There’s a phenomenon that seems to be emerging of late. I’ve never noticed this to happen earlier than a couple of years ago, but if anyone could point out an example of it, I’d appreciate it. This phenomenon is a scourge on the industry, and any gamer who’s interested in playing a certain type of game near release is liable to be sucker-punched by it.

Here’s what happens:

A developer licenses some Intellectual Property, which has a fixed cost.  They come to the conclusion that the best way to maximize their return on the investment of these fees is to distribute the title they’re working on across as many different platforms as possible.  Some developers (I’m looking at you, Ubisoft) have IP internally that is powerful enough to compel them to make games for many platforms as well, presumably to sell more titles and thus earn more income.  This is all well and good, certainly I don’t have any qualms with releasing titles on multiple platforms.  However, not all platforms are created equal.  We can therefore expect a certain level of negotiation with respect to things that are affected by the limitations of that particular platform.  Obviously a game coming out for PS3 or 360 would need to have its graphical capabilities, etc. scaled back if it were also being released for Xbox.  A game coming out for the Wii might need to have the interface modified somewhat to accommodate the Wii’s unique controller.

What should NOT change, however, is the overall game experience.   When a game is publisher and has a certain name, but is released on multiple platforms, customers assume that regardless of which platform they choose to purchase the game for, They are purchasing the same game.  When this fails to be the case, if the different versions of the game are significantly different from each other, but all have the same cover art, same name, same advertising campaign, you are creating brand confusion.  Perhaps some examples will better illustrate what I mean.

The year is 2004, Spider-man 2 comes out.  Despite the fact that most games based on commercial blockbusters are complete critical failures, everything I heard about this game is that it’s phenomenal.  Metacritic gives the PS2 (and Xbox) version of the game 80 out of 100, a reasonably good score.  The game is acclaimed for having the free roaming nature of GTA, but in three dimensions.  Swinging around Manhattan, freely exploring the city sounds like a great deal of fun.  I buy the game for PC, because at the time I was travelling and didn’t want to drag my consoles around when I could play on my laptop.  One would at this point assume I was buying the same game.  After all, there’s certainly nothing you can do on a console you can’t do on a PC.  If one wanders over to Metacritic and looks up the score on the PC version of this game, the score of 42 might come as a bit of a shock.  Why is the score for the PC version of the game nearly 40 points lower than the console versions?  Because it’s an entirely different game.  One is no longer free to explore the city at will (the major selling point of the first game), in fact, you’re restricted to where you shoot your webs by little floating web icons which hang inconspicuously in the air.  The entire PC game can be finished in two hours, and there is absolutely no reason to backtrack.  Why Activision decided to release a PC game which is entirely different from the console version (and much, much shittier), and throw it under the same brand, when it would have been much simpler just to port the console version over, is beyond me.

Case two.  Splinter Cell:  Double Agent.  I’m pretty sure this title is an inside joke, because there are actually two different versions of this game.  Version 1 was developed by Ubisoft Shanghai, the folks who brought you Splinter Cell 2, and was released for PC, 360, and PS3.  Version 2 was made in Montreal (Splinter Cell 1 and 3), and came out for Xbox, Gamecube, PS2, and Wii.  The general storyline is similar, but major sections of the game are changed.  A big feature in version 1 were levels where Sam is instructed to perform some menial task by the terrorists, who will return in a given timeframe.  In each of these levels, Sam must complete the task, but also use the remainder of his time to discover new plot information, and to perform covert tasks for the NSA.  Version 2 completely omits these levels, but instead has entirely new levels which are not present at all in version 1.  The plot in version 2 is also much more throughly fleshed-out, so many gamers playing version 1 may complete it and be left scratching their head.  Despite this, there’s no real indication that the PC version of the game might be significantly different from the PS2 version of the game.

I’m completely fine with having two studios create similar but not precisely the same game for different platforms, simultaneously, but please, brand the game differently.  Brand identity is the sole discriminating factor game developers have to identify their organizations and products.  By creating multiple products which are similar, but fundamentally different, and branding them identically creates confusion which erodes the value of your brand.  This is especially true when one of the products is extremely inferior to the other.  Understandably one would want to leverage the cost of their licenses to get the most profit out of the equation possible, but if you have to mess your brand up to do it, you’re selling a piece of your hard-earned soul that you may not be able to get back in the long term.

Stop making a game for 8 different systems, giving it the same name, but having it be a totally different game.

Yesterday I attended a recruiting session given by Dennis Dyack and some of the team from Silicon Knights here at the University of Waterloo. I don’t think I made a complete fool of myself, but it was definitely one of the first times in my life I’ve managed to stutter and ramble in anxiety, so I guess I must have liked what they had to say.  While I’m not interested in writing a plug for SK, I will say that many of the things they said over the course of that two hours resonated strongly with me. There’s a lot of issues with working the games industry that are hard to judge without actually working in it, despite the amount of blogs you read or development magazines you might subscribe to. SK strikes me as a place where they strongly and fundamentally understand a lot of these issues in a way I agree with, and I thought I’d go through a few of them.

Employee Recognition

Much of the games industry has a reputation for being essentially a meat grinder: taking fresh graduates, putting them into high-stress, long hour positions and running them until they burn out, at which time they’re replaced by fresh employees. I really believe that if you’re going to create great games, you need great people. Game design is an incredibly complex and sophisticated process, and much like any other medium that pushes the boundaries of what is possible, the people in the company are the ones that make it happen. If you don’t make those employees feel like what they do matters, and that they are valued, you’re going to lose them. You might be able to make money churning shit out the door, but nobody is going to celebrate it. Why not reach for the sky.

Lateral Movement

The baby boomer generation has been known for finding a company and sticking with them for their entire lives. Generation X is characterized by the opposite, hoping from company to company and job to job as suits their fancy. Generation Y, the current generation of new graduates and the one I happened to belong to is characterized by a mix of the two. Gen Y wants to stay with one company, but they want to do different things. Gen Y wants all the advantages of changing up your job, keeping it fresh, while retaining the benefits of staying in one organization long-term. Making it easy to move around in the company will attract Gen Y, help keep your employees interested in what they do, and at the same time groom people who are familiar with the whole of the game making process.

Continuing Education

Once upon a time, it was very rare to get a Bachelor’s Degree, much less a Bachelor’s Degree in a field such as Math or Engineering. In Canada, there are approximately 65,000 Professional Engineers. Presently, there are around 27,000 students in an accredited Engineering program. Clearly, the marginal value of the Bachelor’s degree declines significantly when the market is flooded, and a large number of us for these reasons, as well as the joy of learning, are interested in pursuing a Master’s or PhD. Supporting your employees in pursuing higher education, and arranging it so that their jobs are open when they finish can help infuse the organization with much more rare and sophisticated talent, and when your business is making compelling content and pushing hardware to its limits, there’s no way that can be a bad thing.

Games as High Art

It’s been said that games may one day be the dominant form of entertainment. Certainly as the generations who grew up with video games age, console systems will become as prevalent as cable subscriptions. However in order to truly bring video games into their own, developers will have to start making more games which are on par with Hollywood blockbusters, as well as classic critically acclaimed films. There’s a lot of mumbling about this going on right now. Certainly some developers have made piles of money and games which are really fun to play, while largely ignoring story. To me, this is similar to making movies like ‘The Wedding Crashers”. The movie made a lot of money, and was hilarious to watch, but you’re not really pushing the medium forward, it’s not the type of thing people will write about for years to come. If you want high art, you’re going to have to have solid writing. John Carmack once said that story in a video game is like story in porn, it’s expected to be there, but isn’t really important. I think Carmack has done incredible things for the Industry, and he deserves credit for that, but that quote definitely speaks to his games. They’re fun to look at, maybe even fun to play, but they don’t touch you on an emotional level the way something like Ragnar Tornquist’s The Longest Journey does. If we want games to be high art, they have to be more than eye-candy, you have to feel something when you play them, you should be left thinking about them while you’re falling asleep at night…

Anyway, these are all thoughts that popped into my mind while I was listening to the Silicon Knights team talk. I hope that they manage to drive in that direction.

Warning: This post breaks TINAG.

I’ve always been fascinated by Alternate-Reality Games, although my participation in them thus far in my life has been cursory at best. There’s something about the concept of immersing your life in a game which is highly seductive, even though there are practical limits to such immersion (Not everyone can play The Game). I wrote earlier about an idea I had for using light-weight ARGs as a vehicle for inexpensive marketing. In that post I used, as an example, an H. P. Lovecraft-oriented ARG.

I subsequently received an email from Brian Clark, CEO of a certain GMD Studios. It turns out that some of my hypothesises turned out to be not far from the mark. GMD is running an interesting horror ARG dubbed Eldritch Errors.  The trailhead of which can be found at the website of B.A. Saint Feline, at BSeeingU.com.  The game was set to launch the week after I had made that post, and Brian was concerned I had somehow stumbled behind the curtain before it even launched!  It’s still in the early stages, so if you’re interested in Lovecraft or horror in general, and want someplace to step into the world of ARGs, this might be for you.  The cat is out of the bag now, so to speak, so I wish you all well in the hunt.  (If you’re interested in getting up to date, the best place to step into the community would be the Unforums).

I particularly enjoy the use of Craig’s list, by the way, although in retrospect I suppose it’s the perfect forum for such things.

After my Xbox 360 died earlier this week, I finally called Tech support.  As suspected, there is nothing I can do about the issue, and Microsoft will be shipping me a box in which to ship them the console for repair (and for free, as my console is under warranty).  The tech support line was a bit hard to hear, and one has to navigate through an automatic tech support drone (although not a bad one) to get to a real person, but I suppose that’s good as it filters out the people who forgot to plug their system in.

I’ve been trying to discern what might have happened to cause this error.  I’ve found a nifty little guide which allows you to get some more in-depth information about the dreaded three blinking red lights.  I won’t go through the entire procedure here, but if you have this issue, I encourage you to do so.

The particular error code I get is 0102.  This code is an unknown error, an error not handled by any other of the escape conditions.  Essentially my Xbox 360 has no idea what’s wrong with itself.  The guide suggests that it can occur if components have lost contact with the main-board, due to a cold solder or a short, or possibly a broken contact.

As I have not physically relocated my Xbox 360 since this occurred, the only conceivable explanation is that my console has been overheating, and the heat has caused warping significant enough to damage the component connections on the system board.  As my system IS under warranty, I’m not willing to open it up and poke around, nor try to repair it using heat reflow or other techniques.

My system was purchased in the summer of 2006, not exactly among the ‘first batch of 360s’.  Additionally, the system is sitting on my wooden desk, upright, and has plenty of space surrounding it.  In fact, there is not a single device within three feet of the console which emits heat (and even at that, an LCD monitor doesn’t emit much).  If heat was the culprit, this points to a systemic problem with the 360, although Microsoft has denied this.  Either the solder work in the pick-and-place machines used in fabrication are flawed somewhere (a problem which would be relatively trivial to diagnose and fix given large quantities of 360s suffering the same problems), or there is simply too much heat and not enough airflow within the 360 chassis.  If this is the case, it will continue to be a major problem unless the physical case is redesigned (fat chance) or the system uses a lower-voltage chipset which will reduce the amount of heat being generated (would require another model of 360 to emerge).  As both of these solutions seem to be unlikely to be implemented, my hopes of having my (repaired) 360 last as long as my SNES has are foundering rapidly.

I’ve had an Xbox 360 for about 9 months now. In general I feel that of the three next-gen consoles, the 360 has, at the moment, the best selection of quality games, and I certainly wouldn’t wish for one of the other two instead (although definitely as well). The only problems I’ve had with it are a propensity to occasionally throw an error stating that “The disc cannot be read, please clean it and start again”. While this is annoying when it occurs, rebooting the system fixes the problem, and it didn’t happen that often.

Today, I have a bigger problem. My system was working fine last night, but today, booting up would cause the system to freeze right away, sometimes overlaying the Microsoft start-up logo wherever it happened to freeze with a blue checkboard pattern. The situation has since devolved to the point where turning the system on causes nothing to happen but three blinking red lights on the ring of light.

Much has been made of this problem in the last few months, and while Microsoft claims that this problem occurs far below the consumer electronics average of 3-5% failures, the noise in the community would suggest that the problem is much more prevalent than they claim.

Certainly regardless of what the stats say, the number of hardware failures are much, much too high. When Wikipedia has an entire page devoted to the problems that happen with your system, your product has issues. When people have come up with a nickname for an error, calling it “The Ring of Death” or 3RL (Three Red Lights), and error which indicates that the system has suffered an irrecoverable hardware error that requires manufacturer repair, your product has serious issues. When the BBC publishes a consumer report citing the fact that your product is known for having total hardware failure issues, usually around the time the warranty is running out, you have a crisis on your hands.

There are three things that peeve me about this problem. Firstly, that it’s so common, and not only on a first 360, but many have to return their systems multiple times. If car manufacturers did that, they would flat out go out business. Haven’t you guys ever heard of Quality Assurance? Secondly, that the customer support is reportedly terrible. This is a major PR issue which could have serious repercussions on your future ability to move product. This will especially be true in the future when the offerings for the Wii and PS3 catch up. Your customer support staff should be bending over backwards to do damage control, not pissing off the people who forked over half a grand to play games on your system. Lastly, as someone who’s lived in the computer industry for some time, the general rule is that hardware usually dies after a long time, when it’s lived out it’s useful life, or within a month of purchasing it (Infant Fatality Syndrome). Much of the electronics warranty structure revolves around this assumption: The purpose of the warranty is to catch the ones which die quickly due to the product being faulty. What we have going on here though are Xbox units dying months or nearly a year after purchase. These units are not being mishandled, they simply stop working one day, and the reasons for that are poor construction on Microsoft’s behalf. This is exactly the scenario in which the warranty is intended to apply, but because the failures are often so close to the expiration date on the warranty, many consumers are getting screwed by the support staff into paying for the repair.

I own an NES and Super NES, these systems still play just as well as the day I bought them (and in the case of the NES, even better, although I did have to change out the connection pins, for a mere $10). I have no doubt that if I wake up one morning and want to play Chronotrigger, or Earthbound, Secret of Evermore or Mario RPG, I can march downstairs and flip on my system, and all will be well in the world. This is 15 years after the system was purchased, certainly beyond the expected lifetime of most other consumer electronics. With my 360, I now have to question whether it will work on any given day, during the active life cycle of the system. Will I still be able to play Gears of War in 15 years?

Video game systems should not be lumped in with other consumer electronics. A Sony Walkman may not work two decades later, but any of the media you might have wanted to use it for are still available in some format. A television of 2007 can play any signal a television of 1991 could. This is not the case for video games.

So Microsoft, I’m fully aware you have a lot of really smart people in your organization. I’m sure this issue has been floating around the engineering team for a while, but you’ve had a year to your advantage. The solutions to hardware issues like this are not always simple, but in this case, they are necessary. If you don’t get this under control, people will stop buying 360s, and they will not trust you in the future to build a system they’re willing to pay for.

Fix your shit, or suffer the consequences in the market.