My Issues with #eSports & Professional Gaming
This is an area I don’t know a lot about, but am interested in knowing more. What caught my eye is the growing prizes and interested in professional gaming, or eSports as it seems to be known. For example:
Blizzard‘s RTS behemoth is the show’s main event, hosting 64 of the game’s top players in a group format. They’ll eventually be whittled down to 16 and placed into a single elimination tournament for a 200 000 SEK (~$30 000/£20 000) grand prize. Sounds better is Krona doesn’t it? Still, that’s a tidy sum.
Yes, that’s am impressive amount of money. I’m not a huge player of Starcraft, but I’m intrigued to watch some competitive games, so I googled a bit and found some stuff such as this – but I do feel a bit lost in all the commentary. It’s not very welcoming IMHO. It’s a bewildering area, with lots going on – for example the measure of the speed of a player’s hands as they control a game:
I’m also not that enthused by the mish-mash of extreme sports and normal sports styling they give to the coverage. Again, it feels a bit ‘in-crowd’ and not welcoming to newly interested people. I might be wrong, and would be happy to be pointed to links that are more open, but at the moment, if eSports wants to break the mainstream, I think they need to stop seeing themselves as either a branch of Football or Skateboarding and define a new style of coverage.
The Down-Side of So Many Games Platforms
I’d written before that now is a good time to be a content creator, based on the fact that there is a huge proliferation of platforms going on now.
Sadly, there is a down-side to this for us games developers. That comes from the understandable desire of the manufacturers of those platforms wanting exclusivity:
[Developer Brian] Provinciano’s contract [for Xbox] stipulates that Retro City Rampage must not appear on other platforms for a limited period of time. But some other platforms, which he refuses to divulge, are not covered by the clause. “If I really get screwed on the launch I can put it out on some other platforms immediately, because they aren’t covered in the contract,” he says with a glint in his eye.
Provinciano’s story will be familiar to most who have made or are making games for Microsoft’s hugely successful downloadable platform – and even to some who haven’t. Take Amanita Design, the Czech Republic maker of enchanting adventure games Samorost, Botanicula and Machinarium, a game due out on PS3 early next year.“First we wanted to create an Xbox Live version of Machinarium,” Amanita boss Jakub Dvorský says. “Microsoft contacted us some time ago. They were interested and very nice. But after about half a year of negotiations, they told us they were not interested anymore because they decided they don’t want to support games which are not Microsoft exclusive. We had already released the game for Mac and Linux, so they said they were not interested anymore.”
Its a bind. As a developer, the more platforms that my game appears on, the more people can play it and the greater the chance I’m going to make my development costs back. This is important because making games is a very risky business. I can see why platform holders might want to tie developers into one platform, however IMHO carrot is much better than stick; the best way to give players a unique experience is by encouraging those developers to make the best use of the individual features of your platform and to build a fan base there.
Cthulhu Thursday: Cthulhu Countdown to Cthulhumas!
Really happy to say that the Cthulhu Christmas Calendar is now out! This is the first publicly avalible release by our indie development project, Red Wasp Design. Here’s the bumff! Ai! Ai! Cthulhumas!
Cthulhu’s Crazy Nightmare Before Christmas
Fans of the meme-monster Cthulhu and other creations of cult horror novelist H.P. Lovecraft can get a little extra help in counting down to Christmas, thanks to a new mobile advent calendar app. Titled ‘Cthulhu Christmas Calendar’, it features 25 original pieces of artwork – one for each day in December until Christmas Day. Each image presents a fun mashup of festive icons like Santa into the Cyclopean world of the great Cthulhu, the malevolent Mi-Go and the dark god Nyarlathotep. Indie developer Red Wasp Design today released the Cthulhu Christmas Calendar for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android. As well as featuring a new and original creation of art for each day, it also features quiz questions related to the images. Fans will find out their ‘Mythos rating’ on the 25th when their scores are revealed along with the final festivehorror image. The app is available now from the App Store for iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone. It is also available for Android from the Android Market. It is priced at:
· iPhone & iPod Touch ($0.99/£0.69/€0.79)
· iPad 1 & 2 ($1.99/£1.49;/€1.59)
· Android Store ($0.99/£0.69/€0.79)
· Amazon App Store (coming soon!)
There is more information on the Cthulhu Christmas Calendar page and you can chat about it with fellow cultists on its own Facebook page.“That is not baked which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even pudding may die.”
Notes for Editors:
H.P. Lovecraft was a cult US horror writer 1890-1937. For more on him and his work, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._LovecraftRed Wasp Design is a new games developer based in Bristol, England. The app development studio is composed of experienced professionals who have worked on a number of best selling titles on Playstation 3, iPhone and other platforms. More information can be found here. They are currently completing another Cthulhu related project, the game ‘Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land‘. You can find out more from Red Wasp Design via their Facebook page or Twitter
(@redwaspdesign).A hopeful Shoggoth posts a letter to Santa
(Cthulhu Thursday is a dose of Mythos to brighten darken your week. More on the idea can be found here and a list of posts thus far, here. Also for more Cthulhu news, sign up to the cthulhuHQ twitter feed. Enjoy!)
Android vs iPhone: Market Share & Income Share
If you’ve been following the ongoing battle for control of the smart phone market, you’ll know that Android has grown and grown its market share year after year. 2011 is no exception:
Data from Gartner shows that Android now has a 52.5 percent share of the global smartphone market, up from 25.3 percent in Q3 2010. In contrast, iOS’s share has declined from 16.6 percent to 15 percent over the same period.
Though note that this does not mean there are less iOS phones being sold – far from it. The overall size of the market is growing, so a handset manufacturer can loose market share while selling more phones than before. So from a market-share perspective, Android looks the best place to develop for. However, as a games developer, I know that the size of the platform is just one factor. Users of different platforms behave in different ways. One title can be a hit on PlayStation and fail on PC (e.g. Warzone 2100). So it was with great interest I read this article on the Guardian’s apps blog on income share by platform:
Analyst Gene Munster has published a research note claiming that between its launch in July 2008 and the end of September 2011, Apple’s App Store generated 18.6bn app downloads with a total gross revenue of $4.9bn. By contrast, it estimates that since its launch in October 2008, Android Market has notched up 6.8bn downloads, but only $341.8m of gross revenues.
“In other words, it appears that Apple has roughly 85-90% market share in dollars spent on mobile applications,” writes Munster. “While Google has closed the gap in terms of app dollars spent over the last year and we continue to believe Android will grow smartphone share faster than Apple, we believe Apple is likely to maintain 70%+ share of mobile app dollars spent over the next 3-4 years.”
Munster also thinks that only 1.3% of Android app downloads have been paid apps – roughly 90m – compared to 13.5% for Apple’s App Store (around 2.5bn). He also estimates that the average Android device has 34 apps installed on it, compared to 71 for the average iOS device.
So by this data, because the users of iPhone are much more likely to spend money, the Android market share will need to be 10 times the size of the iPhone to make the same money from it. However, given the speed the Android market share is growing, that will happen… (Well worth reading the whole article!)
#Cowclicker, the Cowpocalypse and Facebooks Games
Game theorist and designer Ian Bogost made his own Facebook to critique the actions and ideas behinf games like Farmville:
Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It’s partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today’s social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre.
You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom “premium” cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called “mooney”), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends’ cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.
So the released the ‘game’ to see what would happen. The results of illuminating! This is a transcript of an interview and discussion about the game
BOGOST: After a while I realized they’re doing exactly what concerned me about these games. They’re, you know, becoming compulsively attached to it. There was one point when I realized that I was now attached to in a compulsive way. I was worrying about what the cow clickers thought while I was away from the game. And that was the moment at which I both felt kind of empathy with the players. And also, I began to feel very disturbed by the product.
VOGT: He decided to sabotage the game, to tweak it, to make it more maddening, more dumb.
ALEXANDER: At one point, he just like, he took the default cow, switched it to face the other direction and charged 20 bucks for it. And people bought it.
VOGT: Bogost couldn’t diminish people’s love for Cow Clicker. The game generated its own fan culture.
BOGOST: Cow Clicker poetry, silkscreen printed T-shirts. There was this woman who did these sort of Cow Clicker portraits of all her Cow Clicker friends.
VOGT: Bogost decided that if he couldn’t ruin Cow Clicker, he’d kill it. He got in touch with friends across the world, and had them hide clues in the real world for Cow Clicker diehards to find. Once assembled, the clues spelled out a chilling prophecy.
BOGOST: Cowpocalypse, and then there was this timer that started running. And with the timer ended, then the game would shut down. Or at least that was the implication. I never really said what would happen.
VOGT: In a final twist of perversity, Bogost designed his game-ending countdown clock to speed up whenever anyone played the game and to reset if people paid money.
BOGOST: I wanted the players to feel like they were accelerating their own demise by playing. And then be tempted to maybe purchase their way out of it. And several people, like, extended the clock at the very last minute a few times.
VOGT: When you create something, you don’t get to decide how it will be received. Ian Bogost’s game wasn’t designed to be enjoyable, but it turned out to be possibly the most resonant game he’s ever made. His take on what that might mean is actually pretty optimistic.
BOGOST: It shows us how weird and complicated simple things really are. And shows me not that like I’m some sort of brilliant designer who made this thing that was bigger than I thought it was but how resilient and creative people are. I did this thing that was Cow Clicker, and in spite of it, they rose above and sort of made it something more than it really was.
VOGT: That’s one way to look at it. Here’s another. You remember that countdown clock?
BOGOST: When the clock finally counted down to zero, there was a cow rapture.
VOGT: Here’s how the Cowpocalypse actually transpired.
BOGOST: All the cows were whisked away. And all that was left were the little shadows where they had been standing. But the game continued to run. And, in fact, the game continues to run to this day. And there are still people clicking on the spot where a cow used to be.
Full article is here.
Silicon Valley Comes to Parliament #svc2uk
I got invited to an event at Parliament where they had a number of interesting people talking about technology, society and other related matters. It was part of the ‘Silicon Valley Comes to the UK‘ events and was very interesting. I jotted down a few notes during the seminar that I felt were of interest;
- Joi Ito of MIT’s Media Lab and Creative Commons fame talked about the idea that regions (or countries) who are good at making one thing, can often expand to making a related project and so benefit from the overlap generated by their existing skill base. This seems a good way to look for opportunities in new areas without it being a total leap in the dark. He also talked of this interesting idea that the role of Universities should not be some kind of barrier to learning if you’re not in that institution, far from it they should ‘push out’ knowledge to the wider community. I really liked this approach.
- Speaking of leaps, Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) repeated his pithy and fun summation of what starting a new venture is like: “Entrepreneurship is throwing yourself off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down”. I know the feeling! He also noted that ‘software seems to be eating the world’ and we need more non-virtual systems to compete with the virtual (3D printing!). That said, he noted that the role of software and technology was now so important, that any organisation of more than 20 people needed a technology strategy. This should be more than about what computers you may have on your desk, but is about understanding the role technology can and will play in your area of operation.
- Megan Smith (Google) noted that for new enterprises to work they need to be within a strong network and supportive environment. For example, links to Universities and other educational establishments are key. She noted that Google’s famous 20% time rule for techies, where they can use 20% of the company time to work on their own projects, is a very ‘Darwinian’ system as most projects fail but overall it works producing a small number of ‘winners’ (Google News and Maps for example). This idea interested me, with my PhD being on technology & evolution. She also said that she felt that many of the visionary people at Google including its founders seemed to be from the future, but they’d come back to tell us about it. I like that as a summation of what vision can be.
There are some images from the event here.
ARKive: A Great Free Game for All
Congrats to Thought Den, who’ve just finished a cool little quiz app for Wildscreen. What I like is that the questions require a two-stage mental process rather than simply answering, so in selecting if the creative is mammal, bird or fish, you do a different action (swipe, pinch double tap). It makes it a bit more of a challenge and really works. And it’s free. Check it out!!
Smart Phone Take Mobile Gaming by Storm (Image)
This image shows how the balance in mobile gaming has shifted over the last few years…
If interested in the numbers behind it see here. Note though that a loss in percentage is not the same as a loss overall. The overall market might have grown, so one can lose percentage while still growing in actual numbers. However it does show a shift in control that it’s hard to see Sony or Nintendo recover without radical action – more radical than what is on the table now.
Warcraft, Portal and the scientific habit of mind
I’ve got a new article on the Wellcome Trust blog looking at the scientific habit of mind and how games like Warcraft and Portal can help with this:
I believe that the scientific habit of mind can be widely found within gaming. All video games present the player with a virtual space to be explored. The laws of nature within that space start as a mystery to the player and they must engage in a series of trial-and-error experiments to probe and understand that world and gradually build up a predictive model of how this virtual world operates and how the player can thrive within. This ‘gameplay’ is akin to the scientific method.
In Portal 2, for example, the player finds themselves in a room and must solve its puzzles in order to exit. Puzzles take the form of an increasingly complex series of switches, lasers, locks, springs and fluids. To assist the player in solving each puzzle, they are equipped with a ‘portal gun’ – a device that fires two connected portals that allow objects, lasers, people and more to pass between two points.
Full article. (Past articles here include one on Deus Ex:Human Revolution)
Portal 2 screenshot
Mobile Phones Take 58% of Mobile Gaming Income
I wrote a post on this back in July where the figure given was 33% and now it’s at 58%! (Note that figure is of mobile gaming, not gaming per-se, where the figure given for that was 50% back in March), anyway here is the story:
In statistics provided by analytics firm Flurry, iOS and Android had a 58 per cent share of the revenue from US portable game software. The Nintendo DS had only 36 per cent, with Sony’s PSP trailing at just 6 per cent.
In 2009 mobile games took just 19 per cent of the market, rising to 34 per cent in 2010, while Nintendo has seen the opposite, falling from a dominant 70 per cent in 2009.
The study calculated the changing revenue totals for the portable gaming market at $2.7 billion for 2009, $2.5 billion in 2010 and $3.3 billion in 2011. Those numbers, combined with cheap and easy access to games through App Stores, and the rise of free-to-play revenues, appear to make for a profitable combination.
Flurry also points out the there are around 250 million iOS devices and 190 million Android devices currently in circulation.
Full article (registration needed).
A Great Becoming... 