A veteran’s view on marketing games

• XNA authors to receive 70% of revenue. This is fantastic news and will further motivate a massive push onto this development and publishing platform. We will see innovation and diversity that has been suppressed since the 8 bit days. This is brilliant all round for gaming.
• SCi (EIDOS) loses £100 million on sales of £134 million. So they have cleared the decks and the coming year brings some big releases. I still think that they are fundamentally the wrong size to succeed as a mainstream global publisher of boxed retail product. We will see.
• Wii takes top five positions in UK sales chart. And even more remarkably the number five game isn’t a Nintendo first party title. It seems like no end is in sight for the phenomenal Nintendo gravy train. But dominance like this doesn’t do the rest of the industry any favours.
• Treyarch are developing the new James Bond game, Quantum Of Solace. And they say that it won’t be disappointing (in terms of game quality). They have a point, license based games don’t have a reputation for being any good and as an industry we have no excuse for churning out rubbish. People have to work hard for the money they spend on our games and we should respect that.
• Kazuo Hirai Sets 150m Lifetime Target For PS3. Well it is nice to have targets. To be frank there is no reason why it shouldn’t do this if Sony get their act together in every department and in every territory. At the moment they still seem to lack the impetus necessary to drive large sales numbers but things are certainly getting a lot better than they were.
• Sony PSP continues to sell massively. But it is used primarily as a media player and any games played are most likely to have been downloaded (stolen) using the internet. With 75 millionish sold and the current rate of sales, this could overtake the PS2 if it is left in production long enough. Presumably Sony are making a profit on the hardware on this one.
• Kazuo Hirai, Sony Computer Entertainment president thinks that PlayStation 3 operations will be profitable by March 2009. This is important for the industry, the platform holders are not in this just for the glamour. The bulk of the turnaround will come from reducing manufacturing costs of the PS3 console. Sony have taken a huge hit on how expensive each unit has been to make but they have a high level of expertise at bringing down manufacturing costs. They need to be commercially viable in order to go to war with Microsoft and Nintendo. 
• Microsoft Xbox division makes profit of $426 million for the year. They are being rewarded for their vision and tenacity. It will take a while to get their investment in Xbox and Zune back but eventually there is no doubt that this will become the most profitable part of the whole company.

At last weeks E3 there were two massive announcements that Microsoft could have made but didn’t. The first was about their upcoming gesture interface, the second was an announcement about a new Halo game from Bungie, which was only pulled at the last minute. So why did Microsoft pull two massive stories that would have been worldwide headlines?

The answer is that, quite simply, they already had the world’s press in the palm of their hands. They had the maximum column inches and airtime that was possible. So to add extra content would only dilute the coverage that each story would get. They had reached the law of diminishing returns. Far better to save stories for another day when they will not be cluttered out and so will get far more coverage. Microsoft marketing want to get the maximum impact, the maximum number of times.

Which is exactly what I did when managing the news flow at Codemasters. Often I was sitting on a whole pile of “secrets” but was manipulating unveiling them so as to maximise the coverage that they received.

I started telling the world about a new game 12 months before street date. So that meant 12 monthly press releases plus the launch press release. This gave a nice pace that allowed me to gradually unveil the USPs and features of the game in a way that enabled the press, and therefore the public, to understand what it was that we were making.

I had a press release schedule for a release every Tuesday and every Thursday. Slots on this schedule were booked for months ahead. The schedule was shared with all our marketing people worldwide so we could maximise our management of the press. And with the development staff to maximise internal co-operation. Every release was translated into every language necessary well before release. And we also planned the assets such as screenshots, videos, renders and demos well in advance so they could be polished to the highest quality.

By having a well drilled global press mechanism and only ever releasing quality news content I was guaranteed to reach tens of millions of people with every word that I sent out of the door.

An example was IGI 2, a stealth FPS. The game contained infra red sights that could see through walls and the Barratt 0.5inch sniper rifle, these made a massive difference to the gameplay. I deliberately kept these features secret until fairly close to release date. By then the press thought that they knew the game pretty well, so when I announced these two features in a press release they went “wow” and we got loads of coverage. Far more that if I hadn’t sat on these features for so long.

So there we have it. Manage your flow of news to maximise the marketing impact that it gives you. Secrets are a precious asset so get the most out of revealing each and every one of them.

Because of what I have written on here about Sony I have been accused many times of being a Nintendo or a Microsoft fanboy. Nothing could be further from the truth. I only report what I see. And what I see is a Sony that has lost its way.

The facts are very, very simple. In the Playstation one generation Sony had massive global domination, nobody came anywhere near them. In the Playstation two generation Sony were hugely dominant again. Nintendo and Microsoft were minnows in comparison. Then we come to the Playstation three (PS3) generation and suddenly the wheels fall off. Sony are running third and it very much looks like it is going to stay that way. Analysts and fanboys continually promise or hope that a revival in fortunes is just around the corner, but it never comes. So what went wrong:

• The cell processor, this was a huge mistake in many ways. Firstly it cost a fortune in development and putting into production, which is money that needs to be recovered. Secondly it delayed getting the PS3 to market, giving away huge competitive advantage. Thirdly, whilst very powerful, it is a very long way from being optimised for the job of running a console. Overall they would have been better buying an off the shelf generalised processor as they did for previous models and as their competitors did.
• The graphics processor is a lot less powerful than the one in it’s main competitor’s machine. This effectively limits what the PS3 can do, no matter what the CPU and memory are doing. Fanboys blame the developers for being lazy and not putting enough work into PS3 games when the reality is that it is the machine itself that is holding the games back.
• BluRay. The Playstation 3 was used as a Trojan horse to get this technology standard accepted by the world. And at this it has succeeded. But at a terrible cost. It forced the price of the PS3 up sufficiently to stifle consumer demand whilst forcing Sony to absorb massive losses. It is strange that Sony nearly bet the company on this at a time when physical delivery of content is in steep decline. A phyrric victory indeed. If this were not enough, difficulties in putting BluRay into production contributed to the delays in getting PS3 to market.
• The complex architecture of the PS3 makes it very difficult to develop content for. A lot more difficult than for it’s main competitors. This wasn’t helped by Sony releasing development tools that were also greatly weaker than those from its competitors. A double whammy that caused huge problems for games developers worldwide. Many games were delayed because the problems were so great, costing the game developers a fortune and depriving the marketplace of product.
• Sony totally misread the way the market was going. They have clung to their hardcore gamer base and squandered the lead in casual gaming that they had with EyeToy and SingStar. Nintendo have come along with a simpler machine that has massively outsold the Sony PS3 with the simple tactic of providing entertainment that is accessible to a lot more people. With hindsight it looks so obvious, but Sony missed it completely. As a result Nintendo made a fortune and Sony lost a fortune.
• Sony have been stretched for cash. They have made losses. The technology in the PS3 has cost a fortune and they are almost certainly still making a loss on every machine sold. They have been forced to raise new capital and to sell off bits of the company. So they have little room to manoeuvre. They cannot throw money at the PS3 problem. This whilst their two main competitors are rolling in money which they are both using to reinforce their positions.
• Lack of exclusive content. Both competing machines have a lot more exclusive AAA content. This is a massive USP when the reason for buying these machines is to play content on them. Microsoft have invested heavily into a very impressive catalogue of exclusives and have managed to seduce some former major Sony exclusives into becoming cross platform. This alone has caused an immense shift in competitive advantage.
• Sony have messed up very badly with online. This is a real killer and comes from them being a hardware company whilst Microsoft is a software company. So Microsoft understood the importance of online and invested massively in Live. And that investment is paying them back enormously. So they continue to invest and Live is becoming one of the biggest phenomenons ever in gaming. Giving customers a massive USP whilst generating a lot of revenue for Microsoft. And it is growing with almost unbelievable impetus, both in content and in users. The Sony competitor, Home, is still not released after multiple delays and is now several years behind. It will be nearly impossible for Sony to pull back such a huge lead.
• Sony have huge, world class, divisions in many areas. Telephones, Film making, Portable Music (they invented this) and Console Gaming. Yet these divisions appear not to talk to each other. So a potential huge strength has become a weakness. The film division isn’t used to place all their unique IP on the consoles for instance. And outsiders who are less constrained can enter Sony’s markets and win. Hence the iPhone which could and should have been a Sony product yet instead has come from a company, Apple, that just a few years earlier had no stake whatsoever in consumer electronics.

With all that against them it is amazing that Sony have sold as many PS3s as they have. The reason they have done so is because of the impetus of the brand and the loyalty of a large section of their user base. The majority of console users have yet to upgrade to this generation, there is still a huge untapped market of non console households and we have yet to reach the $199 sweet spot when the bulk of sales occur. So there is still hope for Sony, which is what the analysts are grasping for. The problem for Sony now is that the sheer weight of USPs is against them. A gulf that further widened this E3 where Nintendo and Microsoft forged ahead whilst Sony were distinctly lacklustre.

This article is totally speculative. It is about something that Microsoft could do, should do and may well be doing. It is not about the Xbox 360 or the upcoming Xbox 720 (Phoenix?). It is about a totally new machine. A totally new sort of machine.

Firstly it is necessary to understand the concept of server based gaming. We have it already with MMOs and casual gaming on PC. With these your computer does very little work other than running the display, reading your control inputs and talking down the internet. The game itself is running in a big computer remotely sited with many hundreds or many thousands of people playing the game at the same time.

Server based gaming has grown very rapidly in the last few years, far faster than console based gaming. It offers many advantages and few disadvantages. Typically the gaming is paid for with a monthly subscription and by advertising.

The new Microsoft console will be a set top box for server based gaming. Because it will be doing so little work it will be very simple and very cheap to make. So cheap that they will be able to give it away when you take out a subscription for the service. Ot charge say $50 for it. Alternatively they may add bells and whistles such as a gesture interface and go very slightly upmarket.

To maximise the experience and mimise bandwidth requirements they will use digital compression technology between the server and the home, with a hardware decoder in the box to uncompress the incoming data.

Microsoft don’t even have to make the box themselves, they can license it out to lots of other people to make. So it could be built into into decoder and video recorder boxes as another function. There could even be no box at all with the electronics incorporated cheaply into the television itself.

And what will you get for your subscription? Firstly a service very much like Live but with server based games. These will vary from noughts and crosses to complex MMOs. And there will be lots of social networking capabilities. And they can add all sorts of other functionality such as home shopping. In fact there is no limit to the possibilities.

Now it doesn’t have to be Microsoft bringing us this. It could be Sony or Nintendo. It could be Samsung or Phillips. It could even be Google. But Microsoft seem to have the most potential and resources to carry this through. And it really fits well with their business model.

The interweb is an amazing thing, open to all it puts the sum of human knowledge at your fingertips. And with blogs, forums, social networking and content aggregators it has opened up it’s amazing power to everyone. The led to a few golden years when people were largely positive and the interweb grew exponentially in richness.

These days are now over as increasingly people abuse the interweb and everything that is in it for their own narrow agenda. Now a world expert university professor can and will be shouted down by an ignorant 14 year old. And there are lots of ignorant 14 year olds in the world and they have lots of spare time on their hands. This alone has led to many valuable contributors walking away from the interweb, they don’t need the abuse.

A good example in gaming is the story aggregation and social bookmarking site N4G which has been truly excellent. In one place you could get a feel for what was happening to gaming news over the whole interweb. This made N4G a very valuable resource for keen gamers, industry professionals and journalists. It was the pulse of the games industry.

Now N4G is broken, taken over by Sony fanboys with a narrow agenda. If an article is submitted that could be considered to be in any way critical of Sony (which is quite easy, the way they have screwed up this generation) they pounce on it en masse, marking it down so it never make acceptance. Obviously any pro Sony stories are massively marked up so they get instant acceptance and rise to the top of the points scoring system. So the whole output of N4G is now massively distorted and has lost it’s value.

Not only that, the Sony fanboys also boost each other’s reputation on the social scoring system and knock the reputation of anyone who does not follow their agenda. So the whole social side is abused, distorted and now pretty much useless. To be fair to N4G, they are aware of this and are fixing it. However the fix inevitably means that the site will be less open and more restricted. A prime example of the Balkanisation of the interweb.

Then there was Fatbabies, a forum for games industry professionals. Lots of non professionals joined and ran amok, shouting down those who knew better in typical fanboy style. The site imploded and the game professionals moved to The Chaos Engine and made the site closed to access by outsiders with membership only by invitation to known industry professionals. So all the immensely valuable content created by these industry professionals can only be seen by themselves. This is typical of interweb Balkanisation reducing the availability of the good stuff to everyday users.

Also look at VGChartz, a potentially useful site with guestimates of industry activity. However it is difficult for anyone to take it seriously because on their front page there is a forum dominated by rabid, ignorant fanboys. Which makes any serious discussion impossible. So they lose credibility and are Balkanised.

And then there is Bruceongames. This site started with an open comments policy but started receiving so much vitriolic abuse from ignorant fanboys that now every comment is held until it is approved, which can be for days when I am travelling. Not only that, I send the abusive comments to Akismet, something the fanboys probably don’t know about. And Akismet progressively closes down that person’s rights on the interweb. So they are less able to be a nusiance in future. But which also means further Balkanisation.

I also run a great forum for artists, it is a friendly and supportive community for practicing artists. Yet a full 50% of people who join do so with a narrow agenda of promoting their goods or services and are mostly not even artists. This, obviously, is very damaging to the community. So I have been forced to make the rules stricter and to implement them more thoroughly in order to protect this great community. And once again it Balkanises the interweb a little more.

So every time the interweb is abused it leads to a reaction to prevent future abuse. Which means putting limits and restrictions down. The fanboys damage themselves because what they can get out of the interweb is being continuously throttled as a reaction to their stupidity.

This makes life very difficult for the online marketeer. Blogs and forums will be attacked by idiots which means that they need stricter rules and policing which reduces their quality and usefulness. Community liaison continually come up against agressive fanboys with a narrow agenda shouting down anything they don’t agree with. It is a changing reality that makes things a lot less Web 2.0 and a lot more like the we talk you listen days of old.

• Well it is an earthquake of a news story. The whole gaming interweb is on fire over this one and the Sony fanboys are going apoplectic. Yes Final Fantasy XIII is going on the Xbox 360 and it looks amazing. Hardly surprising when you consider that Square Enix are in business to make money. But a major coup for Microsoft as they chip away at the Sony exclusives whilst building their own formidable catalogue of Xbox 360 only games. Expect Metal Gear Solid to go 360 soon. The balance of USPs moves inexorably further in Microsoft’s favour. The industry analysts must be having kittens.
• Music is coming to console gaming in force. We already have the successful Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises. But soon we will have Microsoft Lips with motion sensitive microphone and iPod/Zune compatability. And from Nintendo, Wii Music looks like being the next Wii Fit, giving them a whole new demographic this coming Christmas.
• Online is replacing physical distribution at a dizzying pace. Far faster than any analyst predicted or the industry expected. Xbox live now has over 12 million new members with a new member joining every 5 seconds. And they have spent over a billion dollars on the site. But remember, this is still just the beginning.
• GTA is coming to the Nintendo DS and promises to very quickly become one of the most pirated games ever. The brand is big enough for T2 to make a profit from the game. But still far more people will be paying stolen copies than legitimately owned copies.
• Logistep catches peer to peer software thieves by pretending to be a peer. It then has all the IP addresses of users computers that automatically offered a game. Using whois they know how to prosecute. And this is what they are doing with many hundreds of prosecutions. Unfortunately Swiss law is lagging behind the technology which is causing a few problems. But these are bound to be solved and yet more game stealing criminals will feel the long arm of the law.
• Both Sony and Microsoft have made announcements to put far more films and TV content on their consoles as downloads as they both strive to become entertainment hubs. This leaves the Wii out in the cold with it’s lack of hard drive and HDTV. Nintendo will need to act soon if they do not want to be left behind.
• Jack Tretton of Sony says that the much delayed Home service will be worth the wait. The problem they have is that with each delay Microsoft Live stretches out a further lead. In content, in technology, in users and in income. Even after Home comes out Sony will be left with a mountain to climb.
• BT in Britain to invest £1.5 billion in high speed fibre optic broadband. About time too. The Koreans are years ahead of us. Copper cables coming into houses have finally reached their limit. We need to grasp the nettle worldwide and rewire with optical fibres. The interweb is the most important infrastructure of our time.

Here we are talking about sites like Digg (236 million annual visitors) and Reddit. They tend to combine social networking with story aggregation. And as the web has filled up with so much rubbish they have taken on an important role. They give the users the information they want far more accurately than search engines do. If you have a story that is good enough, like cream, to rise to the top then getting it onto these sites is incredibly important. They reach vast audiences.

It is easy to find the most important social networking sites because their logos lurk at the bottom of every artice on world class sites like the BBC (this alone tells you just how important they are). You will even find some at the bottom of this article. But to make life easy for you here is a list of 75 for you or one of your minions to flog your way through, enjoy: