Why would Warners dilute their product like that?

Just seen an advert on telly for Batman: Arkham Asylum – great looking ad right until the end when it has a purple GAME ‘wrapper’.

I presume it is part of a ‘co-ordinated’ marketing campaign with GAME supporting the product.

But really, Warners are paying for the space in GAME’s stores that they would get anyway, if they trusted to the strength of their product and brand.

The future of Food

I watched the second part of George Alegia’s documentary last night on the BBC – the future of food. Excellent and thought provoking. I missed the first one but intend to catch up on my return home.

I have only skimmed over some of these issues until now and he presented them very well.

If you missed it, I’d recommend catching up on the BBC’s iPlayer but to summarize….

There are farmers in Kenya – a country that cannot feed itself – growing food that is sold on UK supermarket shelves!!!! What is that all about???

There are farmers in India who have had their land confiscated from them and are now going hungry because their government wants to grow Biofuels on the land. With the oil price so high, it’s cheaper to run cars on biofuel and an increasing proportion of the worlds farmland is turning to this crop – when people are still going hungry!!! Bizarre!!!

We have so overfished the waters around Europe that there are no fish left – so Spanish trawlers now fly under a Senagalise flag and fish their waters in the Atlantic – to the point where another country that cannot feed itself is having their local protein source taking from under their nose and put on the plates of Europeans!!!

We have got to start eating local – wherever we are. Don’t buy from supermarkets – buy from local producers and local sellers. We are really lucky where I live – we have two butchers and a greengrocers, who all advocate the adage of ‘local is best’! Use them or loose them people!

The simple pleasures…

The simple pleasures in life are the best ones and it doesn’t get better than this!

Pre-owned debate makes it to BBC

I read with interest that another publisher is complaining about pre-owned games. But this time it has made it all the way to the BBC!!!

I shall summarise – we can’t make enough money and we blame exchange rates yadda yadda yadda online retailers yadda yadda yadda pre-owned games yadda yadda yadda

I don’t have a problem with anyone making profits but when my business doesn’t make money I don’t look to blame others – I sort out my own ship!!!!

PS3 slim compared to original PS3

PS3 Slim funny

PS3 slim comes with new firmware update

Version 3 of the update will of course be available to current PS3 users but one thing I did notice that was interesting was that BBC iPlayer will be integrated into the XMB – very cool.

If it is fully integrated and allows downloads for later viewing – as on PC’s – then the new 120GB version might be even more interesting….

PS3 slim – more piccies and details

Only two USB slots, so I am gonna need a hub and looking at the picture from the rear, it looks like the power brick might have been moved to the outside of the machine.

This is to be confirmed but it is how they achieved the slimming effect when Sony released the PS2 slim…

PS3 slim is finally here…

I have been telling customers in store that there is a new PS3 coming for ages, or at least it seems that way. And that there will be a lower price point too. And so it is finally here.

A lower price and a slimmer machine

Looks good

Looks good and comes in at a good price at £249.99. I’m happy…

Or at least I was until I saw the other price announcement at GamesCon09.

The PSPgo is going to be £224.99!!!!!!!

How much??!?!?! You can get an iPhone for that. Which is smaller, has a touchscreen, is also a phone and an iPod as well as playing games and running apps……

So who is going to buy a PSPgo? To be honest, I’m not sure?

Could we go back in time?

I blogged yesterday that there is no way back….

Or is there…?

I have been lamenting for a while now the inevitable fall that would become the gaming industry as the retail landscape sucked it up as another casualty on its unending commoditisation of society. The only markets that have been able to resist the supermarkets and to a lesser extent the high street generalists are those that treat their products as brands, and make sure that they are continued to be held in the high stead that top brands should be. You will not find fashion and sports brand clothes in supermarkets. To the extent that, for example, discount sports chains have bought up the producers of some of the lesser brands so they now own the producers. Nike and Diesel and Adidas and countless other brands continue to maintain their margins by controlling the route to market much more effectively.

I have recently got into cycling (tangent coming – be warned!). I have found that my need to keep fit coupled with a dodgy knee that doesn’t like running as much as it used to, has lead me to try riding bikes as a means of keeping in shape. So when I decided to buy a new bike, I was surprised to find that the retail landscape follows much more the fashion model than the games model. I had decided that I wanted a Trek racing bike (they are the ones Lance Armstrong rides so they must be good!!!) but I could not buy one online!!?!? Surely, anything is available online now – I thought! As it turns out, however, Trek is only available through specialist dealers (of which there are many) but these dealers are asked by Trek not to sell their bikes online. Of course, competition law cannot force Trek to stop a dealer but the possibility of loosing your dealership keeps them inline. It also means that dealers don’t discount too much, as they don’t need to – where else are you going to get a bike from? Trek knows this dealer network well and can predict what each relatively small business will sell each season, so can adjust manufacturing largely to suit. There have been some issues this year where demand has outstripped supply but largely it is a relationship that works for manufacturer and retailer.

So what if this were to happen in the games market? Developers and publishers could distribute their games through a select group of retailers, licensed to sell said publishers product and conforming to a code of conduct published jointly that was visible to the customer. Customers would know that they were getting a quality product from a reputable and knowledgable retailer, fully backed by the publisher. In return the publishers would know largely how many games were going to sell and what they could make from a game, and if the specialist retailer were making enough of a margin, they wouldn’t need to sell pre-owned games. I asked my local Trek dealer if they sold pre-owned bikes (hoping I might get a cheaper deal on last years model!??!?). His answer – they don’t do it. Too complicated and time consuming when we make good money on new bikes!

A pipe dream? Probably, it would take a very couragoues sales director at a big publisher to decide that they weren’t going to sell games through all channels and were going to take only certain routes to market. But for the life of me, I cannot see any pitfalls for them if they did???

And in my previous blog, I was critical of a large publishers decision to change the way they go to market by increasing the price of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. Maybe, that sales director should just go the whole hog and treat his (or her) game and all subsequent games as the revered brand that they actually are.

Call of Duty will undoubtably be the best game of the year – don’t let it succumb to the retail market like all other previous big releases have. Don’t let consumers pick it up as a loss leader when they are buying beans and bread.

If publishers did look to control the route to market, Playtime may or may not benefit from that but I don’t think the publisher will loose out. Food for thought…..