The Times: Tech special - Get serious about computer games
It's an industry that makes more money than Hollywood, drives the development of your PC and pervades popular culture. Computer gaming isn't for kids any more. By David Rowan
Last year we spent more on computer games than on going to the cinema or renting videos. Gaming has become so huge - worth £1.6 billion in this country alone, according to the European Leisure Software Publishers Association, and employing 100,000 people - that soon it could even merit a minister. The Minister for Mario? Now that would be a fun job.
You need not have held a joystick to see how influential computer games have become. From Hollywood to children's comics, games characters such as Lara Croft or Mario are now huge intellectual properties, selling 51 million items of games hardware and software in Britain last year - a long way from Pong, the annoying arcade game that helped launch the market 30 years ago.
High-quality games have been key factors in the development of the personal computer, not least through ever-more realistic graphics and the establishment of the CD-Rom as the dominant medium for storing software. Investment in computer-games development has been encouraged by the open non-proprietary nature of the PC platform - anyone can put a new product on this market, and if good (and well-marketed) it has a chance of succeeding. By the mid-1990s, the PC was the main games platform.
At the same time, a parallel video-games market was evolving, based on systems from companies such as Nintendo and Sega. The success of Sega's Saturn, launched in 1994, and Nintendo's N64, launched two years later, encouraged games publishers and developers to work closely with console makers. The mid-1990s Nintendo/Sega rivalry was as bitter as any war game - a battle that further drove sales. Then Sony entered the market with PlayStation. Offering high performance and excellent games, Sony soon took the lead.
The games market has moved in cycles: normally three or four years of growth, prompted by technological advances, followed by a couple of years of stagnation. Today we are at the start of what analysts expect to be another growth period. This is prompted by competition between Microsoft's Xbox, Sony's PlayStation2, and Nintendo's GameCube. Huge sums have been invested in these "new-generation" systems: Microsoft claims to have spent more than £350 million on marketing the Xbox. Each rival system has prompted a rush to produce games that manufacturers hope will be the "killer application" that sells consoles. This requires specially trained teams of designers, 3D modellers, animators and programmers.
Unlike earlier consoles, the latest models are not merely for games, but are being tipped as potential "home-entertainment gateways" that could evolve into the long-predicted all-in-one audiovisual leisure units.
Both the Xbox and the PlayStation2 let you watch DVD movies; with a suitable connection, you can also play games online. Indeed, part of the current take up of broadband Internet access is being driven by games players who want to play over long distances. It is no surprise, then, that the average age of game players has increased in the past decade. These high-calibre machines are anything but children's toys.
Yet the gaming culture has never really had a good press. The mainstream media have tended to see games as a fringe obsession linked to addiction or violence. Only last month, an American judge dismissed a lawsuit against several video game makers for allegedly helping to prompt the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Meanwhile, academic studies point out that games provide poor role models for women. The medical profession, in turn, has its own worries about the dangers of excessive use.
Still, the future is rosy, at least in the short term. As well as consoles and computer games, there is healthy growth in mobile gaming, interactive television gaming and networked gaming. The Internet offers new ways to distribute games and allow players to pay as they use them. It is a lucrative, creative business and one in which British companies excel.
(The Times, April 11 2002)
Last year we spent more on computer games than on going to the cinema or renting videos. Gaming has become so huge - worth £1.6 billion in this country alone, according to the European Leisure Software Publishers Association, and employing 100,000 people - that soon it could even merit a minister. The Minister for Mario? Now that would be a fun job.
You need not have held a joystick to see how influential computer games have become. From Hollywood to children's comics, games characters such as Lara Croft or Mario are now huge intellectual properties, selling 51 million items of games hardware and software in Britain last year - a long way from Pong, the annoying arcade game that helped launch the market 30 years ago.
High-quality games have been key factors in the development of the personal computer, not least through ever-more realistic graphics and the establishment of the CD-Rom as the dominant medium for storing software. Investment in computer-games development has been encouraged by the open non-proprietary nature of the PC platform - anyone can put a new product on this market, and if good (and well-marketed) it has a chance of succeeding. By the mid-1990s, the PC was the main games platform.
At the same time, a parallel video-games market was evolving, based on systems from companies such as Nintendo and Sega. The success of Sega's Saturn, launched in 1994, and Nintendo's N64, launched two years later, encouraged games publishers and developers to work closely with console makers. The mid-1990s Nintendo/Sega rivalry was as bitter as any war game - a battle that further drove sales. Then Sony entered the market with PlayStation. Offering high performance and excellent games, Sony soon took the lead.
The games market has moved in cycles: normally three or four years of growth, prompted by technological advances, followed by a couple of years of stagnation. Today we are at the start of what analysts expect to be another growth period. This is prompted by competition between Microsoft's Xbox, Sony's PlayStation2, and Nintendo's GameCube. Huge sums have been invested in these "new-generation" systems: Microsoft claims to have spent more than £350 million on marketing the Xbox. Each rival system has prompted a rush to produce games that manufacturers hope will be the "killer application" that sells consoles. This requires specially trained teams of designers, 3D modellers, animators and programmers.
Unlike earlier consoles, the latest models are not merely for games, but are being tipped as potential "home-entertainment gateways" that could evolve into the long-predicted all-in-one audiovisual leisure units.
Both the Xbox and the PlayStation2 let you watch DVD movies; with a suitable connection, you can also play games online. Indeed, part of the current take up of broadband Internet access is being driven by games players who want to play over long distances. It is no surprise, then, that the average age of game players has increased in the past decade. These high-calibre machines are anything but children's toys.
Yet the gaming culture has never really had a good press. The mainstream media have tended to see games as a fringe obsession linked to addiction or violence. Only last month, an American judge dismissed a lawsuit against several video game makers for allegedly helping to prompt the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Meanwhile, academic studies point out that games provide poor role models for women. The medical profession, in turn, has its own worries about the dangers of excessive use.
Still, the future is rosy, at least in the short term. As well as consoles and computer games, there is healthy growth in mobile gaming, interactive television gaming and networked gaming. The Internet offers new ways to distribute games and allow players to pay as they use them. It is a lucrative, creative business and one in which British companies excel.
(The Times, April 11 2002)
posted by David Rowan at Thursday, April 11, 2002
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