The Virtual Reality-focused conferences at CARVI 2005 took place these past two days. Very well organized by EUVE, lots of interesting talks and people to meet. I had fun giving my talk exploring where Virtual Reality and Videogames meet, and got asked tons of questions during the coffee breaks.

And, of course, nothing beats a few sunny days in the Basque Country. Good times.

Interesting quote from Greg Costikyan: "fostering an independent games movement really requires solving three problems simultaneously: First, creating a desire among developers to do something different; second, finding a solution to the business issue of creating a viable channel for distribution of independent product; and third, changing gamer culture. By that I mean that people who like indie music and film are willing to accept lower production values in exchange for individual vision and creativity."

Imagine a world where you pay $15-$25 for games that last 2-3 hours. That would be the games equivalent of the modern DVD market. However, would the DVD market work at all without the big movie theater industry behind? Would the modern CD industry work without radio, MTV, clubs and live events?

Oh and let’s not forget that games platforms disappear after a few years, and the backwards compatibility efforts are not solid enough (even if that article is fairly inaccurate, the perception is what counts). At least, according to Jason Rubin, we’re approaching the end of the technological feature race – something that movies reached over 50 years ago. But with several competing platforms fighting for exclusives, the scope of the industry is in fact segregated in 3-5 sub-industries, with the corresponding reduction in awareness and overall power.

So the question is, how would this elusive "independent games industry" be, look, work like? The best I can think of are cable TV-like models for consoles; which is why I believe that Microsoft’s XBox Live project is the single most important weapon in their arsenal. But then, why did I never have any faith in the whole Phantom console thing? I guess because of the catalogue.

Browsing through GI.biz, I came across this bit where a UK store is speculating with a retail price of 400 pounds for the XBox 360. That got me thinking into the prices for other territories.

400 UK pounds is roughly US$ 700. However history says a more likely US price would be $500. History also says that the rest of Europe would see a price of 500 Euros. Weighing in the standards of living, average salaries and whatnot, this means gaming in Spain and most of Europe is twice as expensive as gaming in the US. A similar problem happens with the price of games themselves. No wonder the European market is still behind the US, despite being potentially bigger. I’m going to build some rough figures to get an idea:

Price of a movie ticket:
US: $7 ($7)
UK: 5 UKP ($9)
Spain: 5.5 E ($6.7)

Price of a PS2 game (checked Episode 3 on PS2 in Amazon and FNAC):
US: $50 ($50)
UK: 40 UKP ($72)
Spain: 60 E ($72)

Price of a DVD movie (checked Collateral and Troy)
US: $20 ($20)
UK: 16 UKP ($28)
Spain: 20 E ($24)

Average salaries (circa 2002):
US: $37K /
UK: 22K UKP ($39K) (Interesting bit: median salary was 18K UKP ($31K))
Spain: 19.2K E ($23K) /

(Sources: (US) http://www.bls.gov/cew/state2002.txt (UK) http://www.lirg.org.uk/lir/pdf/article82e.pdf (Spain) http://www.invertia.com/noticias/noticia.asp?idnoticia=1295847 )

Relative prices of a movie, game, DVD:
US: 0.189, 1.351, 0.540
UK: 0.227, 1.818, 0.727
Spain: 0.286, 3.125, 1.042

So, in Spain, a game is more than twice as expensive as in the US, for people of similar standard of living / social status. Of course the salaries are for 2002 whereas the exchange rates and costs are more recent… but I don’t think the results are too far off anyway.

Now, if you need to earn double of the national average in order to be able to afford games in a similar way as the average american does, well you see why gaming is not terribly popular in Spain. At least, paid gaming. 🙂 Let’s make a wild guess that 20% of the population earns at least twice the national average. With a population of 40million (compared to the US’s 290m), you’d conclude that the spanish high-end game market would be roughly 5% of the US. According to http://www.electro-imagen.com/es/noticia/1678, Spain has 2.6% of the worldwide games market, so these figures are not too far off. For our population, we should be somewhere around 6% of the global games market.

Now let’s look into pricing. Given our standard of living, to achieve similar unit sales %’s as the US or UK we would need prices of games slashed from 60E to around 25E. Such a 60% price drop would probably bring revenue per unit down to 20% of what it is today (considering fixed costs such as operations, manufacturing, distribution and etc). If you sell 3 times as many units, but only make 1/5th the revenue, you end up losing money. Such bold attempts have caused enough damage to our industry in the past.

Ok, enough pulling numbers out of my hat. There are enough assumptions here to fill several trucks. Is there a sweet spot where a small price drop could bring a noticeable increase in sales? Well, if that price drop happened, the public wouldn’t increase overnight without some serious publicity and campaigning. Since the games market is handled by several competing companies, it’s unlikely they’d all agree to something like that. However, with the new crop of consoles coming out during the next year, it would be a great opportunity for one of the console makers to pull it off. I’m looking at you, Microsoft.

I found this discussion very interesting:
http://www.buzzcut.com/article.php?story=20040827160706119#comments

The whole site is quite interesting, actually. Another blog to keep track of!

Nightwish, Slayer, Marilyn Manson along with a few others. Slayer were capable but boring (I just don’t like machinegun metal); Marilyn Manson was effective but a bit uninspired; Nightwish totally rocked the place, with great performance and what I believe to be the best sound I’ve experienced in a live concert since Mike Oldfield.

Will Wright chatted with Wired, and participated in an E3 panel. Great stuff in both articles.

I went to watch Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, and was pleasantly surprised! While the two prequels had been visually amazing, the story, dialogue and character development seriously lacked. Episode 3 – RotS is different: the story is really good, and it certainly has the darker tone that Lucas had promised. None of the cute puppet shows of episodes 6, 1 and 2. Ewan McGregor’s characterization is astounding, he really does look like he will grow into Alec Guiness’ Obi-Wan. Hayden Christensen’s acting is mostly forgettable, but he does look dark and scary as he transitions to the Dark Side. Palpatine steals the show performance-wise. There are many childish dialogues and cheesy scenes, but I was so interested in the story that I could somehow imagine those scenes as I think they should have been done. I’d rate this movie up there with the original Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, and I’m really happy that that the series ends leaving a good taste in my mouth.

The first battle, in what will hopefully be a long war, is over. Both have given their first presentation, and Sony has completely stolen the show. Why? Because they have shown a lot of cool stuff and Microsoft hasn’t, that’s why. At the moment theres a certain feeling that Sony has Dreamcasted the XBox 2 (I refuse to call it 360).

Most of the videos are pre-rendered clips, and for those that are in-game footage, when you see the screenshots you notice a lot of tricks which you know will lessen the sense of photorealism and detail. BUT, the fact remains, that Sony is showing games, and doing so in a great bang, whereas Microsoft has been trickling, leaking, and finally exposing, lists of features and plans and visions and fucking celebrity endorsements. Sony shows (prerrendered) footage from MotorStorm and Killzone 2, while Microsoft announces that Final Fantasy XI will be ported to XBox2. Meh.

PS3 has about twice the overall computing power of the XBox2; same RAM (thank god Microsoft listened, they really believed 256Mb was good enough!); I expect very similar rendering features; similar extras, with wireless, net, pluggable HD and etc; Blu-Ray discs versus XBox’s DVDs.

With the same RAM and only twice the raw rendering / computing horsepower (real performance is a different thing), both consoles end up very similar in my book. I doubt that Blu-Ray vs DVD is going to make a difference, Sony simply wants to push that format into the living room ASAP. No, Sony, I’m not going to buy all my movies again. In fact I don’t believe I’ll even have a HDTV for a few years.

The next battle starts tomorrow when people hit the E3 floor and see (and play) the beasts; that is, if the PS3 is in playable form (I bet not).

Nintendo? We should find out soon.

It’s official: I’m overloaded with videos, screenshots, announcements, rumours and facts sheets. Everything has become a messy blur of bumpmapped shading, explosions and numbers.

Imperial Glory is finished and I have a final copy. I only worked on it for three months, but (with permission of the dev team) I am as attached to it as to any other game I ever worked on.

If you only ever watch one classic movie (those filmed in black and white, before you were born), you won’t go wrong if you choose All About Eve. Amazing script, great performances and witty dialogue… it really is one of the best movies ever made.

Interesting interview with Paul Verhoeven (from 2002). I really enjoy the unique view of the world he creates in his movies (I even found Showgirls not that bad!), and his tasteful use of sarcasm, humor, sex and violence.

Gave my lecture at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and the slides (in Spanish) are available here.

I’m not terribly happy with the way the lecture went. To begin with, there were very few attendants; Friday afternoon right before a long weekend with sunny weather? Even I was anxious to hit the road and get to the beach! I also felt that the students were more curious that truly interested in professional and philosophical games development issues. Finally, I am a lot more comfortable giving a lecture while standing, but I had to speak sitting down with my laptop to the right. Oh well – all in all it wasn’t a bad lecture, just not a good one.