“Nintendo have relied on countless revisions of the Mario games to help boost console sales, but how long can this tend continue?”

However Nintendo’s policies where formed in an era when the video game industry was in its infancy and companies were viewed a kin to toy manufactures. Nintendo having a long and successful history in the toy manufacturing business prior to their switch to the video game industry. The problem they face now is that the video game industry has moved on from its kid orientated origins and matured alongside its aging gamers. Gamers who want something a little more than Mario in a cat suit, a game like The Last of Us dealing with adult subject matter raking in a host of awards over the last year. It is a sign of the times that as far as the console market is concerned games are generally aimed towards an adult audience. Nintendo over the last decade has managed to sell record amount of devices with their Wii console hitting the 100 million mark. In spite of this sizeable market lead many AAA titles that are ported over to the console failed to sell anywhere near those numbers expected for such a popular console. A fact that has led publishing giant EA to become increasingly hesitant to publish any of its titles to Nintendo’s latest WiiU console. Former EA CEO John Riccitiello stating in March of last year, that no future titles were in the works for the WiiU platform.

 “Nintendo’s flagging console sales saw a sharp increase with the launch of the Wii, its successor the WiiU has come nowhere close in comparison.”

This is the fundamental root of Nintendo’s problems is that despite the falling out between the company and major publishers like EA they ultimately seem unconcerned. Nintendo long ago became the kingpins of the video game industry and it’s a state of mind that they haven’t lost even in the face of their impending failure. Nintendo’s failure is not something that can be predicted by diving into the future but instead taking a look back at the past and a company in a similar situation Nintendo is in today. Sega were Nintendo biggest rivals with the two consistently going head to head with their console platforms throughout the 80’s and 90’s. Like Nintendo they often favoured first party development over licencing deals with third party companies, relying on iconic video game characters like Sonic The Hedgehog to sell their consoles. The 1998 release of the revolutionary but ultimately poorly selling Dreamcast is the device that spelled an end to Sega’s days as a console manufacturer. Sega announcing its intention to become solely a video game publisher only three years later, this has allowed them to remain reasonable profitable within the video game industry. Even going as far as to swallow their pride and negotiate an exclusivity deal for the Sonic franchise with their old rivals Nintendo.

 “Nintendo might take heed for their former rivals Sega. Whose consoles failure to gain a sizable percentage forced the company out of the console market for good.”

Pride is something that would be a bitter pill for the Nintendo executives to swallow if they ever came to approach Sony or Microsoft about licencing Mario to rival platforms. It is also the fact that despite poor sales for their WiiU console they have managed to retain a decent share of the handheld market in the face of stiff competition from mobile devices. Since the launch of the GameBoy back in 1989, Nintendo have managed to rack up impressive unit sales in that sector of the market. The games developed for the handheld market are generally of a more casual nature and aimed at a younger audience. Something that Nintendo excels at with franchises like Pokémon, Animal Crossing, Kirby, etc. Many analysts have stated that one way for Nintendo to re-establish itself in the industry would be to port many of its handheld titles over to mobile platforms. The latest version of their handheld devices the Nintendo 3DS and 2DS have sold over 42 million units combined, double that of their preceding device. Although something has be said for the fact that there are over 250 million iPhones and over 1 billion Android devices. Just looking at the numbers it might seem like an obvious move for Nintendo to port its games to mobile, but it is unlikely Nintendo will want to enter into a market where they would have to relinquish a certain level of control. More importantly they would have to share in the profits with Apple and Goggle, one reason why Nintendo are so guarded over they own IP’s.

 “Nintendo have hinted that they are doing some research into smart phone technology, but seeing any of their games on iPhone or Android will be a long way off yet.”

Nintendo is somewhat stuck at a crossroad with it obvious to see that their latest console is a failure but on the other hand they seen positive sales of handheld titles. The latest games in the Pokémon franchise accumulating over 11 million in sales in the last 12 months. Boosts to profits like these will only help Nintendo in a small way with its general loss of market share in the console sector not looking good on their financial reports. Should Nintendo follow Sega’s path and give up on the manufacturing side of things and primary focus on software development. That question will become clearer based on the sales of Nintendo’s next console; the company cannot afford to have another console launch fail to generate sales. Another WiiU would surely spell the end for Nintendo’s console days. However many would have said the same around the time of the GameCube, that like the WiiU lost Nintendo a sizeable share of the market. However they were able to bounce back with the highly successful Wii console so a lot rides on the success of their next console launch. In essence Nintendo needs to remove itself form its self-imposed ideology formed in the early 80’s and join the rest of its competitors in the 21^st Century.

By Colm O’Sullivan

The post The State of the Industry: The Fall of Nintendo appeared first on Game Design Ireland.

“I wonder if the creator of the Helicopter game harbours any notion of envy for Flappy Bird’s whirlwind success.”

As stated above the game is essentially the Helicopter Game, with a bird taking the place of the helicopter. The game challenges the player to fly the vertically challenged fowl through a series of green pipes that of course in no way resemble those of a certain Nintendo game. The player is rewarded for each set of pipes that they manage to pass through, the game becoming increasingly harder the longer it goes on. For most getting through the first few pipes is the initial stumbling block, with the bird’s controls been erratic at best. Flying like it’s the birds first day out of the nest not used to operating its wings. This been the main attraction of the game as it’s the difficult that is frustratingly addictive. If the player could simple pass through several pipes with ease, the appeal would be lost. Whereas a player who manages to make it past ten sets of pipes has a huge sense of achievement and wants to try again for more. Flappy Bird could be classed under the genre of a masocore game. The masocore genre of games are defined as containing trial and error gameplay with intense difficulty, which is designed to frustrate the player. The choice of platform has also served the game well as the smartphone is the new home for casual gaming. Although how many Apple and Android devices has been damaged in fits of rage over a miss timed finger tap leading to an abrupt end in flight.

“As soon as it started to climb the download charts, clones started to appear. Some looking to cash in on the craze others just creating humorous pastiches.”

The games creator similarly followed the path his games titular character and has come crashing down after a short lived ascent. Dong Nguyen a developer hailing for Hanoi, Vietnam is the focus of a media storm that has been revolving around him over the last few weeks. Interestingly the game had been on the market for the more than six months before it saw its surge in popularity. The game was released on the app store in May of last year but only came to the attention of the gaming community in early January. Its spike in the rate of downloads so long after its release has led some to question Dong Nguyen on suspicion of market manipulation. Nguyen has not made any official comments on the alleged use of shady methods to increase its rank in the app store. Not that any of this matters as the game has now been pulled from both the Apple and Google app stores. Nguyen citing the stress and unexpected attention he came under due to the games popularity, as the one of the reason for the games removal from the market. He has also stated that he is unhappy about the levels of addiction that people are experiencing with Nguyen’s intention to create a game that players would pick and play on a casual bases. It seems like Nguyen has decided to take the moral high ground and save gamers from his highly addictive game.

“$4,999 is a little ambitious by this seller. Nobody can be that desperate to play this game, can they?”

As soon as the game was taken down on the 9^th of February, outrageous offers were placed on smartphones with the game pre-installed on online auction site eBay. Some “Flappy Bird Devices” demanding in the region of $10,000 as a starting price, even though selling devices with pre-installed software goes against eBay policies. Those who missed the boat and want to experience the addictive frustration of Flappy Bird but lack deep pockets to shell out for a pre-installed smartphone. Can look no further than one the numerous clones that immediately sprang up in the wake of the games success. It’s not at all surprising to see other developers looking to leech of the success of a popular game, but now with the original off the market the clones stand a good chance to have their own moment in the spotlight. Splashy Fish an Ironpants the two apps battling it out be crowned the new Flappy Bird successor. Flappy Bird stands as a testament to our modern age, were success is instantaneous and is only present for a fleeting moment before it falls back into obscurity. With the game of the market and its creator looking to return to a private life, how long can its popularity last? It would be a surprise to hear that the game still been talked about in a few months’ time. Unless this is all just a massive PR stunt and Nguyen is going to return to the limelight with the announcement for Flappy Bird 2?

By Colm O’Sullivan

The post Flappy Bird Review appeared first on Game Design Ireland.

“Will anyone really miss The Ville it’s players could just spend the day watching paint dry”

Zynga has taken an extreme approach to building a company in the video game industry instead of focusing on making new and innovative games they have looked to copy what others have done before them and rebrand it with their own art style. Zynga’s founder and CEO Mark Pincus has been reported by a former employee as saying “I don’t f**king want innovation, you’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.”, this attitude coupled with long hours and little in the way of employee gratitude will start to breed an environment of resentment and has many former employees revealing the truth of what goes on behind the closed doors of the Zynga offices. The company is rotten at the core which won’t help when they are losing money and need their staff to rally together to create new games that will rebuild their fortunes and why is the once Facebook darlings losing so much money, there is a simple answer they have spent outrageous amounts of money establishing new offices and buying out other game developers with little in the way of financial return.

“Are the talented developers working at Zynga being suppressed in order to boost the profit margins?”

Zynga’s case is not all that unique just earlier this year THQ publishing went under due to a similar habit of buying financially unsuccessful game studios, however Zynga has taken this common industry model and taken it to new heights or should that be new lows. Since the beginning of 2010 Zynga has barely gone 3 months without acquiring or starting a new development studio, as it currently stands they have twelve studios with several already shut down not more than a year or two after they were established. This pace of acquisition is unheard off in the industry and begs the question, do the corporate heads at Zynga know anything about financial planning or business strategy as from reading comments from any Wall Street analysts most agree that this model is not one that breeds success but will in fact lead to a quick demise. The real problem with their approach is the curse that Zynga seems to carry with them, the idea is too buyout a development studio that has had a hit game and then rebrand it under the Zynga banner and rerelease the same game with very few additions or anything in the way of innovation. Not surprisingly this model is a complete failure and is no more evident then with the case of OMGPOP’s popular iOS game Draw Something.

“Zynga’s downfall is based on one simple factor, don’t spend more than you make”

The game was based on the popular board game Pictionary and saw massive growth in popularity which brought it to the attention of Zynga who bought the game and the development studio in March of 2012 for $180 million. The follow up game was then released a year later and was a complete flop which has lead Zynga to closing the office and laying off nearly 20% of its staff. Within one year Zynga invested a massive amount of money in a company that would be shut down the next, this is not a sustainable model for any business whether it be in the video game industry or not. It also doesn’t help develop new talent with game studios like OMGPOP failing to succeed under Zynga’s guidance. The company thankfully has missed out on acquiring other successful casual gaming studios such as PopCap and Rovio with the latter being offered over $2 billion in cash and stock in buyout talks, so we can hopefully continue to play new Angry Birds and Plants V’s Zombies games without the fear of Zynga’s fatal curse.

“An analogue version of Draw Something, Zynga are scraping the bottom of the barrel with this one”

Honestly the Zynga approach to video game design is nothing new as developers have being copying each other’s work and re-skinning them with their own art style and design, with video game publishers having always seen the acquisition of smaller development studios as a way to grow their business. The problem is that Zynga has tried to do this at an alarming pace without time to plan for the future, Zynga in some ways is akin to their bulldog mascot hyperactively and hastily making decisions without thinking of the consequences and only realising their mistakes when it’s too late. Mark Pincus’s company has seen success but it soon might be a fleeting memory as they look certain for financial collapse. Zynga like Icarus have flown too close to the sun and are plummeting towards an ocean of debt at an ever increasing rate with no parachute to rescue them.

By Colm O’Sullivan

The post Zynga Review appeared first on Game Design Ireland.

“Mid 90’s mobile gaming at it’s best”

The game that set this industry on its path to widespread recognition was Snake which was available on the Nokia brand of phones in the late 90’s. It is estimated that 350 million people have played the game based on the number of phones sold. Although still a 2D monochromatic version of the game it gave other developers the idea that the ever technologically advancing mobile phone could be used as a platform for gaming working in much the same way as the already established handheld market did, a variant of the game had appeared on Nintendo Gameboy under the title of Serpent. At the time there was no market for mobile games as most came pre-loaded onto the phones and was hampered by the hardware and graphical limitations of the phones themselves. The other major hurdle was the access to these games with no proper mobile networking infrastructure in place at the time, most games were sold through the network carriers with download speeds hampering the development of more advanced games or successful games being able to reach a wider audience. It wouldn’t be until the advent of smart phones with powerful processers and larger memory storage that mobile games would look to compete with the console and pc markets, now with Wi-Fi and 3G enabled phones the mobile software developers such as Apple and Google could now establish digital marketplaces like the iTunes App Store and Google Play to deliver the digital content. In the intervening years the industry included some failures with the N-Gage been the most well-known of these. Nokia had looked to capitalize on the success they had with selling phones that would allow its customers to play games. Among many hardware and technical faults that plagued the device the main issue was the lack of support by third party developers to make games for the device, at the time not many video game companies were solely established to develop for the mobile market, most games where made by those who worked on handheld games or were simply ports of other companies popular titles. The game that could be argued to be the catalyst for the mobile industries growth is of course Angry Birds made by Finnish game developers Rovio, the company was established in 2003 as Relude and aimed to develop specifically for mobile platforms. The company has also made recent moves into the publishing sector of mobile gaming, with their new initiative Rovio Stars helping developers Nitrome and 5 Ants get their games to market.

“Many other ragdoll demolition games have come and gone, but Angry Birds pleasing visuals have seen Rovio rise to the top”

Angry Birds was released onto iOS platforms in December of 2009 and instantly became one of the bestselling games on the mobile market. It currently sits third in the list of bestselling mobile games with 12 million downloads just behind Tetris and Pac-Man. Aside from the games appealing aesthetics it is it’s unique touchscreen mechanics that helped boost its popularity and sales, the development of smart phones with touchscreen features and gyroscopic sensors allowed game developers to explore new and unique gameplay mechanics that just aren’t possible on other devices. Other games that utilized this technology include the likes of Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja or Temple Run. Due to its success Rovio has been able to port the game to several other devices including a move to consoles and pc’s and has led to the subsequent release of multiple sequels and follow up games in the series. One of these ports is the Angry Birds Friends which is a Facebook version of the game and was released last year. The rise in popularity of Social networks and the developments in web based gaming has led to developers now shifting focus over to this new platform for development with Zynga being one of the key players in this area of the industry.

“Farmville seems to teach people to become organized hoarders, how many horses or elephant’s does’ one person need”

Facebook has seen itself become the dominant leader in the social networking scene and has a user base exceeding 800 million and daily activity on the site reaching over 400 million. Undoubtedly many of those users log on every day to play one of the many games now available on the site, Zynga’s Farmville being one of the most popular games with a monthly active user base of over 250 million. The game is based on the freemium business model that permeates much of the gaming industry today. The model was proposed by venture capitalist Fred Wilson in a 2006 blog post “Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc., then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.”, today only two of the top 50 gaming apps in the iTunes store don’t fit into this model. The mechanic used by Farmville and many other like it is the limitation of actions that can be carried out over a certain time period, where traditionally with video game development a player can spend as many hours as they wish playing a game, with the likes of Farmville there is only a certain amount of task that can be completed until the user has to wait a period of time for their actions tally to refill. Incentives are offered to those who invite friends to play the game, subscribe to certain in-game advertisement or pay with real money to refill their actions tally. The model that is used by Zynga has come under many criticisms for manipulating it players most of whom are young as is their target audience in forcing them to spend money to simply continue to play the game without waiting, they have also being subject to multiple lawsuits for promoting advertisements in its games that don’t conform to the proper regulatory bodies and guidelines set by Facebook. The concept of free-to-play games is currently a contentious issue in the industry as there are many arguments both for and against its use, although not officially confirmed it is highly likely that free-to-play games and the freemium model could be coming to the next-generation of consoles with Epic Games Mark Rein speaking at the UK’s Game Horizon conference “The next-gen consoles are going to be fully embracing the free-to-play and these IAP-type business models”. The issue that has many gamers worried is what is going to be both Sony and Microsoft’s approach to the freemium model, Valve’s Team Fortress 2 and Zombie Studios Blacklight: Retribution (announced to launch on the PS4) have paved the way for a successful freemium model that balances the price of additional content and the effects that the content has on those who choose not to spend any money.

 “Valve’s endless obsession with hats, has proved to be a profitable business model”

The mobile and social networking gaming markets have seen a massive rise in popularity thanks primarily to the technology and devices that run these games. Unlike in other sectors of the industry where it is the games themselves that help grow the consumer numbers for a particular device, the casual gaming market relies on manufactures like Samsung and Apple to develop better phones and tablets that our able to advance the graphics and mechanics of the games and companies like Zynga relying on Facebook’s growing popularity to maintain their own user base. Largely the causal gaming market relies on small independent game developers creating games that help to gain recognition for the industry as the vast majority of AAA developers have yet to come to grips with the limitations of mobile devices and prefer to work with more technologically advanced consoles and pc’s. Devices such as the Ouya look to bridge that gap by basing their consoles off the existing android technology that powers a large majority of phones and tablets on the market. It would seem that a move towards a cross platform development is something that might be in the near future but it will still take the major developers wanting to work with the limited technology and the manufactures offering more advanced devices for a blend of the two industry sectors to happen.

By Colm O’Sullivan

The post The State of the Industry: Tap, Flick or Click appeared first on Game Design Ireland.