Posts Tagged: marketing

Industry / News — 6 Comments
17
Jun 10

The doubtful promise of Kinect

“By taking the controller out of the equation, Microsoft has solved a problem that didn’t exist.”

Tom Chick, Fidgit

One question nags at me about the-technology-formerly-known-as-Natal: what’s it for?

Have people really been hanging out for a breakthrough in motion-controlled gameplay? I don’t think so. I think core gamers and the wider market alike are politely disinterested – in the legal sense, of “not having the mind or feelings engaged”. They may yet be convinced, but they’re not clamouring for this.

So what, right? Nobody knew they wanted a Wii until Nintendo told them. And this is, pretty clearly, an attempt to improve on the Wii. Microsoft is doing what Microsoft has always done best: take someone else’s successful idea and build on it. Continue reading →

Culture / Industry — 8 Comments
13
Apr 10

When the trailer is better than the game

I’ve already consumed the best that Gears of War 3 has to offer. And I did it for free.

It’s nothing to do with the game, which I have no burning desire to play. It’s the trailer. Continue reading →

Culture / Experience — 1 Comment
3
Apr 10

RKD on… The name of the games

Earlier I wrote about how “Xbox” has come to be used as a generic term for videogames. After I noticed the phenomenon once, I started to see it everywhere, like in this news article from earlier in the week:

The glamorisation of crime has been condemned by Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione, who cited everything from Xbox games to television crime dramas and Hollywood movies as “abhorrent”.

Xbox is not the first brand to rise to this position of prominence; it only dethroned PlayStation sometime within the current console generation, and in the 1990s Nintendo was king. The dominant brand changes over time, but digging into the history is difficult, as the phenomenon is rarely remarked upon and examples are hard to find with a web search. I asked the other writers at RKD what they could remember about the names people came up with for videogames in their younger years. Continue reading →

Culture — 6 Comments
31
Mar 10

The name of the games

The latest console war has been underway for five years now, and it’s still difficult to call a winner on the basis of sales. But one game company is winning the battle for a place in our minds.

Have you heard of “the Xbox factor”?

The story goes that cinema ticket sales are increasingly dominated by romantic comedies, character-driven dramas and film adaptations of lusty vampire novels – in other words, “chick flicks”. Some Hollywood executives have attributed this to the fact that men are becoming less interested in going out to see a movie as they become more caught up in “sophisticated video games” (and the Ultimate Fighting Championship, apparently).

To me, the most interesting part of this story is the fact that the phenomenon has been dubbed the “Xbox factor”.

Not the “Playstation factor”. Not the “Wii factor”. Not the “Games For Windows Live factor”, amazingly. The word “Xbox” has been chosen to represent all videogames – or at least the videogames predominantly played by young men. Continue reading →

Culture / Experience / Game Design / Industry — 1 Comment
14
Mar 10

Gorillaz in our midst

Welcome to the world of the Plastic Beach, a collaboration between musicians and mediums alike.

My plane arrives at its eerily uncharted destination by the sea. Fortunately, there isn’t an abrupt crash landing, or an Ayn Rand-inspired dystopian society to welcome me. Unfortunately, my first contact is with the insufferable likes of a dopey pelican and a suicidal seagull voiced by the lead singer of Blur.

I must be in Gorillaz territory. Continue reading →

Industry — 1 Comment
25
Jan 10

Mining your habits for fun and profit


Or, how you’re going to end up buying more games than you thought you would.

More than anything else, digital distribution means change. Changes to the way we shop, changes to the way we perceive the goods that we buy, and changes to the way we interact with publishers and distributors. As we’ve explored previously, one of the likely outcomes of moving to digital distribution is that most people will probably spend far more than they were expecting. But, what does that mean, and why will it happen? Continue reading →