“The State of PC Gaming.”

It’s one of the more recent debates that’s polarized both consumers and game developers. There’s been a sharp decline in the variety of titles on store shelves, which themselves have yielded floor space to console games. At the same time, subscriptions to popular titles like World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online are quite high. Whether it’s dying, growing, stagnating, or recovering, there’s only one thing that most people can seem to agree upon; it’s changing. Scratch that… it’s changed. In fact, I can’t think of anything significant about PC gaming that’s remained the same in the last 3-5 years. But that’s actually a good thing, for those differences have allowed PC games to survive for as long as they have.

The past:

Walk into a retail outlet, buy a game off the shelf. Return home, begin the install process. Check the manufacturer website for the latest game patches. Check your PC component specs to ensure that they’re also up to date. Once you’re in the game, the usual single player vs multiplayer options present themselves, and then off you go. After an average 30-40 hours of play (single player), the title is essentially expired, and it’s off to the retail outlet once again. The only exception to this would have happened if you were involved with the still rather niche FPS genre (Counterstrike, Battlefield 1942, Unreal Tournament), or with MMORPGs which were in their adolescence at the time.

The present:

Download a full game from the manufacturer’s website, or though distribution channels like Steam and Stardock. Launch the game and wait for it to automatically update itself, verify compatibility with your system, and connect to a group of servers. Then decide if you want to pay for it. … That’s right. Lots of games are offered virtually free of charge, supported by in-game advertising, graduated subscriptions or other forms of user segmentation. Further, these same channels also allow you to centralize game/community settings, character configurations, and even hook into already established social networks in order to enrich the entire gaming experience.

The future… is anyone’s guess, and here’s mine:

As game platforms evolve, so will their content and their methods of distribution (regardless of genre), and the popularity of the MMO format will continue to inform this transformation. While this is happening, there will be a convergence between the offline and online identities of gamers themselves. The notion of a gamers “Profile” will carry more and more weight. You’ll no longer purchase “a game”. You’ll adopt a another brand which you can then apply to your profile. “John Doe the FPS player” becomes “John Doe the adventurer” with consistency in the way their online identity looks and [perhaps] performs in the new game environment. That environment will continue to integrate different (and hopefully engaging) forms of in-game advertising, in order to sustain the financial growth for the different franchises that choose to be a part of it. Imagine a scenario where you actually order a pizza from within a game environment like Grand Theft Auto, or the Sims, and it shows up to your front door. The advantages to this multiplicity favour both the gamer and the manufacturer (not to mention the marketer). If this model does indeed develop, the information associated with a player’s profile becomes that much more valuable. Granted, the requisite privacy issues will have to be ironed out, but those issues are omnipresent in any case.

To say that “PC gaming is dying/ has died” is to fail to recognize that a PC is merely a manifestation of technology, which continues to change. Arcades have all but disappeared from the planet, but you can still find just about every single game they provided a home for with a quick search online.

From Wikipedia:

LiveJournal was started on April 15, 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities.

Today, some 10 years later, it boasts some 10 million users (with the usual percentage of duplicate/inactive accounts being taken into consideration). It’s an established platform with a rich community, and a feature set that lets you choose your level of involvement. I remember when it was released, it wasn’t met with an incredible amount of fanfare, but it got enough attention to grow into a pretty sustainable organization. It played in a space with few competitors, each of whom managed to carve out their own niche in the marketplace. It predates MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, and many of the other global players in its space.

There aren’t that many celebrities with LJ accounts (I’m informed that Dave Coulier may have had one at one point, but he’s the most *ahem* famous one that I’ve heard of). I’ve never heard of it making the news. In fact I think it’s safe to say that there just aren’t that many people that know about this service and it’s lovable, pants-eating mascot.

Enter another mascot. Except this time it’s not a goat. It’s an unassuming little blue bird that represents the most talked about phenomenon in social media since Facebook and MySpace. Just this past week, the battle over who was to be crowned the “Twitter King” took place. I’m not sure who won that battle aside from Twitter itself, which got more free publicity than they could have afforded on their own. Which brings up another point; Twitter has no business model, or at least not one that’s apparent anyways (they’re largely funded by venture capital).

What’s more, is that Twitter does less than LiveJournal. Much less in fact. It’s limit of 140 characters per post aside, if you actually look at what Twitter does, it’s hard to fathom why this thing has soaked up so much of the limelight. Well, maybe it’s worth asking other Twitter users just why this thing is so useful. The Twitter site features a rotating set of testimonials that should shed some light on the issue:

“If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, it is one of those things, like MySpace, that sounds totally ridiculous and stupid when you first hear about it. But once you start using it, you realize how much fun it is.” – Eric Nuzum, Author of The Dead Travel Fast

“Twitter is the first thing on the web that I’ve been excited about in ages.” – Jason Kottke, Blogger

“Incredibly useful.” – Wired

“When I first started doing it, I thought, ‘geez, not another website to worry about updating and checking’, but now I’m glad I did it.” – point_chevalier, livejournaller

… Alright. So I’m gathering that its immediate benefit is unclear, but it’s fun, “incredibly useful” to all of Wired, and exciting? Further, the point of testimony from the apparent LJ convert “point_chevalier” seems questionable at best. There’s got to be something more to this. I mean, if the US Prez and Britney Spears are on the trolley, then surely I’m missing something no?

Perhaps it’s got some indefinable charm. Something that’s uniquely Twitteresque. … Something that Pownce and Identica don’t?

Now, those who know me often suggest that I’m a naysayer when it comes to new technology like this, but that’s not entirely true in this case. Firstly, it’s not new. The technology has been employed in the past to do exactly what Twitter is doing. And secondly, it’s not that I’m saying Twitter is bad per se. I’m just trying to understand exactly why it’s been the one to receive so much attention when it really isn’t any different from existing platforms.

For the record, I’m neither a “Tweeter” nor do I have an actual LJ account. It’s just not my particular brand of vodka.

I am now going to have a sandwich. Ham and Swiss on white. I may also have a drink. Or not. Stay tuned for more.

I had mentioned in my previous post that I’ve been a bit of a PC hobbyist since the late 90′s. Building my own machines, pulling my hair out when I invariably messed something up and had to start all over again. I’ve been clearing out piles of old PC magazines, including a rather bulky collection of Maximum PC which dates back to 1999. So of course nostalgia kicks in and I start flipping through some of the older issues, and I started to realize something. The actual specifications of PC components have become less and less prominent in just about all forms of marketing material.

There was a time when PCs were marketed and sold literally by the numbers. CPU manufacturers incorporated the processor speed right into the product names themselves. But a glance at an ad from Best Buy or Dell will reveal just how much this has changed. Processor speeds and cache sizes have been replaced with more “comfortable” features and benefits (space-saving, optimized, easy upgrades) and technology “microbrands” like Crossfire, Corei7, and BluRay.

The reason for this isn’t all that mysterious, and I think it represents a definite response to consumer feedback to the industry. The average consumer doesn’t really care what’s under the hood. Well let me rephrase that. Customers don’t care about the low-level details, as long as it performs for them as expected. As a PC manufacturer, this is a bit of an issue because you can’t continue to “wow” consumers with incremental increases in gigahertz or Terabytes anymore. So instead, you go back to basics. Focus on maintaining connection between the brand, and the consumer. The markets will sort themselves out in terms of who buys what. Hobbyists can still get ample information on component specs from any number of online sources, and when you look at it, they were never the primary audience for the major retailers anyways. What really matters is whether or not you (as a company) can recognize the difference between a message that says “We have a PC for you” and “We have YOUR PC”. Hobbyists are more likely to respond to the former. The rest of the world responds to the latter.

This is definitely the direction that the PC market has been heading in for a couple years now. The Mac camp of course has been doing this even before the infamous Mac vs PC campaign. Well, there was this guy too, but… that particular campaign didn’t last too long.

The same kind of shift has been going on in other areas of personal technology too. Consumer level camera ads speak more about ease of use than megapixels. Instead of listing off all of the bells and whistles, mobile phones are all about service plans and the different ways that you can connect with people once you get the device in your hands. Of course, improvements in technology will continue to make there way into successive versions of products, but it will be interesting to see if there will be another shift in the way that those products are marketed to us.

“No,.. it’s the children who are wrong.”

Going over a recent post at Engadget, I was surprised by the recent results of the latest Nielsen report on “The State of the Video Gamer.”  David Hinkle however, seemed to take this in stride (see his review at Joystiq). This caused me to take pause and reflect a little bit about what I thought I knew about the gaming industry. I used to be a very avid gamer, and as one of many hobbyists who still build my own machines, I still like to keep a close eye on the general state of the industry.

After reading the report, a couple of points stuck with me. Firstly, especially after the last 2 years, I’d always thought of the Wii as the undisputed king of the console market. Gauging press, reaction, and the general clamor for Nintendo’s darling, it’s easy to see why. But according to Nielsen, the Wii is trailing behind in terms of popularity and sales. While I’ve always been a fan of the PC as a gaming platform, everything I’ve experienced with the Wii speaks to its superior ability to cater to a market that was crying out for attention; groups of players (in the same space) looking for socially-oriented gaming experiences. No other console is as party/gathering/birthday-friendly. No other console features game franchises that have dominated the lucrative “family-friendly” market forever. And quite frankly, no other console can get away with releasing games that just do not compare to the PS3 or Xbox360 when it comes to pure graphics capabilities. Now these stats were mostly relevant to December 2008, a time when the Wii was particularly hard to find on store shelves, but is that the only reason for this discrepancy in market share?

Second, and this is straight from the report: “Females 25 years of age and older make up the largest block of PC game players…in December 2008.” Now before you fire up your email client, let me clarify that this surprises me for a number of different reasons. Even given my previous assumptions about the popularity of the Wii, it would not have surprised me as much to see a sharp increase in the numbers of female console gamers. The number of titles that appeal to both genders are incredibly vast. Conversely, the number of new PC games has been on the decline in the last 5 years or so. There just isn’t as much money to be made producing new PC titles anymore. Is it possible that MMO titles like WoW and their kin are responsible for holding onto the increased gamerGirl demographic?

These are questions I don’t really have answers for, but I think are still worth discussing. In a climate where everyone’s had to rethink their business models, it would be interesting to get some insight into the marketing plans of companies in industries where we once thought we were comfortable in. Assumptions that were once valid are now worthless. Strategies to capture the right audience are most likely outdated.

Oh, and one final note from the report. The most popular PC game played by both men and women (25-49)? … Solitaire.

Well this little experiment seems to be growing a little larger than I had originally anticipated. Over the last few days I’ve switched everything over to another server, which will allow me to have more control over some of the features and functionality I’d like to implement over the next little while.

Further, you can now access the site using either of the following 2 urls:

http://www.approachingtheta.com

http://www.apptheta.com

Whether or not you want to pronounce that “Approaching the T.A.” is entirely up to you.

More on theme, there’s a great post over on The Social Capitalist by Karl Long entitled “The Medium of Business is Behaviour” that explores the relationship between Design and Business and how both have the ability to influence behaviour (through power and empathy). Purely speaking, companies use a blend of business and design to accomplish this. It’s caused me to think about the response that both of these entities evoke from the public at large. Consumers have just as much ability (if not more) to influence the behaviour of business, though this manifests itself almost purely through [purchasing] power. Consumers don’t really have to put a whole lot of effort into empathic decision making when they’re engaged in a transaction.

It’s a good read. Hop on over and take a look.

A very familiar face has been in the news recently, though I’d be willing to bet few people actually know his name. In fact, I’d bet that even after mentioning Vince Schlomi, most people would still be at a loss to figure out exactly where he was from. That is, until you see a picture of him.

Vince Shlomi. aka: The ShamWow Guy

Vince Shlomi, aka: The ShamWow Guy was arrested recently and is alleged to have assaulted a prostitute. You can read all about the sordid details here: at the Smoking Gun website. As this made the rounds on the internet, it got me thinking about infomercials themselves. You wouldn’t have much trouble getting consensus over the fact that the vast majority of them are absolute train-wrecks. Formulaic, half-baked scenarios encrusted with bad acting, with a nice thick syrupy coating of dubious promises and happy days ahead.

And this is also probably why they work. Little known, but omnipresent companies like Thane Direct and Interwood Direct Marketing are the companies responsible for the vast majority of infomercials that flood the airwaves when any sane individual should just be drifting off to sleep. They’re also responsible for raking in a LOT of money (it’s hard to track down actual numbers for these giants, but it doesn’t take an accountant to take a guess at profits for either behemoth.)

I guess the question is, why is it that we give infomercials so much leeway for being so utterly horrible? Why do we glue our eyes to the screen to watch these pitchmen try to sell us miracles of modern technology that amount to no more than your average chamois, blender, or reasonably sharp knife? There’s got to be a reason why we expect a different calibre of advertisement from a car company or a even a shampoo manufacturer, than we do from Vince or his colleagues.

HI! I'M BILLY MAYS!

I actually don’t think we have to look very far to find a workable theory. The problem is that it suggests a schizoid break between the way we’d like to perceive ourselves, and the way that we actually behave. It’s something that marketers have known for years.

We all want to be sold to.

But, we also hate salesmen, no? The very mention of the term instantly triggers visions of a fedora topped gentleman in a bad suit knocking on your door, trying to sell you a vacuum in the middle of Vietnam (true story, a friend of mine actually does this for a living). But at the same time, perhaps there’s some sliver of psychological need hidden in Maslow’s pyramid that we haven’t yet discovered. You know, if you uhm… subscribe to that particular theory anyways. There’s got to be a reason why someone with a particular cadence in their voice and a flair for the dramatic can capture your attention and dazzle you as they make a waffle in 15 seconds. Maybe it’s the sense of a challenge. We’re all reasonably intelligent individuals. “Alright sure, if you think you can woo me with some fancy talk and an hassle-free payment plan, then be my guest.” Or, perhaps the same part of the brain that’s responsible for the food dehydrator you have hidden away in the back of your cupboard with your sense of shame and defeat, is also the one that feeds your pleasure center. Your guilty pleasure center that is.

Looks a little ... underwhelming when you get it home, doesn't it?

Whatever the reason might be, the future seems bleak for those of us convinced that humanity has, or ever will evolve beyond the need for some degree of state-fair pageantry in advertising. It seems there will always be a provider for that coveted 3am – 5am time slot, now home to Mr. T, Jack Lalaine, and … that girl that was Chrissy’s cousin on Three’s Company.is