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Tag Archives: THQ

THQ’s Demise & Why There’s Plenty of Blame for Gamers Too

Leave a Comment Posted by on January 25, 2013

Yet another AAA publisher bit the dust today. After over 20 years in business but several of those spent struggling and a Hail Mary saving throw that a bankruptcy court ended up rejecting, THQ was officially carved up into pieces and sold off. Most of their successful studios and IP ended up at new homes (though many not at all where I expected) and a bunch of other beloved but dormant IPs like Red Faction and Homeworld will be auctioned off for much less at a later time. The auction raised only a fraction of what they needed to pay off their debts and even the biggest bids on many of these properties and teams were stunningly small, plus they have received no offers for the very talented Vigil Games studio or the Darksiders IP. Not that many years ago, all of this stuff would have been snatched up in a heartbeat and for a lot more money. Few stronger signs have ever been shown that the AAA industry doesn’t have much cash to spare these days.

I know and preach that businesses are not anyone’s friend and they are not something to get emotional over but I can’t help but feel sad at THQ’s demise. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of this failure is squarely on their shoulders and in particular, those of Brian Farrell whose years of inept leadership got them here. Relying on licensed properties for too long, focusing on quantity over quality and worst of all, the uDraw, were all done under his watch and even when it was most important, he refused to step aside and let smarter people try to save the business. He deserves to never work in video games again, though he made so much money even as the ship sunk that I suspect he will just retire after this. Despite it all, they had gotten well under way to transforming themselves from a licensed shovelware peddler into a decent mid-tier core publisher that put out largely quality games and had a bunch more in the pipe. I think if the economy wasn’t so poor and they’d been given enough capital to see out Jason Rubin’s vision, they could have become a force again. Unfortunately, we’ll never know now. Through all the mistakes and stumbles, I was still really rooting for THQ as they seemed to understand a facet of game creation that the likes of EA and Activision had forgotten. For lack of a better term, THQ’s games had soul and you could feel the passion that went into them.

With each passing year, we have fewer and fewer companies making and releasing the kinds of AAA experiences that are still my favourite way to game. There’s only a few publishers left, most of them are making their stuff in-house and almost all of them are in the red. There are no new independent AAA developers starting and most of the ones left are dropping dead or switching focus at an alarming rate. There’s more doubt than ever before that the new generation of console hardware may not be enough to reinvigorate things and that this type of gaming is simply not a viable way to make money unless you have a name like Call of Duty on your package. Even then, a couple of wildly successful franchises cannot sustain an entire platform. The thought of the majority of gaming becoming based off the current concepts that are popular in the mobile and indie scenes makes my heart sink. I feel those arenas as they are now represent a huge evolutionary step backwards for gaming and many of the design tenants and especially the business practices are not what the medium needs to evolve.

There’s a lot of blame to go around for the state of AAA gaming right now. Corporate leadership that is in many ways clueless and in other ways incredibly greedy. Short-sighted investors that don’t understand what’s necessary for long term success in a creative medium. The platform holders clinging to hardware well past it best before date and trying to make consoles about everything except playing games. The “enthusiast press” which seems to relish tearing things down these days rather than you know, being enthusiasts. And to top it all off, we have a world economy that’s still in far worse health than politicians want people to believe and the industry’s about to ask people to spend hundreds on new consoles when many are still neck deep in Apple’s fashion trend. It’s a recipe for uncertainty and doubt and I have plenty of both but there’s one key group that deserves a lot of the blame but which is rarely talked about here: Us, the gamers.

When you boil everything right down, we as a group are some of the worst customers any industry can ask for. We bitch, complain and fight about everything. We are full of mysogninist, racist, homophobic children that pollute forums and online communities. We shun and denigrate anyone who dares to try to get into games and isn’t as good at them as we are. We demand better graphics, longer campaigns, more multiplayer modes and customisation options yet still expect AAA games to cost the same amount or less after inflation that they did 30 years ago. Assuming of course that we don’t just steal them out of some warped sense of entitlement. And worst of all for the industry that tries to accommodate us, we scream for things that are different and innovative and most of us just end up buying Madden and Call of Duty for the millionth time while fresh ideas like Sleeping Dogs, Darksiders and ZombiU are ignored, lose money and end up collecting dust. Meanwhile, a company can crank out another soulless mobile Skinner Box game and have a much better chance of at least not losing any money, if not making a tidy profit. If you were trying to plan the future of a video game company, which would look better to you as a businessperson?

I of course speak of gamers in very generalised terms. Obviously we’re not all like that and I’m not lost on the fact that I speak from a privileged position where I can and do spend a lot of money on games. I get that many don’t have that luxury (especially now) and have to choose where their gaming dollars go much more carefully. But consider that if even 10% of the people who bought Call of Duty 9 this year bought Darksiders II instead, THQ might still be hanging on. If 10% of the people who bought Madden this past year bought Sleeping Dogs instead, it would have been considered a success and not a failure. We don’t get to bemoan the massive consolidation and constriction of innovation happening in the AAA space right now while also feeling like we don’t have to do our part to keep it going. Games are an incredibly high risk industry and getting more so by the day. It’s a business and it needs to make money. If we aren’t going to do our part to support the types of games we all claim we want to see, we aren’t going to get them, that’s just reality. If you don’t want to just see the shelves full of Call of Duty derivatives, then stop buying only Call of Duty and give something else a chance to impress you with something new.

Industries need customers or they can’t survive and grow. There’s a lot of us out there who still love AAA gaming and don’t want to see everything slide into the mobile sinkhole. But it’s up to us to make AAA gaming attractive and to support the kinds of things we want to see whenever we can. If you’re one of the many people bemoaning the death of THQ today, think about how many of their games you bought in the last year when they needed you the most. If we’re not going to be part of the solution, then we are automatically part of the problem. Either we create the market for what we want or it will cease to be, it’s as simple as that.

Business, Culture, Predictions, Video Games , , , ,

My Bold Predictions for 2013

Leave a Comment Posted by on January 2, 2013

Happy New Year! Alrighty, now that I’ve judged myself on my Bold Predictions for 2012 (and done not so badly overall though always with room for improvement), it’s time to spit em’ out for 2013. I’m hung over, have a sore back, haven’t slept and oh yeah, have to head back to what will be an insane merger-induced grind tomorrow so I’m actually not in a blogging mood but dammit, predictions must flow! I’m going to try to put in everything I can think of before posting this but I do these kind of off-the-cuff and with no pre-planning so I am going to reserve the right to add to the post for up to 48 hours after publishing it in case I remember anything. These are also tech and gaming predictions. I have predictions in the economic and political arenas too but these will be long enough and frankly, I don’t have the time or the energy for political arguments.

And away we go!

Gaming

  • THQ’s new private equity owner will ensure all their games in the pipe come out but the company will be split up and sold off shortly after. This is honestly a shame because despite the absolute idiocy of that company’s management (Jason Rubin being very much an exception), they’ve managed to keep a lot of talent and put out some pretty good games. That said, the AAA industry is in a state of massive flux right now (more on that later) and even the big boys can’t figure out how to reliably succeed in it so I can’t see who would want to fund another go for THQ in that arena. There’s a lot of mystery around this eleventh hour deal but from what I’ve read, it looks like vultures who want to ring out whatever profits they can from the nearly finished games in the pipe and then sell the studios and IP for some additional profit. I hope I’m wrong but I don’t think I am.
  • Mobile gaming will continue to grow but the honeymoon is over. This is kind of an extension of a prediction from last year but I’m declaring it to have a bigger effect this year. I’ve banged on about how the meteoric growth of this industry (and the companies whose platforms it runs on) is a fashion trend, that the growth is unsustainable and that a big equalisation adjustment is coming as it already has in the social space. Mobile has quickly been usurped by big companies and the only games that are attaining mass scale success are from big companies with the occasional fluke like Angry Birds was. It’s a super hit driven industry just like AAA is and the press will no longer be able to ignore that as they’ve been doing for a while now. This type of gaming’s not going anywhere and that’s a good thing but this is the year reality hits and people realise it isn’t all milk, honey and guaranteed riches. Mobile will continue to exist and thrive but it’s not going to replace other ways of gaming any time soon if ever. To tie into this…
  • The general public will start to tire of free-to-play Skinner Box mechanics. This right here is why I can’t stand most mobile games. Everything’s filled with microtransactions, nags to spend money and a damn store front between every level, whether it makes design sense or not. It’s a terrible, exploitive way to design games, I hate it and I’ve already heard more than a few other people who are tired of it too. When people look at their credit card statements and realise those 5 $0.99 games they bought actually cost more like $25 in total in order to make them good and not just grind fests, they get frustrated and I think we’ll see more of that. This mechanic isn’t going away but I do think we’re going to start seeing mobile games that offer complete experiences for a higher price.
  • The WiiU will be a modest success. I’m sure Nintendo realises that much like mobile is now, the Wii’s growth was fashion driven and I’m sure they have no such expectations with the WiiU and have budgeted accordingly. I got one of these for Christmas and despite some dumb decisions they made (largely regarding patch structure, DRM and the GamePad’s battery, all of which can be fixed), this is an amazing platform that offers a lot of promise and uniqueness. This isn’t a Wii with a low-rent tablet attached and anyone who thinks so is either uninformed or more likely an Apple fanboy. I still don’t see Nintendo winning over third parties in a big way with this but as always, their own stunning developer talent will carry the WiiU to profitability.
  • The Vita will go from limping to crawling. Naming the Vita one of my disappointments of 2012 hurt because I love this thing so much. It’s incredible hardware and it’s a steal at $250 and it shows how you can do good portable gaming without compromise but no one’s making games for it. Even when they’re hurting bad though, Sony’s not one to throw in the towel and I don’t think they will here. They’ll keep pushing it and I do believe it will continue to sell small numbers and probably will never be a runaway success but I do think it will advance enough this year to keep owners like myself in some decent content. I also believe Sony’s next home system will give it a big push but more on that later.
  • Console shovelware is dead. It’s already happening and good bloody riddance! The Wii and DS were kind of the last bastions for the vulture publishers who make their living cranking out cheap, garbage games for $30-$40 in the hopes of catching suckers at Wal-Mart. The increased development costs of the new systems (which many believe to be 2-3x what they are now at a minimum) will make this slimy practice an impossible model. These publishers won’t simply move to mobile either because there’s already too much garbage in that space and because they were run by scummy businesspeople who didn’t really understand the industry as a whole, they won’t know how to adapt to the realities of the mobile market and will likely just up and die off. They deserve to rot.
  • The first major Kickstarter disaster will happen and will test people’s faith in the crowdfunding model. I think this model of funding games is brilliant and I spent way too much on Kickstarters this year. However, at least one of these projects is either not going to come out and zero out everybody’s “investment” or it will come out, be far below the majority’s expectations and people will feel ripped off. There have just been too many projects and a big portion of those are fuelled by rose-tinted nostalgic expectations. I know I’m probably going to hate at least a couple of the finished projects that I backed. No disrespect to Brian Fargo and I so hope Wasteland 2 is killer but inXile’s track record is not good. The Peter Molyneux and David Braben projects are also just gross and while perfectly legit, abuse the Kickstarter spirit in my opinion. The thing is, I fully knew what I was getting into when I backed them and the whole point of Kickstarter and that you roll the dice and take your chances. Most people don’t know that though or they say they do but don’t really mean it. When one of these games comes out to poor reviews or worse yet, doesn’t come out at all, a lot of people are going to feel burned and run away from crowdfunding. The people that do get it will continue to make it a viable means of indie development which is awesome but much like mobile, we’re still in the honeymoon phase.
  • The OUYA will come out and find niche success. I don’t really think the OUYA folks believe this is going to be the thing that overtakes Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo but I also think the fanboy press who largely hated on this thing not because of it’s ideas but because it’s Android and called it no less than a scam were dead wrong. None of them will do the right thing and eat crow of course but I didn’t expect it as such. Developer kits for this have already shipped whereas the press’ golden boy project I’ll talk about next is delayed until March, maybe. There seems to be a lot of developer hype for this and I think it’s a really cool idea. I actually backed it but had to reduce my pledge due to money issues but if this makes it to market, I’ll happily grab one to try it out.
  • The Oculus Rift will come out late and underwhelm. The same press outlets who have been dumping on OUYA have used such fashionable terms as “the future” to describe this thing. I think it’s very cool and if it does what it does well and gets game support, I’ll totally get one. However, all attempts at virtual reality have proven cumbersome and not generally worth the experience and I’ve seen nothing to indicate this will be otherwise. I do think this could find niche success but I think the press’ own hype of this will be to its detriment when normal consumers start getting their hands on it. I’ll be happy to be wrong about this.
  • Layoffs, studios closures and the viability of AAA development will be a bigger story than ever. This was one of the dominating themes of 2012 and as we go through yet another year waiting for new consoles, I think it’s only going to get worse. Sales are falling (no one’s 100% sure of why but many think it’s not just the normal end-of-cycle downturn), costs are set to skyrocket and anything that isn’t a sure fire hit is a recipe for financial catastrophe. Any studio that hasn’t consistently pumped out critical and commercial successes can’t get work anymore and we now have fewer publishers able to fund new AAA projects than ever before. I love AAA gaming and it pains me greatly to see it in such decline but unless people get bored of mobile games and come running back to it, I don’t see how they fix this going forward. My hope is that this is an adjustment and the industry will realign itself and come out stronger but that requires new players to enter the space and no one is.
  • Valve’s Steam box will not release this year but will enter the promised beta phase. My feeling is it will be a standardised PC design that runs customised Linux with Steam on it. And for that reason, I will probably not care because it will have a fraction of my library available to me and most of it is going to be indie stuff I don’t need to play on my TV or that I can play by running an HDMI cable from my laptop. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a cool idea and from the way they’ve talked about it being able to run competing software, it might even be Valve’s own attempt at an OUYA-like thing which could be something special indeed.
  • Steam on Linux will remain niche at best. Despite the hypocrisy of Valve and others towards Windows 8, I do get where some of their concerns are rooted and I share them. However, to think Linux is going to ever gain mainstream adoption of any kind, especially gaming at this stage is a pipe dream. Even the versions of it that are designed to be “desktop friendly” are a nightmare to maintain, drivers are a mess and the community as a whole is still full of elitists who drive the mainstream away and like it that way. All that’s fine, I’ve got nothing against any of that if that’s the way you want a platform to be but all of those things mean it will never take over Windows. Kudos to Valve for making a concerted effort to make the platform viable for gaming and I do hope they can succeed in some way. But if they do, it won’t be for a long time to come.
  • Cross-media gaming will be attempted multiple times and never take off. Frank Gibeau from EA as well as babbling heads like Kevin Dent say that big gaming franchises have to have components everywhere. Beyond your console or PC game, there has to be a tie-in product on your phone, your tablet, your browser and anywhere else in order to keep you engaged at all times. I think this is a dumb idea and a waste of developer talent and resources. EA tried it with Mass Effect 3 and all the tie-in content sucked and no one really cared as far as I can tell. I won’t talk about this too much here because I have a future blog post about it planned.
  • There will be no new games announced or released from Valve this year (Dota 2 excepted). Forget Half-Life 2: Episode 3, we will get zilch from them in 2013. Between their new hardware experiment, Steam for Linux and whatever else, they aren’t going to be in a rush to put anything out. I excepted Dota 2 from this because it’s technically out to anyone who wants it already but it may exit beta.
  • DayZ standalone will launch late and be a buggy, hacker ridden mess like all Bohemia Interactive launches. Don’t get me wrong, I think the ideas of DayZ are absolutely fantastic, even if I burned out on the game after a month and I respect Bohemia as a developer a ton for finding a super tight niche and thriving in it. But the fact remains that their launch track record is abysmal and I don’t expect that to change with the standalone DayZ game. I hope they buck the trend this time because they might have the birth of a new genre on their hands and they’d be foolish to burn it right at the start.

Next-Gen Consoles

This gets its own section because there’s just too much to talk about regarding the next Xbox and PlayStation. There’s no doubt in my mind that these machines will be radically different from anything that’s come before. They have to be because making themselves stand out against phones and tablets (for better or worse) is a must.

  • Both the next Microsoft and Sony systems will be announced and shipped this year. Rumour is the next Xbox was supposed to come out in 2012 and got delayed for major retooling. The industry can’t wait any more, new hardware has to happen this year or there will be no one left to make stuff for it.
  • Both platforms will use far fewer specialised parts and be more like PCs than ever. It’s cheaper, most of the off-the-shelf parts are more powerful and most importantly, it’s much easier and faster to develop for. The days of Cell processors and weird memory allocation issues are over, they have to be. I’m guessing each system will have a minimum of 4GB RAM and hard drives will be standard but not SSDs.
  • Both platforms will offer every title in every tier for sale digitally on day one. Sony’s already trying this with select PS3 games. We’ve reached a tipping point where despite the telecartel’s best efforts, broadband is becoming a viable way to get large content and video game retail is losing its stranglehold on publishers and platform holders. By selling games digitally, the useless middleman who rips off the industry and consumers with used games gets cut out, pricing flexibility and sales are easy obtained and everyone makes more money. Retail is the only reason this wasn’t done before and Microsoft and Sony realise it’s time to throw caution to the wind and just do it. Whether I embrace this depends on whether they do DRM intelligently. They can look to Nintendo for how not to do it.
  • Free-to-play will become a big deal on consoles. Again, Sony tried this first with DUST 514 and Microsoft tried it with an XBLA title that wasn’t very good. However, they both know how much money there is to be made here, Sony especially since free-to-play is where Sony Online Entertainment makes most of its money now. The ability to handle microtransactions will exist at the system level and seamlessly integrate into both platform’s store front systems. For this to work though, another major change must happen and that is…
  • Console certification processes will continue to exist but will significantly lighten and be sped up. Free-to-play titles live and die on how quickly they can iterate. PlanetSide 2 has probably had a dozen or more patches since it left beta and it’s a better game for it. If each of those patches required weeks of sitting in certification limbo, it would have been disastrous. One of the big complaints from developers big and small over the last year has been how expensive and unnecessarily burdensome the console certification process is. Given that numerous games still ship completely broken or in some cases unfinished, it’s clearly not working as it is. Games shouldn’t have to wait weeks to make sure they prompt you to select your storage device and specifically tell you “Don’t turn off your console” when they’re saving data. I don’t know enough about the current processes to know how they will be streamlined but this must and will happen.
  • SmartGlass will be a big deal for Xbox and Vita integration will be big for PlayStation. Being able to have your console content interact with your phone or tablet is largely a dumb gimmick right now but Nintendo is showing how you can do it in unique and interesting ways. Microsoft will expand their SmartGlass platform to make this a much bigger (yet still optional) component of the gaming and media experience on Xbox. I believe Sony has plans to do something similar but on a more unique scale with the Vita due to the things it offers that phones and tablets can’t. I don’t know if tightly integrating the Vita into the home PlayStation experience can save the platform but I really hope it breathes new life into it.
  • Motion gaming is over. The Kinect was a fad and it’s largely dried up and almost no one’s making games for it any more, certainly nothing with a decent budget. Move died even quicker. The public’s got over motion gaming and I don’t think putting it in the box with the next systems is going to make it popular again. No matter how precise you make it, it’s still not the best way to play games. The next Xbox might support the current Kinect but I don’t think we’ll see another one.
  • Like PC, AAA games will be only a single segment of the gaming experiences available on consoles. This industry simply can’t afford to focus on AAA content exclusively, especially since costs and risks are only going to get more insane. But variety is good and despite some incredible gems coming out of console downloadable services (including half of my top 10 games of 2012), there’s really only the AAA stuff and the high-end downloadable stuff. I believe that free-to-play and a newly refocused effort on promoting and fostering smaller indie development, consoles are suddenly going to have the wide variety of game types, production values and price points that you could previously only get on PC and on mobile to a lesser extent. I think this is going to be the single biggest paradigm shift in the history of the console industry and it’s sorely overdue. This is what’s going to keep it relevant against up and coming platforms.
  • Sony will offer backwards compatibility via their Gaikai acquisition at some point but likely not at launch. They bought that company to probably eventually make PlayStation a platform that isn’t dependant on hardware but for now, I could see them using it this way since the rumoured radical hardware changes in the next console will likely make built-in backwards compatibility impossible. I don’t know if you’ll buy individual games or a subscription service or maybe some kind of hybrid tied into PlayStation Plus. Personally, I’d happy pay a few bucks a month to get access to a huge PS2 and PSP library. I do sincerely hope people who made PSN purchases on PS3 will get automatic Gaikai versions. I’m not counting on it though.
  • Microsoft will not offer retail game backwards compatibility but will offer it for certain XBLA titles like the 360 does with original Xbox games. I don’t think they want to risk pissing off people who will lose access to everything XBLA but they also aren’t going to go through the headache of making every game work. Most XBLA titles never pushed the 360′s processing power very hard so in theory, software backwards compatibility could be enough for most of those titles. I imagine they will also keep the 360 on sale and the Live system for that system up and running for a while.
  • PC gaming will keep getting bigger and challenge the notion of whether many hardcore gamers even need a console. Due to the PC-like architecture rumoured to be powering the new systems, making quality PC ports will be easier than ever and with that goes the reason many PC gamers had for also owning a console. If I could be assured that the majority of AAA PC ports were well done and more like they’ve been in the last year, I’d seriously consider only buying the next consoles when they were cheaper for exclusives.

Technology

  • The Apple fashion trend will finally begin to normalise but the press will ignore it. I’ll say it again before fanboys lose their minds: This does not mean I think Apple’s going away. They aren’t and despite being a mean-spirited, greedy company riding a choreographed public and press perception, it’s a very good thing that they’re around. However, between market saturation, maturing competition and people realising that a lot of their products are underpowered, overpriced and riding hype and form rather than function, their growth is going to start to go from bubble to something more realistic. This is what happens with bubbles. Their stock price has already slid 25% in 2012 but you know how many stories about it I’ve seen from the numerous tech sites I follow? Zero, even though many of these sites live blog their earnings calls. There’s a trend in modern media to build people or companies up high and then kick them back down but that’s never how it’s worked with Apple. They always get a huge free pass that others don’t and I think that’s going to continue. The market’s waking up though and whether fanboys like it or not, a lot of people still don’t use Apple products and many more realise their stuff isn’t necessarily the best at everything.
  • The Apple television is not coming. I made this prediction last year but the rumour won’t die so I’m reserving the right to make it again. Nearly everyone who is big in the TV business is bleeding to death right now. The HDTV market is saturated with people who see no compelling reason to upgrade. Paying 30-50% more for a screen with an Apple logo and the guts of a $99 Apple TV box (especially when many already have iPads you can plug into any TV) is simply not going to happen. Steve Jobs had one line in his biography where he said he’d figured out how to innovate in the TV space. Only for Apple does that one throwaway bit of information lead to an endless stream of speculation on how they’ll somehow revolutionise the TV space. It’s not going to happen.
  • The iPhone 5S will be the next model but in the Fall, not the Spring. Many think that after Apple burned their hardcore by announcing a newer iPad only six months after the previous one that the same thing would start happening with the iPhone too. Aside from the fact that iPhone sales are down because the 5 doesn’t offer anything worth upgrading for, the 6 month iPad debacle was I think just an experiment to see how far they can push people. I don’t think they’re going to keep doing that.
  • BlackBerry 10 will sustain RIM, not catapult them forward. By all accounts, it’s a fantastic operating system and their stock has been reflecting the buzz. The problem is that all 3 of the other major mobile platforms all tie into something bigger. iOS ties into Apple, Android ties into Google’s many services and Windows Phone ties into PCs. All RIM has is mobile and that’s going to make things tougher for them. I imagine that it’s extreme manageability, security features and flexibility will still make it the ideal corporate platform and most of their current corporate and government base will continue using them, as will a niche group of others. But their previous leadership was too short sighted to see the consumer battle approaching and they’ve lost it. I think they’ll refocus on what they have and serving that well.
  • PC sales will slide a bit as the industry normalises but the slide will not be huge and it will settle. While I think tablets are a horrible way to do anything but the lightest computing tasks, there’s a big segment of the population that only has to do the lightest tasks. Those people are buying tablets instead of PCs and with good reason. In addition, a weakening global economy means enterprise spending is slowing across the board and that’s where a lot of PC sales come from. The PC will be the dominant computing platform for the foreseeable future, anyone who says otherwise is clueless. But the industry has been red hot for too long and some cooling should happen. I hope this will thing out some of the garbage vendors and maybe stop the race to the bottom for a while.
  • Windows 8 will sell well below expectations. I think the hyperbolic hate for Windows 8 is way overblown but I get and share some of the big concerns about it. I’ve used it but not full-time and at some point soon, I will be upgrading my gaming rig to it so I can properly judge for myself. Depending on who you ask, it’s either selling OK or worse than Vista which was a dud as Windows sales go and for good reason, it was garbage. Some sales softness can be attributed to slowing PC sales but there has rightly or wrongly been some poison injected into the mainstream consciousness about Windows 8. Microsoft’s been desperate to chase the anti-choice, closed ecosystem model that Apple made popular and I think that’s stupid. They should be running the other way, embracing the opposite side and evangelising that. I believe that the poor sales of Windows 8 and the Surface tablets will cause them to re-evaluate what they’re doing with Windows and maybe back off or make optional some of what people hate about it.
  • Windows Phone 8 will rise to a respectable market share. I was wrong about this last year with Windows Phone 7 but my girlfriend is in love with WP8, as is everyone who buys a phone with it. There’s been lost of buzz slowly building about it and when the platform launched in China, it sold out everywhere in 2 hours, far outpacing the iPhone 5, even though it also set a record. Android is decimating all right now and that’s not going to change, nor are a sizable number of Apple faithful going to jump ship. But there’s still a big market out there of people who don’t own smartphones or who want to switch away from BlackBerry or older Android devices and I think there’s a big chance for Windows Phone there. After playing with my girlfriend’s Lumia 920, it makes my BlackBerry 9900 look last century and if I could afford a new phone tomorrow, it’s without question the one I would get.
  • The TV industry will make a new push from 3D TVs to 2K or 4K TVs. I said we would see no mention of 2K/4K TVs last year and I was right, as I was about 3D dying off. However, the Japanese TV manufacturers are bleeding out fast and they need something, anything to resuscitate their fortunes. I don’t think the market is ready for 2K/4K yet but damned if they aren’t going to try to make it ready.
  • Sharp will go bankrupt and Panasonic will have a massive restructuring. Whether Sharp goes the Japanese equivalent of Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 I don’t know but there’s no way for them to recover from the death spiral they’re in. Panasonic is already talking about shedding Sanyo and I think that’s only the tip of the iceberg for them. Sony is well underway with it’s restructuring now but Panasonic’s going to announce some kind of similar radical plan that will involve much deeper cuts due to them not being as diversified as Sony.
  • We will start to see more mainstream PCs come standard with SSDs or a combination of SSD and hard drive. SSDs have gotten so incredibly cheap that it’s becoming worth it for PC manufacturers to put them in medium-class models just to boast about how fast they are. There are even low-end SSDs that are so inexpensive, they could even make it into some of the cheap big box systems.

And after another epic length post, there’s all my predictions for 2013! There’s a lot of uncertainty in not only the tech and gaming industries but in the world in general. Still, I think there’s a lot to look forward to and I’m very curious to see what lies ahead. I hope your 2012 was good to you and yours and that your 2013 will be even better. I’m very stoked for a lot of things coming in my life this year and may only my good predictions be the right ones. Happy New Year once again!

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Revisiting My Bold Predictions for 2012

1 Comment Posted by on December 31, 2012

The end of 2012 is upon us. Personally, it’s been a Hell of a year, not just in the industries I observe with interest but for me in general. My girlfriend passed the UFE and will be a Chartered Accountant in a few months, we moved from our small apartment into a house (still renting though), we got a puppy and my company reverse merged with another company, went public as a result and changed it’s 30+ year name in the process. And that’s just a bit of it. It was very good overall though and I think 2013′s going to be even better! Before I make my bold predictions for the new year, I must of course revisit those I made for the year that’s just ending. Go here to find them as I will only mention their titles here and more in-depth explanations are included in the original post. I’m going to ape a neat system the crew at Gamers With Jobs came up with and rate how accurate I was in terms of a score. I made 30 predictions (29 “real” ones and 1 joke) so that’s the total the score can be. If I was mostly or totally right on a prediction, I get 1 point. If I was half-right or had some critical information wrong but the gist was accurate, I get half a point. And finally, if I was dead wrong, I get zilch. I’m also only scoring the bolded parts which are the actual predictions, not the additional details which are just general thoughts. This is scored by me of course but hey, this ain’t scientific or nothin’. I will try to judge myself honestly. :)

Off we go!

Gaming

  • THQ will manage to secure additional investment or credit but this will be their last gasp at survival before they run out of cash (half point.) As far as I know, they didn’t get additional money, they were just able to tap a line of credit they hadn’t used. They still ran out of cash and declared bankruptcy just recently, being swept up by a private equity firm. Danny Bilson left but Brian Farrell’s still around and his long-term future there is still unknown.
  • GSC Game World’s upcoming news will be that the company is indeed dead (1 point.) The company still exists but has no staff so it’s basically dead. A new studio did in fact start up with the old staff but they’re making a free-to-play online game in a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-like universe but not with the actual IP which they couldn’t secure. A bit of a battle has started up between the remnants of GSC and bitComposer Games over the IP.
  • The 3DS will continue to sell well at the current price point and the Vita will not do the numbers Sony wants but will do enough to keep the platform afloat (1 point.) I was right on about the 3DS and not fully on the Vita but I’m calling it a win because while it did underperform, Sony keeps saying they’re backing it going forward and there are games coming, though not many. I so hope the Vita can find it’s footing.
  • The successor to the Xbox 360 will be announced at E3 and the PS4 will be teased only (0 points.) No other way to say it, I was wrong, wrong, wrong. This is the year both will be announced but I won’t make a prediction on that specifically because it’s too obvious.
  • The WiiU will get a price and a ship date in the holiday quarter (1 point.) Bang on, though this wasn’t exactly a stretch. They also did solve the problem of multiple tablets but in a half-assed way that’s not close to ready yet. I think the launch lineup was OK and it’s been selling out but talk has been soft so it’s too early to tell how it’s doing.
  • The wonderful trend of analysts either talking less or the gaming press finally realising they’re not worth listening to will continue (0 points.) Why oh why couldn’t I have been right about this? It seemed like the enthusiast press was finally over leeching clicks off these hacks but they’re doing it as much as ever with even more analysts (and even purposefully obscure hacks like Dent and industry failures like Broussard) beaking off in the press all the time. This is a scourge that needs to stop.
  • This is the year where the realities of mobile development  start to become clear in the development community (1 point.) This didn’t happen to the degree I expected it to but I’m calling it a win because it has already started. Multiple promising mobile developers have died this year, largely because they foolishly believed the mobile gold rush meant nobody could fail. I’ll flesh this out more with my 2013 predictions.
  • Many Facebook developers will continue to struggle or in the case of the big boys like Zynga, show themselves to be grossly overvalued and not as big a money press as once thought (1 point.) Nailed it! Zynga’s in a death spiral, Facebook itself has a disastrous fraud-filled year and we haven’t heard a peep in months about a big new social startup. A lot of this is because most Facebook games don’t work on mobile platforms and that’s increasingly where Facebook usage is going. This field isn’t going away but much like mobile, it’s getting kicked in the face by reality instead of hype.
  • AAA publishers that are not Activision will keep losing money and AAA developers will continue to be hit-or-die (1 point.) Nailed again but again, I wish I was wrong. Most of the few AAA publishers left are either losing money or just squeaking out modest profits whereas Activision is still sucking the marrow from Blizzard and Call of Duty. Numerous developers went under this year and almost all of those can be tied to the failure of a single title. This is a dark time to be in AAA and it makes me sad.
  • Diablo III will come out some time this year and it will be a huge hit but not as big a one as Blizzard or Bobby Kotick thinks (half point.) It did come out and was a huge hit but as far as I know, it’s done extremely well. It’s up to something like 7 million sales now and despite being basically broken, the real money auction house is generating revenue. I do think that part is doing worse than Blizzard wanted but I don’t think they’re disappointed with the money the game’s made.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic will experience a sharp drop in subscribers (1 point.) Bang on. They flailed about trying out a trial model, then went to a horrible exploitive free-to-play system and by many accounts, this detonated the upper echelons of BioWare. I actually think it’s a good game, it just came out at the wrong time with a foolish business model.
  • John Riccitiello’s leadership at EA will be strongly challenged (0 points.) There were rumblings in the press that he was in trouble but nothing public happened.
  • Free-to-play will start to really shine this year in non-Asian RPG ways (1 point.) Oh yes! One of my top 10 games of the year is free-to-play and I’ve got like 5 or 6 of them installed on my PC right now. Not all of them do it right (particularly on mobile platforms) but those that do are making great games and best as I can tell, tidy profits too.
  • Half-Life 2: Episode 3/Half-Life 3 will not release this year (1 point.) Is anyone really surprised? I know Valve’s way of doing business means this won’t happen until they feel like it but seriously guys, enough is enough. This series made you a success and your fans are owed closure.
  • Highly intrusive DRM schemes on PC games will be scaled back, though DRM in general will still be an issue (1 point.) Ubisoft dropped their always-on DRM (though activations are still needed) but Diablo III embraced the horrible practice with both hands, which caused highly publicised launch nightmares. It’s definitely a lessening trend though which I am very happy to see.
  • I may potentially buy an iPad 3 to try out iOS gaming (half point.) I split a used iPad 2 with my girlfriend which is why I call this a halfsie because I did specifically say iPad 3. Overall, I’ve been very disappointed. iOS uses dated design and most mobile games that I’ve tried have been terrible. I was wrong about the iPad 3 having Retina too, they totally figured that out. If I even need a tablet of my own any time soon, it will either be Windows 8 Pro or Android.
  • SECTION SCORE: 11.5/16

Technology

  • Apple will not release a branded television (1 point.) I can’t believe I’m seemingly one of the only people who didn’t think this was obvious. There is no market for a TV that will end up costing 30-50% more (which it will have to for it to have the margins Apple wants) but which just has the guts of an Apple TV box you can buy for $99. One line from Jobs’ biography where he says he “cracked it” means exactly squat.
  • This is the year Android tablets finally become competitive (0.5 points.) I’m calling this a halfsie because while Android tablet sales are up significantly (particularly with the introduction of the Nexus tablets), the iPad still dominates the tablet market and from what I can tell, most Android apps are still made for phones exclusively or primarily. It’s getting better but it’s still not the competitor it needs to be.
  • Research In Motion will finally remove Balsillie and Lazaridis from their leadership roles at the company (1 point.) BOOM! Most of my secondary predictions were right too. Their stock plummeted but is recovering well and by all accounts, BlackBerry 10 could be something special. I really hope so, I don’t want to see this company die.
  • More than 50% of laptop models released this year will not include an optical drive (0 points.) There’s no doubt that far fewer laptops have them but I’ve not been able to find a statistic that confirms whether I’m right or not. If I can, I’ll update this but I think if more than half were ditching the optical drive, it would have made the news somewhere.
  • Hard drive prices will return to pre-flood levels (1 point.) Checking a few places online where I can buy a hard drive, I’m saying this is right.
  • Microsoft will announce a scaling back or removal of the new Start Screen in Windows 8 or make it 100% optional (0 points.) I was so wrong about this, I should almost be deducting points for it. I think the hate for Windows 8 is overblown but I do have major concerns about what it means for the future of Windows and the Start Screen is still stupid on anything that isn’t a touch screen. It’s questionable how well Windows 8 is selling right now so I hope Microsoft is taking the negative feedback to heart.
  • Windows 8 will shine on tablets and will also start to compete with Android for a big share of the iPad’s market (0.5 points.) I’m calling this a halfsie because by all accounts, Windows 8 is killer on tablets but Surface has apparently been a sales flop and the app ecosystem is not taking off like many (including myself) thought it would. This could still change but so far, it hasn’t made a dent in the market share of the other platforms.
  • Windows Phone 7 will get a massive marketing push and gain a lot of market share (0 points.) Windows Phone 7 became Windows Phone 8 and while it looks like interest and sales are ramping up, it hasn’t gained a ton of market share yet, certainly not even to make anyone besides maybe RIM nervous. My girlfriend bought a Lumia 920 though and thinks the iPhone pales in comparison to it, as do many other people. Microsoft is traditionally horrible at marketing but if they can figure that out, I still think they could have a winner here.
  • Twitter will continue to grow in popularity but still won’t figure out how to make money (1 points.) Calling it a win because it’s definitely still growing but given how there have been no stories about the financial success this year, no IPO and how they’re clamping down hard on how much third party clients can bang on their servers, I’m guessing they still don’t have a long-term business model yet.
  • Facebook will remain insanely popular but each user will do less with it (0.5 points.) It’s obviously still popular and a ton of people I know personally are using it less and less but I’m not convinced that’s the overall trend. As they continue to test the limits and patience of their users with more invasive ads and terms of use changed though, this might change.
  • 3D will continue to decline and possibly die off in the home entirely (1 point.) Most TV manufacturers are using 3D as a bullet point now but they’ve all run away from making that a reason to convince people to buy new sets. The big Japanese TV manufacturers are all nursing sucking chest wounds right now so they better figure something out fast. I was also right about how the idea of mainstream 2K or 4K TVs didn’t happen. 3D is still a thing in theatres but that’s about it.
  • Best Buy will announce a major corporate restructuring this year, closing underperforming stores and refocusing on providing high quality service (0.5 points.) If I allowed myself three quarter points, that’s what I would get because I was right about everything except the announced refocusing on high quality service. The company’s bleeding, stores have been closed and one of the original guys is trying to take the company private. Refocusing on service is the only thing that can save them but they’re still arrogantly convinced that the horrendous experience they currently offer is quality service.
  • Canadian third party Internet prices will rise but not as much as people fear (1 point.) Nailed it! Prices went up but only a little bit and as I understand it, the third party Canadian ISP industry is still squeaking out razor-thin margins. This makes me very happy to see, especially since more and more people I know are dumping the telecartels for them. They’re still fighting a tough war but I’m glad the fight’s being made.
  • I will continue to search in vain for a tech podcast that doesn’t spend most of its time fellating Apple or that realises tech news exists that doesn’t involve phones or tablets (1 point.) This was a joke prediction but I’m still right. I’ve tried me damndest to find one since dumping This is Only A Test after both the content and the attitude of the guys from that site finally drove me over the edge. I’ve yet to find another one that doesn’t continue to trumpet how Apple is our lord and saviour or that phones and tablets aren’t the only neat things in the world. It’s a shame but such is life. I don’t currently listen to any tech podcasts and I don’t really miss having one anyway.
  • SECTION SCORE: 9/14

TOTAL SCORE: 20.5/30

Overall, I’m still way more accurate than the majority of analysts that get quoted in the enthusiast press. That’s ridiculous and sad. I’m a guy with no knowledge of business or the inside scoop on anything and my largely uninformed guesses were better than guys who make orders of magnitude more than I do to spout this stuff. Insane. I’ve had better years but also worse years but to be honest, most of the stuff I was right on is stuff I would have been happy to be dead wrong about. I don’t like to be a prophet of doom but it seems like that’s my skill sometimes.

Check back tomorrow where my new predictions for 2013 will be unleashed! There will definitely be plenty of them as well as this is shaping up to be an even crazier year in gaming and tech than 2012 was.

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The Humble Entitlement Bundle

Leave a Comment Posted by on December 4, 2012

In a move that was called a betrayal by many and lauded as marketing genius by others, last week Humble Bundle put up a new package by struggling publisher THQ. They put up a bunch of their relatively recent, largely high quality AAA PC titles under the traditional pay-what-you-want model of the Humble Bundle. This is an unprecedented move for a AAA publisher but given THQ’s massive problems, desperate times call for desperate measures. Given that most of these are older titles that aren’t selling well any more, a move like this gives them a small cash infusion and also drums up awareness of several franchises that have imminent sequels in development. Sales of these sequels are vital if THQ’s to have any chance of surviving more than a few months and a Humble Bundle where they get to raise some money while also supporting great charities seems like a fantastic idea to me. I already own every game in the bundle except Red Faction: Armageddon but already bought one to get that plus the soundtracks and another to gift to a friend. I will probably buy more.

Of course, this has not been without its huge share of controversy. A number of previous Humble Bundle community supporters as well as reporters Kyle Orland, high horse enthusiast Ben Kuchera and others have slammed this package saying it cheapens the Humble Bundle brand, is a betrayal of their values and many other stabs of hyperbole. Their complaints really boil down to the fact that this package doesn’t share many traits that previous Humble Bundles have. Among them are:

-These aren’t indie games, they’re all AAA releases from the same publisher.
-The money’s going to a heartless, evil publisher and not the developers.
-The games are not DRM free, they use Steam which is a mild form of DRM.
-They only run on Windows and not also on Mac and Linux as other Humble Bundle titles traditionally have.
-This is a cynical attempt from a dying company to milk a few extra dollars for their executives before they go under.

These are all perfectly valid reasons to not so much as pay a single cent to get the bundle as you indeed can but “betraying their principals?” Give me a damn break. A bunch of incredible games (a couple of which are barely a year old) are released for literally next to nothing and supporting charity at the same time but bunch of entitled prats still whine.

Let’s get this straight guys: Humble Bundle owes you nothing. They offer products that are sold with a certain pricing model. You pay a price, you get the products promised, that’s all. They has never made it part of their mission statement that all the games will be indies, DRM free or that they will run on platforms that are little more then AAA wastelands. There has been no ideological betrayal here, no principals mangled in the name of profits. It’s all in your arrogant little heads.

THQ is on the financial ropes. Did you honestly think they were going to endure the considerable work and cost to port older, high-end games to platforms that virtually no one plays high-end games on? Don’t you think they would have already done that if there was a market there? And so what if the developers aren’t directly getting the proceeds? Last I checked, THQ surviving means the studios who developed the games (all of which are still around) get to continue to exist and employ their teams as opposed to getting shut down or sold off for pennies on the dollar. If THQ does under before Metro Last Light comes out, what do you think is going to happen to 4A Games? Nothing good I can assure you. Yes, this is a desperation move and one they wouldn’t be doing if they weren’t in dire straights. However, as someone who loves AAA games and is frankly terrified at the pace of consolidation and shrinkage in that side of the industry, I say that if this allows THQ to survive and continue making games, it’s damn well worth it.

The values supposedly being betrayed aren’t Humble Bundle’s but ones the ones whining have superimposed on them. This kind of entitled whining toward an organisation all but giving away some of the best games in recent years is a shining example of the horribly named “first world problems” meme. It’s why the indie community has a reputation for being a bunch of whiny, self-righteous, pretentious douchebags. This is a reputation I think is largely unfounded but it becomes much harder to argue that point when I see things like this happen. Those who are saying they will boycott Humble Bundle in the future because of this “betrayal” are only hurting the future indie developers and charities the organisation supports, all in the name of making a pointless statement based on their own vicarious ego stroking. They and the reporters supporting them need to come down from their ivory towers. Humble Bundle helps charity, they aren’t one themselves and you never had a say in their ideals. If you think you can do this better than them, I implore you to go and start up your own organisation based on the nobler goals you seem to think you espouse.

As I write this, the bundle is currently sitting at $3.4 million raised from 606,473 contributors and there’s still almost 9 days to go. I believe this is already a record for Humble Bundle and if not, it surely will be by the time the campaign ends. The silent majority still seems to prefer to buy rather than bitch and I’m happy to see that. I was already hoping THQ would survive but if it does, I can now take extra satisfaction knowing it’s done so in spite of the entitled idiots who would rather see less good games made simply because an organisation betrayed principals they only wish it had. Get over yourselves people.

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Gamers Should Be Mad About 38 Studios’ Failure

1 Comment Posted by on May 24, 2012

This afternoon, 38 Studios officially laid off their entire staff of 380 people and is closing both their studios. This after running out of cash following a rather public scene with the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, a state agency which loaned them almost $75 million dollars to relocate there and to fund the development of their long cooking and until recently, never shown MMO Project Copernicus. Employees are due almost a month’s back pay that they likely won’t get, their health insurance lapsed two days ago and they reportedly only found out when a staffer’s pregnant wife was told by her doctor. The Rhode Island taxpayers are also now on the hook to absorb the cost of the loan which is going to end up being $100 million after interest.

38 Studios was started by former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling. When he retired from baseball, he wanted to take his love of video games and do something big with it so he started up a studio to make an MMO. He staffed it with top talent and brought on Todd McFarlane and R.A. Salvatore to help create the vast universe for it.  It was a big deal and got a lot of people excited include yours truly. A couple of years later, they bought Big Huge Games who were about to be shuttered by THQ. Big Huge Games was working on an RPG for PC and consoles and the idea was to take that game and retool it to be part of their new universe as a lead-in to the MMO. It was a big, grandiose plan and it was a breath of fresh air to see a new AAA studio start up with big ideas. In 5 years, nothing was seen of Project Copernicus but in January, Big Huge Games’ project was released as Kingdom’s of Amalur: Reckoning. I haven’t played it beyond the demo but it was well reviewed and sold nicely for a new IP, exceeding publisher EA’s expectations. Fast forward to now and the studio is collapsing, a lot of people are out of work and health insurance in a very small state that now has to absorb the cost of that, all we’ve seen of Project Copernicus is one rushed trailer that showed little and the Rhode Island government revealed that even though Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning sold 1.2 million copies worldwide, it would have needed to do three times that just to break even.

Despite this very public and abject failure, some people are still trying to defend the company, Curt Schilling and his management. I admit that most of what we have to go on is accounts of the battle with the state in the press but we do know a fair amount of reliable information. I will also admit that I’ve been personally burnt by bad management who got away scott free before so I do have a bit of my own emotional influence in this situation. But even based on the sparse details we know so far, they all point to a company that was horribly managed and screwed a lot of people who can’t afford it while the top dogs basically walked away from the smouldering wreckage. That’s not defensible and it really burns me to see people try to defend it. Let’s break this down some.

To their credit, 38 Studios saved Big Huge Games from being closed by an at the time schizophrenic THQ who bought them just a year prior and was already trying to dump them, seemingly not confident in what they were working on. No one knows what that deal was worth but given that Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning apparently needed to have blockbuster sales that are almost never seen be a new IP, chances are it and the continuing development costs were in the many millions. Still, they gave them the time they needed and a good game came out of it. Concurrently with this, they were developing a AAA MMO with the same new IP, at a time when the common MMO business model was still to charge people to buy the game plus a monthly subscription fee. In the years since, this model has been proven impossible for any MMO that isn’t World of Warcraft and many failures litter the genre as proof. Even Big Huge Games’ former owner THQ recently took their long in development MMO and made it not an MMO anymore. Still, 38 Studios continued to plug away at Project Copernicus, saying nothing about it, even as they were in a financial death spiral which they obviously knew about. I’m sure they spent this time trying to secure more funding but no one wants to invest in AAA MMOs right now. Instead of adjusting their business goals to something that may have a better chance, they continued pouring money down the sinkhole and now Project Copernicus will likely never see release. All the creative effort is for nothing and a lot of people now have to hope they don’t get sick while trying to find work in an industry that’s not very healthy in general right now. This will also likely dissuade Rhode Island from ever investing into the video game industry again and will shake general investor confidence in AAA game development even more. When a team of supposedly top talent backed by a multi-millionaire fails so spectacularly, what would you do if asked to bankroll a new AAA studio?

Meanwhile, what’s Curt Schilling lost? Not much really. He apparently has put a chunk of his own fortune into the company but used the Rhode Island loan to pay at least some of that back. He still has substantial wealth from his baseball career and while his employees bounce rent cheques, he will still be living very comfortably. There’s also the irony of Schilling being a huge proponent of small government but his politics don’t matter much here. Many Kingdoms of Amalur fans say that he was very passionate about the company and their games and regularly engaged with his community on forums and the like. I applaud him for that, it’s more than many developers do. But creative passion often distorts reality–something it certainly seems to have done for him–and passion doesn’t put roofs over your employees’ heads or food on their tables. And it certainly doesn’t magically complete an MMO that was started 5 years ago and yet not even announced or named yet.

It frustrates me to see people defend this train wreck. Sure, we don’t know all the facts but we know enough to see that many poor decisions were being made at 38 Studios and that they must have known for a long time now that they couldn’t survive to see Project Copernicus released. Yet they made no substantive changes to their scope and their employees and Rhode Island taxpayers were left in the dark until it was too late. Now they’re all screwed but the people at the top are walking away with very little lost beyond pride. I’m sorry, that’s wrong. When similar situations happen at Enron or the banks (yes, on a much larger scale), people are rightfully furious but when it happens to a place that put out a game some enjoyed, apparently we should sympathise with the company and to not do so is to take shots at at the people who made the game. No, that’s not how it works and it’s possible for rational people to separate the talent from the management and the latter is what failed catastrophically here.

Having been where the 38 Studios employees are right now, I feel horrible for them and all the hard work they have devoted to a creative project that will likely never see the light of day. Big Huge Games in particular has been through a roller coaster ride the last few years and has been one of the most under-appreciated developers in the industry. I hope that a competent company will pick them up and give them a stable home but with most of the big publishers terrified of risk and AAA development shrinking, I don’t see that happening. The Project Copernicus team are also now stuck in a state with virtually no other game development jobs and no shipped project to put on their CVs. Schilling and his failed management team will likely not be formally held to account for this and they don’t deserve anyone’s sympathy. What happened here may be common practice in modern business but that’s exactly the problem, especially at a company headed by people who are supposedly so passionate about what they were doing. The people at the top are supposed to have final accountability and should be the ones that absorb the brunt of the hits, not deflect them downwind to the rank and file. When my previous business failed, my partner and I had no other employees besides ourselves but we ran the place and ultimately, it was our failure and I will always see it as such. This is no different but where my business was barely a blip of an entity, 38 Studios was a large company and like all large things, fell hard.

This was a business disaster, one that’s done substantial damage to an already frail AAA industry and gamers who still want to see these kinds of games get made by independent studios should be mad about this. To treat Schilling and his management team as the victims here is disrespectful to those who just lost their livelihoods. I wouldn’t wish their circumstances on my worst enemy and it infuriates me to see people standing up for their failed leaders. There’s no doubt that game development of any kind is a risky business and I’m sure many of these employees had a good idea of the potential hurdles. That doesn’t make keeping them in the dark until a taxpayer-funded loan payment bounces any more excusable. If Schilling and the management didn’t want to be in the crosshairs for this loss, then they shouldn’t have been the management and Schilling shouldn’t have put his former jersey number in the logo and put himself out there as the face of the company. They let a lot of people down, they deserve to feel bad for it and we as devoted followers of this industry shouldn’t sympathise with their failure.

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The THQ Drama Continues – Is there really any hope left?

1 Comment Posted by on January 25, 2012

I’ve said before that I like to not only follow creative mediums but often the businesses behind them as I think it’s valuable to know where the stuff we enjoy comes from. One of my early posts here was about THQ, specifically taking the piss out of Danny Bilson and what I believed was a botched strategy that attempted–and largely failed–to revitalise the company. Since then, THQ’s fortunes have gotten markedly worse with their one potential saving grace of Saint’s Row The Third selling well but not as well as they wanted and rumours of dwindling cash reserves, massive cancellations and the possible sale of the company, which were promptly denied and followed up by a statement that they are dumping licensed games and refocusing on core products. Their stock price is well under a dollar and they will be faced with delisting if they can’t turn things around fast. In short, things are dire at what is still the world’s fourth largest publisher.

This morning, NeoGAF posted a lengthy (and I must say very poorly written) letter from an anonymous group claiming to be made up of ex-employees and shareholders. You can read it for yourself but if its contents are true, it paints a very unflattering picture of the top management and a trend of poor decisions and leadership that goes back many years. It shows that the company’s problems are historically rooted and not just a result of bad luck over the last couple of years but of someone running the show who doesn’t really seem to understand the business they’re in. I still maintain that many strategic and creative decisions made under Danny Bilson’s watch (like turning away Respawn, Homefront and Red Faction Armageddon) were bad ones and hurt the company big. However, it also appears as though many of those bad decisions and many past ones were influenced by an overall poor strategic vision employed by Brian Farrell, long-time CEO. I’m not sure if Bilson’s ideas are what THQ needs to save itself but in light of this new information, I will admit that I was probably harder on him than I needed to be. Plus there’s that whole uDraw things which even before I admitted he had nothing to do with. That facepalmingly dumb project was all Farrell.

Despite a plummeting stock price, botched initiatives, massive layoffs and studio closures, the top echelon’s of THQ’s management still took home millions in compensation, millions the company desperately needs to stay afloat. Yet for some reason, shareholders don’t seem to be fighting for a change. Whether or not Danny Bilson should be there is debatable but at this point, I think there’s no question that the CEO and other members of the company’s leadership don’t know what they’re doing and don’t know how to carry the company forward in a new direction. They need to be kicked to the curb and soon if they want to have any hope of recovering. With so many stories in the news of ruthless shareholder rebellions at other companies just for failing to meet a quarter of two’s expectations, I don’t know how Farrell & Co. have survived this long without being overturned.

As I’ve said before (and will say again), the triple-A video game industry is in a bad way right now and it needs more competition, not less. This is a brutal industry and it requires adaptive leadership with razor-sharp business wit and a pulse on industry trends. Brian Farrell is not providing that and if the open letter is true, hasn’t been for a long time. There are a lot of employees, shareholders and gamers who want to see THQ succeed and grow. They clearly can’t do that with the current team at the helm. They gotta’ go.

Business, Predictions, Video Games , , , ,

My Bold Predictions for 2012

1 Comment Posted by on January 6, 2012

Like many other places on the web, every year a bunch of us over at Gamers With Jobs like to make bold gaming and technology predictions for the upcoming year. A large and growing group of contributors and forum members pitch into this, though it’s usually only the forum members who check and grade their predictions before making new ones. I made a bunch over there for this year but I’ve decided to put them here as well where I can go into a little more detail about them and also add some new ones I’ve thought of since the “gentlemen’s deadline” for editing there has passed. So without further ado, here’s what I’ve got for the next twelve months:

Gaming

  • THQ will manage to secure additional investment or credit but this will be their last gasp at survival before they run out of cash. If they stop taking stupid risks for a while, they can maybe turn it around but it’s unlikely. Danny Bilson’s strategy was a failure, as were Brian Farrell’s insane uDraw HD plans. Both of these people will inexplicably stay employed there in spite of these.
  • GSC Game World’s upcoming news will be that the company is indeed dead. However, a new studio will start up and take over their IP and hopefully release S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2.
  • The 3DS will continue to sell well at the current price point and the Vita will not do the numbers Sony wants but will do enough to keep the platform afloat. As usual, the gaming press will continue to trumpet that the handheld market has “moved on” and will not admit they were wrong despite all the evidence to the contrary. Mobile gaming is here to stay but dedicated handhelds still have a major place.
  • The successor to the Xbox 360 will be announced at E3 and the PS4 will be teased only. Neither will get a ship date or a heavy reveal of pricing or details until current console sales slow down which they won’t for at least the first half of the year. Regardless of when the slowdown happens, neither of these platforms will release in 2012.
  • The WiiU will get a price and a ship date in the holiday quarter. Nintendo will announce they’ve solved the problem of having multiple WiiU tablets paired to one console. It will once again have a weak launch lineup and will initially sell OK but not great.
  • The wonderful trend of analysts either talking less or the gaming press finally realising they’re not worth listening to will continue. Many will love seeing Pachter fade into obscurity where he belongs. This has been tested a little bit already this year but we’ll see.
  • This is the year where the realities of mobile development  start to become clear in the development community. Those being that it’s much like AAA in that most titles fail, the majority of the revenue goes to a small few and that costs are quickly spiralling out of indie-affordable range. Mobile development will not slow this year however. I will detail this more in a later On Gaming’s Future post.
  • Many Facebook developers will continue to struggle or in the case of the big boys like Zynga, show themselves to be grossly overvalued and not as big a money press as once thought. Facebook development will continue but will be talked about less and less as the future. This will also be discussed in an On Gaming’s Future post.
  • AAA publishers that are not Activision will keep losing money and AAA developers will continue to be hit-or-die. This is a trend that I suspect will get worse as costs continue to go up in the next generation. Larger scale industry rumblings on how to keep AAA viable (or if it’s even possible) will start to be heard. A lot fewer AAA titles will be released this year both due to the industry’s money bleeding but also as they scale back development on the current generation to ramp up for the next one. This will also be discussed in an On Gaming’s Future post.
  • Diablo III will come out some time this year and it will be a huge hit but not as big a one as Blizzard or Bobby Kotick thinks. The real money auction house will be a profit generator. The cracks in Kotick’s leadership style will continue to show themselves as everything they own that isn’t Call of Duty continues to decline.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic will experience a sharp drop in subscribers. This will partially be because of people getting bored and partially because of the dictatorial way EA is treating the player base. Enough will stick around to keep the game profitable month to month but the long-term numbers will be well below expectations and it will not be EA’s saving grace. It will not go free-to-play in 2012.
  • John Riccitiello’s leadership at EA will be strongly challenged. I applaud some of his strategies but they haven’t been working out and shareholders won’t tolerate these massive losses they’re racking up for much longer, especially is SWTOR starts to drop.
  • Free-to-play will start to really shine this year in non-Asian RPG ways. Bigger scale, North American focused titles like Tribes: Ascend and FireFall will do well and show that higher budget titles can work with this business model.
  • Half-Life 2: Episode 3/Half-Life 3 will not release this year.
  • Highly intrusive DRM schemes on PC games will be scaled back, though DRM in general will still be an issue. Things like requiring persistent connections will become a rarity. As usual, entitled douchebags who think they deserve everything for free will keep stealing content, publishers will continue to whine about it rather than deal with it intelligently and Mike Masnick will continue to defend the thieves as if stealing is a right.
  • I may potentially buy an iPad 3 to try out iOS gaming. Many minds will be blown. Also, the iPad 3 will have a much nicer screen but it won’t be a “retina display” because they can’t get the cost low enough on it for that size.

Technology

  • Apple will not release a branded television. The market is too competitive and there is no room for a TV that costs 30-50% more when you can add the features it would have to any TV with a $100 Apple TV box. There will be an updated Apple TV with some rudimentary iOS features and app support.
  • This is the year Android tablets finally become competitive. Ice Cream Sandwich will be the version of the operating system that shines on the tablet platform and other manufacturers will start to compete on price as well as features. iPad will remain the dominant tablet but Android will make big inroads.
  • Research In Motion will finally remove Balsillie and Lazaridis from their leadership roles at the company. They will announce a new plan to restructure both their business and design philosophies to stop the bleeding and get competitive again. Many of those steps will not be taken this year however and their market share will drop a minimum of another 15%. I will discuss this more in a future post.
  • More than 50% of laptop models released this year will not include an optical drive. Fewer and fewer people care about them anymore and though it’s a cheap part, removing it could bolster razor thin margins quite a bit.
  • Hard drive prices will return to pre-flood levels. The shortage was overblown to create artificial demand but the manufacturers will spend their way to a quick return to normal production.
  • Microsoft will announce a scaling back or removal of the new Start Screen in Windows 8 or make it 100% optional. There has been a lot of blowback against this feature as while it is great for tablets, it is trying to “tabletify” the desktop and users of that platform don’t want that. To avoid Windows 8 being thought of as another Vista on the desktop side, they won’t force it on people there.
  • Windows 8 will shine on tablets and will also start to compete with Android for a big share of the iPad’s market. PC users (particularly corporate users) will really take to being able to seamlessly integrate their tablet with their PCs.
  • Windows Phone 7 will get a massive marketing push and gain a lot of market share. Much of it will be the remaining 90% of cell phone users who don’t have smartphones. Developers will finally start releasing content for it.
  • Twitter will continue to grow in popularity but still won’t figure out how to make money.
  • Facebook will remain insanely popular but each user will do less with it. People are burning out on the information overload and the fad value of Facebook is starting to decline. Everyone will keep using it but they won’t use it as much and it will start to become less valuable as a result.
  • 3D will continue to decline and possibly die off in the home entirely. We will also not see any mention of “mainstream” 2K or 4K televisions.
  • Best Buy will announce a major corporate restructuring this year, closing underperforming stores and refocusing on providing high quality service. Like the other million times they’ve vowed to do this, they’ll screw it up and continue to push revenue numbers over customer satisfaction. Their decline into eventual failure will continue.
  • Canadian third party Internet prices will rise but not as much as people fear. The latest CRTC idiocy has allowed the incumbents to gouge third party providers in a different way than UBB would have but not as badly. A small increase has already happened with the third parties already saying bigger increases may be coming if peak demand remains high. However, I think many of the heavier users will take advantage of capless off-peak hours to keep the peak demand reasonable and there will either be no further increases or minimal ones. The third parties will continue to provide better service for fairer prices than the incumbents.
  • I will continue to search in vain for a tech podcast that doesn’t spend most of its time fellating Apple or that realises tech news exists that doesn’t involve phones or tablets.
So there we have it for 2012. Assuming I haven’t become like so many bloggers and stopped updating this one out of laziness by this time next year, I’ll check in on these and see how wrong I was. I have some apprehensions about the future of some of the things I like in 2012 but any way you slice it, this is bound to be an amazing year in tech and gaming. I hope it’s great for you and yours as well! Happy New Year!
Business, Computers, Mobile Phones, Predictions, Predictions, Technology, Video Games , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

THQ’s Continued Slide In the Danny Bilson Era

1 Comment Posted by on October 23, 2011

In the world of large video game publishers, THQ has always been an interesting one to me. They started as a toy company in 1989 (industry nerd trivia: THQ stands for Toy HeadQuarters) and blew up in the 1990s into one of the top 5 publishers today. They’ve never had the financial might of an EA or a Ubisoft but they still manage to crank out a lot of triple-A content and have not been afraid to push riskier franchises without huge sales potential. In today’s industry where big publishers are often fleeing to the financial safe havens of licensed properties or going on acquisition benders, THQ has actually doubled down on their expensive triple-A franchises, shedding the licensed stuff which was their bread and butter for many years, reducing their title slate and trying to make more with less.

Many of their recent moves have been attributed to Danny Bilson, their Executive Vice President of Core Games who also often acts as a public spokesman for the company. As big company executives go, Bilson has an interesting history. He got his start in comic books, film and television as a writer and director. Ever seen the Rocketeer? He co-wrote it. From there, he moved into a few different positions in the games industry, including another Vice President position at EA before moving to THQ. He’s a business guy but he also loves playing games, a trait amazingly not found in many industry heads. He’s only one of many corporate officers at the company but he was brought into THQ to take it in a radical new direction so I think he’s probably at the helm of many of their new changes. They’ve had some success with them but from a longer term financial point of view, it has not proven very lucrative. In the last couple of years, they’ve mostly lost money, slashed a bunch of talent and studios and their stock is sinking. One thing you can say about THQ is that they’re not afraid to get rid of baggage. If they see something as not working, they don’t turn it into a money pit, they cut their losses and move on. Being that nimble is critical in business today and they seem to understand that. Given that, I think it’s time for them to realise that Bilson’s experiment while a worthwhile attempt, has not worked out and it’s time for a change, either to his strategy or possibly to his entire position within THQ. I’m the first to admit that I’ve never worked in the video game industry and I’m not an expert on how that business should operate. However, speaking from the point of view of a hardcore gamer (the demographic Bilson’s title says he’s catering to) who also closely follows the business side of the issue, many of his initiatives were things I personally saw flaws in from the beginning and which ultimately ended in failure. Here’s a few examples of what I believe were missteps made on his watch:

  • Turning away Respawn: After a very public falling out with Activision, the creators of the mind boggingly successful Call of Duty series parted ways with the mega publisher and started Respawn Entertainment, a new independent triple-A studio. They went shopping for publishers and talked to THQ as I’m sure they did everyone else. According to Danny Bilson himself, THQ had Respawn all but locked up to publish with them but in the end, the deal fell through because THQ refused to allow Respawn to retain the IP for their new project. He said “My responsibility to our stockholders and to my CEO and the company is to build an IP library” and due to that, THQ had to turn them away. Shortly after, Respawn signed with larger rival EA, who let them keep their IP. My jaw dropped when I first read this. Every publisher wants to own the IP if they can and a deal is significantly more valuable to them if they do. But this isn’t any new studio, it’s the creators of the biggest triple-A franchise there ever was. Unless many balls are dropped, their title is going to sell huge. It’s virtually a lock. Had THQ signed them and not owned the IP, they would still see a major slice of all those sales and made a mint to say the least. That would eventually have turned into a franchise and had they played their cards right, they could have ridden high on that franchise and eventually, probably purchased Respawn and ended up with the IP anyway. Instead, they let them go and got nothing, handing all those sales to a larger competitor. If EA thought it was worthwhile for their shareholders to let Respawn own their IP, why wasn’t it OK for THQ who has a lot more to gain? For that matter, why didn’t they care about owning Double Fine’s Costume Quest and Stacking or the new You Don’t Know Jack game? They were looking a cash cow right in the eye and said “Nah, if we can’t have it all, we don’t want any.”
  • Homefront: I was really excited about this game. A modern day first person shooter with a story that wasn’t written for idiot dudebros who think Michael Bay films are high art. Though the team at Kaos Studios apparently crunched on Homefront for more than a year before release and THQ put a ton of marketing money behind it, it just wasn’t very good. The campaign was short (I finished it in a Saturday afternoon), the story was full of cookie cutter characters you couldn’t sympathise with, their attempts at meaningful imagery and plot points felt forced and contrived and while the multiplayer had promise, it was horribly balanced and went unsupported. The reviews were mixed (with the negative ones being really negative) and though it quickly sold more than 2 million units, it was well under expectations and barely a rounding error compared to Call of Duty’s 11+ million sales each year. While THQ was quick to say that the franchise will continue, it closed Kaos Studios shortly after launch and relocated development to its new Montreal studio whose startup is largely being funded by the Quebec government. It’s possible that more time could have made Homefront better or maybe they should have roped in other studios to help realise the vision. But in the end, they bet huge on a title that almost anyone in the games press or the buying public could have told them wasn’t worth the investment and lost big.
  • MX vs. ATV Alive and the related experiment: To be fair, it was more CEO Brian Farrell that hyped this in the press than Danny Bilson so maybe it wasn’t his baby. MX vs. ATV was a racing series that had done well for THQ but had waned in recent years. To re-launch it, they proposed an experiment: Put the game out at $40 instead of $60 with limited content on the disc but have a ton of DLC options available that would allow people to customise the experience to their liking. The thought was that by lowering the cost of entry and betting the success on higher margin DLC purchases, they could end up making more money in the long run. I thought this was a really neat idea at the time but it ended up having its execution botched for a few reasons. Firstly, the game didn’t get a lot of marketing and what it did get failed to attack the fundamental problem in the gamer mindset which is that games which launch at a budget price are crap. For any experiment like this to work, it needs to be drilled into people’s heads that they’re not buying a $60 game but they are still buying a triple-A experience, just one built differently. This was not done so people saw a budget game and stayed away. Secondly, they didn’t built the triple-A experience I talked about. MX vs. ATV Alive launched at $40 and had $40 production values. I didn’t play it but I watched a lot of video of it and I think the results speak for themselves. You can’t say you’re experimenting with budget priced triple-A titles, sell it to triple-A consumers and then give them B grade stuff. Lastly, $40 was still too much. I understand that there’s a lot of fixed material, manufacturing and certification costs that come with retail games which doesn’t change no matter what price you charge. However, given the pithy options MX vs. ATV Alive shipped with, I think $30 would have been a more reasonable asking price and this sentiment was echoed in several reviews. It kind of ties into the second point but in a different way. If you are going to strip a game down to bare bones to allow people to choose their experience, you can’t make the entry point so high. I think this was a neat experiment that I would like to see tried again in a smarter way by either THQ or another publisher. However, rumour is the next generation of consoles will support free to play titles so the whole paradigm may change by then.
  • Red Faction: Armageddon (i.e. Red Space): I’ve said in other places that I think 2009′s Red Faction: Guerilla is one of the best games of this generation. It was a semi open world game based around destroying stuff and it was a ton of fun. It also sold fairly well. When I heard a sequel was coming in Red Faction: Armageddon, I was thrilled. Then it came out and I found a title that was nothing like its awesome predecessor. While it retained some of the crazy environmental destruction, they turned the game into another linear corridor shooter with a wafer thin story, generic characters and in a very clear attempt to rip off rival EA’s successful Dead Space franchise, they introduced aliens to the mix, something unseen in Red Faction before. THQ once again backed this title in a big way, striking a TV movie deal with SyFy which eventually produced the unrelated Red Faction: Origins. I never saw the movie but it was apparently OK, though I don’t think many watched it and it clearly didn’t drive sales for the game. As with Homefront before it, the press opinion leading up to Armageddon was one of skeptical optimism and when it launched, it was largely met a response of “What did you do to Red Faction?!” and was a sales flop. My guess is that developer Volition didn’t want to take the great formula of Guerilla and break it. Given the clear attempts to ape other franchises, this title reeked of executive interference. With Bilson’s experience in writing television and movies (which I’m sure led to the SyFy deal), I’m kind of shocked he chose to take Red Faction in this direction and why in both the case of this and Homefront, he didn’t stop and realise that the narratives were simply not good and needed big improvements. Injecting aliens into the Red Faction universe wasn’t necessarily a bad idea but it was so poorly handled that it just looked bad. After the poor sales of Armageddon, THQ announced the franchise was being shelved indefinitely.
  • Crappy downloadable tie-in games: One of Danny Bilson’s mission objectives when he was brought on to THQ was making their properties “transmedia”, basically meaning that every release should have other things tie into it to drive brand awareness and secondary revenue. That was the idea behind the Red Faction SyFy movie. It also morphed into the idea of releasing small downloadable titles on places like Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network which were based in the universes of bigger triple-A titles that would follow soon after. I always thought this was kind of a weird idea but given how expensive PR is for publishers now, this may be a cheaper way to drive consumer engagement. The problem was, these titles had very little to do with their triple-A cohorts and were pretty terrible games. The first preceded the aforementioned Red Faction: Armageddon and was called Red Faction: Battlegrounds. Aside from taking place on Mars, this game had nothing whatsoever to do with the series. It was an arena vehicle combat game and a bad one at that. Ironically, while Red Faction: Guerilla did have vehicles and combat with them, Armageddon only had a couple of flight and mech segments so nothing portrayed in Battlegrounds related to the new game. The second title was Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team which was supposed to lead the release of Space Marine. This title was better that Red Faction: Battlegrounds but not by much. It was a co-op twin stick shooter that took place on an Ork ship the Space Marines were trying to invade. I actually think it’s kind of fun but again, it had nothing to do with Space Marine aside from taking place in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The story (what there was) didn’t relate and it played completely differently. Both of these titles were overpriced and flopped, THQ Digital Studios Warrington who developed them both was closed and the initiative was scrapped, including the planned Saint’s Row: The Third tie-in. In fairness, THQ wasn’t the first or only publisher to try this model. EA did the same with Dead Space: Ignition and it also didn’t take but at least that game loosely tied into the fiction of the bigger titles. In this case, we got two titles designed to promote IPs that had almost nothing to do with them, except share the names and setting. I’m sure these were cheap titles to make but that’s money THQ could have spent promoting the bigger ones and in the end, was money pissed away.
So where have all these failed experiments left THQ? Well, they’re still kicking and likely will be for a while but they’re bleeding bad and the one bright spot that can save their finances this year is Saint’s Row: The Third, which based on buzz is poised to sell very well, though it also has its share of face palm inducing design choices. Many speculate they are a prime takeover target. The continuing consolidation of publishers in the video game industry isn’t a good thing for consumers or innovation and the last thing I want to see is the number of competitors reduced even further. I think a willingness to experiment is important and I admire THQ for doing so, despite having a lot more to lose than their larger rivals. However, I think the decisions above were largely bad ones and since Danny Bilson has been the one talking him up, I assume they’re his. They can’t afford to make many more mistakes and continuing as they are now isn’t going to save them, especially with a newer and more expensive console generation approaching. I’m not sure if the solution is canning Bilson or shifting his responsibilities around but they need another shake up and soon. This is all just based on my observations and I don’t claim to have the answers but so far, it doesn’t appear Bilson does either. I hope THQ can get back in the fray but they need to make big changes and soon.
Business, Video Games , , , , , , ,

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