A blog on women and games is bound to raise a few eyebrows. Hasn’t this topic been done to death?

*************************** Update - Jan. 28 *****************************

Thank you for your comments so far! Some reflections from Brenda:

Wow, great comments on the blog. Love the revenge of the nerd argument, and agree that my "guys can't make games for women" was a very broad stroke. Of course, someone who wants to understand how women think and what they enjoy playing can do that work and get the info he needs to deliver. I do want to respond to the last entry, however. I don't agree that the "women in games thing" will "sort itself out". I have a 12 year old who is a math star. She is the best in her class in math, and her mom runs a game studio. You'd think she'd include tech as a possible career path. Nope. She wants to be a fashion model. A Fashion model! I swear, this kid was brought up in a house full of lego, with only a barbie or two, both of which her brothers had severed the head off of in one of their experiments with the rowing machine. All of this to say, please don't underestimate the pressures on girls (and boys, for that matter) to conform to stupid societal conventions - they are loud and strong, and we've got to be vigilant if we want to offer alternatives to our bright kids who deserve a chance at the world outside of those binding stereotypes.

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A blog on women and games is bound to raise a few eyebrows. Hasn’t this topic been done to death? We can all point to some great female game characters, so what more is needed? Have you played Mirror’s edge?

The thing is, we’re still very early on in tackling this issue, and there are so many layers to what needs to be addressed. Last year’s finding in Game Developer Magazine showed that 93% of engineers in the industry are male, around 70% of artists, and importantly, only 10% of studio heads are women. So, no, IMHO, this issue has not been done to death. In fact, this issue is still wet behind the ears, and needs to be on the agenda all the time, throughout the industry. More, not less, attention to this topic is needed.

Most gals working in the industry are in Sales and Marketing, HR, or Art. These are important roles, and I’m not belittling that, but it is also important that women make up part of the other disciplines of the industry as well. Why? Is this a feminist argument for equality? Is 50 / 50 just a rule to be applied, regardless of all else. Well, there might be something to that, but the real reason, to my mind is simple. Until we have great women making games for women, we won’t have great women’s games.

Yah, I just said men can’t make great games for women. This is the point in the argument where someone throws Will Wright at me. True, the Sims is probably the most successful franchise, ever, and a big chuck of their market is double X chormosoners. We all know the story of how guys bought the game, turned their female buddies on to gaming, and the rest is history. I’m grateful for that, don’t get me wrong. And, of course, when Mr. Iwata announced at E3 06 That Nintendo’s “Revolution” was going “disrupt” the market and change the demographic of who games, it wasn’t just your typical PR propaganda. Girls and women are a huge driver for the incredible dominance that continues to be the Nintendo story. I’m grateful for that too.

What’s the grateful thing about? Why does it matter if girls or women game? Sociologically, it’s a question of access to technology and the issue of gender. Futurists have written frightening scenarios that the feminist in me shivers to thing about. Business wise, we want the female entertainment budget to be spent in our segment of the market – on games. Downloadable, in a box at retail, on the cell phone or PC, we want women to spend their buck on our game, rather than on that movie or the latest novel on Oprah’s book list.

The fear is, if guys were first to the keyboard, and drove the tech advancements of the past x decades, and made tech that spoke to their sensibilities and desires, isn’t it a self fullfilling prophesy that they build what they want to use? Women, who, due to social stigma or biological makeup (insert nature vs. nurture arguments here) are late to the party, will continue to be locked out because the tech being created is designed from a male perspective? I think this is pretty likely, and may in fact be the case in gaming.

Seems to me that this is proven out in comparing and contrasting the casual game market to the console market. While the console space is still largely male dominated in terms of developers and consumers, this is not the case in casual games. There seem to be more women creating in that space, and the primary consumer of casual games is female. My observations have been that many of the most innovative and engaging games for gals have been in the casual game space. Interestingly, this is also the gaming segment that employs a higher percentage of women. Wouldn’t it be great to have this be the case throughout the industry? It would not only expand the range of product, I think it would drive further market expansion, which is important if the industry is going to continue the double digit growth we’ve become accustomed to.

I’ve got to run. I’m reading Brenda Laurels “the Utopian Entrepreneur” and it’s hard to put it down for long. Check it out if you are interested in hearing from an industry veteran who is truly plugged in and has amazing stories to tell on the issue of trying to make successful games for the female market. Anyone remember Purple Moon?

Mobile Gaming....move it or lose it debate

Where is mobile gaming heading in a turbulent 2009? People's Daily Online headlines highlight China's mobile gaming market up by 62% in 2008. In contrast Jaakko Kaidesoja, head of Nokia's gaming operations predicts more gloom for the overall gaming market, referring to hiccups in Western Europe and North America [quoted in Helsinki, Reuters, October 2008].....so where is mobile gaming,....exactly?

Distribution – One of the challenges for mobile developer is how exactly to get your apps out there, how to raise awareness of your apps, how to engage with carriers? What best practices can anyone out there share from their own experience? Are there carriers reading this that are wondering where to find the next generation apps?

Pros & Cons of Application Stores – in the iPhone app store, initial uptake of mobile games was phenomenal. Now, the market is saturated and so many vendors have been undercutting one another that it’s near impossible to get traction unless you sell the game for $0.99 or free. How do you deal with this battle for the bottom? How do you still make quality games when the margins are so small?

According to Gamasutra in the iPast, many games started life at $9.99 but quickly retreated to $0.99 territory. Revenue per unit sold is very low, and this could potentially create a glass ceiling for content quality. What are your thoughts? Can you see any cracks in this ceiling? Another good point raised by Gamasutra is will it be profitable for larger publishers to support the iPlatform at $9.99, or will they need more money to support the iPlatform in addition to the DS and PSP platforms?

Multiple skews and a fractured market – how do you handle making so many different versions of your app for so many different devices running so many different platforms(BlackBerry OS, Palm OS, Palm Pre, Windows Mobile, Android, Symbian, iPhone, etc)? If you’ve got 20 games, supporting 20 devices, and 5 languages, that’s 20 x 20 x 5 = 2000 skews. Yikes??

Cost of development – developing for high definition 3D consoles like Xbox 360 and PS3 is becoming so expensive that many developers are finding it impossible to even enter the marketplace. Mobile gaming presents a nice alternative since mobile devices today are roughly comparable to the consoles of 10 years ago like the PlayStation 1 and Super Nintendo (some of the more advanced mobile devices are about on par with PlayStation 2 and Nintendo 64). The result is that development shops can re-use a lot of the work they’d done 5-10 years ago, giving new life to old games and getting more bang for the buck on those R&D dollars. What's your experience?

Links:

Interview with head of Nokia’s Gaming operations 29 Oct. 2008. Sees no growth in overall gaming market (though certain areas e.g. N-Gage and iPhone will grow):

GamaSutra feature on developing games for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

2009 Predictions for mobile gaming

Scarberia speaks from the penalty box

Scarberia:Scarberia has been an executive in and around the games business for almost 20 years, both in publishing and product development. "The reason for the pen-name is to protect plausible deniability in case I piss anyone too important off, since I still rely on them for deals, good gossip and expensive dinners...."

“For us in The Business, and of course by The Business, I mean, The Industry…”, Paul Schafer (Canadian), Late Show With David Letterman.

The Games Industry is huge. And despite all the bad economic news, we can still find positive reports about how the Industry is still growing, how it’s one of the only entertainment mediums with a positive future, how it has surpassed film box office receipts, blah, blah. But is this Industry really a Business anymore?

In order to thrive, a Business needs to have an eco-system of companies and contractors with a reasonable expectation that their investments of time and talents can result in profits. Everyone in a Business won’t and even shouldn’t make profits, of course, but most of the good ones will and should. Otherwise, they’ll do something else. And these profits will be the direct result of selling goods and/or services at a higher price than the costs that go into them. All very simple and, admittedly, simplistic.

Throughout the 1990’s, the Games Business was a great business. Lots and lots of people made money, some made obscene amounts. But without running the numbers, I would hazard that a healthy majority of that growing eco-system was making a good living. But this living wasn’t like the dotcom boom, when many people worked in ventures that had no chance of ever making profits, or even real revenue. The Games Business was making and marketing and selling games that people wanted, with costs that allowed good games to be blockbusters, and decent games to make a decent profit.

But with every new generation of hardware, this has gotten harder. The first big increase in costs was the shift from 2D to 3D, which required an expensive retooling and retraining of product development in the mid-90’s. The next was the rising necessity of supporting on-line features, first on the PC and later on the consoles. This was followed by dramatic growth in marketing budgets. And finally, with the arrival of the 360 and PS3, there was the requirement again to retool and retrain expensively for HD.

What this means is that even before the latest economic crisis, the Games Business has been struggling to make profits. In fact, without the sales from games on the previous generation hardware, which are now quickly disappearing, I calculate that hardly any publisher is making anything but losses. Of course we can all point to Nintendo and Blizzard and a couple others, but their exceptionalism proves the thesis. Ten years ago, only the lousy, the unlucky and the corrupt were losing money. Now it’s Microsoft (maybe making a small operating profit now for the first time), Sony, EA, THQ, Eidos, Midway, and nearly everyone else who are losing not just small, but very large amounts of money. This is not because they are all lousy, unlucky and corrupt. It’s because there is practically no Business in the Games Industry anymore.

Let’s look closer at some of the exceptions. Nintendo is the one true aberration and they’ve done it through innovation and a very tight control over their platform. Good for them, but the Wii isn’t helping hardly anyone else in the Games Business. In fact, without the DS, we wouldn’t have a global, profitable platform left for the independent publishers and developers.

How about Activision? With CoD4 in 2007 they had one of the only next gen titles to make lots of money; and with Guitar Hero they had one of the most profitable games in history. This was not an easy feat to repeat, and signs are that it didn’t happen at the same levels in ‘08. But thanks to the Blizzard deal, Activision looks to be the only independent publisher to have a plausible future that looks better than their past. What about Ubi? They’ve done an incredible job with a few quality games, but there’s a good argument to be made that most of their current and recent profits would disappear without the Montreal and Quebec subsidies. In other words, they have more in common with corn and sugar farmers than they do with being in a Business. And they are very, very good at what they do.

So where does that leave us? I’m sure all the publishers will keep hammering away at this generation of hardware, hoping that things will become more like the last cycle. And maybe it will. But if it eventually does, it will not be this year, and probably not even next because of the economy. They will also continue to look for THE NEXT BIG THING: mobile phone, casual, MMO, browser, free-to-play. There are isolated bits of success in all these categories, but little evidence that there’s a near-term, global Business model to make up for the profits disappearing through massive risk-taking on big titles with big marketing budgets that need to be big, big hits in order just to break even.

What this means for the development community, and the entire Games Industry eco-system, is decline. In fact, the Industry was probably already overbuilt three years ago. But it’s only now that those investments are showing that they will not be paying off any time soon. So there’s a long way to go backward before the new equilibrium. And even then, without some new big growth market, I’m not sure there’s enough business to be a “Business” again any time soon. We’ll remain an Industry, big and seemingly powerful, but a much duller, scared and miserly one.

And yet, what has been done is the creation of a medium. One that pound for pound still delivers the best entertainment value for the money. Games are not going away. In fact they’ve only just started. But we as an Industry may have tried to feed it too fast for its own good. Prepare for a rough diet.