Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 Multiplayer footage

All I can say is….

Well actually – I don’t know what to say because I am speechless.

This game is going to be sooooooo big!

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 simple pleasures…

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

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…..

The old debate and the new one….

Over the past few weeks I have been reading views from many in this industry we like to call gaming – all commenting on the impending release of Call of Duty 6 or Modern Warfare 2 or Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare 2 or whatever it is called this week. When Activision originally announced that it was going to charge £5 more for the game when released, it seemed to go relatively un-noticed and I think some at Blizzard Activision might have thought they could dodge this bullet yet. But slowly and surely, most parties have been coming out and having their say.

To summarise so far, I think those in the developer ‘camp’ largely welcome the move and will look to the effect on the games sales performance to see whether they can follow Activision’s lead. After all, it wasn’t that long ago when we were regularly selling new release titles (not always triple A either – Turok on N64 anyone?!?!?) for north of £60.

The retail camp (for me at least) seems to fall into two sub-categories – those who take the view that increasing prices is anti-consumer and those who support price increases on the basis that they would like to return to the hey day of video gaming when they could charge the earth and the customer wouldn’t bat an eye!

So – three different views then. In camp one, developers (and publishers with them) argue that they are struggling to make profits in today’s crowded and competitive gaming market, so the move to increase prices is only natural if they are to survive. Of course, some have already done so – citing the currency fluctuations against the UK market as the reason for doing this. Nintendo’s Wii console increased in price to the trade earlier in the year and whilst we haven’t seen an increase in the retail price, there has certainly been less aggressive discounting and bundling on the Wii this year – even though the console is now available as free stock. I understand why developers and publishers are struggling but to a certain extent this situation is of their own making. For the last five years publishers have fought with each other to be the number one. EA for a long time held this crown and Ubisoft and SEGA have been pretenders to the thrown – all at one point or another at pains to point out to all who will listen that their market share is growing or was number 1 in the year so far or has been increasing year on year – or whatever. To drive this growth, they have been happy to commission title after title that is effectively a re-hash of a previous years franchise and publish licence after licence that is just a re-skinning of the same game with a different IP. So when gamers see this year after year, being asked to fork out more and more, they are bound to expect to pay less and less.

Supermarkets (and large generalist retailers) shall be know as camp two, and for years have played the role of the consumer champion so were happy to cater to this demand to pay less. By beating up the supply chain, as they have done in so many other industries, they could maintain their margins whilst offering the same to the consumer for less. Publishers offering marketing credits, campaign payments, volume discounts etc are only fanning the fire. Any retail buyer worth his or her salt will use the number of store fronts they have as a big battering ram on the publishers door. Give me the deal I want or I won’t give you the shelf space, store coverage etc you need for your second rate 2008 re-hash of four year old IP!!! Sounds harsh? – perhaps a little in the language but the point remains that as the quantity of titles published increases, the quality must diminish, and therefore the average price will too.

Don’t get me wrong – I have been as guilty as the next buyer. This is not a criticism per-se – more an observation. Economies of scale rule in the open market. Many would also argue – and I would be inclined to agree – that this is simply a sign of a maturing market and that market forces are coming to bear as technology barriars fall. More developers can do the work that only a select view were able to in the past, but that is nothing different to what has happened in a thousand other markets that have developed since time immemorial.

Camp three is the indie camp – watching all this from the outside looking in, hoping beyond hope that maybe at last after years of decline we might see an opportunity to charge customers more than we actually pay for games and make a bit of profit on new games for once. After all, those of us still here (or like Playtime, here but not in their original guise) and can remember back to the launch of the PS1 and the N64 (and others) would relish the opportunity to make those sorts of profits on new releases once again. Some have even linked this to the ‘old debate’ that keeps on raging, that is pre-owned games. After all, if we could make money on new releases again, then we wouldn’t need to offer the pre-owned route to our customers, would we. After all, it is a lot more complicated and costly to do in-store than simply selling 100’s of new release titles on release day at full retail and making 30% on each one.

But this is the nub of the issue – the market isn’t the same as it was 10 years ago. Things have moved on. Supermarkets have entered the game of selling games, general retailers too. They have taken customers away from specialists in the only ways they can – offering price and convenience advantages. Publishers (with developers in tow) fed this by conceding to retailers supply chain demands as they chased their own goals of growth and market share. Activision’s attempt to increase prices surely is a last resort in the face of inevitable downward price pressure. There can’t be any going back to the old days…..?

Screenshots now on product listings

We are about to start implementing a series of updates on the website, the first of which has been to try and increase the amount of information we put into product listings.

We are now embedding a screenshots slideshow within new releases, so if you are thinking of pre-ordering something, you can see some screenshots of the title before buying. Not all titles will have them, it depends what the publishers release, but whenever we can get them, we will put them in. We are also working on putting video in too, and for the moment embed links to video that we host on YouTube.

Some of the titles we have put slideshows on include Resident Evil, Street FIghter IV and WWE Legends of Wrestlemania

Let us know what you think!!!