Why do you care about sales numbers?

Pie, I like pie!

It’s getting to that stage of the month that I dread, just a few days away will be the official release of the September console sales figures in the US. At the release of this news, every game site, blog and 2 bit hack will get themselves into a spin to syndicate and analyse the figures, a million articles of why Sony needs to cut the price of the PS3 and how Microsoft/Nintendo can own Christmas will be posted within 4 hours. In response, thousands or even millions of 14 year old boys will stop doing what 14 year old boys do and put their overworked wrists to work, hammering away at their keyboard with an ever more incomprehensible series of mildly offensive and derogatory internet slang. My question is, and really always has been, why the hell should you, me or anyone outside of the console makers give a damn?

I just can’t get that in my head. I have a PS3 under my TV and I love it like it is my first born but I don’t understand why anyone would be in anyway bothered by a statistic that last month X hundred thousand more were sold. Sure, if my friends buy a PS3 I am pleased as we can play together, share games and tips (try PixelJunk Eden, it is awesome) but why should anything beyond that matter.

The number one default defence for this kind of thing is that people say if sales figures for console X or Y then there is a better chance of great games coming to that console. This is true to an extent but even then surely the only people who need to see the figures are at EA, Activision and Capcom; you can talk about it as much as you want but you are still just a consumer and the decisions are made way higher up the food chain, often making little or no sense at all (Dead Rising on Wii, 300 being exclusive to PSP etc; feel free to think of your own bizarre platform choices). Joe Bloggs from Minneapolis (love that name, must visit one day) thinking it is good the 360 has outsold the PS3 2:1 means bugger all in the grand scheme and to think it does is not only deluded, its plain stupid!

I assume that at this point you are expecting me to go on a rant about fanboys, using an ever increasing series of big words to make me sound smart (I don’t use a dictionary, or a spell check, I am just this good) and to an extent you may be right. No-one can deny that the level of fanboy banter has skyrocketed this generation of consoles; though it can be argued that this is because in the past there has not been the venue for such rants to be heard. The simple point is that these figures serve no purpose to most gamers other than serving as a stick to beat others with, sadly something even the console makers have started gleefully indulging in to get their champions all riled up.

The point therefore is that sales figures, whether from ChartTrack, NDP or VGChartz have absolutely no relevance to gamers other than to encourage chest beating and generally idiotic behaviour. Play the games you want and enjoy them, do you really need to hear game/console X has sold x units to make you enjoy it more.

There may be a console war but it is between corporations. You are a gamer, not a foot soldier or a propaganda expert!

Does games journalism do gamers a disservice?

At the time of writing, Kotaku declares that they have made 42 posts in the past 24 hours (which one would assume includes much of Sunday evening as well as Monday) and N4G has had (in a entirely guesstimated count) over 60 articles published (based on 2 1/2 pages of posts working on 25 articles per page). There is no way to get around this, that is a lot of news. However, I am increasingly dismayed at the calibre of games journalism and frankly what exactly qualifies as being news. I mean really, does this much stuff actually happen which needs to be reported?

Lets look at some of the apparently essential information that these 2 website have published in the past day. N4G brings us the essential news that some random bloke has YouTubed some videos of himself playing Daft Punk (that dance/techno band who released a song you kinda liked about 6 years ago with astronauts in the video) songs on a Nintendo DS. Interesting yes but news worthy? Kotaku brings us the essential update we all needed on a list of the top 9 most uncomfortable outfits in gaming (linked to GamesRadar and its never ending treasure trove of dull lists but Kotaku did obviously think it was interesting enough to link to and write a story around).

I know you may be thinking I am a grumpy arse (even writing ass sounds wrong with a British accent) and you are right. I understand that these stories are little more than light hearted stories; if N4G were a network news TV show then DaftPunk would be the ‘and finally’ story, equivelant to a cow on the motorway. However,so much of what we call news in gaming circles is really little more than tabloid tittle tattle and a never ending game of Chinese whispers (sorry if I offend, I have no idea of the P.C way of talking about Chinese whispers, maybe sub in another country like Slovakian whispers or Bolivian whispers to avoid offence).

The problem as I see it is that game news providers work from a position that all games news is created equal. Is the Guardian newspapers interview with Peter Moore really of the same calibre as some bint fannying about with a Nintendo DS? All news is not equal and to pretend it is suffocates the real news. News is an event or an opinion from a well known and respected individual. Frankly this is all to rare, does anthing truly happen in the games industry every day?

I understand that sites and blogs need to keep people coming back to them every day or more than that (I need not comment on Gawker Media) but does this need to stuff and fill to make a living lead to a low almost tabloid level of journalism? Should the interview with Peter Moore really have been treated the same as the guy with a DS? Should it really have been shuffled down the list of posts below more recent posts about costumes or should it have been treated differently given its status as actual news worthy media?

This is of course all opinion, my opinion in fact. However, what I know is that when I want to read sensationalism, rumour and hype with a little genuine news here and there in a newspaper then I buy The Sun but if I want real news, hard hitting journalism and well reasoned arguement and opinion then I buy The Times or The Guardian. There are lots of game sites who publish on the level of The Sun but for games journalism to really be a worthy of respect then someone needs to take the high ground and become a little more Guardian esque.

Where is gamings Polly Toynbee? It’s certainly not Brian Crecente!

Are gimmicks ruining games?

I had to write this post now because I am just bloody furious right now. I just downloaded and played through the demo of “Fracture” and it was one of the most hateful experiences of my life. Being honest, I didn’t like the game one bit, its not because I have something against 3rd person shooters or even that I hated the deformable aspects of the environment; I loathed that the gimmick of changing the landscape had taken such importance in the experience that the core mechanics of a 3rd person had seemingly become pushed to one side and forgotten during the making of the game.

We all l know that the marketplace for games is now much more crowded than it has ever ben before, especially for action games of both 1st and 3rd person aspects. due to this crowding, we get the gimmick as developers fumble around to try and create something which stands out rom the crowd. It’s not difficult of course, in a world where any FPS released on the power consoles or PC will have the same M.O as most others (you are a *insert elite military branch* fighting your way through wave upon wave of *insert alien race* in a grey brown landscape of the future earth or alien homeworld; all running in glorious 720p 60fps with a 8/16 player online deathmatch mode) anything other than this stands out as a gimmick. The problem is that in many of this type of game, the gimmick becomes dominant as a sales technique but in terms of gameplay it is either underused or annoyingly overused.

Maybe you are asking what I am talking about, what exactly qualifies as a gimmick? A few of my favourites are listed below;

• Haze (you take drugs)
• Timeshift (you control time)
• Fracture (you control the ground)
• The Darkness (you have big devil arm things)
• Mace Griffin bounty hunter (you fly a ship and walk off it without loading screens)

The gimmicks in all the games listed above have at one stage accomplished their goal because we have all heard of them and no doubt at some point have read an overexcited preview from some publication or another crowning its gimmick as being revolutionary to the genre but have ultimately been shown to be anything but. The problem is that all these games above fail in 2 areas; firstly none of them manage to present a solid and well formed core gameplay without the gimmick, none of them have particularly fluid controls, good graphics, textures, AI or level design. Second and most importantly, none of them manage to be remotely fun, interesting or entertaining to play; in fact they are more frustrating than fun.

Maybe the gimmick is not the problem but the implementation. Games like Burnout, Motorstorm, Resistance and even GTA have a gimmick of sorts but they manage to succeed on a different level because the gimmick does not dominate the game (Burnout took a few sequals to get the alance right) as the core mechanics of the gameplay are strong enough to carry the game without the gimmick.

My personal thinking is that the games I have played most in the past year or so (COD4, Uncharted, GT5:P) have all summarily eschewed the gimmick and instead have been solid simple and thoroughly enjoyable games because they did the basics well. I don’t think it is a coincidence that those 3 games have been some of the highest sellers inthe past year while bunf like Haze and Timeshift bombed. The message therefore must be that by all means bring a gimmick to the table, a 3rd person shooter where the heroes absurd JRPG style hair is able to grow and change colour at the players request and be used as a weapon is more than welcome, but if the core of your game like the controls and AI is not up to scratch without the gimmick then your game is destined for a quick nosedive from the sales charts to the bargain bins and deservedly so.

Will Spore and LBP expose the problem of game journalism?

Sackboy, could he change the world?

Today is the first day of September and so the games rush is warming up. After a quiet month or two where few games have been released (So gamers filled our time with hype and rumour about those games about to be released), there is about to be a torrent of games unleashed for our collective gaming pleasure. Now while the old yearly updates will sell about as well as usual and Gears of War 2 will sell about the same as the original, the real big story of the year will be about just 2 games. Two games which could completely reinvent the industry by going completely against what conventional wisdom would tell you makes a blockbuster game in the 21^st century. Those two games are Spore by EA for PC/Mac and Little Big Planet by Sony/Media Molecule for PS3.

One thing that is true of most gamers is that at some point there has been a review of a game that we have disagreed with and I predict that these two games will create more arguments than just about any games ever. The reasons for this go back right to the very beginnings of games journalism and will hopefully prove once and for all that the current status quo of games ratings cannot be sustained. The reasons are simple; universality or the lack of it.

The job of a reviewer has always been to play through a game to a sufficient degree to enable them to present a summing up of the merits and failures of the complete package to inform the reader/viewer, often assigning a arbitrary score to enable readers to compare scores of multiple games. Seems simple enough I know but this is the thing which will force reviews to change and continue to do so. I’ll start with Spore.

In case you have been living in a cage for the past 2 years or have a pathological hate for PC gaming news; Spore is a pretty unique game in that it allows players to chart the evolution of a species throughout time. The thing is, how can one review this? Spore has literally thousands of possible outcomes, no story and the promise of a completely unique experience for every single player. Reviewing this game therefore will be a challenge because how can any two reviewers review the same game? Yes the physics and graphics will be the same but the evolution will be entirely different with some finding a evolution which is long, humorous and full of complex social changes while others will find a dull game with few real jumps and a species which gets bogged down in an amoeba like state. The universality of the experience is therefore impossible to guarantee; something so unique and impossibly complex cannot therefore be simply given the same basic out of 10 scoring system which was devised during the Super Mario era where there were simple linear levels which players could complete in only one way.

Little Big Planet is much the same. While at face value it is a simple 2D platformer with a series of levels on the disk for players to complete, we all know that this is not why anyone is buying the game. The incredible looking level designer software and the promise of free sharing of user created arenas is truly a magnificent promise but its implementation waits to be established. That is the problem though, when IGN and EuroGamer et al get their copy to review, it will be 2 weeks or so before the united nation of PlayStation gamers get our grubby mits on it; as a result they will be completely missing out on the point of the game because that all important user created content will be nonexistent. How can a reviewer accurately present a picture of the game when one of its major features will be missing. In fact, can a truly comprehensive review be given the week before the games release, can LBP really be reviewed until 2 weeks, 2 months or even 2 years after release to get the best picture of the game. I am aware the same argument can be given in criticism of every MMO or even every game with an online mode and I agree but they do not so neatly fit into my argument as LBP and Spore do.

You may therefore be asking yourself what I think is the solution, where is this revolution coming from? Am I really advocating the abolition of reviews? Of course not, that would be utterly stupid; reviews have a place and a service to many gamers which should not be ignored, I just think that reviews need to change their approach. The answer comes in experience.

Presenting the single experience of a person is an increasingly used technique in academia, particularly in social sciences and humanities. The technique is called autoethnography and what it does is places the writer (and in this case reviewer) centrally in the piece; the thoughts, feelings, ideas and nuances of the reviewer to be central and form the basis of the piece. Reviews now try to present an unbiased and standoffish whole universe view of a game but in a autoethnographic technique a reviewer would give their own view of a game instead; even gamer reviews and blog opinions would then have the same credibility as the opinion of John Doe of GameSpot. Therefore the reviewer could be excused for missing out the largest features because they are only reviewing what they can while recognising the limitations of their work.

I know this sounds strange and all but think about it, doesn’t the idea of John Smith’s personal review of Spore or Lisa Jones personal musings upon Little Big Planet sound much more interesting and rewarding to read than the IGN one and only completely infallible review? Even if one of them comes forward and expresses dislike about a game that you truly love, doesn’t it seem much more palatable that it is the personal opinion of one individual than the judgement of a corporate juggernaut?

The fundamental truth however is that with online integration, post release patches, user created content and MMO elements becoming more popular in the game-sphere along with the increasingly sophisticated and expensive technology required to truly experience a game to its full potential; the experience presented by reviewers and the experience of gamers who are putting the money into the coffers of publishers is becoming increasingly a very different proposition so sooner or later the status quo will need to be destroyed to redress this balance; why not now?

GTA4 DLC – A disaster waiting to happen?

Why does no-one own me anymore?

Remember back to those heady days of April 29th 2008; seems like a very very recent memory I am sure, but in video games it is a millennia ago. Back in those heady days, thousands of gamers worldwide waited outside games retailers at midnight to get their clammy hands on Grand Theft Auto 4. The GTA4 publicity machine had been in full working order for several months and gamers were positively foaming at the mouth in anticipation to get their hands on the latest and greatest instalment of the most controversial and profitable franchise in this millennia’s gaming landscape.

However, predictably gamers were not united in their anticipation. Much of the pre release chatter was idiotic console zealots arguing over the merits of the promised Xbox exclusive downloadable content. The content was (and still is) a very unique arrangement in gaming and showed the importance that post release internet delivered content had taken; something which is even more remarkable considering that this market had been non-existent on consoles at the time of the time when GTA3 was released (ignoring the Dreamcast’s joke of a delivery service with no memory, no content and a 56k modem; I loved my DC BTW so no hating people but the truth hurts). Microsoft dropped a big $50m to secure this exclusive loveliness and the Microsoft advertising machine did a pretty good job of publicising the existence of the 2 content packs and telling the boys and girls who would be getting a new console for GTA (turns out there were not many) that a 360 and not the PS3 was the plastic box of joy which they should invest in to get the best GTA4 experience.

However, fast forward nearly 4 months and I think that the gamble is starting to look a little foolish. In the past 17 weeks we have seen the release of MGS4, Soul Calibur 4, Lego Indy and a whole host of great games and movies which have pushed GTA4 from the hearts, minds and disk drives of most gamers. Think it over; I doubt that many gamers will have seen more than the odd person on their friends lists playing GTA4 in the past 2 months. Looking at the wider picture, my local Gamestation (a small one) has literally 20 pre-owned copies of GTA4 for each platform up for sale; strolling past my local Cash Converters (a national pawn brokers chain in the UK) they are selling GTA4 on Xbox 360 for just £9.99 ($19 or 20% of RRP), a truly astonishing figure this close to release and considering the overwhelmingly positive reception it received.

This is kind of a problem for Microsoft, while trumping the merits of the exclusive DLC for over 2 years, there has still been no information about what it is, how much it will cost and no concrete info on when it will be released. Without this information, hoards of gamers are simply looking at that game on their shelf as being not worth keeping and are instead taking the discount on a new game it offers. Therefore whenever the mystical content is announced and released there will be a significantly reduced audience for the content than there was a few months ago, reducing further the chances of Microsoft recouping their substantial investment. Even if the content is truly magnificent in scope, how many gamers will be willing to buy back a copy of the game to buy it? If half of the gamers who sold the game buy a pre-owned copy back, the market for the DLC is still significantly reduced.

Of course, the number of trade ins on PS3 is less than ideal too but without the promise of DLC on the horizon, Sony and Rockstar/Take2/EA (future proofing is a good idea) are losing little by comparison except for a devaluing of the title with very cheap 2nd hand copies saturating the market competing with new Platinum range copies.

So what is Microsoft to do you might ask? More importantly, how did such a situation arise? Well first I have to point the finger at Microsoft who have displayed an almost Sony Europe like lack of communication and foresight with its customers. While everyone knows how outrageously well funded Microsoft is, you would hope that when they signed the cheque for $50m they had some idea about what content they were buying and what form it would take. Microsoft should have been jumping from the rooftops screaming about any info they had, even if limited, to anyone who would listen since pre-orders started properly after Xmas. If they want anyone to wait as much as 12 months for new content then they need to keep them informed about what it is they are waiting for or else they will move onto something else which is what seems to have happened.

In the end it comes down to inexperience. Net delivered content is still a new industry and everyone is learning. However, one thing is abundantly clear; communication and advertising are key to the success of DLC, not only up to and around launch of the disk game but also well after this time or else your market will shrink fast. I am sure more gamers are excited about getting their hands on Gears of War 2 or Dead Space than the GTA4 expansions.

I hope it is not the case, but at this moment with no information and a shrinking market to sell to; Microsoft’s $50m gamble could be one of the biggest commercial failures in gaming history.