Lewie Proctor pulls in a variety of opinions on piracy over at Savy Gamer, including CEO of TIGA Richard Wilson, indie developer Cliff Harris, and Dmitry Guseff from DRM provider StarForce.

All kinds of new platforms are habituating people to buying downloadable titles, but it’s new territory and there have been a lot of screw ups. The industry is finding it’s way through them, slowly, and pieces like this SavyGamer one will help. Two things really stuck out to me from it. First, Richard Wilson:

“It is not the responsibility of publishers to sustain a secondary market in games.”

He’s quite right. It’s a different matter if they’re trying to actively destroy it, but frankly, it’s entirely up to digital distributors if they want to offer any ability to resell or not. Digital games aren’t property in the same way piracy isn’t theft (it’s copyright infringement), and a lot of people, no matter what their position on piracy, seem to want old models to apply whenever they’re to their advantage.

Tellingly, the most naive and conflicting two of the interviews are with the guy from StarForce, and another from ReleaseLog, a site that links to newly pirated content. It’s interesting that StarForce see their product as a temporary bulwark against piracy rather than any kind of cast iron solution, and that they see making it consumer friendly as fundamentally weakening it. It turns to self-serving fluff as soon as he says discs are more convenient than downloading though.

The second real standout from the piece are Lewie’s own desires for DRM in future, which include:

Publishers should be absolutely open and honest with what DRM they are using. Everyone along the supply chain should take responsibility for communicating to customers exactly how their digital consumer rights are going to be managed.
Ideally, when the DRM devalues the product, the product should be discounted. Charging £30 for a game that can be resold, and charging £30 for an equivalent game with DRM that absolutely [prevents] it from being resold isn’t right. They are inferior products, and should be priced accordingly.

That kind of pricing structure is an interesting idea, though I suspect it would lead to almost universal acceptance of DRM. That in itself is not so bad, but if or when it begins to lock tinkerers and developers out of platforms altogether, or oblige developers to work with DRM whether they like it or not, that’s very, very bad.

(CC image by Mike Baird)

I’ve heard from one XBLIG developer that any game making three hundred sales there is doing very well relative to most. Brandon Boyer goes into quite some detail on Boing Boing about what Microsoft promised at launch and what they’ve actually done, finding a somewhat depressing result. There’s clearly some commitment from Microsoft when they’re getting us to produce events like X48, and running competitions such as the Imagine Cup, but as Brandon points out, they seem to have fallen short on promises they made with regard to marketing. XBLIG is basically buried fairly deep in the interface.

Were Microsoft expecting better results than “Rocket Fart” and “Don’t B Nervous Talking 2 Girls”? Most probably, but to be fair, there are a few excellent games on there that they could be making more from, both financually and in terms of PR.

Quite possibly, there are also multiple departments within Microsoft contesting various things related to XBLIG. No matter how much Microsoft departments, project managers and developers believe in the indie community, they have a marketing department to go through when it comes to the front end of Xbox Live.

More importantly though, what do developers do when things such as XBLIG, the App Store, and Android Market are exhibiting such small, long tails that even the short heads can fail to make project costs back? It’s quite literally a $64,000 question, and there’s no easy answer. None of these methods of digital distribution offer a ready made living for anyone; it’s as much a jungle, and a business effort, as sending something to bricks and mortar retail.

EDIT: Gamasutra jump in with a much more positive piece on it. Some games have made decent amounts of money during 2009, but they are a tiny minority. Nonetheless, as Gama say, it’d be vey premature to call XBLIG a failure at this point.

(Image: XBLIG title Leave Home, by Hermit Games).

Consollection really has a good, documented set of games console images. Look how far the industry has come!

Parliament commissioned an educational game: MP For A Week. Nicholas Lovell Dan Griliopoulos reviews it on Games Brief.

It guises as educational, and to an extent is, but it also smacks heavily of PR, as Nicholas points out:

The win element also implies that bad MPs always in the long run are losers, which is not strictly true. An MP who does nothing in parliament but bangs on in the local media, or a safe-seat MP who does nothing in his constituency, or even a media-friendly cheeky chappy like Charles Kennedy, Alan Clarke or Boris Johnson, will get re-selected and re-elected most of the time.

Flawed then, but still an interesting games project.

(CC image by **Maurice**)

Develop posted this piece recently, interviewing Saint John Walker from Skillset about the accreditation criteria and plans for Skillset. It’s an intersting look inside what’s been a fairly shrouded process to most people.

Of course, the debate about Skillset’s role is far from over, with plenty of criticisms being leveled by universities. One of the things I most like about this industry is that both Saint and Mike are right there in the comments on the piece, having a civil discussion about their differences.

I’ve heard reports of interdepartmental awkwardness for years at the BBC, which is apparently why Channel 4 have raced ahead in games while the BBC have failed to commit. Until now, that is, since BBC Worldwide are now courting developers and publishers to develop their IP into videogames. They seem serious this time too, hiring Robert Nashak from Electronic Arts.

mTrends put up an interesting project this week: dozens of futurists consulted on what they think will be the state of mobile in 2020. Some of it is straightforward extrapolation. Some of it reads like marketing, and is indeed from marketing people or executives fom mobile companies. A few of the predictions are things that have already happened, but still sound nice and futuristic.

Of course, absolutely everything in it should be taken with a pinch of salt. Some of the people in this selection have vested interests, or are trying to sound interesting or authoritative. A few of them contradict each other, which I think makes the project trustworthy.

The most pleasing thing about so many futurologists being gathered into one thing is that you can easily hit the mouse button while shouting “NEXT!”. Here are the slides, below are some of my highlights with slide numbers and comments in square brackets:

7: Always-on backlash: [...] The ability to gracefully disconnect and go ‘dark’ must become a USP for many products and services.
17: Non-humans (objects, animals, places) will generate more data than humans.
19: People still won’t pay for digital content
21: People will pay for content again, especially mobile content since mobile advertising takes up valuable screen real estate, because operator billing will finally replace the piece of plastic in your wallet.
42: You will travel to go to a no-airwaves National Park; the first cellular reserve [Faraday cages will become USPs for some venues]
44: Login will replace SIM cards [interesting idea]
49: M2M Services (machine to machine services, without a human behind the device). [It's not skynet, but it is new territory for interaction design]

Sensing and health:
(5, 13, 14) [SETI@Home is just a beginning, phones will likely be used as distributed computing platforms. Battery life in our smart phones is jealously guarded at the moment because a few hours of heavy usage will kill it, but with enough capacity there could be massive benefits to mobile sensing platforms that are always with us.]

Cynicism over bandwidth:
(27, 54) [IBM once thought the total market for computers worldwide was for maybe 5 or so of them. Put the bandwidth in place and people will find ways to use it; I can't believe people are making these predictions when video is still only taking off.]

Matt Jones from BERG has been nominating console games for the Designs of The Year Exhibition, and they keep getting rejected.

On one level, I can see why: shooters such as Left 4 Dead 2 and Bioshock and aren’t the kind of things that represent games particularly well to outsiders, even though they may be visually stunning and eloquently implemented. Even players are only just finding ways to articulate the qualities of a game beyond “It’s really good” or “It has good gameplay”, and though game designers are further ahead in this respect, we’re quite a way from having any kind of comprehensive lexicon or heritage to reference.

Game designers don’t fully understand their own discipline yet, because it’s morphing and new things are discovered every year. Externally games are still seen as media, but if they are, they’re the strangest, most syncretic form of we’ve devised, depending on or at least being able to profit from a welter of disciplines. As a result, it’s going to take a while to, as Matt suggests, build a critical footing for games in the design community. For now, I don’t think you could ask for better proponents than BERG.

It’s just a start though. A small group of people in London, no matter how high their profile, aren’t enough, and games need to be taken seriously in many fields before they’ll truly be embedded in culture. The mechanics of game design have already spread tendrils into just about everything, but cultural awareness of that is lagging far behind, not just in design but in all respects.

Gamesbrief pointed to the New Year Honours List recently, in which four games industry figures received honours, and suggests that people nominate more in future. While I know a few people who despise the very idea of the honours list, even they would recognise that it’s useful to an industry to get that kind of recognition. Much as we’re learning about game design a piece at a time, the industry is also learning how to swim in a wider culture.

(CC image by evelynishere)

Spotted this one off physical pong set on Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories the other day:

You can read about the full build on their blog.

Something absolutely monstrous has emerged from the Scamville scandal instigated by Techcrunch last month.

Not only were offers being used to scam users into subscriptions, but they were also being utilised to dupe people into supporting political campaigns they don’t necessarily agree with, building a base of fake dissent to campaign against healthcare reform in the USA:

Instead of asking the gamers to try a product the way Netflix would, “Get Health Reform Right” requires gamers to take a survey, which, upon completion, automatically sends the following email to their Congressional Rep:

“I am concerned a new government plan could cause me to lose the employer coverage I have today. More government bureaucracy will only create more problems, not solve the ones we have.”

(CC image of astroturf by gregoryjameswalsh).