GameDaily is running an excellent opinion article on why the games industry is broken:

GameDaily BIZ: Opinion: The Video Game Business Is Broken
We all know this a year of change in the video game market place. The future of the industry is very much at a crossroads with the big 3 bringing out their new platforms and many questions remain unanswered. Maybe it’s time to say “the Emperor Has No Clothes.” The video game business is clearly broken and is in desperate need of fixing. This is not just another console transition%u2014we are 6 years away from the last one and in a totally different world. Here are my observations on the problems with the current model.

And, you might wonder, what does American think about this? First off, I like to refer to myself in the third person. What’s that about? Second, HELL YES – the industry is broken. But only from the perspective of those who aren’t profiting HUGELY off the existing model, despite how that might translate to general lame-ness for the rest of us.

Lo and behold, I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a while… mostly because, as a little guy competing against the likes of EA, and Sony (not that I’d presume there to be any actual compeition – yet), it is painfully obvious that a full-frontal assault on territory so masterfully dominated by the Big Boys is pure madness. So you have to think outside the box. And thinking outside the box offers some interesting solutions, many of which we’re beginning to see emerge even now.

Things are not so dark as they seem. In fact, I sense that David is winding up one hell of a sling throw.

There’s a book called “Blue Ocean Strategy“, which outlines ways to create new playing fields inside existing industries. It forces you to look at the way an industry works (which usually translates to a heavily protected process controlled by big corporations), tear the process apart, and rebuild it like so:

Key factors taken for granted to be eliminated:
Retail distribution, traditional marketing budget, box product/manufacture costs, gamer jargon marketing/feature lists, in-box AI, initial cost to download/play

Key factors to be reduced well below industry standard:
Cost of development, size of development team, size of initial release, time to initial release, time between subsequent releases, player time investment per episode, cost per hour of gameplay

Key factors to be raised above the industry standard:
Ability to respond to customer feedback on content, quality of AI, mass market appeal with adult and broad narrative, cliffhanger style content

Factors to be created that have never been offered:
Online marketplace for content distribution, star designer content, community content sales, multiple productions inside same universe, artistic flavor to content like HBO films, users can decide which episode to travel to next. AI stream, offsite AI processing (improved AI and adds copy protection).

You ELIMINATE, REDUCE, RAISE, and CREATE factors that everyone is currently taking for granted. When I play around with this, the outcome is the above back-of-envelope model for… online distribution of episodic content with online AI and a host of other “weird” ideas. And while the big publishers are moving towards concepts like this, the great thing for the small guy is that with this model they don’t have to rely on the big publishers to build the product they want to build. We’re finally moving back to the days when companies like id Software could build their fortunes on self-funded games released via the internet.

And while some people are going to hate me for this, I have to say that I believe advertiser funded game development is going to play a huge role in the transformation of the industry away from one dominated by the EA’s of the world. It works for television, and I think it can work for games. At least I know I’d rather play an advertiser funded innovative game than another big-publisher funded film license genre conformer.

There’s no reason why these two models can’t live together in the same universe. Ultimately it means more choice for gamers, and that’s not a bad thing.

This morning it was announced that Aspyr will publish Bad Day LA in the US. This isn’t the first time that Aspyr has dealt with one of my products – they previously did an amazing job with the Mac version of Alice. I’m excited to be working with them again and hope we can have equal success with BDLA.

WORTHPLAYING –
Aspyr announced today that it has signed Bad Day L.A., a third-person action/adventure game with a tongue-in-cheek comedic twist. Set in modern day Los Angeles, Bad Day L.A. combines a fantastical art style, groundbreaking collaborative gameplay elements and a heavy dose of dark satire to create a truly unforgettable experience.

Oh, and the ESRB gave the game an “M” rating for:
Blood & Gore
Intense Violence
Mature Humor
Strong Language
Use of Drugs

I guess they didn’t like the “get kids off drugs” mission.

It’s not hard to believe that video games cause violence when you read headlines like these:
“Video game slayings trial gets underway“
“Witness won’t testify at Xbox murder trial”

Both of these stories relate to the same murder trial taking place in Florida. Three men are accused of killing six of their friends. In the initial story the motive, defined by the prosecution, is stated in the first paragraph as being “…over an Xbox”. Two paragraphs down we’re granted an additional detail related to motive:

Authorities said Victorino became angry when 22-year-old Erin Belanger took his Xbox video game system and some clothing from her grandparents’ vacant home where he had been squatting, prosecutors said.

So, we have one of the victims taking an Xbox and clothes from a group of people who were squatting at her grandparents vacant home. Murder follows. More to the story than just an Xbox. Too bad we didn’t know that the clothes in question were from Abercrombie and Fitch, or this could have been the “A&F slayings”.

It wasn’t until I found the follow-up article to this story a few days ago that I decided I needed to say something about this particular bit of headline spin. The update adds even more detail to the story (emphasis mine):

Another witness, Brandon Graham, 19, testified he was with Cannon and the three defendants when Victorino outlined a plot to kill everyone at the rental home shared by Erin Belanger and several housemates.

Most of the victims, ages 17-34, worked together at a Burger King. Graham said Victorino had wanted to imitate a scene from the movie “Wonderland” where people are beaten to death with pipes.

If you were writing this story would it still be the “Xbox murder trial”? This sounds a lot more like “Wonderland 2”.

I understand that the prosecution in this case wants to define a clear motive and stick with it: “A took X from B, B then killed A.” I can understand that this trial is “about” a stolen Xbox, but then, why not make it more clear to the reader that this is the case. Look at these two headlines again:

Video game slayings trial gets underway.
Witness won’t testify at Xbox murder trial.

If you are just skimming through the headlines, and you’ve heard in the past that video games might be inspiring real-world violence, then these headlines will connect certain mental dots. “Video games might cause violence…” – and now here’s an “Xbox murder trial” and some “video game slayings”. 1+1 = video games cause murder.

Why is it that the headlines to these articles place such heavy emphasis on “video games” when there is no real connection to video games in the trial? Why label this the “Xbox murder trial” in the same breath as you reveal a substantial link between the killer’s inspirations and a previous mass murder?

I attempted to contact the reporter who wrote both of these articles, but never got a response. Perhaps, for the media, like politicians, “video game violence” is too easy button to press. Too bad neither group seems so contentious when it comes to real-world violence.

We’ve all heard the saying that money cannot buy happiness. I read recently that an investment firm researched the root of happiness so that they could better serve their customers’ needs. They discovered that buying luxury watches, expensive furs, and fancy cars did nothing to improve long-term happiness. Instead, it was revealed that world travel, hiking mountains, visiting distant temples, making pilgrimages to interesting places, meeting new people, and experiencing new cultures was the path to joy. Albert Camus said that for any man who was able to sustain himself at a minimum level financially, traveling the world should be the most important thing in life.

Of all the aspects of my job that bring me joy it is the one often seen as the most arduous, the press tour, that I enjoy the most. Press tours are by their nature a travel event. The routine goes something like: fly to new city, do press event, sleep, fly to new city, do press event… lather, rinse, repeat. Cities whiz by in taxi windows or are seen from behind the revolving doors of nice hotels. When I’m lucky we the tour stays in a city long enough to enjoy a dinner on the town with a crowd of new faces.

The European press tour for Bad Day LA landed me in Paris, then Munich, Hamburg and finally Berlin. In each city I met the local people, ate the local food, and saw what sights my schedule would allow. Press tours are for travel what speed dating is for romance.

I always come away from these adventures with an altered sense of scale. I feel humbled by how small my place in the world is. I see that each person is the center of their own story, and I’m always reminded that we should recognize everyone has their own personal narrative, of which they are the star. And then I recognize the scale, how big the world is. At every moment the world is happening. Somewhere in the world right now people are preparing themselves for sleep while others are drinking their morning coffee. Someone is making love while somewhere in the world another person is breathing a last breath. In this sense we are all a part of the larger whole, all inhabitants of the same giant sphere.

The truth is that people everywhere are the same. They all have their lives, their dramas, their desires, and their fears. Guys in Berlin race their cars around recklessly just like guys in the US, South America, and Japan. Taxi drivers yell at pedestrians, slow moving vehicles, and nothing in particular in Paris the same as in Hong Kong. There is bad pop music in every language. We all love our friends, our coffee, our food, and our cities. We are all the same, and yet for some reason we’re constantly made to feel separated, apart, and different. “Hell is other people”, but is it really?

Personally, I believe this sense of separation is the fault not of the people, but of their governments and particularly the media. Another aspect of the world I witness when I travel is the way in which the media represents our planet to us. Things don’t happen to “humans”, but instead to Indians or Palestinians. Words are colored so that those who aren’t on “our” side are labeled terrorists and evildoers. The world is constantly broken into territories, split by borders, and separated by colors, religions, and income levels.

When I travel I meet not just my fellow humans, but my brothers and sisters, and essential reflections of myself. I feel thankful not only for the work that people involved with the tour put into these events, but for the fact that I’m able to momentarily step into their world and see their lives, their cities. This window into the world always leaves me feeling hope that some day we’ll all recognize how we are all essentially the same.

If you do not resist, it does not exist.

(More images from the Berlin leg of the PR tour can be seen HERE.)