I was just reading an interview with Peter Moore (The head of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Division, and coolest ’suit’ of 2007) and came to two realizations.  Firstly, Peter Moore is really awesome.  He has a way of articulating answers to questions which is at once both professional and clear-cut, unfettered by marketing jargon.  Secondly, developers used to pay companies to obtain licenses to use their brand!

You’re looking at companies that are just lining up down the street to be involved in the game environment.  I look back at the old days in my previous life at Sega, when we were actually paying for licenses of consumer-product companies to put in the game. I think about Crazy Taxi [Dreamcast], things like KFC and Pizza Hut…. Boy, the shoe is on the other foot now, no pun intended. The ability for us to be able to have control of this demographic and bring that to consumer-product companies…it’s a powerful tool.

It’s somewhat ludicrous that a development company spending the millions of dollars it costs to make a game would fritter that money away to place brands inside their game… especially brands like KFC or Pizza Hut.  In theory, the only reason you want to do this is that in some way the inclusion of those brands will sell more of your game and earn you more revenue than it cost you to license those brands in the first place.  Nobody wants to buy a game just because they can deliver a tasty pizza to someone (although that’s not universally the case).  Product placement in a video game feels the same way it does in movies.  If done well, the fact that you’re essentially being marketed to doesn’t detract from the experience of immersion, in fact in certain cases it can add to it.  If, on the other hand, what you’re delivered is a garish, in-your-face product placement, my reaction is one more of disgust:  not an emotion you want tied to your product brand.

Two examples that come springing to mind of horrible product placement would be the iPod and iTunes in Blade Trinity, and Reebok shoes in I, Robot.  Blade Trinity contains a lengthy shot, what felt like around 30 seconds of Jessica Biel loading music onto her iPod, which she always uses when she’s killing vampires…

Yeah.  At this point in the movie you pretty much want to get up and leave.  The experience is so out of touch with what you’re looking for in a vampire movie that all suspension of disbelief is lost, and you’re irate at both the producers of the movie, and the product itself, causing exactly the opposite reaction intended.  This effect is so profound that politicians should place ads for their opponents in movies coming out near voting time.

In I, Robot, Will Smith is putting on some sneakers for an entire shot, in which one of his buddies comments on how nice they are, whereby Smith replies “Thanks, Vintage 2004 [The year the movie came out]”.  If ever you wanted to smack Will Smith, that was the time.

These pitfalls can just as easily happen with video games, if not more so.  There is a place for such ‘in your face’ use of brands, and that place is parodying the brands themselves for comic effect.  Sierra did this to great effect in the Space Quest series with Monolith Burger, satirizing the stereotypical behaviours and appearance of McDonald’s employees.  The effect, rather than bringing you out of the game, made you laugh, which was the whole point of the Space Quest experience.

It’s about time things have turned around financially, and that product companies have realized the huge potential of marketing through video games.  Video games are a particularly powerful channel because the target audience is generally of more narrow scope, and the brand exposure is more prolonged than a movie (hard to find a game only two hours long).  As a result, marketers can acheive a significantly deeper penetration with a target group that genuinely might want to buy into their product; and they should have to pay through the nose to for that privilege.

Ryan Winterhalt has an interesting article about what it’s like to be a westerner working in the Japanese games industry over at Gamasutra.  Definitely worth a read.

In an interview with Home Media Magazine, Video Game Analyst Billy Pidgeon had some fairly interesting numbers (and, er, theories) to share.  Nintendo moved 259,000 Wiis last month, not a suprising development considering overall hardware sales for the industry have doubled from $659 million to $1.3 billion between Q4 2006 and Q1 2007.  According to Pidgeon, the sales on 360 and PS3 are stagnating, largely due to a lack of system-selling games.  This is due to pick up in Q3 when a number of highly anticipated titles are scheduled for release.  In the meantime during Q2 though, Nintendo has an opportunity to sweep with the Wii, that is, if they could keep them in stock.

And herein we see a problem.  Why are Wiis so hard to come by?  Pidgeon believes supply won’t reach demand until 2009 (Personally, I find this difficult to believe).  So far this year, Nintendo has managed to sell more gaming systems than everyone else combined, along with a heft chunk of peripherals to boot.  Since its release in November 2006, the Wii has sold over 2.1 Million units in the USA alone (Nevermind in Japan, where the Wii has consistently been the top selling next-gen system).  Sony can’t even close to match these numbers, and Microsoft, who’s had the 360 out for a year long than the Wii has only managed to sell 5.3 million units. 

So it’s possible that the appeal of the Wii to an audience outside of mainstream gamers has resulted in an insatiable demand for the system.  Certainly there’s been no mention of supply chain problems such as the ones Sony has suffered with its PS3, in fact, Nintendo reported in October that Wii production had exceeded expectations.  Even so, five months after the release of the system, one study showed that of 100 American game stores visited, only one had a single Wii in stock.  It’s basically impossible to order one from an online retailer, as all the major brands show the Wii being out of stock.

This is not a good scenario for Nintendo.  Despite rumors that Nintendo may be artificially constraining supply to ‘generate demand’, economics don’t tend to actually work like that.  They are in a position to take advantage of a low point in the year as far as game releases go to sell their system, but in order to do so, people need to be able to get their hands on one, and Nintendo will want them to do so before the fall line-up starts pressuring people to move towards PS3 and 360.

Even if Nintendo had not anticipated the rampant demand their system has created, one would think given five months they would be able to scale up production to accomodate it.  I suppose it takes some time for the reality of the situation to make it up to the decision makers.  Nintendo did announce recently it was going to increase production line capabilities, but no specifics were mentioned. 

I just want to play Zelda without having to wait in line all morning.  Please?

I was going to write an article musing about why so little attention is given to developers who make games for mobile devices.  We get endlessly barraged with news story after news story about developers for high end console systems, and what the newest PC game of the week is, but the mobiles don’t get such lovin’.  That article is never to be though, because the answer is too simple.

Mobile games suck.

I’m sure there are those who disagree with me on this point, and that’s fine, you’re wrong.  Yes there’s the Nintendo DS, and the PSP, and even the now long-toothed Gameboy Advance.  I’m not talking about those systems, although it is a useful exersize to ask yourself “If I were sitting at home and had the choice between playing something for console system X, or playing on my handheld, is there a scenario where I would choose the handheld?”.  The systems I’m talking about are the true cesspools of mobile gaming in the form of the cell-phone.  

Think about some of the best Super NES games you ever played.  Chronotrigger, Final Fantasy, Super Mario World.  Mobile systems these days easily eclipse the raw power of the super nintendo, and yet it’s impossible to find a game as memorable as these classics on any of them. 

At the University of Waterloo’s 50th Anniversary Dinner, Mike Lazaridis remeniced about the “Red Room”, a room once present on campus which held what was at the time some of the most powerful computing equipment on the planet.  He then proceded to pull out his Blackberry and stated that these devices now have many times the computing power of that entire room.  I don’t think processing power is the issue here.

If you really want to hate yourself, spend some time looking through the pathetic offerings available to cell-phone customers.  What you will find is a large number of puzzle games, card games, and some form of billiards.  There are companies about who are spending relatively tidy sums of money to convert the code from 70s classic arcade games like Pac-man and Spade Invader into Java to run on cell-phones.  These games are thirty years old, and while there may be some nostolgia from those of us old enough to have cut our teeth in video arcades, very few such people have the time or inclination to play them on the way to work.

In an interview with Guardian’s Games Blog, Jon Hare of sensible soccer described the mobile games industry as follows:

“Mobile games are the most licence driven pile of shit you’ve ever seen. You can’t sell a mobile game unless it has a license attached. Mobile is the worst format for gaming. The DS and PSP have far more potential. The PC, certainly in online gaming. already offers original games. Live Arcade? It’s all about getting money out of them.”

So this is a call to the mobile games industry.  Stop making Pool simulators.  Stop making variations on Bejewelled and Hold em’ poker.  Stop porting games that, while good at the time, have no particular lasting appeal over the generations.  Stop making games that have no gameplay value whatsoever, but cost thousands in licensing costs from some brand (as a matter of fact, that goes for all game producers).  Start making new content, it doesn’t have to be on par with the best of the best in the PC and console world, but make something compelling that might actually interest me in buying your product.  The same principals of game design apply on mobiles just like everywhere else, and it’s a shame the world seems to have forgotten that.

The XNA Team is proud to announce the availability of XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 Refresh.  This release is an update to the 1.0 product which contains improved functionality along with new features.

Some of these new features include Bitmap-based fonts, 3D Audio, Windows Vista Support, and the long awaited ability to share binaries with other users without having to share the source code as well!

As always, if you want to share your work with other Xbox 360 users, you still need a Creator’s Club Membership.

Check out the “What’s New” section of the product documentation for full details.