What Games Are

OUYA and I [News]

2013 has been a big year of transitons for me. Some have been great. I moved to the USA, went from being a consultant to working in a studio again. I survived turning 40. My wife and I are enjoyed a crazy new adventure and made many friends along the way. Some transitions truly sucked though. The worst was the recent passing of my father, which was every bit as awful as you imagine it to be.

Another was the need for Jawfish to pivot out of making multiplayer mobile games. Mobile has become incredibly difficult to crack without an immense bank balance because of the escalating costs of user acquisition, and the smart choice for Jawfish became to pivot into technology provision in the casino space. While wishing them all the luck in the world, that change didn't make a lot of sense for me.

So, another transition. But this time a good one: I'm off to work with OUYA.

I've been talking about microconsoles for the best part of a year. I think there's something to them, and a number of people that I know tend to agree. Everyone knows that its still in its early days and there's half-a-hundred million problems to overcome. Yet the essential notion is worth paying attention to. The possibilities of disruption in what's still the most rigid of all gaming markets (console) is huge. To bring that App Store sensibility to TV required a bold idea, and that's why I've liked OUYA since I first heard of it. It represents something potentially game-changing.

I needed a change, and my mind kept coming around to working on the platform side again. I used to do that at Sky and found it a lot of fun, and I see strong parallels between how that business worked and how the microconsole business is starting to shape up. I particularly wanted to do that on a platform that was trying to find interesting, weird, radical and downright wacky games. So I reached out to Julie Uhrman, whom I knew a little, and she concurred.

I've met many awesome indie game makers over the last few years and hear stories about how many of them are finding new markets very challenging. I've recently experienced first hand how hard that's becoming for some. My involvement with OUYA is all about trying to help them solve that problem. It will primarily consist of working with partner developers to help bring their games to the platform and make them better. In addition I'll do some content acquisition (if you have game, get in touch) and act as an in-house advisor for those who'd like to make free-to-play work in their games but aren't sure how. I'll also do some blogging on the OUYA site.

All in all I'm very excited about taking an active role in the new frontier as well as writing about it. Who knows where it will go (as is always the case in the games industry) but it should interesting! 

PS: Just as when working with Jawfish, I'll still write independently. Posts, columns, articles, and even some book material will continue to flow forth with Chinese walls firmly in place. I'm used to wearing many hats.

Microconsole Generation Video

Welcome to the Microconsole Generation from Tadhg Kelly on Vimeo.

I couldn't attend the Future is Games conference in Arizona this week for reasons, so instead I put my microconsole talk together as a video. It was shown at the event last night, and it's up online now too. It's about 35 mins long. Enjoy!

The Microconsole Generation [Presentation]

Welcome to the Microconsole Generation from Tadhg Kelly

The above slides come from a talk that I gave at Casual Connect San Francisco 2013. I talked about a future when microconsoles like GamePop and OUYA overcome their initial hurdles and find their customer. My supposition was that the microconsole gamer probably won't be today's console gamer, but instead more like the players who've made social, mobile and tablet games a phenomenon. To them the idea of a tiny, inexpensive and simple gaming device is key. They like to play games, but don't want to feel that they have to join a religion to do so.

Bleszinski's Paradox [Xbox One]

The honorable Cliff Bleszinski weighed in on the furore surrounding Microsoft's decision to reverse course on how Xbox One would handle digital-rights-management, and lamented about what's been lost in so doing. He writes passionately about the commoditization of the used games trade, and how many developers link their own lack of success (financial especially) with the predatory practises of retailers. If only, he seems to suggest, the gamer universe had shown a little more foresight and realized that in the long run a fully locked-up console could have been a good thing. And that's ruined now.

The problem with this line of reasoning is very simple to tease out: The row over DRM is not about the freedom to digitally trade. It's about value for money. Outside of certain academic groups who consider the implications of such things, nobody on Earth cares about being able to trade their digital wares. Your iPad is likely stuffed to the gills with apps and games that you will never be able to sell, and yet you don't really care. Your Steam account probably has a library of hundreds of titles (many unplayed) that are likewise tied to you forever. But you don't really mind because you got them cheaply.

The consistent factor in determining whether a digital market succeeds is if it offers radically cheaper prices. Then it seems worth the trade-off. If you can get ebooks cheaply, buy music by the track, get games at huge discounts or apps for free, it's worth buying in. That's why the mobile game sector gives games away for free and does phenomenally well. And the prospects for where that approach to the business can go is why the maker of Puzzle and Dragons is valued as highly as Nintendo (although that valuation is likely exuberant).

The problem for the console industry is that it's caught in a paradox. Designers like Bleszinski want their world to go digital for a multitude of empowering reasons, but the business people who do the math want digital to happen while retaining retail (or near-to) prices. Selling a disc-based brand new Call of Duty for $59 and a digital version for $49 maybe makes sense in their world. Selling it for $9, on the other hand, breaks their business.

This is why the recent meme about how Xbox One's scheme was all about reducing console game prices rings hollow. Microsoft, the company that sells full priced games on Live years after they're only $5 new at retail, is not in a position to do that. EA cannot realistically refactor its entire business model around selling $9.99 games without losing a lot first. Nobody wants to admit it, but for the console sector to get to a digital place it has to climb down a very steep cliff first (no pun intended), and nobody - not even Sony - is able to.

Meanwhile the customers, used to these crazy prices and maximising their dollar by trading games (in effect paying what they can afford via swapping and topping up), are not keen to pay a whole lot more than they already do. They can't afford it. Now you see why I think microconsoles are a much bigger deal than they appear to be: they're climbing up rather than trying to avoid rapelling down. Similarly you see I think a whole gang of indies coming out of the app space with the idea of skilling upwards is much more interesting in the long run. 

For now, absent all other choices, customers have chosen not to change. They won't be shifted until someone makes a radical case to them based on price. Call of Duty for $9? Sold.

The Reviewers Are Wrong About Ouya [Microconsoles]

 

The subject of my latest column on TechCrunch is essentially that microconsoles have a perception problem, leading them to be reviewed in the wrong context. The full article is available here.

Why Microconsoles Are A Big Deal

There are two remarkable observations to make about the microconsole phenomenon. The first is how quickly the idea has come together, and how companies like Ouya have realised that the time is right for hardware and software to come together and disrupt all that we know.

The second is how much the main / regular / grown-up / established games industry is not getting it. The reactions I keep encountering this week at GDC vary from wait-and-see to outright bafflement. What, I keep hearing, is this "microconsole" thing I keep hearing about? How is it supposed to compete with the might of MicroSonyTendo? Who would want to develop games for something like this until it reaches critical mass?

This is how the industry typically reacts to new ideas. Five years ago the industry was equally baffled by the idea that Facebook games would be a very big thing. It had much the same reaction to smartphones, or tablets. Most developers and publishers tend to develop a fixed understanding of the gaming universe, as though how the market is today is somehow how it was always meant to be, and how it will be for all time. And then it changes.

To me, microconsoles represent a very big change. They're small boxes with big ideas, low prices, common operating systems, developer empowerment, free-to-play economics and so on. They're compelling to me because they take many ideas from the app world and say "Why not on TV too?". They're compelling to developers (especially indies) because they promise to get out of the way of the conversation between game maker and customer.

And as for the customer? You don't think $99 and free games is a compelling argument when stacked up against $3-400 and very-not-free games? Think again.

2013: The Year of the Microconsole?

The year is barely a week old, and yet already something momentous has happened. While many of us are expecting it to be the year when Microsoft and Sony bring out new machines and try to get their platform stories moving toward perihelion, it seems that other companies were thinking differently. We already knew about the Ouya, of course, and the rumours about Valve making a dedicated machine for Steam have been circling for a while. 

However this week it has surfaced, under the codename Piston. In additon Nvidia announced a clamshell PS Vita-alike named Shield, which may be both a peripheral and a game machine in its own right. And we should not forget about Gamestick, a USB-sized console from Playjam that has already been funded on Kickstarter. 

2013 may not turn out to be the year of the console after all. It might be the year of the microconsole.

Ouya? Booyah! [Marketing Stories]

With 26 days to go and $4.4m already raised the Ouya is probably on course to the be the biggest Kickstarter-funded project since the last one. However the reaction from the industry and its press has been generally negative. 

There are some fair assessments like that of Kris Graft, who welcomes disruption to the console space but is unsure if Ouya's the platform for the job. Then there are others who question whether it can be delivered on time, what the cost of manufacture could possibly be for it to "match up to expectations". There's even the comment from Jeff Gerstmann (of Giant Bombcast) that relying on Kickstarter is some sort of sleazy end-around tactic.

I think they're mostly missing the point. Unlike the Phantom, the Gizmondo and the Indrema, the people behind Ouya have proven on day one that there is a very excited market for a hackable console. Ouya taps into the same sentiment that's driving Raspberry Pi, Arduinos, Makies and so forth. It also verifies that there is great interest in an app-store, low power fun-games-on-TV machine as many wistullfy hope the Apple TV would become. In a word: resonance.

Almost nobody in games seems to have grasped that Kickstarter et al aren't charities (sorry Andrew) soliciting a few donations around business-as-usual. Crowdfunding is a direct manifestation of the marketing story, the cause in which people believe and want to see made happen (reason bedamned). The tribe is falling over itself wanting to give its money to make these kinds of project succeed, and yet the industry wants to tell us why they shouldn't. 

This is probably what watching dinosaurs fight while meteors streak overhead looks like.