A stocking stuffed with parables from various entertainment media for the Christmas period:
- If you’re in the business of selling novels, the book’s cover has barely seconds to sell its contents. If the same holds true for videogames, it’s hardly surprising that reviews have little effect on sales.
- When kids are stuck inside on a hot summer’s day, playing videogames, we’re told it’s a tragedy. When kids are stuck inside on a hot summer’s day, reading Harry Potter, it’s a PR dream and a cause for celebration. Where are the videogame versions of these stories?
- If the movie industry’s current creativity problems can be shrewdly described by an essay written 20 years ago, is there really any hope that videogames can free themselves from their current obsession with sequels, franchises and licenses?
Monthly Archive for December, 2005
Merry Christmas! (How come I have never run into these GROW things before? The RPG one is a lot of fun too.)
‘ “A piazza is not a plaza,” fumes Piano. “The plaza is the theme park of the piazza; the plaza is the commercial version. A piazza is an empty space with no function. This is what Europeans understand.” A space without function allows one to be “in the moment”, he says, and to counter what he sees as a major flaw in modern life - the habit of interpreting all experience in the light of achievement, as a means to an end. We should, he thinks, learn to lighten up, and the creation of empty, purposeless spaces within cities might encourage that. “You don’t have to struggle to give function to every single corner. You can just wait and see and enjoy.” ‘
The Guardian interviews architect Renzo Piano.
Valve will soon add a variety of cinematic effects to their Source engine, raising a number of fascinating questions about the relationship between subjective reality (or ‘real’ reality) and cinematic reality. To what extent does the latter define the former? (It’s tough to try and imagine WW2 in your head without seeing things in grainy black and white, isn’t it?) By aping the imperfections of a camera, do these artificialities make things feel more ‘real’ for a player, make them feel more like they are ‘there’? If they do, to what extent, do games dictate their own visual language and to what extent must they work within the existing bounds defined by other visual media? What can be said about games’ artistic expression when they are trying to express a sense of being on a Spielberg filmset or an ancient filmreel, rather than some aspect of being on the battlefield?
I’ll be interested to see how their implementations work out in an interactive, actually-playing-the-game context, especially depth of field. Thankfully, Valve’s track record is of a delicate touch when it comes to introducing new graphical features, never over-emphasising them just for the sake of pointing out their presence. I also look forward to playing with the colour correction tools, since I went looking for just such a feature in Source, only a few weeks ago.
Joystiq notes that recent research points to the absence of any statistically significant correlation between game ratings and game sales. Statistics, though - what are they good for? Okay, lots, but life is much more fun when you deal with anecdotal evidence.
There are quite a few well reviewed titles that have sold in excess of 2.5 million on the graph, but the best a poorly reviewed title manages is short of 1.5 million. If you were to plot maxima rather than averages, you’d have an exponential increase across review scores, rather than a flat line.
This suggests to me that there is a relationship, but one hidden by other factors. I’m reminded of a quote I read once from (I think) an EA exec: EA finds that good marketing helps game sales, but only by upto 30%. If the game sucks, marketing isn’t going to be your saviour.
Obviously this kind of ‘analysis’ has no place in a statistical report - it’s impossible to quantify ‘good marketing’ - but it seems to me that sales function based on three factors: review score, quality of marketing and raw appeal of the basic concept to the customer. If you get all three right, well then you’ve hit the jackpot. If you mess up just one, then you put a ceiling on your sales, but the ceiling that a bad review score puts on your sales isn’t nearly as low as the one imposed by bad marketing or an unsaleable concept.