The on-demand console gaming service, OnLive recently released pictures and videos demoing its product and peripheries through Facebook in an attempt to create some hype surrounding its upcoming release into public beta mode. The projected release of this cloud gaming service has brought much attention in the press with headlines such as “Is It Game Over for Consoles?” in The Independent.The attention grabbing headline refers to the potential threat OnLive offers to the current gaming industry by removing the iconic, chunky hardware boxes from gaming.
OnLive aims to cut the need for hardware by using the upper limit of internet bandwidth to stream any game to a display of the users choosing. This would fundamentally alter the marketing war between games consoles that has existed for years, it will essentially cut the need to upgrade hardware in order to play new, more advanced games. Instead of buying new, OnLive will merely upgrade their servers, making gaming far cheaper for gamers; and accessible only to those with fast enough internet access. The above video seems to endorse this as the graphically heavy and admired PC game Crisis is streamed to the iPhone. With constant internet access being a key factor OnLive also allows users to view exactly what games their friends are playing, opening enormous possibilities for multiplayer games. Laptop and smart-phone access for cloud gaming is apparent in their built-in access to the internet, TVs will also be able to have OnLive access as they release a ‘microconsole’ flatter and smaller than a standard console controller, connecting the large display to a modem and streaming the game information to the TV.
Yet on the day OnLive officially announced themselves in 2009, Sony happened to register the name ‘PS Cloud’.While the gaming industry does not yet appear to be quaking in its boots, technology trends of the last decade indicate that if the service is ‘good enough’ it will succeed. The console heavy gaming sector is only just waking up to what the music industry has had to deal with for the last decade in digital distribution becoming the dominant method. While technology experts have negatively stated that they fear the ‘decade of the gadget is over’ the positive upspin on this is that an integration of information will be taking place within these gadgets as differentiated services and internet access/speed becomes a more central component.
Youth behaviour will define further which of these services are fully adopted as they defined the last decade with the adoption of cheap, accessible ‘good enough technologies’ to become the dominant consumer electronics of the last decade. While vinyl is in the midst of a cult revivial amongst young people, there is no denying that MP3 players and laptops have long over taken record and CD players as the main mode of listening to music. While the sound quality of these newer technologies is inferior, the accessibility and cheapness has clearly won over many young people. This will be the same with books, as a New York Times writer recently noted in that his daughter called his Amazon Kindle ‘daddy’s book’ instead of an electronic reader .Tech Tribe 2009 clearly shows that young people have fully adopted this ‘good enough technology’ which has suddenly come to outline consumer electronics for the last decade in online films through laptops, digital photos, eReaders and Skype. If OnLive is cheap, accessible and good enough, young people will almost certainly adopt it, evidencing how youth are possibly the driving demographic sector in how consumer electronics develop.
For a more detailed overview of how OnLive will work after it’s full release later in the year, watch the detailed presentation below. Parts 2, 3, 4 and 5 are also available on Youtube.
Facebook’s recent announcement that the embedded game Farmville has more users than the whole of Twitter shows just how casually games have seeped into our lives. The proof is in the pudding as Farmville’s 69 million users earn Facebook an estimated £614, 150 per day, while Twitter’s revenue was projected to be £245,516 for third quarter of 2009. The realization that gaming has casually seeped into the everyday lives of many more people than hardcore gamers, is a significant one for the gaming industry.
The CEO of Electronic Arts, one of the worlds biggest games developer/publishers, John Riccitiello, believes that “with the advent of the new digital media landscape, we’ve seen a torrent of new consumers. Conservatively, if I add up mobile phone users who play games, social network people who play games, people who play PC games online in Asia, there’s at least a billion people gaming today. So we have five times the audience we’ve ever had, and it’s growing in leaps and bounds.” This integration of games into the more casually used devices, beyond consoles has important implications for how games are developed, as the wider populace interact with the more casual qualities of simple pick-up’n’play games. These qualities have allowed more and more people to begin producing their own games for mobile phones and web browsers. Casual games have clearly become immensely successful in the last few years with estimates suggesting that the casual gaming industry will be worth $13.5 billion by next year. It has even been suggested that the runaway success of the Wii was built on adapting these casual qualities to console gaming. The gaming industry has most certainly noticed it as Nintendo’s competitors begin to adapt their hardware to attract more casual gamers.
While the term casual gaming has become popular only over the last few years, it can be suggested that the concept has been around for 20 years. While dedicated video game consoles produced games as their ultimate end, Microsoft allowed their users to casually dip in and out of gaming with Solitaire, which is widely considered the first casual game with more than an estimated 400 million users to have played it since it’s release in 1989. This success along with handheld devices such as the Gameboy reaching 118 million units sold worldwide in 2008, may suggest, that there was always a market for those more casual about gaming as.
The advent of Adobe Flash games distributed by a web-browser begun the modern drift towards casual gaming as a new market market began to develop. The game Bejeweled has been downloaded more than 150 million times since it’s release in 2001, which is by no coincidence around the same year that broadband internet started becoming commercially available in the UK, with broadband penetration becoming akey driver in the distribution of casual gaming market. Apple realized the potential of digitial distribution and began producing iPods that could play simple casual games in 2003, the same year that Nintendo announced they were developing the Nintendo DS.High internet speeds, application simplicity and availability would eventually reach levels of dissemination where consumers who could previously not create there own games were distributing them to phones and browsers, yet it was the console market that next begun examining the profitability of casual gaming.
Upon the European launch of the Nintendo DS in 2005 the President of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata commented that with their new consoles Nintendo intended to cater for “the needs of all gamers whether for more dedicated gamers who want the real challenge they expect, or the more casual gamers who want quick, pick up and play fun.” This expansion in philosophy to include casual gamers was a winning stroke in the current ‘console war’ between the handheld consoles the DS and the PSP and later the home consoles, the Wii, Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. In just 4 years since its release, the Nintendo DS became the biggest selling games console ever in the UK, passing 10 million units sold in December 2009.Celebrity friendly marketing in the UK helped in the in the breaking of this record, but it was the simplicity of the largely puzzle and crossword based games including Brain Training, Sudoku and Professor Layton that contributed to bridging the boundaries between gamers and non-gamers.
Nintendo quickly followed the casual yet phenomenal success of the DS by releasing the Wii in 2006. The Wii differed from its competitors the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3, in choosing not to rev up the graphics of its predessor the Gamecube, but instead to branch out to “bring new gamers and casual gamers into this industry” largely through the use of the Wii’s innovative motion tracking control-pad, the Wii remote. The scaling down of buttons, meant that those who were not used to which button is which in gaming could easily swing their arm in the arc of a tennis stroke in a tennis game, giving a more simple, accessible and intuitive control system for casual gamers and those outside of the hardcore. The strategy worked. As of October 2009, the Wii had sold over 22 million more units worldwide than it’s closest competitor the Xbox 360. The console has sold more than 6 million units in the UK in only 3 years and analysts have stated that its current worldwide lead in unit sales, even if the worse case “scenario were to occur, the Wii would still come out the winner, with some room to breathe.” This is a signal of the ongoing trend of good enough technology surpassing its more expensive competitors. While the Wii is first perhaps mainstream example of successful casual games could get, it was still within the console realm, giving it limited success to more casually accessed devices such as computers and mobile phones.
A key factor in bringing more casual consumers into the gaming industry has proven to be to allow gaming in short bursts, either on public transport or on work breaks. Suitably simple, playable games with no need to save were necessary therefore to emerge on devices, which could be easily accessed in these scenarios. In 2007 both the iPhone and Facebook began allowing third party development for applications on their platforms. The lines between games developer and consumer have begun to blur as the last year has seen an exponential rise in gaming on both platforms as developers with basic skills have gotten to grips with the possibilities and the challenges of the mobile phone and social networking platforms. One of the major players in social network gaming Playfish, was bought by EA for around $300 million in November signaling the enormous valuation of gaming on social networks.As previously mentioned Zynga’s Facebook game Farmville has more users than the whole of Twitter and makes Facebook an estimated £614,150 per day through micro-transactions. The social gaming company has also recently raised $180 million in venture capital fundsand is doing well enough to advertise, during a recession, that they are hiring on a huge billboard going into San Francisco, without using any words.
In the space of only a year 18,554 third party developed games have sprung up for the iPhone App store. Former ATM software developer Steve Demeter, becem one of the most famous iPhone game successes by creating ‘Trisim’ in his spare time. He submitted it to Apple priced at $5, making $250,000 in profits in the first two months of it’s release. London has it’s own successes in iPhone App development, including Simon Oliver whose ‘Rolando’ sold several hundred thousand copies, with a sequel doing equally as well, this even lead to a recent article in the London Evening Standard newspaper heralding the “Triumph of the Apprepreneur”. The emergence of this trend has given opportunity to websites like iPhone App Freelancer http://www.iPhoneAppFreelancer.com/ to emerge which allows those with no technical no-how but good ideas to collaborate with developers looking for freelance work to create fresh iPhone Apps and games, celebrating the new found potential in the co-creativity of casual gaming.
Microsoft seems to understanding this at last with that controller-free system which can also be used beyond games. Only the sales will be able to tell if Playstation 3’s Motion Controller will be able to challenge it, yet the ability to dream further to appears to be Microsoft’s, purely in pre-release hype. All the console systems however, will have to some extent take the lead from their users who are becoming ever more vocal, and used to instantaneous tweaking and adjusting of their systems with the digital distribution via phones and social networks. In order to keep up with the casual phenomenal, the behemoth that the games industry will have to continue to look towards is the wider populace and how they wish to casually interact with entertainment and games.
The controversial and immensely successful release of the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 video game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is particularly timely given that we are in the midst of the festive season. Modern Warfare 2, which was released in November of this year, smashed entertainment industry records to become the biggest entertainment release of all time. Within 5 days of it’s release Modern Warfare 2 generated $550 million, over $150 million more than the biggest ever 5 day gross at the box office (Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince, $394 million in opening 5 days).
Banned in Russia, because of a controversial scene in which the player can choose to mow down civilians in a terrorist attack on an airport, the storyline of the game focuses on the large-scale outbreak of war in the modern world, further pushing its timely quality with the recent ramping up of the war in Afghanistan. The controversial subject matter and particularly realistic setting has set the game up one of the most talked about Christmas presents for mother’s to give their children this year. On her blog, one Mother sarcastically asked and answered: “How do we really feel about war, anyhow? After 40,000 years the evidence is in. We like it. Here’s the top toy we will give this year to our children to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.”
Upon hearing the discussions about whether Mums would buy Modern Warfare 2 for their young children, I thought about my Mum’s impact upon my early life as a gamer. Unable to conceive of getting into video games without her financial backing as a child, and baring in mind that the world of gaming had changed significantly since I was a child in the early 1990s, I decided to ask her a few questions about her interactions with games via my obsession with them as a child.
“I think I started buying you games around 8 or 9 years old. You didn’t get them immediately. You had to ask for a long time, even though your friends had them for a while, but I guess it was a point of reference for you. To have something in common with others was I think the main reason we bought you a console.
“Particularly being an only child I didn’t want you to feel left out, I suppose all mothers have that urge though. I thought it might have a positive impact on your hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills, so when I first started buying them I would more or less choose the games that you got, apart from the ones your uncle bought for you! I remember I bought you Ecco the Dolphin and Art Alive because I thought the covers looked nice and I thought there might be some education value to them!”
I don’t really have any memories of my Mum getting me those game I didn’t really want, although there are lots of stories floating around the internet about Mum’s getting the wrong game for their child, especially with Modern Warfare 2 having a similar release for the Wii that is more an updated version of an older game.
I had totally forgotten about these placid and notoriously difficult games, but it was probably more its difficulty, especially of Ecco the Dolphin, rather than the fact that my Mum had chosen it. It was interesting that she choose the game purely based on the cover though, rather than play-testing it herself, as the internet didn’t exist in our world circa 1992.
I asked her what her concerns were with me playing video games as a child in general.
“Yeah I had concerns generally. I had heard stories of addiction on the radio, alongside those more extreme stories of children getting violent through not being able to differentiate between fantasy and reality and re-enacting the games that you had, but ultimately I didn’t censor you beyond the extremely violent and gore-filled games as I had faith both in my parenting ability by correlation your own ability to distinguish fantasy and reality.
“I was vehemently against buying GTA for you, all I had heard about was the violence in it, even though I knew your friends had it and you had the money to buy it yourself when you were 12 I didn’t let you buy it.”
I remember that my friends had Grand Theft Auto, one of the most controversial games that has since become a best selling series, allowing the player total freedom in a city but encouraging them through storyline to become a career criminal. I suppose the early censorship my Mum had instilled had worked as I don’t really remember having a large desire to get GTA, and it was only when the 3D version came out when I was older at around 15, that I had a desire to buy it, and my education in games in conjunction with my Mum’s early censoring had firmly distinguished gaming from reality.
This ability to distinguish even formed part of my argument when asking my Mum to buy me a game she wasn’t prepared to.
“Well your Uncle Herman would pass you down lots of games he would have, but I asked him to censor them, which he did most of the time! I’d buy you gaming magazines quite regularly; I still think to do that sometimes! And you’d usually get the same games as your friends. When it came to me actually buying games for you, you’d try and charm me!
I remember one time when we had been at the theatre seeing Richard II and you said to me ‘Can we have a look in the games shop?’ phrasing it in such an innocent way that you just wanted to have a look at what was there, but we both knew full well that you knew exactly what game you wanted!”
I too remember never once thinking ‘ah I’ll just have a look’ and always attempting to get my Mum into the games shop so that I’d have a shot at getting the specific game I had in mind.
“Once we got inside you’d keep the charm going but on this particular occasion after the theatre, with a large bout of pestering too! On the whole though you knew which games I would get you and which I wouldn’t, and once I had told you that it wasn’t suitable for you, you’d try with another game you had in mind.”
I do remember my journeys to the game shop as mostly being successful with my Mum, but I don’t think she ever bought me a game that was way out there and unsuitable.
“I would largely look at the cover then decide whether it was suitable for you, because you’d be with me most of the time I didn’t really have the opportunity to test it at home for myself, but we did end up playing one of the more controversial ones together and I got really into it.”
This brought me to one of my clearest memories as a young gamer. My Mum sat down and actively took part in scrolling beat-em up games with me. None of my other friends Mum’s did that! So it was really fun that she actively took part in them and we able to complete or get to the final round of, the two games we played the most together; Streets of Rage 2 and Golden Axe 2.
“I think your Uncle Herman gave you Golden Axe, which I really really enjoyed but although we got to the final round we never completed it! And Streets of Rage, I was iffy about the violence on the cover but I let you convince me slightly and I wanted to experience it myself to see whether it was bad or not, and in the end I ended up really enjoying it! The girl character became a fantasy me! I really loved that we got to go on a quest together, especially with the fantasy setting of Golden Axe, I trusted your ability to differentiate between the game and reality. I liked the stories too and felt a thrill at accomplishing them!
I think I ended up playing it through wanting to experience how violent it was for myself and also you asking me to play with you when you didn’t have friends round. Unless you experience it for yourself, you don’t really know what it’s about and it also gave me validity if I needed to censor it while we were playing. I guess the lack of blood and gore, despite the violence was a key factor in letting those two particular games slide, they really weren’t as bad as some of the others, and especially Golden Axe which was set in a more fantastical realm”
At this point I begin to contrast my Mum’s attitude with 16-bit graphical violence with the graphics of the modern day behemoth of gaming, and in particular the controversial level in which the player takes the role of a soldier who goes undercover as a terrorist and is encouraged to gun-down innocent civilians in an airport. The fact that this level can be skipped is in many ways an emotional plot device to get the player to dislike the bad guys of the game. Even if the player does decide to take on the level they do not have to largely partake in the shooting of civilians.
After the brief story monologue, and the in-action graphics of the game appeared, my Mum looked at me shocked at how realistically the graphics had progressed since we were playing together more than 10 years ago.
“I’m shocked at the realness of it! I’m not sure I would’ve bought you the beat-em up games if they’d been this real!”
When the shooting of civilians started happening she looked visibly disgusted.
“I don’t like how the gun was coming from my perspective, that makes it too real. It didn’t used to be like that point of view. There’s a crossover with reality here also.”
She stopped the video ¾ of the way in though, as she was unsure if she could continue. “
I’ll finish it but it’s caused me a degree of anxiety definitely, but then again I suppose I am able to suspend my disbelief as the characters walk through the bodies in a cartoony way rather than stepping over them in a more realistic way, but the wanton destruction of this game disgusts me. It made me shudder and dragged my emotions into it despite it being a game. If you were younger, I wouldn’t be buying that for you if you!”
I ask about the upcoming proposal for the Digital Economy Bill, which will make it illegal for the first time to sell 12+ rated games to children under the age of 12 and she answers with full confidence in the passing of that law.
“Yep very sensible, the media has a part to play in this because you only hear about the games that cause controversy, or I do anyway because you were my link to that world, but I suppose if you were younger now I’d use the internet more to check up on what games you wanted and maybe look for more realistic takes on reviews or multiple ones anyway.
“Games have definitely got more realistically violent since I was buying them for you, but I suppose the world has seemingly got more violent too in the reporting of violence. There’s more a saturation of violence it seems, but having said that I’m intrigued by the Wii, which my friend has a Pilates game for so I’d consider checking that our, and I get the impression that it spans generations rather than hardcore teenage gamers. It seems to have something more appealing. I think the key factor in parental control is actually experiencing the game for myself though.”
While my Mum has been musing about whether to buy herself a Wii since interviewing her, there is definitely a thread that the violence of games past went unnoticed by parents and there are plenty of examples of kids appealing to internet gaming community members to help them persuade their Mum’s to buy them Modern Warfare 2 (examples here, here, here and here). Yet in a lot of cases (well, at least in mine), Mum’s decision was often final and perhaps it needs that firmness to give children a clear sense about how to choose what games they can deal with. There is no doubt that it’s essential to censor young children to games in some form, but my discussion with my own Mum also suggests that it is possible to find a middle road, where both parents and children can enjoy games together, where censoring can become more of a behind-the-scenes issues rather than a confrontational one.
As a related link it seems there are also others comparing the violence in the games of yesteryear, including the aforementioned Streets of Rage 2:
