Eight new stories 30.4


  • PSP2 rumor specification firming up. Looks like it is goodbye to the UMD drive, another failed Sony media standard. But if it isn’t a phone they have lost the plot. iPhone, nGage and Android have moved the bar for mobile devices. And a Zune phone from Microsoft must be due pretty soon to further stiffen up the competition.
  • The journal Psychological Science has an article on game addiction based on real research. This is a good thing as we need to know what is really going on. The challenge reward cycle of video gaming is obviously very compelling, it is why people play them. This can slip over to addiction in some, that is just human nature and I have written about it on here before. There are far worse common addictions out there, tobacco, alcohol, gambling and crack cocaine, for instance. This doesn’t mean that the industry should ignore the problem, but most of all responsibility lies with parents.
  • UK game publisher Empire in trouble. Very sad as they have been a part of the industry for a very long time. However they are just too small in an industry that has massive competitive advantages of scale for plastic and cardboard publishers. It is interesting that conventional physically distributed publishing is consolidating down to just a handful of global players whilst the number of online game publishers is exploding. The industry is changing a lot faster than most people think.
  • Yoichi Wada of Square Enix complains that it takes too long to make games. This is because our industry persists in repetitively re-inventing the wheel. We need to have more industry standard tools and libraries and to recycle in game assets many times. The movie industry learned this a long, long time ago.
  • Texas state government acts to support the video game industry, which they have quite a lot of. Britain is at increasing odds with the rest of the world and doesn’t even give games the same support that it gives films. Hence our share of this massive and rapidly growing industry is a small fraction of what it could be. Britain has huge competitive disadvantage as a place to do business in the video game industry.
  • Guild Wars sells six million units. A substantial yet quiet success that has fallen below many industry people’s radars. This is a compelling example of what happens when you combine an MMO with community and get it right.
  • Konami cancel Six Days in Fallujah, presumably because of misguided and ignorant outside criticism. If this had been a book or a film there would have been none of this, the double standards people have when it comes to games are a disgrace. More than three dozen marines, who were actually involved in the real battle, had contributed to the development of this game. It would have stood as a testament of what happened there and would have brought the true realities of modern warfare home to a huge audience. So it is a massive shame that Konami have given in to noisy ignorance. Video games are an art and it is a job of art to take people where they would otherwise not go. Atomic Games, the developer, are now looking for a new publisher. Let’s hope that they succeed, this would be ideal for Take Two!
  • Apple have 84% of mobile app market.  A percentage that Nokia could have easily achieved if they had got their nGage act together. And a percentage that will be rapidly eroded by Android as handsets come on stream.