The game market and industry have been growing every year, and this year continue this trend. Both in terms of revenue and media space. This fall, I have notice and enormous increase in TV commercials for PC and Video games. A list over the games and consoles I’ve seen recently:
Fallout 3
Resistance 2
Playstation 3
Xbox 360
Gears of War 2
Motorstorm 2
Wii Fit
Wii
Animal Crossing DS + Wii
Little Big Planet
Guitar Hero World Tour
Mirrors Edge
World of Warcraft - wrath of the lich King
Lips
Raving Rabbit
Prince of Persia
Maybe this is a changing point for game to take more place. The total amount of advertisment games seems to be more than movie and music combined this fall. Here in Sweden at least.
One thing I do when I’m bored is (like many other) to scan Youtube and the rest of the net for interesting video clips. Often its just short clips from series like Simpson, Family Guy and South Park. But it seems that the owners are fast to ban content that people have uploaded without permission. As people (especially Pirates) find new way to distribute copyrighted content, the companies and people that own the rights have to work harder to hunt the ones that upload it. I don’t think pirating and distribution of copyrighted content without permission ever will stop completely, as long as it isn’t free. And the ways to distribute content will be even more sophisticated, and the owners will have to adapt and stay even more informed of all the new places and technology to keep up.
All over the world, especially in the car industry, the economy have generally showed black numbers. Which might leads to people scrimp with their spending and look at “free” pirated content online. It struck me last night that this might open up for a whole new industry, Digital Content Copyrighting Polices. Basically, people how know the web, the latest trends and the hippies places were people get together and share illegal content. People who can be hired by the big content owners, like Universal, Electronic Arts, Sony BMG and 20 century Fox, and do their scanning of uploaded content for them. Specialist that the bigger companies can hire with one mission, to report illegal digital content. Like scanning Youtube for unapproved uploaded video clips. I don’t like this how ever (when it comes to video clips on Youtube), cause I think they miss a great opportunity to promote their TV shows even further for new audiences. Who view a clip, find it funny or interesting and want to see the whole episode. Thou I think this could be a great opportunity to create a new industry, not internet police, rather detective that investigate and report. For hire of cause.
Microtransactions and DLC (Downloadable Content) are two relatively new phenomenon in Games. In Asia, the big thing in online games are Free-2-Play the big model, were you play for free and have the option to buy small micro-items in game. Many small transactions, that combined add up to a bunch of money. In the west this type of thing in games haven’t really become successful, yet. But it seems that the whole industry are focusing their attention for this and develop games with this in mind. DLC have become big, were the developer can expand the life of a game buy developing new extra content for a game. This works for game, that is a consuming and interactive media. One example that comes to mind in books are when JK Rowling wrote a extra short story for her Harry Potter universe.
For big games, from big publishers this works very well. But til now big games that are already or on the way out on the market, DLC maybe doesn’t cost so much to develop. But it still a risk to incorporate it from scratch and depend the whole project on it. Here, we at GamersGate have been developing a complete platform to ease for developers to incorporating microtransactions into their games. Microtransaction and DLC are indeed the future, or a part of the future, it have many advantages but still have some childhood things to fix. But this is probably just the beginning!
About a week ago I learned about something we have outside our office. There were a big lamp that lit up each of the five big buildings in the middle of Stockholm. The lamps change colors all the time. And a co-worker told me about them, that they reflex the mood of the city. Something called Emotional Cities, were the people of Stockholm can enter a website and chose how they feel, and the lamp will then change to correspond with the most popular mood. So by just looking at the colour we can find out who the people of Stockholm feels.
I’ve posted some post about Chris Anderssons upcoming book and theory Free. It seems not to have received the same impact as The Long Tail, but he isn’t done yet, and I’m looking forward to dive deeper into his theory. That Free is the future for digital content and services. Still, can it be that some times Free loses to paid services? In the recent episode of Bonus Round over at GameTrailers, were the current topic is Online Services, Michael Pachter claims the difference. The discussion regards the Free Playstation Network services vs. the monthly costly Xbox Live, were Live seems to have attracted more players that use the services. As Michael Pachter says about the problem of Playstation network not attracting players in the same way: “Free actually hurt them”, he also is astound that free can cause more grief and that free let all kinds of retards into the service. Were paying customers from Live have the paid privilege to complain.
He has a point here. Sometimes maybe paid services work better than free, in that it attract more quality customers, were the big selling point is playing and meet other people/players. The old notion that price and quality is connected, may still be true in some areas. People are more willing to use a service they spent money on, rather than a free one. They put a greater value on a non-free services. Maybe the future will be different, but right now the free theory still have some convincing to do.
Today I went and picked up a cheap copy of Army of Two (only 180 Swedish spänn!), and in a almost routinely fashion people have begun to camp outside a certain store here in Stockholm for the release of Gears of War 2 tomorrow. The release of games at the moment is crazy! Many big games that just popup in store, and they all fight for media attention so I get lost what and when games are out. Next week we will have a great line up o games release at work, but it feels like this will somewhat unnoticed thanks to many other title (among them the new WoW expansion). The game release race have truly begun. And on Monday I will pick up my copy of Mirrors Edge. But there are many other titles Im looking forward to play as well. Among them:
Dead Space (PS3)
Fallout 3 (PC)
Little Big Planet (PS3)
Far Cry 2 (PC)
Left 4 Dead (PC) (hope to play this co-op with Stoffe now that he finally have MSN)
Resistance 2 (PS3)
Valkyria Chronicles (PS3)
There are probably many more game I have forgotten, but the race of game releases to Christmas is truly on! Gears of War 2 would be nice to play to, but I have to wait for the PC version (the guys at work nag on me to buy a Xbox360 so we all can play together…). I can only hope for a long good Christmas break so I have time to play all games!
Yes, its been a while since I wrote a post. But my time and thinking mind have been occupied with other thing. Mainly my new job. Its been taking up all of my time, and I havn’t had the energy to blog. I will try to better myself. We have so much new interesting going on at GamersGate, and I miss some of my reflexing and thinking outside work.
Okey, I have finally given in and created a account on Twitter, the biggest Microbloging site. After listening to many podcasts, were people talk about their Twitter experience (or addictions…), I decided to sign up myself. Also cause I like to know how new popular web phenomonon works. So today I signed up!
For anyone who what’s to add me, and follow my little life, my Twitter name is: (tahdahh!….) helmehytte.
One of this years biggest Swedish game releases, Dice’s Mirrors Edge have one of the best trailer-track. A cozzy chillout/electronica track that really contribute to build up the mood. I don’t think I’m alone wanted to know which song it was. But its clear that one of our biggest Swedish female artist, Liza Miskovsky will do the theme song for ME. Also the Swedish group Teddybears will do a remix on the theme song. Mirrors Edge will soon be released, and I’m planing to pre-order it really soon.
It hit me the other week when I saw a “documentary” about our Swedish Finance minister Anders Borg, how he resembles the American Bullshit hunter and Magician Penn Jillette. What do you think? Anders Borg really have stood out amongst the Swedish politicians, especially within the Finance area, with ponytail and ear-piercing. The documentary portrayed him as a person with strong opinions and somewhat of a “free thinker“. This too seems to remind me of Penn, the little I’ve seen of him through his program Bullshit! Penn his a famous successful entertainer, who doesn’t dare to share his views on things. Maybe Borg wanted to ride in the wave after Penn?
All over the world, especially in the car industry, the economy have generally showed black numbers. Which might leads to people scrimp with their spending and look at “free” pirated content online. It struck me last night that this might open up for a whole new industry, Digital Content Copyrighting Polices. Basically, people how know the web, the latest trends and the hippies places were people get together and share illegal content. People who can be hired by the big content owners, like Universal, Electronic Arts, Sony BMG and 20 century Fox, and do their scanning of uploaded content for them. Specialist that the bigger companies can hire with one mission, to report illegal digital content. Like scanning Youtube for unapproved uploaded video clips. I don’t like this how ever (when it comes to video clips on Youtube), cause I think they miss a great opportunity to promote their TV shows even further for new audiences. Who view a clip, find it funny or interesting and want to see the whole episode. Thou I think this could be a great opportunity to create a new industry, not internet police, rather detective that investigate and report. For hire of cause.
