just about every measure. Adding insult to injury, even the game display area was bigger than the game show floor at E3. Unlike E3, there was more than just show floor and secret meeting rooms. The show was littered with the kind of panel discussions we used to have at E3, the only difference was, people showed up for them. Probably because they were not the game GDC overlapping game industry panels of E3 of old. Instead, they celebrated the real world tangents rising from popular culture. Stuff like the stars and creators of television shows and films who presented first looks at the Max Payne film, or Prince of Persia. More specifically, things the game industry should be doing at E3. But, it wasn...

Games are like children. If you nurture their growth and support them once they leave the nest, they will be happy and support you and bring you joy the rest of your life. If you treat them poorly and stunt their growth, they will enter the world angry, not contribute to society, and like the Menendez boys, quite possibly kill you. In a Dickensian way, Fagin - like publishers are sending games out into the world deformed, immature, socially retarded, and ill equipped to face a cruel world. These emotionally undeveloped game are expected to perform in the real world and send money back to Fagin. When the handicapped games displease the publishers with a "please sir, may have some more," because the subsistence level support did not allow them to grow, publishers withhold support and expect them to fend for themselves. No marketing for you. Fend for yourself, or die. These publishers don't realize, a piece of them dies with each wasting and withering game. It seem...