Ken’s Blog

TechCrunch talked up a Finnish startup called Ball-It which is trying to push a new wireless controller that will be breaking TVs and other furniture in your living room in the near future.

The controller contains sensors to sense just about any movement and even squeezes and passes it to the console or computer. The demo on CrunchGear looks pretty cool (you can sort of skip the first half if you want).

Outside of being a largely direct competitor to the Wii controller (Microsoft? Sony? You listening? You’d better get in there quick!), I think the best parts of it are the fact that it’s smaller (it’s the size of a friggin golf ball!) and wireless (i.e. none of this bullshit IR that requires you to point a part of the controller at the screen all the time). It can really free things up when it comes to the more “active” gaming experience.

Of course, the downside is that–just like the Wii-mote–it will be limited a bit in terms of gaming experiences. Even in the demo, you can see that the movements in the real world tend to be jittery when translated to the computer (note the basketball as the guy’s talking flails around like a loose electron). That might be a calibration or sensitivity issue but it’s still a potential issue game devs will have to deal with.

And while the Wii has plenty of games that use the Wii-mote they aren’t always that good. Shooter games have the issue of accuracy (I can never seem to get the console to realize where it should think my controller is aimed at when I look down its length) and sword fighting requires big movements.

Still, if you checked out that video you’d see how well the controller worked for running and jumping (though I think there was a bit of a delay on the jump which can be annoying). It’ll be interesting to see who picks it up and how well it will penetrate. As the days of the PlayStation seem numbered in my mind (it’s not like it’s going to disappear…it’s just not the hot platform anymore and if my game library is a judge of it, I’ve got a 10:1 ratio of XBox360 games over PS3 games…for a reason), this is really Microsoft’s ball to play (pun intended).

If MS can license that sucker and figure out how to attach, include or incorporate the controller’s technology into its console bundles, it can finally take a chunk (a potentially huge chunk) out of Nintendo’s new-found success. Of course, if Nintendo can get it first, they can further solidify their place in the market but it won’t be quite as revolutionary. It would just be a downsizing of the controllers–and would make people look even funnier as they play with the controller in their pockets when someone walks in.

The tech has been around for a while–it was profiled almost a year ago here–so you’ve got to wonder if it’s just a funding thing or if it’s because they had trouble figuring out how to leverage the tech properly.

I guess we’ll see. I’m sure the main console players have heard about it by now. Time will tell if they pick up on it and grab it before it’s too late. If they don’t then Ball-It might have to go the route of the obscure controllers like the PS Eye, the Novint Falcon, and the NeuroSky which are all trying to carve out some sort of niche in a market that doesn’t require them for anything.

kn

Not surprisingly, someone else has decided to throw their hat into the hosted gaming service arena along side OnLive’s. Gamasutra’s reporting that said competitor’s got a name, Gaikai. Better still, David Perry, the person behind Gaikai, is boasting that his service doesn’t require all the proprietary crap OnLive’s service has.

At least that means there’s going to be some competition in this market, which I love. Now, OnLive’s got a reason to continue to improve the service (though I suspect they’ll spend more time and effort on landing publishers before Gaikai does rather than spend on R&D).

I think Gaikai might be better positioned, though, since I think they’ll make a killing in Korea, China and Japan. A new PC used to be (and probably still is) the equivalent of a year’s salary in Korea…thus the reason LAN centers are the hub of gaming activity there. With this, they could shell out for an older PC and still keep up with the newer requirements of modern games…or better yet, play the games on their smartphones which I expect the Japanese to be doing already.

The bigger question will be if console makers will give in to these services. It’ll hurt their console sales. Though their business model’s all about game sales they’re still manufacturing those consoles and still measure penetration based on sales of those consoles. Besides, Microsoft and Sony both want to own that last leg (from the ISP to your home)  since it’s the most important leg when it comes to exposure and services. If Sony can advertise the hell out of their BluRay’s on your home entertainment center made by them, they’ll be a lot happier than having you use OnLive of Gaikai to just stream your entertainment (yup, don’t forget, if they can stream games, they can stream movies and TV eventually) to your home.

The next couple years will be very telling for this market. We’ll see…

kn

Gamasutra’s reporting that EA’s decided NOT to use DRM on the upcoming The Sims 3 release. Surprising considering what they’ve done in the last couple years and especially considering how much money they’re probably hoping/expecting to get with the release of that game.

It’s simple, EA, just do this:

1) If an internet connection exists, authenticate the CD Key (Activision/Infinity Ward have done this with the Call of Duty series when it came to multiplayer). If more than one session is active, bounce them.

2) If no internet connection exists, require the original CD (with the correct Key of course).

It’s less disruptive to legitimate customers and enough of a hassle for the “hobbyist” pirates. You’ll never find a solution that permanently halts die-hard pirates (biometrics?) but at least this balances the needs of the publisher with the wants of the consumer.

kn

Gamasutra has an interesting contest going about the future of gaming. I submitted my entry but I thought it’d be interesting to consider more than just a single tech or game trend. Take a look and feel free to comment on what YOU think would be the future of gaming in 11 years.

Gamasutra’s reporting that SquareEnix has decided to start supporting Steam with it’s new releases in North America and Europe. While I don’t recall ever buying a SquareEnix game (at least for PC), I’m taking this as yet another sign that digital distribution is maturing into a standard outlet for developers. I can’t speak to Valve’s selection criteria but given the lower cost of doing business, I can imagine it would be easier for a smaller developer to get their indie title up and out to the publich without being hampered by costly distribution deals with established players in the boxed retail channels. Not to say boxed retail is a dying breed (I do like getting my hands on software) but I think we’re nearing the hump where we could see some serious pain for retail outlets as they see game sales decline in favor of instant gratification (lazy) deliveries of games via network fiber. Plus, with networks getting faster and bandwidth availability high, there are few limitations for digital download (except for, maybe, power for those data centers).

In other news, it turns out InstantAction decided to throw the switch and take down the beta sign. Another outlet for indie game developers, Garage Games has been doing it’s Torque thing for a few years now. Better still, they’ve been improving that sucker for those years and barely increased the price (up from $100 to $295) for an indie license. I played around with it ages ago and it’s pretty solid for most single player and non-massively multiplayer games. I’m sure someone could take a look at the netcode and figure out a way to make it MMOG-capable, if they haven’t already. The only downside is the same downside of anyone selecting a platform they haven’t developed for in the past: ramp-up time.

InstantAction is built upon a new Web-based engine that relies on Flash but integrated well with the IA site. It definitely proves that you can offer a boxed retail experience via the Web but it turns out the Web’s “everything must be free” mentality is also a carry over. Hard to say, though, if a certain standard is set or if a method of peer-rating is implemented so that the gamers can self-police the games out there, that a game offered for a fee might still be successful. Still, you’ve gotta love all the options out there for game devs now…lots of room for creativity.

kn

The Wall Street Journal reported today that Amazon’s opened the doors to its Casual Games store…well, the beta anyway. 600 titles at $10 or less!

It seems casual games have come to the fore pretty quickly and have reason to be successful: everyone wants to play games and the US is saturated with computers that can handle casual games with low footprints just fine. The question is, how saturated is the market at this point?

The Casual Games Association (when they’d get one of those?) reported in 2006 that by 2008 the market would reach $1.5 billion worldwide, $690 million of that in the US. By way of comparison, the not-so-casual game market reached almost $11 million in 2008 with $701 million of that being PC games.

If you assume the PC game market (non-casual) represents a portion of the potential market (i.e. maybe 2-3 of every 20 people out there are non-casual gamers), you’re talking about a huge potential market. I know I’m pulling numbers out of thin air here but if $701 million in sales represents an average of $30/game, you’re talking about over 20 million units moved. So, with equal saturation, the casual game market could see more like 200 million units moved in the US alone. Of course, you have to account for the fact that these suckers cost a hell of a lot less, probably averaging between $5 and $10 a pop. So, you could be looking at a potential market of $1.5 billion with today’s population.

Consider, though, that each generation brings more computer-savvy people and means the average computer per person will increase as everyone wants and gets a computer in addition to the one they’re likely driving at work.

So, back to Amazon. I love Amazon but while I’m sure they’re going to expand the market a bit I can’t imagine it’s going to be significant. They’re more likely to cannibalize the sales of other players out there. Yet, they represent a significant exposure potential (not everyone’s heard of PlayFirst and other casual game sites) but Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL have their own casual games markets/portals. I think we’re looking at a mixed bag. You’ve got die-hards like me who wander the crowded halls of Amazon.com who will possibly be interested in a purchase (though I also wander PlayFirst.com as well).

In the end, with Amazon’s hat-toss into the casual ring, I think we’re going to see the peak of sales/distribution in this area. Google could get involved and change that but there are few other players that could get the job done (and would bother in this market). What you won’t see peak, though, is development and sales. Casual games have exploded but I think there’s a lot more distance to cover before you’ll see this market slow down. It’s easier and cheaper to throw out some casual games (have you seen all the iterations of Diner Dash? FFS…) than AAA titles so you can win on volume.

Time will tell…

kn

EA and other publishers (but mostly EA) have been under fire lately due to more and more incorporation of DRM software with their game titles. Spore was the latest and most public of the game titles with DRM (in this case the SecureROM DRM).

EA’s response has been, of course, indifferent. Outside of adjusting the limits for installation, they’ve been pretty confident that they made the right choice.

Now, Spore broke a new record. Not a sales record but a pirate record. It’s the most pirated game of 2008! Awesome! So, all that trouble that they went through, all the bad PR, all the bugs, and all the customers they lost was worth it! I can’t wait to see the Game of the Year edition come out with “Most Pirated Game of 2008″ on the cover!

SecureROM…you’re our hero. If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t have made so much money off pirated games…oh…wait…we don’t make anything off those. Damn.

I read this great blog entry by one of the guys behind Gal Civ II and Sins. I’ve always been annoyed by the different hoops that legitimate game consumers like me have to go through to play games that are technically geared towards me but wrapped in whatever the current mode du jour is on the DRM from.

Check it out here: http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/303512/Piracy_PC_Gaming

While you’re at it, check out Penny Arcade’s latest series…brings back memories…

The basic jist of Brad’s blog: they don’t bother with DRM because they know their customers hate it and as long as they’re able to turn a profit on the games they make (which they do), they’re good to go. Piracy is never going away…the guys cracking your games are always going to be smarter than you because a lot of them come out of the engineer factories in Eastern Europe and China where they eat, sleep and shit code. Plus, they’ve got more incentive than you really have to get the crack done. Ego trumps cash flow any day.

It’s sort of like when you see those sports games in stadiums where people sit on rooftops and in parking structures to see the game without paying the $$ to get in the stadium where the franchises have set prices to rival movie theatres. Captive audiences pay the price but who’s fault is that?

Basic economic principles (borne out by centuries of historical evidence) is that lower prices net you larger sales volumes at, usually, slimmer profits. If you sold a game for $70 (nowadays, this isn’t unusual on the console side), you’ve set a barrier for a lot of people for whom $70 is several meals. So, you’ve got to ask yourself. Who are you selling to? Do you want the mass market to buy your game? Have you considered selling it for $30? You’re guaranteed, assuming the game’s good of course, an increase in sales with the lower price.

Here’s an idea…the next time you’re releasing a game, sell it on your online store for a discount during the first couple weeks…offer a 40% discount for those people who buy in the first few weeks. See how much more it sells. Assuming you’re not hampering the experiment with lacking marketing or just a bug ridden game, I’m sure you’ll see more purchases than you’d have seen just selling the game at retail prices.

kn

Thought I’d lighten the mood a bit. I got my copy of Spore (Galactic Edition, of course…anyone who knows me knows I love Special/Collector’s/Limited/etc editions even if the tchochkes are silly…sometimes though: GTA IV’s limited edition came in a safety deposit box…awesome).

What a game. Quick overview: you’re given a “limitless” galaxy to work with and have five phases of life/civilization: cell, creature, tribe, city, space. While there are similarities between tribe and city phases (with space including the city game to a limited extent), each phase plays out as essentially its own game. The interface is point and click for the most part but you can use the WASD keys to move around and some various shortcuts but most of the time, you’ll likely be left- or right-clicking.

Once you’ve successfully completed a phase, you can start a new game later at that phase, skipping previous phases if you want. So, if you really like the city and space phases, you can just start there.

From a pure gameplay perspective, each individual phase is fun but I can’t help but feel the gameplay is limited. I understand that the whole goal is to advance you creature/race to the next phase and you can linger in a phase without advancing if you want. But, the things you can do in each phase will always be limited enough that you won’t want to.

For instance, at the tribe phase, there are nine structures you can build (corresponding to three structures per behavior category: weapons buildings for aggro, music buildings for social, and food buildings–like a fishing hook building for fishing–for gathering/economic). You get six or seven (can’t remember) slots in your village so you’ve got to pick and choose what you want. This combined with a cap of maybe 12-14 on the number of villagers you can have means this is the sampler platter for an Age of Empires-type game.

Honestly, I can’t say it’s all bad since I’m sure they (Maxis) wrestled with scope and how much playtime to allow in each phase before you really should move on.

Despite this, though, the game is fun and is really easy to pick up and get going. This is definitely a game that kids and families even could have some fun with. I remember hearing Wil Wright talk about how he wanted this to be all about freedom and the ability to play how you want to play. I think he really hit the nail on the head with this one. You can be an aggro/militaristic race or you can be a social/religious race. And, the choices you make early on in the evolution of your species will impact your race’s direction in later phases.

Of course, you have to talk about the creature creator/vehicle and building customizer. This is a very intuitive tool and it’s really fun playing around with the various things you can attach to a creature or object. On the creature side, you can unlock items various ways in the early phases (killing a creature and consuming its DNA, accomplishing goals, etc.). Counting the slots available, the possible permutations for any creature is staggering: for each of the six body parts, there are something like 24 parts. There are literally millions of ways you can create a creature.

Via Spore.com, you can subscribe to Sporecasts which basically mean your Spore game sessions will pull from other people’s published pools of creatures (by default, you’re subscribed to Maxis’ Sporecast for the creatures in the game). This is a really great feature which I could see being used in other types of games (imagine being able to subscribe to a cast of characters for a boxing/fighting game or modded creatures for an RPG or FPS).

All in all, is this worth the purchase? Definitely, if you’re into sim games and such, you’ll have a great time. Is the Galactic Edition worthwhile? Only if you’re a fan. It comes with an art book and a DVD with the National Geographic documentary that recently aired, actually, on cable. The hard case is interesting and keeps everything together but unless you’re a nut like me, you’ll probably do just fine with the regular edition.

I literally laughed out loud when I first saw another creature being teleported up into a UFO. Too funny. The humor mixed in with the openness of the game really make a game I love to play. Because of the myriad of creatures and styles of play, you can bet this has a lot of replayability. I wonder if I can conquer the galaxy as a blob with eyes and a mouth and that’s it…I’ll find out tonight!

Ken’s Rating: 90%

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Title: Spore (Galactic Edition reviewed)

Dev\Pub: Maxis \ Electronic Arts

Released: September 8, 2008

Web: http://www.spore.com

Platform: Windows and Mac (both on the same DVD!)

Chances of Success: 100%

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UPDATE: For those of you interested in game development, check out the Spore team’s prototypes page: http://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes

You can download prototypes the team put together to test concepts and ideas when building Spore.

So, I pre-ordered and kept an eye on Age of Conan over the months prior to its launch and, yes, I’ve played it a bit (few hours…enough to level two characters up to 11 and 13). Nothing new, major amounts of work in progress (textures pop when you’re STANDING ON TOP OF THEM) and of course there are the ample breasts.

What’s funny is how much they’ve learned from WoW. For example, here’s a Gamasutra article extoling the HUGE number of units “shipped”: link WoW loves its subscriber number (10 million+ at last count) which is loosely defined…loosely enough to work its square girth into a tight round PR hole.

What’s also funny is how much they’re sitting on the throttle hoping they’ll make it over the ravine. Check out this little announcement of the losses Funcom is taking posted on Gamasutra a couple weeks ago. Basic gist: Anarchy Online is not growing much so no help there and AoC is obviously costing them millions to produce. They’ve got plenty of cash ($46 million) giving them about four years worth of funds assuming costs don’t increase. Though with the coming updates for Funcom, those costs are guaranteed to increase.

Still, they “shipped” a million copies. Let’s assume the average retail price is $53 (collector’s editions are $80 and represent about 86k of the 1million units; the remainder are retailing at $50). Let’s also assume that since they’ve developed a MMOG before and since they have cash they likely didn’t take an advance to build the game so their royalty on the wholesale price (assume wholesale is 50% roughly of retail) is 25% of wholesale (so, they got $13.50 for each unit), they netted $13.5 million on those units. They were in development for 4 years and saw losses go from $1.2 million to $3.1 million in the last year (I didn’t search for full financials), so we’ll assume they ramped up costs in recent months to cover hardware and the build out for launch so, three years of $1.2 million losses per quarter ($4.8 million a year) and a final year of $3.1 million/quarter losses ($12.4 million).

That puts them at development costs around $26.8 million. They’ve covered half their costs. Seems great but the question is…how much are they making in revenue based on monthly fees (lots of profit in there). Given that most MMOGs see a tidal wave at the start but then see that crash as the free month expires and as people get bored and realize they still like WoW, those 400k subscribers they got in the first few weeks are likely the best they’ll do after a while. So, for year one, averaging $15 per month per user, you’re talking $72 million. Before you go and change your pants, though, keep in mind that EQ probably has around 200k subscribers and it was hugely popular (anyone know if Vanguard still has people playing it at all? lol…) so, a more realistic number might be 100k as the level population number.

That brings you down to $18 million a year…gross. If you assume margins are 50%, $9 million a year means it will still be a successful adventure for them. Of course, that doesn’t account for the costs of new expansions and any new IP.

As much as the game produced a resounding “meh” from me, I still hope they manage to pull it off and at least manage EQ-post-WoW types of numbers…someone’s gotta prove that WoW isn’t the only game in town…

kn