Rock, Paper, Shotgun

So supposedly the UK market will become the second largest in the world behind the US in 2009, overtaking Japan. That’s the maths from trade journal MCV. Assuming things follow last year’s trends (which seem like a fairly big assumption right now) the UK will grasp a video games market value of £4.77bn, rather more than our Japanese brothers-in-games.

But that’s not all the news that MCV have, they’ve also got a huge global analysis of the games market, right here. Needless to say, the Americans come out on top with £14.89 billion. That’s enough boxed games to crush a small country like, say, France.

Activision are the new kings of gaming hill, they claim – in America at least. They’ve just published their results for the last financial year, and, well, they’ve made lots of money. More than any other publisher. Primarily from Guitar Hero III and Call of Duty IV, by the sounds of it. Admittedly they’re number one for console and handheld, not PC, but we can surely expect their swollen coffers to impact their future PC releases.
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In a recent interview Cliffy ‘Gears Of War’ Bleszinski, he say:

I think people would rather make a game that sells 4.5 million copies than a million and “Gears” is at 4.5 million right now on the 360. I think the PC is just in disarray… what’s driving the PC right now is ‘Sims’-type games and ‘WoW’ and a lot of stuff that’s in a web-based interface. You just click on it and play it. That’s the direction PC is evolving into. So for me, the PC is kind of the secondary part of what we’re doing. It’s important for us, but right now making AAA games on consoles is where we’re at.

It’s true, we’d all rather be insanely wealthy than mildly wealthy. And talk about a role-reversal, eh? The PC becoming the casual gaming platform where Peggle and friendly MMOs dominate? Weird ass. He’s right though, what terrible times for PC gaming. Disarray, you might call it. The full story is over on MTV’s blog thing.

I’m off to interview Paul Barnett, Creative Director at Mythic for Warhammer Online in That There London tomorrow. As part of my research, I’m watching his presentation from the LIFT conference site (Which has a mass of videos to watch. I’ll probably move on to the oft-brilliant Robin Hunicke next). Now, if you’ve been following Warhammer, you’ll probably have seen Paul speak before. But that’s Paul in selling-the-game mode. Here, we have his high-speed delivery applied to a much more serious topic. There’s lots of Barnettisms (“We’ll be playing games on cans of soup!”), but these are bigger issues than how Dark Elves are a bit like Lord Byron. But, yes, we get a massively extended metaphor about how videogames really shouldn’t be like Las Vegas…

Some interesting (and perhaps worrying) facts’n'quotes over in this report on PC industry heavyweights discussing the future of the ol’ IBM Compatible as a gaming platform. They claim all is rosy and well, but it seems PC gaming generates half a billion dollars less now than it did in 2001 – though as the piece points out this doesn’t include digital distribution such as Gametap or Steam (and, I’d guess, MMO subscriptions too). Or, indeed, pirated copies of games, the elephant in that particular room which doesn’t seem to have been mentioned, and could quite possibly account for some of the drop from $1.5 billion to $970 million over the last five years.

I can’t help but get a little bit snooty and defensive when I hear talk of something rotten in the state of PC gaming. Read the rest of this entry »

I should have mentioned this yesterday, but CCP’s full time economist, Dr. Eyjo “DrEyoG” Gudmundsson, has published Eve Online’s first financial report. In it he examines the mineral trade, which is the backbone of all Eve’s production and manufacturing stuff. The Doc explains:

This first Econ Dev Blog (EDB) has given a descriptive overview of the major trends for the market of minerals in EVE. Overall trade quantity and volume has increased dramatically over the last 3 years and the price of minerals has fallen considerably due to increased mining efficiency through better tactics and improved technology. The price formation has also improved showing that price difference between regions is becoming minimal in Empire space and reflects only the time value of moving minerals in low sec. However, smaller population and the risk of piracy in zero-zero space results in less efficient markets with low volumes and great fluctuations in prices given an arbitrage trade opportunity for the brave entrepreneur.

Needless to say, money means graphs:

We here at RPS are enormous fans of graphs, and the more they are seen in relation to games, the better. I should stress at this point that Eve itself has built-in graphs (take that, World of Warcraft), although none of them relate to blowing people up, which is all I do in the game these days. Hopefully a future patch will correlate time over death-mongering, as well as the price of techno-whistles and space-bells.

Meanwhile the economic reports will continue to stress Eve’s complexity as a business-focused game. It’s good for learning how to deal with business problems in the real world, apparently.