Intelligent Artifice

Electronic Arts buys Bioware / Pandemic for $800 million October 11, 2007

Reuters says Electronic Arts is buying Bioware / Pandemic for $800 million.

I think many people saw the Bioware / Pandemic merger, with support from private equity firm Elevation Partners, as a bold move to create a large-scale independent developer.

With this news, it looks more like a fancy move by John Riccitiello, who worked at Electronic Arts, left to co-found Elevation Partners, came back to EA as CEO, and now this.

As usual, it is a bold move that makes sense for EA. I wonder how long it takes them to crush the soul of those two companies.

(Thanks, Mark!)

Update: Greg has some more in-depth analysis.

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Games and Web 2.0: My presentation at the University of Applied Sciences Wiener Neustadt September 14, 2007

Last Wednesday I gave a 90 minute presentation on how the internet is changing the games industry at the University of Applied Sciences / Fachhochschule Wiener Neustadt, a university near Vienna. It was part of the eMarketing course taught by Sascha Mundstein for the Business Consultancy International B.A. programme.

The structure of my presentation was:

• An overview of the ‘core’ games industry, including big players, numbers, demographics.
• The internet on consoles.
• The internet as a community platform: past and current trends (think small moves into integrating the web and web 2.0 - I showed WWS stats of a recent boss kill by my World of Warcraft guild).
• User-generated content: past and current trends (Spore, LittleBigPlanet, Halo 3).
• The internet as a marketing channel: the most boring slide, I practically skipped it.
• The internet as a distribution channel: Steam, consoles, Manifesto Games.
• The internet as a trading platform: all the kooky stories of people buying virtual real estate for $100,000. This took quite a while to research.
• The internet as a gaming platform: Gaia Online, Desktop Tower Defense, Line Rider, Habbo Hotel, Three Rings, Runescape. This was my key point: a disruptive new market/industry is developing that is mostly being ignored by the ‘core’ games industry. And yes, if you follow Raph Koster, that won’t be news to you. I came at it from a somewhat different angle though.

It really was an overview of the various ways in which the internet is transforming the games industry - it was wide, not deep. There were still many topics I had to leave out: ‘big’ games and ARGs, mobile games, professional gaming, South Korea and Asia in general, game elements in pure Web 2.0 sites, in-game advertising, machinima… it’s a big subject.
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South Korea Taxing Virtual Worlds July 3, 2007

South Korea Taxing Virtual Worlds. It was only a matter of time, and as usual it’s happening in South Korea first.

(Via Slashdot Games.)

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Nintendo and Apple to partner on games for iPhone June 20, 2007

According to Noheat.com Nintendo and Apple are going to partner on games for the iPhone. Slightly surprising… but I can’t really get excited about it. Odd, and a bit sad, considering the brouhaha over the iPhone not having as powerful an SDK as people were hoping for.

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Former Rockstar Games co-founder & VP of Development starts a new company June 19, 2007

Jamie King, who co-founded Rockstar Games and was VP of Development until he left over a year ago, has started a new company called 4mm Games. That’s all the information that seems to be available right now: if 4MM Games has the same PR strategy as Jamie’s previous company, it will take a while before we find out more.

(Thanks Tobi!)

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Electronic Arts and ID Tech 5 at Apple WWDC 2007 June 14, 2007

If you’re only slightly following tech or Apple or games or all of the above, I am sure you know that there was another Steve Jobs keynote last Monday at the WWDC 2007. I was slightly underwhelmed. There were a couple of intriguing announcements involving games though.
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Handhelds drive games market, says Enix chief June 12, 2007

The Financial Times has published an interesting interview with Yoichi Wada, the chief executive of Square Enix.

To sum up, he says:

• The demographics of gamers have changed completely over the last few years.
• Dragon Quest IX, the latest part of the insanely popular series, will only appear for the Nintendo DS.
• Nintendo was succesful in broadening the market for games.
  

  “We chose the Nintendo DS because the widest array of people use it, including people who previously did not play games before,” said Mr Wada.

• The world is not yet ready for next-gen consoles.
  

  “There are too many specs – and you also need a high-definition TV, a broadband connection and a deep knowledge of gaming – these consoles are mismatched to today’s environment. In a year or two years they will fare better,” Mr Wada said.

This from the CEO of a public company, one of the largest game development companies in Japan, with a long and fruitful relationship with Sony.

There may be more going on here than meets the eye, I don’t have a lot of background information on this. But even on the surface this has to be a feather in Nintendo’s cap. and an affirmation of their strategy. Too bad it’s such a closed platform.

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Spider-Man 3 may be the most expensive movie ever made April 26, 2007

This article in Radar Online discusses the budget of Spider-Man 3. The exact budget is not known, but ‘industry insiders’ claim the production alone cost over $350 million, which with marketing and promotion means the whole movie cost half a billion dollars. Sony, ’still reeling from a flurry of bad press on its PlayStation 3 gaming console’, disputes the $350 million number but won’t say what the correct number is.

Which is all well and good. One little bit made me think of games:
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More on Aufbaustrategiespiele April 21, 2007

It always surprises me which posts here get commented on and linked to, and which ones don’t (although I am no longer surprised at the amount of traffic I get from people googling ‘everquest porn’ or ‘wow nude patch’).

Greg Costikyan commented on my recent post about the Anno and Settlers franchises. I could write him an email back, but hey, this blog doesn’t write itself. So here is some feedback:
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Guitar Hero II song pack pricing April 20, 2007

DonkeyXote, a lawyer at Microsoft Game Studios has written a blog post explaining why the Guitar Hero II song packs may be priced the way they are. Apparently some people are… shall we say… mildly puzzled about the pricing.

I don’t have Guitar Hero II for the Xbox 360 and my Guitar Hero 1 controller is collecting dust. But it’s interesting to get a glimpse of the dark, arcane world of music licensing, and the strange systems and organizations that are involved.

(Via Kim Pallister.)

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