It's interesting to look at reportage of the deal.

Most cluelessly, Digital Mediawire, an email newsletter I get that's usually pretty good, with coverage both of games and other digital entertainment media, says:

San Francisco -- Cell phone maker Nokia announced on Wednesday that it
will acquire networked multiplayer gaming technology from Sega.com, a unit
of Japanese game developer Sega. Financial terms of the transaction were
not disclosed. Nokia will integrate the Sega Network Application Package
(SNAP) into its N-Gage hybrid cell phone/handheld video game device,
slated to go on sale on Oct. 7 for $299. The SNAP technology will allow
game developers to create more feature-rich wireless multiplayer titles.

No, Nokia will not integrate SNAP into N-Gage, because SNAP is a serverside technology. Nokia might use SNAP to support multiplayer air network games on remote servers.

Gamespydaily, generally one of the best sites for consumer news about games, says:

Nokia -- makers of the new N-Gage handheld gaming platform -- has announced it is to buy Sega's Network Application Package (SNAP) which is designed specifically for mobile multiplayer gaming online.
No. 1 mobile phone maker Nokia, planning an aggressive push into video gaming, on Tuesday said it has signed a deal to acquire some assets of Japanese game maker Sega Corp. dedicated to networked game play.
Nokia said it would acquire assets of Sega.com Inc., including Sega's Network Application Package, or SNAP, which is designed to form the core of multiplayer online games.

Again, this sounds like Nokia is licensing SNAP and acquiring "some assets", when in fact they bought the operation outright. The confusion is understandable, since Nokia's press release was confusing, but of course we do expect journalists to probe a little deeper and figure out what's going on--after all, it didn't take me long. Gamespydaily did apparently call Nada Usina, Nokia's general manager of the entertainment and media business unit for the Americas, and the obvious source for an American journalist, and has a quote from her; they also apparently were on a conference call with Ilkka Raiskinen, so they have two quotes, but this is very rote journalism: Get a quote and recap the release. Unlike Digital Media Wire, Gamespy is less off the ball, because at least they're grounded in games, but they still have the story wrong.

Gamespot, a consumer-oriented site with decent news coverage, reports:

The mobile phone giant picks up Sega's SNAP middleware for online gaming and will use it in N-Gage games.

Again, sounds like a license deal; this isn't the real story. Gamespot does, at least, know what SNAP is--presumably the journalist covering this has encountered it before, and good for him. They also mention a Reuters story that SNAP will be used with the N-Gage title Path to Glory, which I hadn't known; good for them, and it sure is nice if your employer has access to search of all the major newsfeeds :). And finally, we have the requisite quote, this time, oddly enough, from Hisao Oguchi at Sega, rather than anyone at Nokia; but perhaps the writer just has better contacts there, and after all, all you need is one quote, and you need to bang this thing out fast.

Still and all, the lessons here are:

• Be careful with your press releases; make sure they're clear about what's going on. 90+% of the time, nobody probes farther.
  
• Typically, any news story is only about 80% right.
  

posted by Greg at 12:29 PM 2 comments

And the press release is here.

That's my startling news of the morning... Still trying to figure out what this means for me.

A few things that the release does not make clear (god help us, do PR people ever have any clue what they're talking about?):

• No, Nokia didn't buy Sega. Sega.com is the online unit of Sega--essentially, it used to be the Dreamcast network, Sega re-used (and continued to develop) that technology to provide player matching and hosting for online console titles, and has also licensed the technology, called SNAP, to some other publishers.
  
• I'm not 100% certain whether Nokia bought Sega.com whole cloth, or just the SNAP unit within Sega.com.
  
• ...And reading the release, you could easily come to the conclusion that what it means is "Nokia just licensed some technology from Sega," but apparently that isn't the case, because
  
• Sources at Nokia confirm that they did indeed buy the operation, and 50 folks in California now report to Ilkka Raiskinen, head of Nokia's entertainment and media business unit.
  

So, uh, what does this mean? I haven't quite figured that out, except that if you wind up developing a multiplayer game for N-Gage or Series 60 devices that's playable over the air network (rather than via Bluetooth), I imagine that Nokia is going to want you to use SNAP on the server side.

Does the deal make sense? I'm not sure about that, either. It probably makes sense for Sega, which needs the cash and for whom SNAP is probably a cost sink rather than a revenue generator. My guess is that Nokia's motivation is to provide a single, standard, serverside technology for WAN multiplayer mobile gaming, which is not necessarily a bad idea (although, really, it's not all that difficult to roll your own for non-massively multiplayer games). But I don't know that they needed to go buy the operation whole cloth.

But hey. Interesting, nonetheless.

============

Added.... And information about SNAP can be found on the Sega site. It's a PDF. Thanks to an old email from John Byrd for the link.

============

Update 2: A source at Sega confirms that it's "all of Sega.com's assets and a majority of its employees."


posted by Greg at 10:18 AM 3 comments

....a quote from Scrooge that occurred to me over the last two days.

When the blackout of '77 hit, I was having dinner with my Dad. I had dinner with him once a week, then, and generally took the opportunity to drink a fair bit of his wine, this being an earlier era when it was not considered scandalous for an 18 year-old to drink. There was some discussion about whether I really wanted to go back to my Mom's apartment or not, but I certainly did. First, because I wanted to sleep in my own bed; and second, because I rather looked forward to the adventure of walking the city streets in the dark.

I don't remember much of that walk, from 54th Street and Sutton Place up to 88th and York; perhaps that says something about the amount of wine I'd drunk. I certainly remember climbing 31 flights of stairs to my mother's apartment in pitch darkness and stifling heat, with other panting people about me.

Mom and I--I believe my sister was away at the time--had a dog. This is a problem, if you live on the 31st floor during a blackout. After a couple of times down and back, we decided simply to take her up to the roof garden, 5 flights up. Feces could be picked up, and urine, well, c'est la guerre.

The upper east side, at least as upper and east as we were, was one of the last sections of the city to regain power. I was sitting out on the balcony at the time, and I'll never forget the cheer, a palpable wall of celebration, that rose out of the entire neighborhood around me at the restoration of power.

The city was, of course, a different place in 1977. Looting was rampant. And the same year, but not during the blackout, I recall watching a procession of police march down my street to Gracie Mansion, the mayor's residence, and urinate on his lawn in protest at some damn thing that Beame was doing. Fiscal crisis, late 70s, tension on the streets, Ford to New York: Drop Dead, and all the smug suburbanite assholes telling us cities were things of the past.

=====================================================

This time round, I've just sent off some articles I've edited to the N, and am looking at Salon when the power dies. There are several possibilities here, as I indicate to Karen, who starts looking at the fuse box. I look out the 12th floor window down on the traffic on Second Avenue. Vehicles are approaching intersections gingerly, slowing, and proceeding carefully. "The traffic lights are out," I say.

We are about to go uptown to a hospital for Karen's Lamaze class, which I've agreed to participate in, although I've been through this drill before. When we clamber down the stairs, another building resident informs us that the blackout has affected a huge region, including Detroit and Toronto, and the subways are dead.

This is, of course, utter bullshit; it's amazing how quickly rumors spread under these kind of circumstances. For one thing, the subways are DC, and have their own generators; for another, they put in safeguards after '77 to ensure that so wide an outage never happened again. I imagine it's like the blackout in Battery Park City I went through last year; Ellie and I had to go to midtown to get batteries and water, she freaked at the thought of no water, but it lasted less than twelve hours, and in any event, was very localized.

Although my cell indicates a strong signal, we can't get through on it; Karen calls from a payphone, while I go buy some batteries. The class has been cancelled, and yes, the subways are down.

Okay. We buy some water, trundle back up 12 floors to the apartment. While the water system is not dependent on electricity, city pressure only takes you up about 4 floors. Higher buildings pump water to a water tank on the roof, which gravity-feeds it down to the apartments below. The pump runs on electricity. Our water supply is limited to what's in the tank--and as I well know, both from '77 and '02, it won't last that long. We fill a couple of buckets, so we at least can do a couple of flushes when doing so becomes pressing.

I am becoming antsy. This kind of thing has clearly happened before, but it is also possible that it is the result of enemy action. No Internet, no TV, no radio, and while my cellphone will make a fucking WAP connection, CNN hasn't, apparently, updated its mobile news site since early this morning, the fucking idiots. Also, Karen and I between us have about $30, and we are now living in a cash economy, since neither ATMs nor credit card machines are going to work. Indeed, as we note when we get to the street, businesses that have no faith in the ability of their employees to perform simple arithmetic--that is, any chain--is closed. It's Ranjit on the corner, and similar enterprises, where the owner operators can count out change, that remain open. And they are doing a land-office business, to folks like us, who wander back into the dimness of the store, with flashlights, in search of cans of soup and bodega candles.

The cybercafe/stationery store on 3rd has "just sold out" of radios, but oh now, they discover they have one, which they will sell us for $15. I shake my head at Karen, because I am looking up at the wall where there are three identical models on a pegboard marked "$3.99", but she doesn't get me, and buys it anyway. It's a model with headphones, no loudspeaker, and plastic thingies you shove painfully into your ears, since if you don't jam them in far enough, they fall out.

This area of town is often busy, but not like Times Square; yet at the moment, there are hordes of people wandering down the street. It feels a bit like 9/11, with people leaving work to get home early, and no way to do so other than by walking, although the atmosphere is not as grim. Indeed, in some places, it's festive; the ice cream shops are offering $1 cones and have lines out the door, while all the bars are selling bottles of beer while they remain cold at pretty decent prices. I'd be tempted to sit back and enjoy, but we're down to $15 in a cash economy.

We sit in Union Square park for a moment, and Bloomberg comes on. No evidence of terrorist activity, walk home carefully, drink lots of liquids, the police and fire departments are running double shifts. Just the right note of reassurance. But I've always liked Bloomberg.

Karen's stove is gas, and we still have gas, of course. And a couple of buckets of water. And we sure aren't going out for dinner. We pick up some bacon, some parsley... Oh dear, I feel a recipe coming on. And you thought this was a gaming blog.

PASTA CARBONARA AMERICANA

An authentic Carbonara is made with prosciutto. This is your basic American breakfast food variant thereof.

INGREDIENTS
3 large eggs
1/2 lb bacon
1 bunch parsley
1/2 lb pasta--spaghetti is good--and maybe a bit over 1/2 lb
2/3 cup freshly grated parmesan or romano
pepper to taste (i.e., lots)
some salt for the pasta water

1. Boil a big pot of water--maybe not such a big pot if the power is off and you don't have any access to additional water. Pour in some salt, coupla flicks out of the carton.

2. In a skillet, preferably cast-iron to distribute the heat, over medium-low flame, fry the bacon until golden grown, turning frequently, 3-4 slices at a time, depending on skillet size. Drain on paper towels.

3. Grate the parmesan or romano. Personally, I like the romano better, and it's cheaper.

4. Take a big whacking cleaver, and from one end of the parsley bunch, start whacking off bits of it, 1/4 inch at a time. When about half the bunch is lying on the cutting board, put the rest of the parsley away. Then scrape the parsley into a big pile, whack it into smaller bits, and repeat, until you have what you might consider "chopped parsley".

5. Crack the eggs into a large enough bowl to contain the entire dish once assembled. Beat them lightly with a fork.

6. Take the slices of bacon, which should now be reasonably cool, and chop them with the cleaver, too.

7. When the pasta is al dente, drain; throw into the bowl with the raw eggs; and toss. The heat of the pasta will cook the eggs.

8. Throw the bacon, parsley, and cheese into the bowl, and toss some more. Grind pepper to taste, meaning shitloads, into the bowl, and toss some more. Serve, with a salad and beer that's now lukewarm because the fridge has been off for hours.

9. Don't bother to wash the dishes until the power comes back on.

==========================

Out the window, it is now dark. I mean, dark. You can see the Empire State Building out of Karen's window, which I generally find comforting; large buildings, in my recent experience, tend to suddenly disappear from the skyline, and it's comforting to look out the window, and confirm that the Empire State is still there. Indeed, it is there--but there are few lights anywhere. In nearby buildings, you can see the occasional flicker of a candle; on the streets, the swoop of a flashlight's beam from one point to another. Headlights probe cautiously down the street; the gridlocked traffic of a few hours ago has been replaced by a few careful cars. Down on the streets, you can hear the whoop of celebration; folks drinking bottled beers out in front of the bars that remain open. I'm reminded of carnival, of Mardi Gras; of the classic medieval 'inversion carnivals' that reversed the social order for one day in a celebration to reinforce the urban identity. There is a bit of the same feeling that you get in a major snow storm, or the evening after the Yanks win the World Series. Tonight, New York =can't= work, and therefore, it chooses to party.

======================================================

I'm awake at 4 AM. Gazing out at the city. Everything is dark--but not quite everything. There's a line of four windows at the top of the Empire State Building that faintly glow; why is that? The building at 13th and Second Avenue has power; of course it does, it's a Verizon switching center, and doubtless it has emergency generators. But there's some other building up toward Union Square with power, and I never do figure out why; I don't think there's a hospital there, the likeliest thought is that it's an NYU dorm, and I doubt their solicitousness for their undergrads extends to the provision of emergency power.

On towards dawn, the red "GE" lights on the GE building come on. Karen later suspects it's a trick of the light, sunlight reflecting off the letters in such a way as to make me think that the light are on--but I don't think so. Midtown has power.

=======================================================

When I awaken later, the radio says ConEd claims that "half their customers" have power restored. ConEd mostly serves Manhattan and the Bronx; Brooklyn and Staten Island are served by Keyspan, and who knows what goes on in Queens. We don't have power, obviously, and "half their customers" could mean all of the Bronx and none of Manhattan.

I'm concerned about our lack of cash, in a cash economy, and want to go scouting to try to find someplace where the ATMs work. I suggest taking my bike down, because Ill be able to get around faster that way; and Karen allows that, in a city whose streets now seem to be largely deserted of cars, even a pregnant woman can probably bike in reasonable safety. However, she points out, we would have to get our bikes down 12 flights of stairs. Or, more to the point, UP 12 flights of stairs afterward.

Well. Yes. We decide to walk.

In front of Karen's local branch, a fellow informs us that midtown has power, and we should walk up there. We're talking a couple of miles, but okay. Karen and I however disagree as to what constitutes "midtown"; I grew up on the East Side, midtown is clearly centered on Lex, and 6th Avenue and westward is Johnny-come-lately. Karen used to work on 6th Avenue, and can't imagine that anyone would mean anything east of 5th by "midtown." We do agree that midtown begins at 42nd Street, and comprimise by marching resolutely up 5th avenue.

At 43rd street, mirabile dictu, the streetlights turn from dark to lit. But Karen is right, or at least right to the degree that our misinformed informant conceives of "midtown" as being on the west side. We find a Chase at 47th and Madison that has functioning ATMs, and no longer need fear deprivation in a cash economy.

We decide to find a place for brunch, and head West, toward restaurant row. Eventually, we come to a Brazilian place I know of, by the name of Rice & Beans, where we share the feijoada (I resist the impulse to provide another recipe) and I happily down an Antarctica Guarana, not having had enough caffeine today.

I'm also not wearing a patch, which means I'm receiving 7 mg less of nicotine today than I've become accustomed to, but despite occasional irritation (this is a pedestrian city, you motherfucker, I'm crossing whether you like it or not) I'm reasonably okay.

Chelsea is dark. We stop in at the building of Karen's friend, Audrey. Audrey's mother called us at 7 AM; she hadn't been able to contact Audrey. This is an artifact, I suspect, of advanced technology; Verizon delivers power through its line. If you have an old-fashioned phone, you get phone service, even if conventional power is off. However, if you have, say, a cordless phone, the device gets plugged into the conventional power grid, and uses that to broadcast to the cordless handset; this deal don't work if the power is down. My guess is that Audrey is too high tech for her own good.

The doorman will only let us up if we assure him that Audrey is elderly, and potentially at risk to her health if we don't visit her. Unfortunately, he knows Audrey, and doesn't seem to believe us when we tell him that she's on her last legs and will probably need a headstone instantly if we aren't permitted to climb ten flights and pound on her door to tell her that she should call her Mom.

However, he does reluctantly admit that he knows what Audrey looks like, and that, if she should come down, he'll tell her to call Mother.

Then: Back east via bus, up 2nd Avenue, and home. I listen to our clueless mayor flubbing two set up questions from journalists, viz:

JOURNALIST 1: How would you say our municipal employees have responded to the current crisis?

RIGHT ANSWER: By god, these brave men and women have more than risen to the occasion, and I'm proud beyond words, etc., etc., etc.

ACTUAL ANSWER (was something like): Well, they did their jobs, and when they were called upon, they were there for the citizens of this city, etc., etc.

JOURNALIST 2: In the dead of the night, with the darkened city looming above you, what thoughts went through your head? Did there seem a sense to you that the world is different from how we normally perceive it?

RIGHT ANSWER: Well... Yes... I see what you mean... I remember looking up at the Emprie State Building and realiznig how extraordinary this all is, and how strange it is that we depend so much on electrical power for our day to day existence--- But you have to understand that I've also been very busy for the last 24 hours trying to get thigns back to normal, and trying to ensure that our city does not suffer from this extraordinary hiatus in its normal life.... (etc., etc.)

ACTUAL ANSWER (was something like): Well, I was talking to someone.... And I said... We all have to get a grip. Just deal with it. There's nothing extraordinary. Thank God so few people died. Let's just focus on the mundane day to day, and there's no point in even attempting to acknowledge that something pretty weird happened here, or even that there was a positive side.

My basic takeaway from all of this is that Bloomberg is exactly the kind of down-to-earth technocrat that I want running my city, and will without question vote for him in the next election--but that I also question his sanity, at least when it comes to attracting votes. Both of those questions were gentle lobs, letting him slam-dunk them in a way guaranteed to play with the voters; the first, letting him praise our municipal workers, as they deserve to be be praised, and let everyone in the city feel happy about the emergency response. The second, letting him wax poetic for a moment, and let us all feel that yes, it's true, he really does love this city in a way beyond reason, as we all do--but doesn't let that distract him from his plain and certain duty.

Instead "They did their duty" and "Poetry escapes me."

Dweeb.

So. We're back at the apartment, sweating like pigs. Another sip into the infopipe of radio, realizing how disapointing it is, particularly now that WINS has decided that the "crisis is over" because most of their viewers have power, and they won't even tell us who does and who doesn't. Bloomberg Radio is even worse, because all they want to do is tell me about the Dow and commodities prices, and about the first I have little interest, and about the second even less. Ultimately, I look the frequency of WNYC, the NPR-affiliated City-owned station, up in the phone book, and turn in to another interview with the Mayor, with info I can actually use.

85% of the city has restored power, including Staten Island, the Bronx, Queens, and all of Brooklyn. That leaves Manhattan, and sure, I'd fuck Manhattan if I had any say, because othewise you'd be accused of fucking the outer boroughs at the expense of Manhattan, and why shouldn't those fuckers taste pain on occasion.

Except, of course, that I'm in one of the areas that doesn't have power, and it's now in the 90s.

Chelsea, Cooper Square, and Madison Square are among the areas that don't.


Um.. Cooper Square? What the fuck is that? The area around Cooper Union is "Cooper Square," but as far as I can tell, the whole East Village, from the East River to at least Broadway, and from Houston to Canal, don't have not power. Normally, we'd call that "the East Village" or possibly "Alphabet City" or maybe "Loisaida" (though that extends southward). You can't legitimately claim "Cooper Square is without power" because that means the area just around Cooper Squaree. Meaning Cooper Union. Meaning maybe 4 blocks, when you've got maybe a 100 block area without power.

So.... Anyway, the implication is, maybe the West Village got power, and I don't fancy sitting up here in the stifling heat and drinking warm vodka and cranberry juice and eating melted cheese on English muffins. So I volunteer to go scouting.

So I do. Everything west of Broadway and south of 9th is lit. I call Karen from a payphone, and suggest we eat at the Apple Bom Bar on Mercer.

We're there for quite a while; nice to have ice. And food that doesn't produce pots we can't clean, because there's no water. And a toilet where the water flushes. And beer that's cool.

But it's time to go home after a while.

To climb 12 stories, waving flashlights around.

And lie on the couch, sweating gently into the night....

Until you hear, I swear, the same cheer rising up from the neighborhood that I heard in 1977.

And realize that the power is on, and we haven't noticed, because we've turned everything off, as the authorities suggested.

The same damn cheer.


posted by Greg at 12:13 AM 2 comments

This is a subject I've been thinking about for some time.

Forget broadband distribution of most games for at least a few years; even though gamers are early tech adopters, a minority of PCs are hooked up to a broadband connection, as are a tiny minority of consoles. Never mind the marketing issues, which are a bear, too; the publishers know how to work retail distribution, and although some experiment with online, they're not going whole hog into it until they need to.

But... MMGs are a little different. For one thing, their income derives largely from subscription revenues; retail sales are largely irrelevant. Retail is just a way of getting clients into gamers' hands, and it's great, because you get a lot of market exposure by going through the retail channel, and people actually pay you for the privelege of getting the client. Broadband isn't as good, because when you distribute online, you typically offer the client as a free download (it's hard enough getting anyone to download the thing at all, let alone imposing a charge barrier to reduce trials further), and you pay substantially--something under a buck, but still multiple dimes--in terms of bandwidth to serve a several hundred meg file.

But still--you'd happily give the client away, or pay that bandwidth cost, if it increases your subscription base.

Additionally, there's one problem with retail: Except for a few publishers with limited distribution clout, like, say, Matrix Games, publishers don't even want to talk to you unless they think your title can generate at least 100,000 unit sales at retail, and don't get excited unless they think it can generate 300,000+. Lets assume your game has a 50% subscriber conversion ratio; that means an ultimate playerbase of 50,000 in the first case, or 150,000 in the second.

150,000 would be a pretty substantial hit in the world of MMOGs; outside Asia, only three games are at or above that level. But even with AAA level support and development, a game like Asheron's Call or Anarchy Online can run in the black with less than 100,000 subscribers. And Themis believes that you can run an MMG profitably with as few as 5000 subscribers, if you know what you're doing (and are willing to live with quarterly rather than monthly updates).

In other words, there's a range of MMG titles, real and potential, whose realistic player base is in the <150,000 range that will either have difficulty finding retail distribution, not get it, or get an initial retail sale and then see the client disappear from retail distribution. That's what happened to Anarchy Online; it doesn't really sell enough continuing volume to justify continuing retail distribution, so they're now largely stuck with online distribution.

There are supposedly several dozen MMG titles under development at present, and while the overall playerbase is growing, I doubt it's going to grow rapidly enough to permit more than a handful to achieve 150,000+ subscribers. Thus, in future, most MMGs are going to face this problem.

So--given the absence of a retail SKU for your game, how do you maximize your exposure and therefore your ultimate playerbase? One approach is simply to make the client a free download and rely on publicity and some advertising, which is what most games in this trap are doing at the moment. But this only gets you so far.

As usual in this market, it's useful to turn to Korea. Korea has a major software piracy problem, so there almost isn't any (legit) retail market for games. And it has staggeringly high broadband penetration. Thus, MMGs there have been free downloads since the inception. Yet as you might expect, the 100+ Korean MMGs on the market vary hugely in playerbases--some with just a few thousand subscribers, others with millions. What seems to make the difference in Korea is portal deals; essentially, portals wind up taking the place of retailers as gatekeepers, and you need deals with the major game (and general-audience) portals to get exposure.

That's not likely to happen soon in the US; both general audience portals and the largest game portals cater to an audience that is, by and large, not interested in MMGs. An ad buy on neither Yahoo! nor Yahoo! Games specifically is going to be efficient. But it's certainly worthwhile to offer bounties to linking partners--and it's also worthwhile to look for other distribution partners.

Which is why a couple of recent deals are of interest. Sony Pictures Digital, the parent of Sony Online Entertainment, recently announced a deal with Qwest Communications, a telco, to offer free trial subscriptions to SOE's games (which include EverQuest and Planetside) to Qwest's DSL customers. And Simon & Schuster Interactive has announced a deal with two cable execs to offer Eve Online, which S&S publishes, to cable operators as a "premium channel" for cable modem subscribers. S&S hasn't announced any particular deals with cable operators, mind you, just that they've got these two cable industry guys to work with them--and while Eve has had a pretty decent launch, it's not a brand that's going to excite the cable industry too much, I suspect.

Still, everybody trying to flog broadband is looking for reasons to justify to consumers why they really need to pay 2 to 3 times the cost of a dial-up subscription--and "so you can pirate music to your heart's content" isn't something you can really say aloud. Figuring out how to market games through broadband providers makes all kinds of sense.

So this is exactly the kind of thing that MMG operators need to be thinking about: not just ways of getting client software into people's hands without going through CompUSA, but also ways of marketing MMGs to people that don't depend on the conventional channels.

It will be interesting to see where this goes.

(A good source for playerbase numbers is here, by the way--as far as I can tell, Sir Bruce's numbers are correct or close to, but his coverage of Asia is spotty and odd--neither Mankind nor Ragnarok Online are market leaders there, though it's interesting to see any reported numbers out of Asia.)
posted by Greg at 2:43 PM 2 comments

Seth Rosenfeld runs a monthly event at a bar in Brooklyn at which he sets up consoles with games--ranging from an Atari 2600 and a Colecovision to a PS2 and XBox, with stops at Sega Genesis, SNES, and so on in between--around the bar, lets folks play, while a DJ spins.

Pretty cool, so I'll post his notice here. If you want to get onto his mailing list for future events, contact him at bbabybrooklyn NOSPAM yahoo dot com, which I imagine you can figure out how to render in a style acceptable to your email client.

Formatting is his, btw, so I accept no blame. And no, I won't be there, as I have kid care responsibility that night.


posted by Greg at 2:50 PM 3 comments

A colleague today sent me a story from today's Wall Street Journal, reporting that Nintendo's president, Sataru Iwata, has announced games to appeal to a broader range of game fans, saying that the complexity of today's videogames is scaring off consumers.

"Mr. Iwata said many videogames lost their allure as they gradually became too difficult for average users to enjoy."

My colleague asked whether I agreed with this.

Yes and no.

All game styles run the risk of what I term "grognard capture."

"Grognard" was a slang term for members of Napoleon's Old Guard. Hardcore board wargamers adopted it as a term for themselves. By extention, grognard capture means capture of a game style by the hardest-core and most experienced players--to the ultimate exclusion of others.

The most extreme example I can think of is what happened to the Squad Leader series. Originally a relatively simple, accessible game of infantry combat in World War II, the publishers released supplement after supplement, each with new rules adding to the complexity of the game. Finally, they revamped it as "Advanced Squad Leader," publishing it in a loose-leaf binder so you could insert new rules as they were published, with systems as obscure and silly as the "Sewer Emergence Table" and the "Kindling Availability Table."

The original Squad Leader sold more than 200,000 copies, an astonishing figure for a board wargame at the time. Advanced Squad Leader sold a few tens of thousands of copies. Advanced Squad Leader is, I believe, still in print--Churt Schilling, a baseball player, bought the rights from Avalon Hill when they went out of business, and keeps it around. It has a fanatical following--tiny, but fanatical.

As another example, consider what has happened to the first-person shooter. Doom sold in the millions, and was accessible to anyone who could use the arrow keys and the space bar, since you could set the difficulty level quite low. With the move to Quake, FPSes gradually became more oriented toward deathmatch play, and less toward solitaire play; that alone began to exclude some players, because when you sign onto a server to play an FPS game, you're likely to encounter people far better than you, and having your head handed to you over and over is not normally a positive experience. The interface became more complex, as well; if you don't master mouse look, for example, you really have no chance of competing.

There are fanatical FPS players out there--and you can't really say that FPS games aren't popular. My guess is there are more people playing Counterstrike and Battlefield 1942 online at any given moment than in every MMG put together.

But the combination of player skills and increasingly complexity make FPS games less and less accessible to newbies.

You see the same process at work in a lot of other game styles; real-time strategy games layer more and more complexities onto the system over time. Fighting games have taken special moves to a ridiculous extreme, requiring you to memorize chords as complicated as anything a concert pianist uses. And so on.

Developers move in this direction because their market demands it; the hard core, who are also the opinion setters, want new features and games that reward their hard-won skills. And if that ultimately means cutting off a game genre from a wider audience, that's not their concern--though perhaps it should be of the developer's.

There are ways to ameliorate the problem--TSR used to publish both Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, the former serving as a gateway drug for the latter. Properly designed learning scenarios for RTS titles can ease people into the complexities. And so on.

Thus, in a sense, Mr. Iwata is right that games are "too complicated for the average user to enjoy." But in another sense, he is utterly wrong. If you look at "games" as a whole, not just as "$40+ titles published in the conventional PC/console game market," you'll find that there is a huge range in complexity. Games like Bejeweled have a large audience, and tens of millions of people play games like Hearts and Spades on sites like Pogo.com and the MSN Gaming Zone every month. Simple Flash and Shockwave games are often the largest driver of traffic for sites that offer them. And as I reported previously, Snood is the ninth most played game in America.

Simpler games are readily available and accessible to a wide audience, and do in fact achieve a wide audience. But when you talk about the PC/console game market, you're talking about games that cost more than $40. Few people are going to lay out that kind of money for a trivial game. For that much money, they want a deep, compelling experience--and for the hard core, who are the opinion makers, remember, that means games of a certain complexity.

My guess is that the remark is motivated primarily by Sony's announcement of the PSP, and is an attempt to position the PSP as the "hardcore device for geeky hardcore gamers", while the GBA remains the "game platform of choice for the rest of us." And that's fine as far as it goes--but in general, I think it's a mistake to try to sell games to non-gamers. What you really want to do is develop a game that the hardcore likes--well enough to recommend to casual gamers--and that does in fact remain accessible to casual gamers.

Which was part of the brilliance of The Sims, of course.
posted by Greg at 4:56 PM 28 comments

I've been playing way too much of this game, lately. I know, I'm out of date, it was first published in 2001, but hey.

The reason it appeals, of course, is that it satisfies my historical wargaming jones and also hits some of the same buttons as Civ III. Indeed, in some ways, it feels a lot like playing Empires of the Middle Ages with JFD and the boys. And I've always been a sucker for a game that offers intellectual challenge rather than fast twitch action.

It's a hard game to get into; there are a lot of complexities, and the diplomatic system, in particular, takes some getting used to. But if you get over that hump, there's huge depth here. The game covers the period 1419 through 1820--a big chunk of history--and does a pretty good job with it, despite the huge variations over that time. For example, I played as the US in the Napoleonic scenario--a brief war with the Brits netted me lower Ontario and Fort Ticonderoga (Boney was keeping them busy, and they were glad to buy me off after I'd occupied the whole of Canada), a bunch of Indian wars netted me most of the continent east of the Missisippi, American traders were dominating markets across the Western Hemisphere, the Louisiana Purchase happened on schedule, and another war with Spain got me Florida and Texas, all before 1820.

Historically, not bad. So to go to the technological opposite extreme, I played the earliest scenario as England--and here we are as Henry V tromping all over France. The game doesn't handle the complexities of noble politics during the Hundred Years War as transparently as it might if it were designed for that purpose, but manages reasonably decently; essentially, it treats the more powerful French nobles (Orleans and d'Auvergne in particular) as "independent nations" possessing just a province or two, but in firm alliance with "France," meaning the evil Valois. This works pretty well, and the challenge in this position is to grab as much of France as you possibly can before Henry V, a kick-ass war leader, dies.

In other words, the system is sufficiently flexible that it represents both Medieval dynastic warfare and 19th century frontier combat plausibly enough--no mean achievement.

At first glance, the list of scenarios (just half a dozen) looks limited for a game of this scope--until you realize that you can play as any country in any scenario meaning that if, say, you want to be Count Palatine of the Rhine, running a single province and trying to survive and expand in the face of much larger powers, you can. More likely you'll choose a great power, of course, but even here, your choices are wide--including, say, China; or even the Byzantine Empire as of 1419, reduced to Thrace and the Morea and trying desperately to prevent your utter extinction at the hands of the Turks.

In other words, even within a scenario, your choice of country provides a hugely variable set of challenges and problems to deal with.

The music, incidentally, is fantastic; apparently the developers made a deal with a smaller classical music label, so they have quite a wide range of music that varies with the century you play, ranging from Medieval chansons to Beethoven.

The game is not unflawed, however. In particular, the interface is in some ways quite frustrating. EU II is "realtime" rather than "turn-based". I have no particular preference for one over the other, but the interface implications are important. In Civ III, a turn-based game, for example, you give an order to a unit or city, don't worry about it until the order is complete or something happens (e.g., you come under attack), and when your intervention is necessary, the map view jumps to the appropriate location, and the game waits for your decision.

EU II is in some ways a similar game, but because it is realtime, this elegant solution doesn't work. Instead, every time a unit completes its orders, or something such as an enemy attack occurs, a window pops up and your view remains unchanged (although the window has a "goto" button). That's logical, because you may be doing something in your current view (giving another unit an order, say, or ordering a build) and want to complete that before dealing with this other event. But quite often what happens is that six windows pop up immediately, you have to look at each and gauge whether an immediate response is needed, put them all away, and continue on. And indeed what you typically do is pause the game to consider all this--you might lose a battle in the interim if you don't.

So what? Think about the rhythm of play here. I'm working away and suddenly---pop pop pop, six windows, hit pause, look at them all cluttering the screen. This is awkward at best. I'm not sure how to solve the problem, but I'd start by classifying these kinds of alerts into "informational," putting them in a separate area of the screen and not requiring a "close" button press, and "vital"--ones that do pop up and require a "close." And I'd autopause the game for vital ones. This isn't ideal, either, but it would be less annoying.

And about those constant pauses: The pause icon is a tiny little thing at upper right that's easy to miss. And when paused, "Game Paused" appears in small white type at screen top, while all the unit and battle animations continue--meaning that it's easy to think you're paused when you aren't, or think you're running when you're paused. This is also very annoying--you're waiting for a vital battle to play out for twenty seconds before you realize no one is dying and the stupid game is paused.

Another easy interface fix here.

So all in all--very cool game, and I suspect I'm going to lose a lot more time to it, enthusiasm somewhat tempered by UI frustration. I may have to pick up one of the more recent titles using the same engine (like EU: Crown of the North) to see if they provide UI improvements.

And... I have to admit that, as the designer of Pax Britannica I'm rather looking forward to the next game from the developer, Paradox Entertainment, which is entitled Victoria. Almost enough for me to fantasize about going to work for them in Sweden for a couple of years.

posted by Greg at 11:04 AM 2 comments

Hmm... This is interesting. Tim Oren, in a post on reverse mergers (the practice of taking a company public by merging into a moribund company that is already listed) mentions that Dwango North America recently did such a deal. I've been unable to find any other information about the deal, unfortunately--no press release on their site, and Googling doesn't help.

Dwango is a name that old timers will remember--originally, the company was a US-based operation that provided a virtual network with technology to emulate an IPX network over TCP/IP. But never mind the technobabble; what they did was let you play Doom, which allowed LAN play but not Internet play, over the Internet. They charged a monthly subscription for that plus player-matching services, and did pretty well--for a time.

Dwango's success is what spurred VCs to invest in the Total Entertainment Network (later Pogo.com) and MPlayer (later HearMe). Both companies maintained that they had technology that allowed them to offer lower-latency connections to gamers thereby "solving the basic problem of online gaming."

The basic problem of online gaming was, of course, that not enough people had Internet connections, and most online games sucked. But VCs will persist in investing in technology rather than business fundamentals. By the time of Quake, FPSes already supported TCP/IP connections natively; a million fan sites offered player matching for free (and Gamespy made it possible to find fan sites pretty easily), and both TEN and MPlayer found that people wouldn't pay for their services.

Dwango died a slow, hemmoraging death. TEN and MPlayer were a little luckier, in that their backers refused to let them die, and they both went through multiple rounds of funding. TEN, originally a hardcore, gritty site for hardcore shooter fans, took a page from Gamesville's playbook, and transformed itself into an ad-supported, fun, friendly, happy site for the whole family--and ultimately sold itself to EA.Com for eight figures (missing the boat by a year--Gamesville had sold itself to Terra Lycos the previous year for $200m+). MPlayer went basically nowhere until they launched one of the first voice chat solutions as an adjunct to their chat rooms, had a surprise success, rebranded themselves as HearMe, a voice over IP company, went public, sold off the original MPlayer business to Gamespy--and then went belly up.

With both HearMe and MPlayer, the VCs at least came to a 'liquidity event,' a means of cashing out--but I would guess that everyone who invested except perhaps in the final round wound up getting burned.

But back to Dwango--before Dwango shut down, they had established a Japanese partner company to bring its online game network to Japan. I'm not sure of the deal structure, but I believe it was a separate company in which Dwango US retained a small ownership stake. And evidently, Dwango Japan hung on for dear life--and, a few years ago, reinvented itself as a mobile game developer and publisher.

They opened up a US satellite office in Seattle last year, and have a number of games live through AT&T Wireless, maybe some other carriers. And if Oren has his facts right, it's Dwango North America, rather than Dwango Japan, that's accomplished the reverse merger... A rather bizarre revival of an old name in games.

I'm not sure what lessons to draw from this--except to be bemused at the gyrations startups put themselves through when their initial business plans prove utterly wrong.


posted by Greg at 2:18 PM 2 comments

3DO has Set up a site to handle the auction of its game properties. For a minimum bid of $25k, the Might & Magic franchise can be yours...

I find this rather sad. I also wonder how and why this continues to be reported as a Chapter 11 reorganization, rather than a Chapter 7 dissolution... If they're auctioning off all their IP, what's left to reorganize?


posted by Greg at 5:53 PM 2 comments

So the results of the moot court at the Black Hat conference are in... Apparently the jury was unable to reach a verdict, but agreed that the loss of virtual property is 'real' and constitutes monetary damages. Edward Castronova writes about the case on his site.


posted by Greg at 5:52 PM 3 comments