Xemu liveblogs DICE

 Posted by (Visited 5090 times)  Game talk
Feb 072008
 

I’m sitting here at home, sick with whatever nasty cold is going around again — three or four of us out of the office today in fact! — so I am not at DICE. In fact, I’ve been asleep most of the afternoon. But Rob “Xemu” Fermier is at DICE, and apparently awake even, and he’s been liveblogging the talks. Two in particular caught my eye.

One was the Blizzard talk, which really does reveal just how not like any other company in the industry Blizzard is, or really has ever been — hardly any publisher supervision, ever?

…Through the years, most of the owning entities didn’t know anything about game development. This worked out to be a good thing because they are able to hold off any ideas from above, the last thing they want is someone with no ideas about games to impose them on Blizzard…

…Even as an executive, still rare to see someone from the corporate owners. Don’t do demos, don’t have to get approval, etc.

It also shows the price of WoW: team of 130-140, and now up to 2600+ in the company…

The other one I found really interesting was the talk by Robin Kaminsky, EVP Publishing at Activision. About as stark a demonstration of the increased costs issue as I have seen:

Gameranking analysis: higher ranking games sell better... Every 5 pts over 80 on average doubled sales. Didn’t guarantee sales, some games above 80 didn’t sell...

90+ last year, 18 90+ rated titles. Only 2 did better than 7 million. 7 did less than a million. 12 titles less than 2 million. 2/3 of 90+ rated games did not achieve large scale commercial success. 90+ rating is incredibly hard but it doesn’t insure success.

Their answer?

10s of millions of dollars in the game you need scale in the selling process.

Which turns out to mean millions more in marketing; and

Three concentric circles: mass market > casual gamers > hardcore gamers in the middle. It is important to reach that hardcore gamer, but it is not enough. All three audiences combined are what make the true mega successes.

Other DICE talks Xemu has liveblogged:

  5 Responses to “Xemu liveblogs DICE”

  1. Gamedev Planet says:
    February 8, 2008 at 1:17 am

    Xemu’s Long-Winded Game Industry Ramblings :: DICE ‘08: BlizzardPosted on February 8, 2008 by Raph

  2. Wolfgang Wozniak says:
    February 8, 2008 at 1:07 am

    http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3166030

  3. Elita says:
    February 8, 2008 at 11:43 pm

    I wonder if anyone from that conference has the whole transcript? Those ‘highlights’ are interesting to read and I would very much like to hear the whole session.

    Clarification: the discussion with Blizzard execs.

  4. moo says:
    February 11, 2008 at 9:37 pm

    But game rankings are crap, though… The scale always goes from 7 to 9 and watching 5 minutes of footage on gametrailers.com (or even better, a video review) will let you make a more informed decision than some arbitrary number does.

    Even more bizarre to me is the meta-critic type stuff? I never even knew these things existed until recently. They create a situation where publishers get very unhappy about even a small number of negative reviews, because they *drag down the average* and that ends up costing sales (for some reason that makes no sense to me). More directly annoying, is that the rankings are often a contributing factor when it comes time to decide the bonuses that the developers get. And that’s pretty ridiculous.

    An *average rating* is an extremely useless metric, anyway. I much prefer the method used by http://www.tomatometer.com to judge movies: they collect the reviews of a movie by dozens of reviewers, summarize each review as a binary bit (“thumbs up” / “thumbs down”) and then give you the percentage of “thumbs up” out of the total. So then when you see 85%, it means that most of the reviewers thought the movie was good. When you see 35%, you know its probably worth skipping.

  5. moo says:
    February 11, 2008 at 9:41 pm

    Ahh.. I have a theory, work with me here…

    On average, games sell twice as well for each 5 points above 80 because they’re way better games. Coincidentally, better games get better rankings. And of course a 5 point difference is huge, since the scale only goes from about 70 to 95.

    Funny how they’re convinced that the way to sell more games is to spend more money to get them a better rating, instead of to spend that money making a better game.

    /end rant

  6. Rik says:
    February 11, 2008 at 11:48 pm

    A “better game” is not a measurable metric, nor do their stockholders care about the quality of the games made.

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