EGB's Psychic Hotline: Random Acts of Prophecy

Electronic Gaming Business, August 27, 2003

After all the self-congratulatory back-slapping this year over how the gaming industry "is bigger than Hollywood" (which it isn't, by the way), where exactly is this new art-cum-industry headed? Everyone has an opinion, and some of them even tell EGB about them. Here, then, is our own game industry psychic hotline, tidbits of trending and prognostication we have been hearing and reading in recent weeks from around the industry.

Multimedia Consoles Get Boost

The entire gaming industry is speculating wildly about how much multimedia muscle will go into the Xbox2 and PS3 when they roll out in a couple of years. One rumor has Microsoft putting full Tivo-like personal video recorder technology in its next box and another has Sony envisioning the PS3 as a true multimedia playback device for a range of downloadable content.

But analysts are split about whether next-gen consoles should go in this direction. The booming market for home theater suggests that multi-function game devices could be attractive ways of bundling in functions like PVR, MP3 libraries, digital photo/video shows, etc. On the other hand, we heard one market analyst quip that the only multi-function electronic device to ever succeed was the clock radio.

Multi-functionality will get a boost in September when The Hollywood Reporter releases further details about a study from Centris showing that consumers are making very good use of the DVD playback functions already in their PS2s and Xboxes. According to the report, 54% of gamers with DVD-capable consoles (all PS2s and Xboxes with the DVD kit) have played a DVD film on their units in the past 30 days. That is truly impressive and unexpected, and we expect it is a number that Microsoft and Sony will be waving for some time.

Mass Market? Bosh!

Feel all proud and confident that games are the new movie industry, that it has tapped into the mass market? Not so fast, bark two legendary big mouths of the industry, Seamus Blackley, vp, Capital Entertainment Group, and Chris Crawford, designer of classics like Balance of Power and perennial critic of the game business.

Blackley told the audience at the Edinburgh International Games Festival in early August that "games really still are the ugly stepchild of the popular media." In large part because game companies chase film and TV licenses at the expense of developing their own intellectual properties that relate more directly to a broader consumer base. "If we want to drive entertainment culture, we have to concentrate on building games that have the power to touch real people and to do that we have to be very honest with ourselves about the audience. We have to really grow up about who our audience is, what they think, what they're like, what they like about what we do, and we have to start designing games and thinking about games so that give them an entertainment experience that's relevant to their lives," he argued.

Let's translate and extend guru Seamus's abstractions into tangible points. Aside from Lara Croft, no fictional character of any substance has emerged from gaming, and even Lara is shallow compared to even the thinnest of film or TV personae. Lara did have, um, legs in the culture because she tapped into several converging trends, the most important of which was feminine heroism and athleticism. That is an example of how game character and game mechanics intersect with a broad audience, and it just doesn't happen when you add a few extra weapons to Ratchet and Clank 2 or plug Pierce Brosnan's snide asides into the next 007 iteration. That is what you do when you want to solidify your standing as a niche industry, not broaden your base.

Brother Crawford recently emailed us from the wilderness with this explanation of the problem.

"I think that games have reached a creative plateau of the industry's making. The fundamental mistake was at the executive level. The guys running the big publishers were too intent on immediate profit and didn't pay attention to long-term issues. So they went after the easy adolescent-male market and never bothered to develop other markets.

The games industry painted itself into the adolescent-male corner the same way that the comics industry did. Now it's too late to break out; it will cost millions and millions of dollars to build and market products for other market groups. Worse, the entire industry has adapted to that market niche. Everybody is too damned comfortable for the industry to grow. So they'll stay put."

Sure, throwing "street" stylings into sports titles may have some greater appeal among "minority" demos, but that amounts to targeting content to an existing customer base more effectively. It isn't going to make gamers of anybody who wasn't a player already. Nothing bespeaks this industry's doomed-to-be-niche mentality more than the fact that the most successful extension of game play into new audiences in the past decade (perhaps ever) was actually unintended and haphazard. According to sources at Electronic Arts, many executives were very doubtful about funding Will Wright's The Sims project because it fit into no existing successful game genre. The story goes that they went with it mainly on the strength of Wright's reputation and talent. Of course, neither Wright nor EA knew that The Sims would tap deeply into tween and teen female culture with its ability to build both physical and social worlds.