ConQwest, another "big game," this one created as a promotion for Qwest wireless services by Frank Lantz (an occasional commenter here) and ad agency SS+K. Looks cool--but more importantly, "big games" (please, we need a better term) have previously been either art projects or academic experiments--and I've previously expressed my skepticism that the game style can be commercialized. (Some game styles can't--LARPs, for instance. And generally, it's a shame--imagine a LARP developed with serious financial resources, for example: How cool would that be?)

But maybe there is a commercial future for "the big game," if only for purposes of corporate promotion... Also, an interesting use of semacodes here.

An interesting post from AFK Gamer on My 2005 MMOG Wishlist--funny, and thought-provoking.

Jamie Fristom raving about Half-Life 2 makes me wish I wasn't an FPS llama... I couldn't get more than a couple of scenes into the original Half-Life, and I'd like to play this, but am pretty sure I wouldn't get far. With action-combat console RPGs, I can usually get by with handing the controller to one of my teenage daughters to get me past the bosses, but they're just not PC gamers. Unless you count Neopets. Or Gunbound.

Gunbound is pretty decent, btw. A Korean game, it's a multiplayer online cannon game--that is, a lot like the Worms games (but thankfully 2D--Worms 3D was a bad idea. Some game styles just work better in 2D). With persistent characters, customizable equipment, levelling up, etc. And free to download and play (but you can buy in-game cash if you want--though in principle you can earn sufficient cash to buy cool stuff in the game just by grinding). If you like the basic game style, definitely worth a look.




posted by Greg at 3:26 PM 3 comments

Some time ago, I posted about my harrowing experience trying to get AT&T to activate my N-Gage.

This Christmas, I wanted to buy my daughter Vicky a camera phone; she's an enthusiastic amateur photographer, and while the picture quality is generally not as good as with a stand-alone digital camera, you have to decide to take the camera with you because you plan to take pictures, while you carry the cellphone with you all the time as a matter of course, and if it can take a photo, you may find yourself shooting something on the spur of the moment.

I checked Vicky's current phone, to see what operator she's on--her mom, my ex, pays the bill--and saw it was an AT&T phone from Nokia. No problem, I get her a Nokia camera phone, and all you have to do is pop out the SIM card from the old phone and stick it in the new one, right?

A little research convinced me I wanted the Nokia 3200, which was considerably cheaper than the alternatives (a Series 40 phone, and thus a lot cheaper than the Series 60 camera phones--also lower res, but hey). But when I tried to buy it through the AT&T Wireless site, I couldn't figure out how to do so--mainly because I was not a "new" customer, but I also didn't have the last four digits of my ex's social security number, nor did I think I should be futzing with rate plans--that's up to her, since she pays the bills.

So I went down to the local AT&T Wireless outlet (now with a Cingular banner across it)--but they weren't able to sell me a 3200, because Cingular doesn't support it. I could buy a pricier Series 60 phone, or a Samsung camera phone--but neither option appealed.

Okay, no worries. I looked online, and wound up bidding on a 3200 on Ebay. It came today.

It was in an AT&T wireless box, but the guy I'd bought it from had written "unlocked" on the box. GSM phones sold by American operators are normally "locked," that is, they won't work unless a SIM card from that operator is installed. (GSM phones sold in Europe will generally work with any SIM card.) In all cases, there's a way to unlock the phone (you can Google this if you're interested in the details), and the guy had done me the favor of unlocking it, not knowing whether I'd want to use it on AT&T, Cingular, T-Mobile, or, who knows, Rogers Cellular or something. Meaning any SIM card in the phone would work.

Great. So I open Vicky's old phone, take out the battery, and--no SIM card. Stupid me, it hadn't occurred to me that it might be a TDMA phone. (AT&T uses both networks, for legacy reasons.)

Well, that shouldn't be a problem, should it? Vicky and I meander down to the AT&T/Cingular store, and ask to buy a SIM card, pretty please.

No can do. Why not? Well, because this is an AT&T phone, and they only have Cingular SIMs now. Because of the merger. You know.

It is on the tip of my tongue to point out that the phone is unlocked, and a Cingular SIM will be just fine, but I decide not to, for two reasons: First, my ex is billed through AT&T, I don't know the details of her contract, and she probably wouldn't want to have to pay a separate Cingular bill too. Second, I suspect they're going to get pissy if I point out that I'm using technology they way I want to, not the way they want me to.

They tell me I have to call AT&T's customer support line. Oh boy.

Back home, I get on the phone. It is a 15 minute wait to talk to anyone, during which time I'm told that if I have questions about the merger, I can go to the website. Repeatedly. Finally, I get a person.

They can't help me without the last four digits of my ex's social security. Muttering under my breath, I call Louise on my cell while the support lady waits, and get the numbers. Good, now are we okay?

No; she has to pass me off to "migration" to move Vicky's account from TDMA to GSM. "Migration" is, however, in India, and decides that because Louise's account is a "business somethingorother" account, it need to be passed to yet a third person. She transfers the call--to a busy signal. In other words, they dropped the call.

I call customer support yet again, with another 10 minute plus wait. Another person in India, who basically tells me there's no way they can send me a SIM card and I have to buy another phone. I point out that I have just bought another phone, and ask him to transfer me to a person who can help me. Back on hold for another few minutes, and I have a person in the States, thank God.

She at least understands what I'm trying to do, but thinks they can't send a SIM card to someone who doesn't already have a GSM account with AT&T, and Vicky's phone number is attached to a TDMA account. Do I have another account they can attach the order to?

Yes, there's my N-Gage account. But no, that's paid for by Nokia now, they can't use that. How about Louise's personal cell phone?

Yes. And what is the number? Damfino. I spend a few minutes rooting around before I find the N-Gage, which has it in the phone book. Okay. Are we okay now?

She has to check, I'm back on hold. She comes on after a bit, and tells me that she can't find anything in her system that lets her send me a SIM card. So she's going to pass me off to their sales department, who should be able to deal with it, but I'll need a credit card, and it'll cost $25. Okay, no problems.

Now I'm on with some other guy. Actually, two of them, one of them a trainee. This... doesn't sound good. In order to open the GSM account, they need some information. Like Louise's full social security number, and her date of birth.

Her date of birth? Hell, when I was married to her, my inability to remember her date of birth was, shall we say, a considerable source of strife. I sure as hell don't remember it now.

No worries, they can access the TDMA account somehow and dredge the information out of that, but it will take the a while. Like five more minutes on hold.

But then they discover that actually they can't sell me a SIM card. They don't sell SIM cards. SIM cards are supposed to be included with new phones. Actually, your best bet is to go to a retail store to get one. But I went to a retail store, and they only have Cingular SIMS....

Finally, he decides there's a simple solution; this is a "new" account, and what they'll do is ship me the "free" phone that comes with a nnew account. When I get it, I can take the SIM, stick it in Vicky's 3200, and use the free phone as a hockey puck or doorstop or something. Oh-kay. Whatever. This seems remarkably wasteful, but so long as it solves my problem. And hey, it saves me $25.

It's supposed to be here by early next week. At which point I have to call for activation and get service to Vicky's number switches from the TDMA network to the GSM one. Should be no problems, right?

Total time I spent on this today: just over three hours.

The whole thing reinforces to me that customer service outsourcing is a false economy, particularly if your internal systems are so complicated and your rules so hidebound that your customer service people practically need a college degree in Navigating Our Company's Idiotic Backend. The Indians I talked to were completely useless, I consumed probably a year's worth of profits on Vicky's account in hours of support from US-based CS people, and the Indians in the mix merely made the whole thing take that much longer.
posted by Greg at 4:50 PM 3 comments

Gamedaily today has an editorial lamenting the quality of the coverage about EA's acquistion of an exclusive license from both the NFL and Players Inc (the NFL players' association). So I'll try to provide a little, although please note that I'm not a sports gamer.

EA Sports is EA's cash cow. Until this year, they had pretty much crushed competing sports games by out-spending competitors and providing prettier games than the competition, in the process turning "EA Sports" into one of the few valuable corporate brands in the games industry. One of the great attractions of sports games is that they are about the least risky type of game to create, at least when you've established your line with sports gamers; no real creativity or innovation is needed to get people to buy the next game in the line, because people will buy the new game simply to get the new player stats. Who wants to play Madden 97 (or even Madden 03) when you could be playing Madden 04?

Thus, all you really need to do with each title is provide incremental upgrades to the graphics as the technology improves, tweak whatever you got complaints about in the last title, and pour in the new stats. Simple, straightforward, easy to schedule and budget. EA Sports invariably delivers its titles on time and on budget, something true almost no where else in the industry, even at EA's most disciplined studios.

EA makes plenty of money on other game styles, but EA Sports is Old Reliable. And for many years, they've pretty much had the market to themselves.

Enter Sega and Take Two with their ESPN-branded games (which they co-published). They released them this year at a $19.95 price, because the EA Sports brand is so strong, and they figured they needed a strong price differential to get gamers to experiment with a non-EA line. They succeeded; the games were strong, sold pretty well, and forced EA to cut the prices of their own games (not to the same level). It was, in short, a successful product launch of a new line of games aimed directly at EA's core business. And in August, Take Two announced that the 05 titles would not be at the budget price, but would return to normal videogame pricing, indicative that the companies felt they'd succeeded in establishing the ESPN sports game brand as at least a strong number two in the market.

The NFL deal, then, is a strong counter-move by EA. At least in North America, football is the single most important sport for sports game sales, and while it is theoretically possible to publish a sports games with generic names--"New York" instead of "the Jets", football players who don't look like or have the names of real ones (but might have remarkably similar stats)--who wants to buy that when you can have the real thing? Except maybe at a steep price discount, and even then, you'd feel like you were getting a cheap imitation of the real thing. Nor can you really differentiate the product on gameplay; the basic gameplay required of sports games is now largely set in stone, and it's hard to see where any real innovation can occur.

In sort, EA has essentially pulled the rug out from the ESPN line, at least as far as football is concerned, and by excluding football, makes the rest of the line look that much weaker.

The deal must have been enormously expensive for EA--but if it means they keep a lock on the sports game market, it is almost certainly worthwhile. And the deal hurts both Sega and Take Two greatly--in Take Two's case, more so, since the ESPN line was probably Take Two's best bet of establishing a cash cow other than the GTA franchise.

For gamers, the deal is a loss; without competition, there's essentially no incentive for gameplay improvement or innovation, and given what the exclusive license must have cost, EA is likely to hike prices above the $49.99 that's the videogame norm. But gamers have no say in this. A monopoly is a monopoly.

The other loser is probably John Madden. If EA has an NFL exclusive, it's hard to see why they would want to continue paying Madden for a license, and while dropping his name might confuse some purchasers, well, where else are they gonna go?

The logical next move, if EA wants to be aggressive, is to lock up exclusives with other sports--and, in North America, the only ones that really matter are basketball and baseball (in that order--baseball is the sport of old men, fewer of whom play games). And indeed, we see reports that EA may be trying to negotiate an NBA exclusive as well (though supposedly the NBA has rejected the approach).

Of course, back in May, EA and the NFL denied reports that they were negotiating an exclusive license, too. So there's no real way of knowing exactly what's going on behind closed doors at the moment.

In general, this story, together with the purchase of the stake in Ubisoft and EA's takeover of Criterion (which makes the Renderware middleware platform used in a huge proportion of games) implies an EA that is becoming even more aggressive in its attempt to utterly dominate the games industry.

But more than this, I believe the moves indicate that EA is altering its core competitive strategy.

For almost two decades, EA's strategy has been simple, and successful: Raise the bar. By that, I mean that EA has consistently pushed budgets higher and higher, confident that improved graphical quality and polish would make their games stand out against the competition--and also that competitors would have to raise budgets to stay in the game, and EA, as the largest and best capitalized company in the industry (bar the hardware manufacturers) would always be able to make the grade, while weaker companies would fall by the wayside. And indeed, that's precisely what has happened; smaller game publishers fail or are acquired every year, and consolidation has been enormous. To give a sense of how enormous: ten years ago, if you were looking for funding for an independently developed title, you could probably find 40 publishers who were at least semiplausible. Today, maybe a dozen.

But as budgets head toward $10m for an average AAA title, with the clear understanding that the nextgen consoles (and the need to support HDTV) are going to push budgets up farther, it makes sense even for EA to look for other ways to sustain their competitiveness. If budgets head to $20m or $40m, the industry starts to look more like Hollywood--where even the strongest and best-capitalized studios can suffer severely on the basis of a few misplaced bets. Even for EA, this has to be worrisome.

So: How to beat the competition other than by outspending them? I think we're seeing the answer: By locking in monopolies where IP allows it, by playing financial games with competitors' equity, by grabbing companies at other points in the value chain that competitors rely on.

And here's the thing: The attacker always controls the game. At the moment, EA's competitors are doing little more than scrambling to try to limit the damage EA is doing to them. No one has yet taken a move anything like as strong as the three EA has just accomplished--no one has forced EA on the defensive anywhere.

So Redwood City wins again.

posted by Greg at 1:19 PM 3 comments

If you look at the games industry outside Asia, you can divide publishers into five categories. First are the console manufacturers--Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft--who publish games both as profitable entities in themselves, and to differentiate their platforms by ensuring a steady flow of games exclusive to their devices. They are profitable and will endure, and so long as they don't go Sega's way and lose a grip on a piece of the hardware market.

Second, there is EA--no independent publisher comes close in terms of market share or diversity of portfolio. "Diversity of portfolio" is an important concept in a hit-driven industry such as games, because game development is fraught with risk and consumer taste essentially impossible to predict; you need to produce a lot of games over the course of a year to ensure that your portfolio contains a handful of hits to sustain the industry.

Third, there are what you might call "one hit wonders"--companies that just don't have an adequately diverse portfolio, but which can thrive at times on the basis of a single franchise. Take Two falls into this category--and so does Eidos, which points up the danger of being here. If your franchise dies (Tomb Raider), you're screwed.

Fourth, there are the ailing giants--Vivendi and Atari--companies with the development spread to, in principle, produce an adequately diverse portfolio of games, but which, through some combination of bad management, inattention by corporate controllers with other fish to fry, and inappropriate corporate culture, just can't generate a consistent flow of hits.

From EA's perspective, there's nothing you can do about the hardware manufacturers and their game development operations, other than compete aggressively; they're too big to be taken over, and they have deep pockets. The ailing giants are no threat, and the one-hit wonders not much of one; one hit wonders almost never transform into major competition, and when they run into trouble, they usually die--and if they have any assets worth stripping at that point, EA is well positioned to strip them.

Which brings us to the final cateogry, whatyou might call the EA challengers: smaller companies with aggressive management, an adeequately diverse portfolio, and good marketing operations. Outside Asia, only three companies are here: THQ, Activision, and Ubisoft.

Ubisoft is an interesting company. It is, in essence, one of the products of enthusiasm for the game industry by French investors in the 90s. The other two are Atari and the Vivendi Universal Games Group, investments that haven't particularly panned out. Ubisoft was founded by the Guillemot brothers, who also founded Guillemot (a hardware manufacturer) and Gameloft (a major mobile games publisher). The three companies are linked through part ownership of each other, but each is independent.

Ubisoft's strategy has been to grow partly by building big-team studios along EA lines, and partly by acquiring stronger independent studios (such as Red Storm) as they become available. In essence, they've copied EA's successful approach, down to insisting on long hours from staff, as well as purposefully recruiting young, underpaid, relatively inexperienced developers, and not particularly caring whether or not they get burned out after a few years because of the burdensome hours. Like EA, they've created whole development communities in cities where not much previously existed--EA in Vancouver, Ubisoft in Montreal.

If there's one point where Ubisoft does diverge from EA's approach, its in their treatment of acquisitions. When EA takes over a studio, you can bet that, within a matter of years, it will be gutted: staff laid off or invited to move to Redwood City, IP taken over by EA core and assigned to one of their big, directly controlled development teams. Origin, Maxis, Westwood, Kesmai... et cetera. Ubisoft seems to be willing to grant acquired studios a pretty high degree of independence, at least so long as they continue producing decent product.

Because Ubisoft's corporate culture matches pretty well with EA's, and EA is enormously confident in the success and viability of that culture, EA has viewed Ubisoft as its most interesting, and potentially threatening, competitor for some years. In fact, they've directly challenged Ubisoft in the past by, for example, opening a studio in Montreal specifically to poach development talent in the city that had previously been Ubisoft's North American development powerhouse. Hence also this week's deal to purchase almost 20% of Ubisoft from Talpa Beheer BV, a major investor in the company--a larger portion than now owned by the Guillemot brothers.

The real question is what now? The stake is large enough that EA is unlikely to want to try to sabotage Ubisoft, but small enough that EA will not have effective control of the company. A seat on the board will give them direct insight into Ubisoft's plans, and certainly help them to soften any directly competitive plans--but EA is used to dominance, and I think it likely that they will seek to gain control of Ubisoft in some fashion.

Much depends on the response of the Guillemot brothers, at this point. One possibility is for them to, in essence, seek to sell out to EA at the best price they can get. They retain effective control of Gameloft and Guillemot, at least--and the mobile industry is growing quickly enough that it might well be a good financial bet to cash out of Ubisoft and plug the resources into Gameloft. But it would undoubtedly be galling to have built a world-beating game publisher only to be forced out by a financial trick from your greatest adversary.

Or they could try to come to some kind of accomodation with EA--a notoriously difficult task. Or they could wage corporate war--acquiring more equity through whatever means, poison pills to make a takeover more difficult, and the like. That may well be the likeliest path, but it wouldn't be good for Ubisoft to have its upper management consumed by corporate infighting rather than building the business.

All very interesting, to be sure.
posted by Greg at 1:11 PM 2 comments

So after eating Atlas Mobile and Iomo, Infospace is now acquiring Elkware.

Elkware's been concentrating on mobile games, generally ones aimed at pretty high-end handsets, for the last couple of years, but was originally a Germany-based PC developer (Port Royale, Anno 1503--not bad games, actually).

I guess Infospace has concluded their current business makes no sense, and they need to be in one that does. And I guess they have capital to splash out. I do somewhat wonder whether they can replicate the kind of global distribution reach that, say, MForma and Gameloft have. But I guess I have to take them seriously as a major mobile publisher now.
posted by Greg at 10:41 AM 4 comments

No, I didn't actually see this thing. My TV has nine console systems attached to it, but no cable; I don't watch TV. (I mean, talk about a waste of time; you could be playing Halo 2).

But based on commentary, say, here and here, I'm very glad to have missed it.

Let me ask you something. When they give out the Oscars, do they get Stephen King in to present? Does Britney Spears MC the Pulitzer ceremony? Then if you're doing game awards, why the fuck do you have Snoop and Motley Crue on hand? Shouldn't, say, Sid Meier and Yuji Naka be on the stage?

Oh, well. At least there's the Game Developers Choice awards.
posted by Greg at 5:12 PM 5 comments

There's an interview with me by Mark Frauenfelder up on The Feature today, mostly talking about what needs to happen to foster more innovation in mobile game development.
posted by Greg at 1:02 PM 3 comments

What is the problem with Gamespot News anyway? Used to be that occasionally you'd run into a "link not found," but these days, it seems like half or two thirds of the stories I want to read can't be accessed (like, today, EA Employees Wear Frustration On Their Sleeves or UBS Conference Offers Window on the Majors' Strategies). Do these guys have any right to rag on buggy software if they can't even be bothered to conduct minimal Q/A on their own site? Or is it the fact that I use Mozilla? Or what?

And Gamespy Daily is now completely useless, just regurgitated press releases, which leaves Gamesindustry.biz as the only reliable industry news source--and it's pretty lite, and UK-slanted.

The Game Daily email newsletter used to be pretty good, but they've gone from plaintext with full stories in the email to HTML email requiring you to click a link to get the main story, which makes it far harder and more time consuming to do my daily read (and their website itself isn't well organized for looking at news). And Game Industry News is worthless.

I wish the Fierce Markets guys would start a game newsletter. Fierce Wireless is a gem.

But it makes you wonder. We like to compare ourselves to the film industry? Hell, they have two =massive= daily news publications, in Hollywoord Reporter and Daily Variety. We don't even have a decent website or email newsletter. It is to bleh.
posted by Greg at 4:35 PM 3 comments

The 2005 IGF Finalists are up. Two New York-area companies are listed--Large Animal Games for RocketBowl, and Blackhammer for Supremacy.

I've played RocketBowl, and sort-of like it; the graphics are retro-50s, and it's the only game I can think of with lounge as the musical style. It is, as the name implies, a bowling game, with the typical "select power and direction" interface, but the "lanes" are on a 3D landscape with height variations, obstacles, and so on---more reminiscent of minigolf than a bowling alley. The "rocket" aspect is that you can trigger a direction change on the part of the bowling balley after releasing it. Fun with physics, in other words. On the whole, this isn't really my type of game, but it's well executed, and the color--the graphic and musical style--is nice.

Supremacy is a turn-based space combat game, originally slated for Strategy First, if I recall correctly, but now to be released by Matrix Games (another NY-area company--a small PC publisher specializing in wargames). Looks like it might be fun, although I'm somewhat astonished that the budget is claimed to be $65k...

Digital Eel, run by Zdim and Fingers, occasional commenters here, also get a look in with Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, the follow up to Strange Adventures in Infinite Space (which Ernest Adams called the perfect short game).

The one game here I hadn't encountered before but will definitely have to check out is Steer Madness--looks like a simulated 3D city with open-ended gameplay and rideable vehicles. In other words, a lot like GTA, except that you're a steer on a mission to save your fellow animals from meat-eaters and other evildoers... Pretty darn goofy.




posted by Greg at 10:09 AM 3 comments

And yet another deal: Infospace buys Iomo.

I remember reading an article in Red Herring about Infospace, not so many years ago, while sitting in a VC's foyer and waiting to pitch, and thinking, "man, if this can get funded..." The company was founded by Naveen Jain, who claimed it would one day be larger than Microsoft. It wasn't clear to me what the company was supposed to be doing, but hey. Today, they seem to have a search business and a mobile content application delivery thingie. Which looks to me like "let's invest in flavor of the day," rather than anything based on a clear vision. (Nice pic of the Nokia 3650 on the corporate site, though.)

But apparently they still have money; they're buying Iomo for $15m in cash. Iomo is another excellent UK mobile developer. Good for the founders, I guess, but I can't say a company like Infospace is likely to have any understanding of games. Maybe they'll be hands-off, but if I were an employee, I'd have some hard questions for the acquirers.
posted by Greg at 9:17 AM 3 comments

A slew of interesting news today.

Sorrent, one of the best-funded US mobile game publishers with a track record of producing dull licensed products, is acquiring Macrospace, a prominent UK mobile games publisher. Macrospace is probably valued by Sorrent largely because of their co-publishing deal with Cartoon Network, but some of their original games are actually pretty good, and their backend technology for "connected gameplay" (more often meaning shared high score lists and new level downloads than actual multiplayer gameplay) is among the best in the industry, something Sorrent may feel they need to compete more effectively with mForma, which also has good backend technology. In this case, I can at least hope that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts--ideally, Macrospace's creativity filters back to Sorrent, although of course, in such situations it's probably more likely that the dullness of the dominant house quashes innovation at the subordinate one.

Bruno Bonnel steps down at Atari, with James Caparro as the new CEO. Bonnel remains chairman and Chief Creative Officer, which perhaps doesn't bode that well--Atari is not exactly a ferment of creativity. It also has been losing badly, and clearly need to find a new direction. Caparro is out of the music industry, however. Sigh.

Infinium, which is presumably doing the VC dance to raise enough money actually to launch Phantom, is being sued by what the story describes as a venture capital firm, SBI-USA. The claim is that Infinium promised a cut of all money raised in the most recent round to SBI, which implies that SBI isn't really a VC firm, but an private equity broker. Infinium's CEO says the agreement was that SBI gained only a share of money raised from people it introduced to Infinium, not from investors Infinium found independently, and that in fact SBI's introductions wound up contributing no money.

I've dealt with brokers like this before, and in my experience it's never worked out. It's also a bad deal for potential investors--in essence, some slice of the money they put up drains out of the company instantly to the broker, and you're far better off investing without an intermediary in the picture. But when you're scrounging desperately for capital, it's tempting to make deals with people like this--your upper management has limited time to pursue investment leads, and it's at least notionally attractive to have other people out there chasing down potential money. I don't know what the SBI/Infinium contract said; I certainly wouldn't make a deal promising a share of all money raised, so Infinium's response sounds plausible, but SBI presumably thinks they have a case, or they wouldn't be spending money on lawyers. Additional complications: Infinium's original founders have since been eased out because of, ah, ethical challenges, and this may be a case of an earlier, bad deal coming back to bite current management in the ass. And, of course, Infinium seems to be down to basically no money, its only real value being the product it's developed and the hope of raising enough money to launch it. From that perspective, it's an odd move by SBI: the only way SBI is likely to get money out of it is if Infinium is successful in closing the next round, which is going to be that much harder with this lawsuit hanging over them, so SBI may be shooting themselves in the foot. Or maybe they're hoping that Infinium will settle quickly for equity rather than cash, in order to take one more negative off the plate when pitching to investors.

It's pretty ugly, however you look at it, though.

Nintendo's gonna make movies. What a great idea. I mean, Square was so successful with the Final Fantasy movie, right? Bleh. Similarly, American McGee is going to write the Oz screenplay for Jerry Bruckheimer. What is it about the game industry's colonial cringe toward Hollywood? Cut out the crap. Just make better games.
posted by Greg at 1:35 PM 2 comments