The PC is Dead, Long Live the PC

So Valve made an interesting announcement today.

To summarize:

• Steam is coming to the Mac platform, starting in April.
• Valve games, starting with Portal 2, will be simu-released on Windows, Mac, and 360
• Cross-play between Mac and PC is supported
• Purchasing for one platform can mean getting it for both (Steam Play).
• All existing Steam services will work for Mac
• Source Engine is also coming to Mac
• Source Engine code will cross-compile to either Windows or Mac, meaning less re-work in porting

Let that sink in for a minute.  This means a lot more than simply another way to buy Mac games, this is potentially the first step in a complete shift in the computer video game market.  About 60% of all AAA Mac games are published by one company: Aspyr.  That means that with a single business deal, Steam could be fronting a large portion of the entire Mac gaming catalog.  Steam is already easily the dominant digital distribution service for retail titles on PC, and could easily become the dominant force in Mac gaming too.  By making a bet on their future titles, they’re also saying that they see the Mac as a valid platform on it’s own, at least on par with Windows.

We’re moving to a world of digital distribution on the PC (Windows and Mac both).  The benefits to (transparent, non-obtrusive) DRM that becomes available on that channel make this a certainty.  To Valve, this isn’t just about opening a new market segment, this is about consolidating the retail channel under their house, and about continuing to provide further reasons why when you make a PC game, you should integrate with their user services and their social network.  If they’re successful, it means that they’ve abstracted away the OS.  The game will not be defined by what OS it runs on, but on what social network it’s tied to.  You won’t be a Windows Gamer, or a Mac Gamer, you’ll be a Steam gamer.

Macho Posturing

Saw this story on Eurogamer today.  Apparently Kaz Hirai (SCE President) thinks that Sony is the ‘official’ leader of the gaming industry.  This status is conferred upon the illustrious lords of Sony, not because of retail sales figures (in which they are being thoroughly spanked), or install base (the smallest of current generation consoles), but simply in terms of an anticipated longevity.

It would seem, in fact, that Hirai-san does not even see Nintendo and Microsoft as competitors.  Nintendo, he claims, is in “a different world”, which I guess is how you address a company that has nearly matched sales of your best selling console in a third of the time.  Microsoft, on the other hand, “lacks longevity”, and I suppose is beneath contempt in this regard.

My favorite quote from the article is as follows:

“We don’t provide the ‘easy to program for’ console that [developers] want, because ‘easy to program for’ means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?” -Kaz Hirai

It’s very simple.  You WANT developers to be able to take advantage of what the hardware can do.  What that means is that for the rest of the nine and a half years, while PS3 developers finally learn to master the console and push it to its limits, Xbox 360 developers will have mastered the console years before, and can concentrate on Design.  If there’s anything we should have learned from this generation, it’s that you don’t get great games by forcing the developers to work against the tools you give them.  The fun comes from a great, polished design and execution.  Sony should be working as fast as they can to make it EASIER for developers to harness the PS3s power, not treating it as some kind of gauntlet to be overcome.

Child’s Play Auction

I’ve always wanted to go to the Child’s Play Charity Auction, and since I’ve now moved to Seattle, it became a possibility for the first time.  Armed with several hundreds of dollars, I planned to carve out a stake for myself in gaming memorabilia and meet a few new folks.  I definitely had the chance to do the latter, and as for winning some auctions, I learned a few things.  Like that these folks are not fucking around.

The silent auction consisted of probably around a hundred lots of various items, gaming packages, paintings, often signed by the developers.  I was easily outbid in all of these, in one case by a rather intimidating ten year old girl who had staked out a pair of cthulhu plushies from the Steve Jackson game Munchkin Cthulhu.  Any bid was promply replied with by a higher bid from this sniper.  I’m pretty sure she was actually Kristin Lindsay’s daughter.

Chasened, I headed into the Live Auction, hoping to maybe pull through in that arena.  You may have seen the comic for today.

That’s not exactly how it went… exactly.  The price ended up being more around the $4500 mark.  That’s a lot for an awesome statue.  One dude paid literally ten grand to be immortalized in a Penny Arcade comic.  Another paid $4000 to be invited to the Penny Arcade office warming party.  Jerry offered to write a song about how awesome you are, and sing it at PAX.  That cost a cool $4300 as well.

Now, my personal favorite was an object you’ve probably never heard of before.  These are made by a local designer, and truely are a phenomenon.  The Sultan Gaming Table is essentially the epitome of table top gaming surfaces.  It has four player stations, each with a compartment for your books, a holder for your drinks, and a bay for your dice.  The central surface has several different acrylic sheets with hex grids or whatever that you can sandwich your maps underneath to protect them.  The whole thing is recessed so you can put leaves over top of it and eat dinner without taking apart your game.

It also doesn’t fit in your house.  I think ownership of one of those puppies contractually obligates you to build an underground lift that it will emerge out of after pulling on a candelabra, like in Goldfinger.

Overall, around 50k was raised during the live auction alone, and the night overall raised about $200,000

If you’re a gamer, and you’ve got some cash to throw around, the Child’s Play Auction is a definite must, and I think I’ll be attending a little more prepared next year.

 

Valve and Google

There’s a rumor going around that Google is going to buy Valve in the near future.  While that makes some people really happy, I’m not one of them.  Google is interested in Steam, because it’s an awesome content delivery system for the PC, and it meshes well with Google’s roadmap.  What doesn’t really make a lot of sense is what’s going to happen to the game studio part of Valve.

Valve Software has some of the most talented people in the industry working in their studios - games like Team Fortress, Half-Life, and of course Portal don’t happen on their own.  Steam has lots of publishers on board already (Eidos, Ubisoft, Activision, etc.), and Google’s ability to run a game studio internally is a huge unknown (although I’ve been wrong before).

All in all, a very uncomfortable position for me.

[Update]: Or maybe not.

EA flips off Take Two

The finance sector is caught up today with the collapse of some of the biggest and oldest banks in the US.  This has largely overshadowed a more interesting piece of news to gamers:  EA has walked away from Take Two after 7 months of negotiating to purchase it.

As a result, Take Two’s stock price has taken a swan dive, as all kinds of speculators unload the shares of TTWO stock that sadly, EA is not going to buy from them at a premium.  What I find interesting is that analysts seem to think this is a mortal blow for Take Two.

EA saw a good opportunity to buy Take Two because they have some extremely talented people working there, and several key franchises EA would like to get their fingers in.  From my point of view, this little breakup is better for everyone involved, including you.

EA’s new CEO has been doing a fine job of diversifying their development portfolio into new IP, but you can’t do this entirely buy purchasing studios.  The value in a studio, even more so than in most companies, is in the people who work there.  Intellectual Property they own certainly has a premium attached to it, but no IP in the world is going to be profitable if you don’t put it in the hands of talented developers.  But buying studios wholesale is a risky business, because if those developers think you’re going to mess with the way they run things, they tend to jump ship, leaving you holding the empty - and expensive - bag.

EA needs to look across the continent from Vancouver to Montreal, and look at what Ubisoft has managed to do by developing highly innovative titles in house, much to the delight of their shareholders and the gaming community.  A purchase of Take Two would have consolidated the entire suite of sports franchises under EA’s grip stifling innovation in that arena even further - not something anyone wants to see.  Take Two has quite a few studios, and as much as analysts talk about EA being able to integrate these studios under their own technology stack, this has historically not worked out well for companies that tried to do so.

Take Two isn’t exactly bereft of cash.  GTA has historically been the foundation upon which Take Two operates, but they have other gems as well (Bioshock, Civilization).  If they can retain their top talent - and continue innovating new IP - I expect we’ll continue to see both shareholder value and excellent titles out of Take Two in years to come.

What is a Successful Game?

From a critical standpoint, Metacritic is about objective as things are likely to get. My own research uses Metacritic, and most of the industry looks to it for the “official” critical score. Steam embeds the Metacritic score right in the interface, and Microsoft announced yesterday that a low Metascore will be one of the trigger points for having your game de-listed from XBLA.

That said, the critical score isn’t the be-all and end-all of life. Gamasutra ran an opinion piece by former Eidos president Keith Boesky to that effect earlier today. Boesky’s main point is that critical success is not indicative of commercial success. It becomes intrinsically dangerous to pivot your entire business model on the critical reviews of your products.

If you look at a publisher like EA, they produce games that are commercially viable, even lucrative, but consistently receive mediocre reviews from critics. EA has published only three of the top 20 games on the 360, and is the developer on none of them. Additionally, of the hundreds of games EA has published since the release of the Xbox 360, only a handful have a Metacritic score above 80 for that system. EA’s new CEO, John Riccitiello has taken this to heart, having several times publicly stated that EA will be concentrating their efforts on producing newer, higher critical quality games than have been seen in recent years. That said, Riccitiello has also been quoted as saying that “You don’t cash MetaCritic, you cash cheques.”

There’s certainly a balance to be struck between the realities of business, and trying to create a game that tickles the critics. At the end of the day, I think that all of this concern is smoke and mirrors for the developer. All a developer can really do is try to create an amazing experience, to push the envelope of what’s possible with a technology, and to manipulate a player in new and interesting ways. If you can work your craft well enough, and on a scale that will appeal to a broad enough group of people, both the critical acclaim and commercial success will come. Understanding how to do that is where the mastery comes into play.

ESA Exodus

The Entertainment Software Association seems to be losing a lot of major players lately.  LucasArts pulled out last week, followed by Activision Blizzard earlier this week, and now iD software.  EA has stated they have no intention of leaving, but nevertheless, this smells strongly of a divisive precipitating event that’s cleaving apart the ESA’s members.  I find it hard to believe that this is a coincidence, so what’s the triggering factor?

Byron Review

If you haven’t checked it out yet, the Byron Review has been released (full text here).  Tanya Byron, she’s a widely respected clinical psychologist who actually knows what she’s talking about.  She was commisioned by the Prime Minister of the UK to conduct an indepentant review of the risks to children from exposure to potentially inappropriate content on the internet and in video games.  Instead of a knee-jerk reaction typical in the media and Mothers know best, Byron presents a rational, evidence-based and analytical view of the situation.

Parents are often much less adept at the usage of technologies that have emerged during their child’s lifetime, and the review recommends improving the support framework so that parents can make decisions about their children in an educated manner, instead of reacting to fear-mongering impulses.

Some sample recommendations:

• Globally, the video games industry is thriving and the popularity of video gaming amongst children and young people is widespread. Games are diverse and developing rapidly, especially with the growth of online gaming and increasing convergence with other media, such as film. We need to take a sophisticated approach to classifying games and managing children’s access to them in the context of this diversity and convergence. We also need to recognise that there is no single solution to the problem of children and young people playing games that might not be appropriate for them.
• There are some possible negative effects of violent content in games, but these only become ‘harmful’ when children present other risk factors
• When it comes to content, parents want better information on which to base their decisions – but importantly, they do see it as their role because only they can take into account the characteristics of their children and the context in which they play. This is reinforced in the research evidence, where context and what the child brings to the gaming experience is key to understanding potential risks and harms.
• Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe – this isn’t just about a top-down approach. Children will be children – pushing boundaries and taking risks. At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim.

What Ever Happened to Tex Murphy?

Chris Jones and Aaron Conners?

Backup.  Today’s Zero Punctuation regarding Zack and Wiki features references to several old adventure games (Yahtzee himself being a designer of some very emotive ones).  Among these are two piece of box art that are probably unfamiliar to most people:  Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive.

These two games are are the 3rd and 4th installments in what is generally referred to as the Tex Murphy adventure series.  You play a cynical middle-aged Private Investigator set in post WW3 San Francisco.  The first two games (Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum) are controlled in a reasonably standard side view that we have come to expect of adventure games, with the addition of a flight simulator-esque interface to travel from place to place.  Mean Streets in fact was originally designed as a flight simulator with some adventure elements added in, although the reverse ended up being the result.

The three latter games (Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Directive, and Overseer) all use live character actors, and most of the game takes place in a first person view of a mostly photo-realistic environment which is accomplished by projecting photographs onto 2D meshes.  These adventure games were hilariously funny, intuitive, and kept you playing until the very end.  The interface was extremely ambitious for the time (Moon came on 4 CDs in 1994, Pandora came on 6, and Overseer on 5 plus an alternate version on DVD, the first game I ever saw do this).  Nevertheless, the game suffered from a variety of mostly technical issues, and were being made during the twilight of adventure game popularity.  Sales were, one can assume, not exemplary.

A year after Overseer was released, the Utah based Studio - Access Software - was acquired by, wouldn’t you know it, my company, Microsoft!  Microsoft was, I assume, primarily interested in Access software’s more lucrative property in Links Golf, because the Tex Murphy series was never heard from again.  This is particularly unfortunate because Overseer ends in a cliff-hanger.  In 2004 Microsoft sold Access Software, now known as Indie Built, to Take Two Interactive, and it became part of the 2K Sports brand, again emphasizing the golf label over the now defunct Tex Murphy series.  Indie Built created a snowboarding game for the launch of the 360, and was then closed by Take Two in 2006, with no public reasons given for the closure.

Chris Jones and Aaron Conners were the designer and writer, respectively, for this phenomenal series, with Jones playing the titular Tex Murphy.  Aaron Conners also made novel versions of Under a Killing Moon and Pandora Directive, which are pretty good for pulp fiction.

Both Chris and Aaron moved with the acquisition to Microsoft to work on projects there, primarily on the Links series and the Amped snowboarding series.  Aaron seems to have moved to 2K Sports following the second sale, and worked under the 2K label until Indie Built was closed.  He has subsequently left the software industry entirely, and has started a contracting company called WordPlay LLC.

Chris on the other hand appears to have left around the same time Indie Built was sold to Take Two, becoming a partner in an new company called TRUGOLF that makes life-sized golf simulators for what I can only assume to be the “I have a vacation house in the Hampton’s” crowd (One can assume that Chris Jones really, really likes Golf).  Both he and Conners still live in Salt Lake City, Utah.
So what’s to become of Tex? Well, Tex has a sizable following over at James LeMosy’s Unofficial Tex Murphy Site.  Last month Aaron Conners left a note on the forums saying that he and Chris have a new game they’d like to make, and are actively searching for a publisher.  If that goes well, they’ll try to use it as a shoe-horn to make the final chapter of the Tex Murphy series, in some capacity.  The story is finished, apparently, and waiting to be told.  It’s been 10 years since we last heard from Tex Murphy, hopefully it won’t be another 10 before he finishes his tale.

If you’ve been negligent, you should try to get your hands on a copy of Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive.  If you copy the contents of the CDs into folders on your hard-drive, you can get DosBox to mount them as separate CD-ROMs, and you can avoid the interruptions you would have encountered at the time of having to switch CDs constantly because the games natively support putting each CD in it’s own CD drive (if you for some reason had 4 CD-ROMs in your PC in 1994).  There’s a lot to learn - both good and bad - in terms of game design from these games, and the writing is extremely rich in both.  I would highly recommend the investiture.

Get Over the Hardcore

Stardock has built themselves a tidy little market turning around profits that are orders of magnitude higher than their development costs (under a million!).  They’ve done this on the piracy haven that is the PC, and without using DRM.  In the dawning hours, as the industry is starting to realize the potential in casual gaming, I think we can predict a related move:  Getting away from the hardcore gamer.  Trends that begun with the first high resolution FPS in the nineties are beginning to reverse.  I predict in the next 5 years a major shift away from those large budget titles and into a field of much smaller, more innovative and original titles with smaller development budgets, delivered through digital distribution, and appeasing a much broader audience than the twitch crowds.

And I’m looking forward to it.  (On a related note, Dreamfall is getting released on Xbox Originals on Monday!)

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