Categories
games industry

Retailers and the Game Development industry

This year, numerous retailers (GameStop (GamesIndustry.biz sucks) , HMV (GamesIndustry.biz sucks) ) have been whinging and crying that they can no longer make huge profits out of selling computer games. Publishers have often jumped on the same bandwagon, but tended to blame retailers for selling 2nd-hand games (oh my! shock! horror!).

You might think that developers would agree, would sympathise – after all, they’re losing money too.

Not really. Here’s the historical perspective:

“Industry: Hey, Retail. Take your dick out of my arse!
Retail: You love it you little bitch.
Industry: Grr!
<Time passes>
Retail: OMG THERE’S A DICK IN MY ARSE! I DON’T LIKE IT! HALP! HALP!
Industry: You cheeky fecker.”
— ForkBoy

…at the end of the day, there’s no drop in demand for computer games; there’s only drop in demand for the weak ways that those games were traditionally *sold* to the consumer. Developers (and publishers) aren’t facing doom. And after many years of having to “bribe” retailers to even be “allowed” to send their products for sale, no-one’s feeling much sympathy for the retail sector…

Categories
computer games games design

Games and the loss of Art

If a picture paints a thousand words, then a 3D engine wipes-away 900.

Even a 3D engine with “a great game” and “good level-designers” still only manages five hundred.

It’s taken me a long time to realise this, but … games published today often have inferior visual Art to games published 20 years ago.

Working inside game studios you still get to see stunning art on a daily basis – it’s just that none of that ever makes it into the game. It’s all “concepting”: static, one-off paintings. And although it’s only a minor issue, I feel we’ve lost something in having these moments fade away from the games themselves.

I don’t have time to carefully research and pick my examples, so I’ll just pull straight from memory (and hope the point still makes sense by the end :))

1991-1994: in-game graphics

This is going to be hard to demonstrate if you judge each image too literally, but bear with me…

I’ll start with one of the most “art” games of the 1990s: Another World (1991):

Another World is easy for this post: the whole game was designed around “how good can the visual art be … with a very small colour palette, no shading, and very blocky characters?”

Here’s a screenshot from Ishar 2 (I think; could be Ishar 3?) – either way, 1993-1994:

From GOG.com

Ugly, horrible. Composition is mediocre.

And yet … just have a look at the open book on the left-hand side, opened, with the pages caught in the act of riffling in a breeze. Hand-painted in *very* low resolution, with readable text.

Look around the room, look at how much stuff is crammed in a single image. Why? Because none of it had to be modelled in 3D – the game was crammed full of this kind of whimsical artistic painting, full of imagination.

Or look at Elf – published 19 years ago! Here’s two screenshots. First, look at the “normal” graphics in this platform game:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/elf/screenshots/gameShotId,315213/

…now look at one of the “boss” screens:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/elf/screenshots/gameShotId,315213/

In the second screenshot look at the background: hand-painted, but also soft-focus, to provide greater contrast with the player and the boss. I want you to consider the technique, rather than the actual screenshot – this is a poor example, sadly – but my copy of Elf is FUBAR so I can’t take a good one.

2010: the missing Art

15 years later, how has the artwork improved?

The engines produce stunning visual effects, fully animated, in 3D. Sony and Nintendo are now putting their games onto mass-market 3D displays so you see *actual* 3D images, rather than 2D simulation of a 3D scene.

But the artwork has atrophied. Modern games have no time to spare for epic vistas – there’s no room in the gameplay for static screens.

And it’s phenomenally expensive too: it used to be that painting a 100×100 pixel area of screen required 10,000 pixels to be painted – a matter of minutes with a good photo app.

Nowadays, you have to create 3D models – separately – for each item that will appear in that area. Then you have to paint textures for each one – usually 100 times as many pixels *each* as in the 2D equivalent – and apply lighting by hand, and positioning in 3 dimensions.

Net effect: low-importance areas of scenes are empty and ill considered (artistically). Flights of fancy are rarely possible (developers literally can’t afford them – it costs too much money in the salaries of extra staff)

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it”

Don’t believe me? Then try this site, find a game you’ve played, and compare the images here to the images you *actually saw* in the game:

http://deadendthrills.com/

From the about page:

an emerging art form that’s as far from the average screenshot as it is the average photograph.

So … what?

Go back to the Ishar screenshot.

Fire up Oblivion (a modern equivalent: a sword-and-sorcery RPG), and look for anywhere in the game with even half as many “interesting” items that might spark the imagination. What are those things? What do they tell about the character of the person who lives here?

(in Oblivion, you’ll find that everyone has a fetish for broken crates and buys their chairs and tables from the same – apprentice – carpenter. Some of them have a couple of houseplants. That’s it.)

This post was about the visual art, but the loss is felt in the games themselves, in a loss of immersion, and a loss of *player* imagination. Sole-author flash games – often made by artists working alone – go some way to redressing the balance. Even if they didn’t, it’s small, and it’s subtle – it’s really not that important. But it’s a loss nevertheless.

(some of my favourites from Dead End Thrills)

Categories
web 2.0

Google Groups: destroying the internet one community at a time

Google has just announced that they’re deleting all web content (pages, files, downloads) from Google Groups, leaving only the mailing lists.

(Incidentally, they failed to inform the group-admins / owners that they’re doing this – which is mind-blowingly stupid when you think about it)

Just to be clear, *without* the web content: Groups is a high-spam mailing list with very poor setup and controls. It’s difficult to find a mainstream mailing list that is as bad as Groups. But it’s from *Google*, so you can trust it, and it had all this “web content” that’s essential to running a group – I’ve run a few groups using Google Groups.

(Google does NOT provide spam-filtering for their mailing lists: if you have an open group you will receive thousands of spam users even for groups of under 100 “real” people)

I’m disappointed that Google has taken the actions they have. Their web-hosting for Groups was hard to use but it *worked*. Google’s “production quality” was very low, but I trusted the company to keep the service live. Like many admins, I spend weeks of my free time wrestling with the tools until I could make a useable group, because I trusted Google not to do something Evil, like … well, like: deleting the content and the service. Never again…

Anatomy of a community-hating executive

When I look at things like this, and things like Yahoo’s acquisiton of Upcoming.org, it’s amazing how often these big companies:

  1. Find/create a community with huge value
  2. Take it over, and put their brand on it
  3. Destroy it as thoroughly as possible, sowing salt on the ground to make sure it can never rise again

I find it hard to understand how/why these companies do something so stupid. Who allowed a committee / manager / executive to do something so self-destructive?

But then I realised there is a very traditional explanation for this kind of scenario, from back in the mid-20th Century:

  1. Senior executive at “big internet company” wants a promotion/raise/etc
  2. Said executive doesn’t really know what they’re doing, doesn’t really understand the business that the company is in
  3. Exective’s manager cares even less themself; he/she is probably just hanging on waiting for their own pension
  4. However, the exec knows that their manager rates “internet success” on the number of unique users that a service has
  5. They spend $100 million acquiring / creating a useful service
  6. PROFIT!!! (get their raise / promotion / whatever)
  7. …and dump the project as fast as they physically can

The net effect on the service is this:

  1. Service gets acquired/funded: All the best people working on the service get a big bribe / pay-off and are happy to leave to start something new
  2. There’s lots of press releases from Big Internet Company, and lots of claims of all the Great Things that will be added to the service
  3. Users get excited, and growth rate increases
  4. … but then: …
  5. Big Internet Company provides zero cash, because the Executive has received their promotion and no longer cares
  6. Service falls to pieces
  7. Service haemhorrages users
  8. Big Internet Company’s finance department sees the spending on hosting / servers / bandwidth, and wants an excuse to shut it down
  9. (there is no *need* to shut it down – but inexperienced and/or bored financial employees have nothing better to do all day; more on this in a future post)
  10. Other executives come along and shutdown and destroy whatever they can, so that they look good in front of the finance department
  11. Service becomes worthless for most people, and loses all but the tiny, hardest of hardcore, segment of users

I’d assumed that companies like Google had improved their hiring procedures a little, and weren’t so prone to this. Maybe not.

Categories
web 2.0

LinkedIn doesn’t like money?

LinkedIn is running a promotion right now to get more people using their advertising platform.

It’s nicely conceived – two clicks (the first to login), and I was straight into writing an advert. Brilliant!

The advert-writing was simple, easy to understand, and fit within the top 500 pixels of the screen – really welcoming. Not at all complicated.

“And then you go and spoil it all / By saying something stupid…”

…like “your email address is dis-allowed”.

My startup doesn’t have a profile page on LinkedIn, so I can’t direct people to it. This hugely undermines the value of running and advert.

I try to create a profile. Takes a few false starts, and then:

“You cannot create a profile for a company unless you can receive an email at the same domain address as the company website”

Oh.

(this is, apparently, non-negotiable)

We don’t even run a mailserver, let alone have an MX record for our domain.

SO … after lots of effort trying to convert me into a paying advertiser, LinkedIn once again shoots itself in the foot. There isn’t even an OPTION for me to sort this out – it’s just a big “fuck off!”.

Sigh.

Categories
iphone

Generating iPhone App Icons

A couple of years ago, someone setup this neat, handy, site:

http://www.flavorstudios.com/iphone-icon-generator (DON’T USE THIS)

…but their web skills were poor, and their script kept crashing, and they couldn’t be bothered either to fix it or to document the bugs. Or even to just … you know … release it as open-source and let someone else fix it.

I wouldn’t mind, except I’d contacted the authors multiple times, and simply been ignored.

I run a local non-profit group that hosts monthly iPhone events for designers, programmers, clients, freelancers, etc, and I was stuck with this tool as the only free icon mangler that made decent icons at minimal effort.

Finally, I’ve found an alternative. It’s not quite so quick-and-easy (and it requires flash), but it does the job:

http://www.iconj.com/iphone_style_icon_generator.php

Notes to self:

  1. Set the output size to 64×64 or it will destroy the icon quality
  2. Set the “icon shadow” to “normal” (bizarrely, it always defaults to “not normal”)
  3. Resize to 60×60 afterwards to get an icon that’s ALMOST exactly 57×57 (iPhone size) with applied shadow
Categories
amusing

Customer Service, Czech-style … now with Taser!

iPhone app seeks to prevent taxi drivers from ripping-off their passengers

“there has even been a case of a driver who had wired up the seats so he could deliver an electric shock to any troublesome passengers.”

Categories
amusing Web 0.1

Embarassing uses of Flash #342: Wicks Group

The Wicks Group is a private-equity firm routinely buying and selling companies for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Here’s their web page:

Yes, really. At first I thought it was some small spam-using firm with crappy webskills, that had managed to buy the domain name of a bigger company. I closed the window.

But later, I got referred back to the same domain by a reputable site, so I tried again.

Here’s what the site looks like when you enable Flash:

Ah! That’s better!

So, I’m guessing their website got hacked some time ago, inserting the advert spam for NFL Jerseys … on that basis, I’ve emailed them and suggested they hire a decent web developer to take a look at the site and remove the hack – and probably upgrade their webserver so that it doesn’t get hacked again.

Categories
amusing

Apple: Keepin’ it Complex, Impenetrable, Unusable…

Apple runs a conference each year (“WWDC”) where they provide documentation and material that developers MUST use – but isn’t available elsewhere.

That’s OK – they record it all, and the slides, and make it available free afterwards.

Except …

  1. You can’t download it from the web, you can only download from inside iTunes – Apple doesn’t like the web, they insist you use iTunes
  2. You can’t find it on iTunes, you can only find it on the web – Apple’s proprietary “iTunes University” declares that the files don’t exist. Even if you’ve got them downloaded. But google finds it quick and easy.

I *guess* this is because some “genius” at Apple declared that since you need a Developer account (cost: $99) to download the content, they would remove it from their (proprietary, low-quality) search engine “just in case a BAD PERSON got to see the mere existence of this content!”.

Of course … if iTunes is already checking my account is allowed to download this stuff before downloading it … how much of a “genius” would it take to merely make the SAME check when displaying search results?

Google, Yahoo, Bing, et al: +1
Apple: -1000

Categories
iphone

iPhone: massive news for developers re: App Store

After 2 years, Apple finally shares the list of reasons that they reject apps (approximately 100 or so – it’s not complete, but it’s close)

This is big news – finally, professionals can act professionally and do their own QA before submitting apps, rather than just wishing and praying.

(http://apprejections.com/index.php/post/264)

Categories
amusing startup advice web 2.0

LinkedIn more popular than Twitter (according to LinkedIn?)

When I log into LinkedIn, I now receive 3 pages of spam. That spam is “every tweet by every person I’ve ever met”.

Somewhere, buried inside the avalanche of spam, are a few genuine LinkedIn messages. e.g. today I saw that a friend had moved to a new company – important, useful information.

Support: why would you want to refuse our spam?

I asked the LinkedIn customer support folks how to disable the spam. Their response:

You can “only hide the member’s Twitter updates [if you] also [hide all] their LinkedIn updates”.

i.e. your choices are:

  1. Get spam
  2. Get nothing

Hmm. Think about the people with tens of thousands of connections on linkedin. Their linkedin home pages must be absurdly high spam-to-signal ratio.

LinkedIn’s management: Twitter? WTF is Twitter?

LinkedIn’s CTO / lead architect / whoever authorized this stupid setup apparently “forgot” that the main feature of Twitter is it *allows* you to choose the people you receive tweets from.

(or, more likely, they’ve never used Twitter – it’s just a buzzword they’d heard of from a VC)

LinkedIn removes that choice. It simply forces everything on you. No filtering. No choices. Nothing. As a user, you exist to be spammed.

As a user, you exist to consume LinkedIn’s adverts, and nothing else. The site is – it would seem – not intended to be useful.

RIP LinkedIn.com

For a business to sink to such a low level of utility, and for the management to achieve such a high level of ignorance about the market, suggests to me that LI is moving rapidly towards implosion. I don’t believe it will still be with us two years from now. And that’s rather tragic, given how valuable it used to be.

Categories
marketing social networking startup advice

Startups: measure your attention-marketing (download)

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ll have read my thoughts on the Science part of Marketing, and how much money this makes you.

As I explained recently to an Accountant, we don’t have a “business plan” for my current company, we only have a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet – done correctly – *is* a business plan, and a better plan than any you’ll ever see written down.

(NB: I’m not an accountant. I’m not a Finance Director – and never have been. I don’t even like spreadsheets; normally they bore me to death. But this is an exception. It is the only way to effectively plan and run a startup)

So I was delighted to see that Dave Stone has posted a spreadsheet to track and measure the effectiveness of your “attention” campaign – how much exposure did you get from TechCrunch et al? Was it worth it?

Categories
amusing recruiting

Everyone should work for the BBC…

Seriously: I’m not getting paid enough!

(read closely, from this page)

BBC Worldwide job advert