Debate on female gamers continues

Interesting discussion on female gamers with a lot said. Unfortunately, I think it was particularly poorly chaired.

Game conference shock

In game conference shocker, attending journalists sit in the corner and try to unwind while other delegates talk to each other over coffee...

(Photo not taken because they called us back in).

Running low on battery again...

Sorry - dropped out of there to save power. Will charge a little more during the coffee break.

Eve Online concluded with Q & A centred around the logistics of running a small country and jokes around the relative size of Eve Online and Iceland, which they expect to exceed the size of in the next year or two.

Eve Online

[Edit: For Eve fans out there, you might also want to have a look at the live blog notes I made on another panel that Hilmar Peterssun was on. I also can type up the notes on the Q & A that immediately followed this session if you want, including how Scottish rodents took down Eve Online. And I can provide some general impressions of Hilmar if requested. Just post below if you are interested.]

Peterssunn: I am going to explain the concept of Eve Online and CCP. CCP is an Icelandic company from 10 years ago, its taken a while for us to get to this point. We founded the company in a space that didn't really exist at the point in time. Worked on a property called Lazytown to fund the start of the company.

We began full-force in 2000, by raising $3 million which is about one-tenth of the current MMORPG. 3 years of development, the last year of which we had no money but everyone turned up to work anyway despite us not being able to pay them. This created a core of people who have gone through hell with us, and helps with the community especially.

We had publishing problems, with Simon & Schuster, which resulted in no distribution or marketing, despite having 30,000 players. We ended up buying the rights back at 2002 and going into digital distribution. This has forced us to treat this more as a service as a product and using viral marketing techniques to propagate the product out, long before others were doing this.

We are planning a massive graphical upgrade to the game, and should hit 200,000 subscriptions later this year. We have had different growth than most other games, because the whole game takes place on a single shard, which allows escalation of power and social equity as the size of the community grows.

(Plays Revelations II trailer. Audio mix isn't great and voice over not really legible.
Good to see the Titans with lots of tiny ships around them).

The important thing to note that the graphics were straight from the game. From 2003 I had to have arguments on the phone as publishers would not believe graphics from the game.

Started off as an MMORPG but it is now become more of a virtual society. [He contrasts Themepark (WoW) vs Playground (Eve / Ultima) approach] Ultimately, its about the kids who are playing in the sand box. CCP just has to make sure the sand is clean.

When you give people the tools, which can be small and not particularly complex, complex behaviour emerges. What surprised us, was how fast the players came up to speed on what the potential of the tools in the sandbox are. 121.573 man years has been put into Eve by the players. When people play, they are doing something social and its inheriently competively social and that allows you to hone and develop skills which are applicable to real life: incentive plans for employees, using PR to take down your enemy, manage complex logistics.

[Shows the Tranquility Map] The hope was that people would start off in high-security space and then move to low security space. What we saw was that people did this in accordance to their nationality. The Russians hacked the game so that they could write in Cyrillic. This lead to the fact that their only method of communication was violence. Their next door neighbors, the Scandinavians became the recipients of this. The Russians were very well organised and had better pilots, but they couldn't defeat the Scandanavians. But as it turned out that the Scandanavians were being fronted by the Americans, who were claiming not to be involved. And until the Russians figured this out and persuaded the French to attack the Americans were they able to defeat the Scandanavians. This ran from month 3 to month 6 of the game and involved about 20,000 people. There was a lot of PR in this: e.g. the American's claiming their innocence and so on.

[Talks about fansites] Very early on a radio station was created: Eve radio. They have now built a TV station to complement this. Eon magazine is the People magazine of the Eve world. Eve TV has a CNN style news report of the Eve world. There is a huge group of people who make trailers and movies in the world [Shows Day of Darkness video by an amateur community in the game]. All the property destroyed in the game was destroyed for real.

(Aside: I was expecting a movie, but its more like a dance track. I guess its from the lack of frame of reference not having played the game).

[Slide: It took 250,000 man years to build the Great Pyramid. We are half-way there.]

The important thing to note the social equity investment in the game. Even though they are not directly creating the world (as in Eve), the social structures they have created in the game are real.

Scalability is the hugest issue. It has continously exceeded our ability to build the servers to support the infrastructure. There's about 2 tonnes of equipment and we are investigating high-performance computing concepts to scale the load. You are at the forefront of the impossible of computer science. Last year we introduced the concept of solid state disks to support the database.

We have 200,000 people who buy and sell resources on an open market, so we have to use natural resource dynamics to ensure that the economy that does not inflate or deflate. We hired an economist earlier in the year.

We have strived to build the way people relate within an organisation within the game [Goes into linear relationship between brain size and maximum number of people known]. Its like running IBM with 20,000 employees. Traditionally, MMO developers have been despotic. We are now in a big effort to decentralise governance of the world. We want to employ democratic elections to elect representatives to have an ongoing say in development.

[Shows examples of improvement in graphics]

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Virtual Reality TV - Q & A

I'm not going to cover all the Q & A for this session, but I just asked a question: "What is to stop advertisers themselves moving into the space you're in?"

Summary of the answer: Not much...

I think he was specifically talking about ad agencies, which were looking to acquire the company after they were spun off. But I was specifically thinking of the companies themselves e.g. Coke MMORPG. I'll dig up the reference I was thinking to, which was actually talking about the impact on MMORPG subscriptions when the likes of the major broadcasters decide to move into the same space and offer the same product for free to attract viewers to their television product.

Live blog - Virtual Reality TV

(May not be able to cover all of this. I want to save battery for Ian Livingstone at 16:30).

Peter Cowley: I want to explore where the world of tv and the world of games will interact in the future. The consumers who enjoy our content are moving a lot quicker than us in the tv industry. There are a large amount of similarities between the developer industry and the producer industry in television. The one major difference I noticed is that in television, we have had government intervention has allowed us to protect our intellectual content around the world.

Endemol is a big independent tv producer who is trying to be a content producer. Began with Big Brother, also Deal or No Deal, Fame Academy etc. We are big believers in growing the number of genres of television. Big Brother had natural extensions into platforms other than tv, internet streaming and so on. We also try to repackage some of the brands and recreate them on other platforms in particular mobile and online flash based games. This helps us to work out where our future is.

The big broadband companies are looking at commissioning content and repackaging content from the likes of us.

We don't believe television or the games industry will go away, but there will be convergence between the producers of television and the games industry.

Its not just about creating the content, its about understanding the audience. As we move into the digital space, we have to understand how people use these services and how we can make use of these.

The tv industry has been slightly put off by the use of interactivity by the [failure] of interactivity around the red button interactivity of set top boxes.

The blurring of physical and virtual is going to have a huge effect on how the content has delivered. Second Life, David Tench, Kate Modern. It should be possible to create real time avatars with the [mechanics] to get facial expression in a television show. LonelyGirl15. Banner advertising on social networks doesn't work so well, however Kate Modern is an attempt to bridge the gap and uses brands such as Orange MSN and Pantene in every day life.

We are all trying to adapt to this new consumer world.

Endemol has created a small development environment in-house to extend the game show experience. Gambling and skill-gaming which has huge amounts of money in quite a small niche area, and the providers who have had to get out of this space in the US have got smarter in this area. Flash based video and flash based games are an attempt to generate revenue in this area. Deal or No Deal is the first working in this area. It is a game of chance that has a brand related to it and we have been able to create fixed odds betting games, slot machines, scratch cards, java mobile games, interactive DVD, board games that extend on it.

We've tried to take the excitement into a multiplayer online game. A Deal or No Deal equivalent of online poker.

We've experimented with Big Brother in Second Life and is interesting and made us believe there is quite a lot of legs in extending brands to worlds like Second Life. Like a lot of people we have yet to find the killer business model and are still experimenting.

Big Brother has done well in the social networking area. This year, we have gone to online casting for the next Big Brother show. People want to talk about Big Brother, and would like to have a chance to be on Big Brother or their friends to be or Big Brother.

Roar: the Game has more unique visitors to the website than viewers of the television show. Appeals to an audience that is leaving television shows in droves. Roar is a tamagotchi style game where you grow your zoo. We didn't have a link between the television show and the game, so we built cheat codes into the television show. For the first time, the website is bigger, braver and bolder than the television show. The cheat codes did brilliantly well.

ILand (not misspelled) is 'third-life' which uses an online community to go to a real community on an island. Sold to AOL USA as a multimillion pound broadband concept. The founding family is elected online, and new people are recruited to a real world island on an ongoing process. AOL USA took this to the upfronts in the States and was successful in this approach to the tv advertisors and networks.

Signs of Life is an interactive flash drama for teens, by the BBC. Not much more details can be made available. An attempt to get young people to be interested in the news. Ideas that could story tell online. Combines tv produced drama with game-like interactivity. You can watch 8 episodes of 6 minutes. Within each episode, using Flash video you can solve puzzles, play games and has an online personality test that matches the episode. You can then import this personality test into Face Book, Bebo etc.

Ubisoft CGI studio

Here's the announcement from February about Ubisoft setting up a CGI studio. And here's further discussion about the marriage of Ubisoft games and film. All by our very own Gamasutra.

Makes me feel warm inside...

Edit: Yves was definitely talking about Ubisoft CGI making feature length films. I think that counts as a scoop. Particularly as the second article above only mentions shorts at this stage.

Dare to be digital

Just had a couple of people come up handing out fliers and a comic from the Dare to be Digital protoplay which runs alongside the Edinburgh Interactive festival and features 12 teams from around the UK, India and China who have been competing to produce the best video game prototype.

I've included a photo of the web comic, which features Gorillaz style artwork and a humorous look at the game development process.

Live blog - What am I worth? (part ii)

(Was just a quick overview of market position of games and games companies)

(Matt Rothman:) We're keen to understand how quickly a company can get out of Europe. Its a big market, but its not big enough for Wall Street. We look at game development from the casual games point of view with portals and telcos as the natural customers. As investors, we are always looking at the exit strategy.

(Overview of China)
The video game market in China rose 68% to $995 million, subscriptions make up 70% of that.
Forecast to exceed $1.3 billion in 2008. The Internet is the driver: people are not sitting
at home with consoles, they are in giant Internet cafes. Broadband penetration is driving the online games blow out.

While outsourcing is currently important in China, the groundswell out there is in original IP e.g. Ultizen which is a blended model of outsourcing and original IP for games.

Live blog - What am I worth?

(This is a talk about what the consumer is worth - I'll type up session description later).

(Ed Williams & Matt Rothman.)

(Ed Williams speaking first. He's also speaking from the slides a lot more than Yves.)

Looking from the current market environment, the subprime mortgage market is affecting the current equity situation, with companies selling the higher risk products and moving to safer positions...

(I'm not going to bother blogging the rest of this session in detail until it gets relevent to game-design).

QA - Yves

1st question: How difficult is the management issues in China?

I was quite impressed when we first went into China. At first, we said we would only to do graphics or part of a game, but very quickly we saw that this [was too difficult]. So we asked them to convert games [across platforms]. This allowed them to learn about the whole game and to create better games and to innovate. We have 500 people there.

Q: How difficult was it to enter America? To what extent did the Tom Clancy acquisition impact this?

We always wanted to go to America. We used the [market boom] in 2000, and raised money to acquire Red Storm, who were not too expensive and helped us become American.

Q: Ubisoft sold remaining shares in game loft. What was the thinking behind that? Withdrawing from the mobile sector or raising capital?

Our intention first was to buy the company, but they are in the business growing extremely fast so they didn't want to sell. We needed the money elsewhere, so got out, step by step.

Q: You spelt out a scenario where the industry growing world-wide. What are the challenges of the industry in Europe?

We are also recruiting a lot in Europe - we increased our French studio by 30%. We are capable of expanding where the cost is high (Europe, US, canada) because the skill-base is there. Other cheaper countries, we have to train them. The world-wide market is expanding which brings along Europe. The governments need to help a little with e.g. pound and Euro costs.
[When everyone (worldwide) knows everything about gaming in ten years, there will be more of an issue with global competition and development costs.]

Q: You mentioned in your talk about building closer links with the film industry, even though historically the association has not been good. How do you start to break down the barrier of mutual incomprehension?

In building a CGI studio you start to understand the movie industry better. When you understand them better and have more and more talent cross between both worlds it becomes easier to deal with them.

Q: (follow on) The movie industry spends a lot to raise the profile of IP very quickly. Do you see the game industry moving in the same direction?

We are moving towards launching the book, the game and the movie at the same time. The movie industry creates more ideas than us at the moment, but the more they work, the more they are coming up with the same ideas. We are working more and more on re-using the same graphics, the same ideas [to reduce costs] and we are going in that direction, especially for the AAA products. We will have to start making movies because if we don't do it, we won't be able to take advantage of the power of the next generation (Aside: !!!). In creating the movies and the games at the same time, we see what we have to improve in the games to make better games as well.

Q: Is there a sweet spot in terms of the length of game-play for AAA games? How long do you want a game experience to last.

We always try to make a game that will last between 12-15 or 20 hours, in a single player game. Multi-player is different.

Q: How far do you intend to take user generated content on the console?

We will try to create as useful and easy to use tools as possible. We will come back to what we had on the Amstrad or Atari ST where users could create a lot of content. The goal is to make sure our customers become creators.

Q: Is there not issues with problems with character in releasing across multiple medium? Does a faceless character suits games, whereas a stronger character is important on film or game?

Yes. You have different experiences in different mediums. We try to make the products complementary in different mediums. [You'll do more explaining of the why in a book medium, for example]. The goal is not to do the book of the game, it'll be a quality product in itself, but will help you feel more immersed in the game because you know more. Its the same in the movie.

Q: (follow) The game-mechanic e.g. the moving stairs in Harry Potter works in the film, but is horrible as a game mechanic. Does this cause problems?

Yes. You have to do these at the same time - you have to modify the mechanics in the different medium. We'll find the answers, for us, its the beginning of this idea.

Q: Given the different models for content distribution across different platforms, will you be tailoring user content differently for different platforms?

We are already sharing content across multiple platforms. We already have a system of evaluating user generated content, what are the best maps, who are the best creators and so on. The experience will be the same on both consoles - Ubisoft will help creators port across to multiple consoles [for e.g. top 10 maps]. Some people will be happy to keep their content on which ever platform they are on, because their friends are on the particular platform.

Q: How are you handling the idea of games educating people, when the media is interested in stories about e.g. manhunt?

Its part of a normal industry, we just have to make sure we have good rating systems to make sure that consumers don't make mistakes. I want to take more creators who have the know how of content, which is the only way we'll enrich our industry.

Q: About bringing back old gamers. I don't have the time to be fully imersed any more.

That's why we are creating games with valid 12-15 minute experiences, which you can drop and come back to a month later. The goal is to ensure that you can download content and have the time to play.

Q: How are you working on getting mass media acknowledgement of games as an artform?

We have to get the guys who are writing the articles playing the games. Its playing, but its playing for fun, or playing to learn things. If you get more from our products, you'll spend more time for them. Players are getting burnt out, even though they know it is a good things to do. The longer we last, the more people will be playing our games.

Q: Mass marketing. You are spending less on print media, particularly special interest media (Questioner is from Germany - where Ubisoft has a 70% less spend on specialist media). What is the role of the specialist (print) media.

It went down in the last two years, because the new generation of consoles. Its easy to get the information from the internet, and we were putting more money in the creation of games for the new generation of consoles than the marketing. I see quite a good future for people who are able to relay information about the products and help select the best products.

(Aside: I have heaps of questions, but am to busy typing the answers to previous questions).