Gaming Notes and Revision Materials

 The Games Industry Notes and Revision Handout

 

Section B: Institutions and Audiences

A study of the production, distribution and marketing of a specific game within one or across various gaming platforms, along with its reception by a variety of (British) audiences.
This should be accompanied by study of the impact of next generation capabilities (HD, Blu-Ray, online services etc) on the production, distribution, marketing and consumption of games.
Candidates should be prepared to understand and discuss the processes of production, distribution, marketing and exchange as they relate to contemporary media institutions, as well as the nature of audience consumption and the relationships between audiences and institutions.
In addition, candidates should be familiar with:
1. The issues raised by media ownership in contemporary media practice;
2. The importance of cross media convergence and synergy in production, distribution and marketing;
3. The technologies that have been introduced in recent years at the levels of production, distribution, marketing and exchange;
4. The significance of proliferation in hardware and content for institutions and audiences;
5. The importance of technological convergence for institutions and audiences;
6. The issues raised in the targeting of national and local audiences (specifically, British) by international or global institutions;
7. The ways in which the candidates’ own experiences of media consumption illustrate wider patterns and trends of audience behaviour.

Who owns the games industry?

The gaming industry is controlled by a handful of large corporations. This is known as an oligopoly. These corporations are Microsoft, Sony and, Nintendo. They have more money and power than all the other companies in the industry.
Smaller companies for example Rockstar (the company that made GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption) need to find ways of staying in business. It engineered the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE).
This is a game engine developed in order to facilitate game development on the XBOX 360, Playstation 3, Microsoft Windows and Nintendo Wii systems.
It should act as a form of protection for the company as all ‘next-gen’ consoles will need this upgrade in order to play all future Rockstar releases.

What is the purpose of the games industry?

The answer obviously is to make money. These companies want consumers to 1) stay loyal to them and 2) use their platform for other things besides games and become home entertainment hubs.

1. They maintaining loyalty by:

• Producing successful franchises ‘in house’. E.g. Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda.
• Buying up companies that make successful games and ensuring all future releases of the franchise are made for their platform. E.g. Bungie was a studio that made Halo until Microsoft bought it.
• “Sweet heart” deals e.g. Rockstar Games released exclusive episodic content for the Xbox 360 version of GTA IV. Microsoft paid Take-Two (the publisher) a total of £40 million for the first two episodes.
• Incentives for gamers – E.g. the Rockstar Games Social Club is a web site that displays the gameplay statistics of registered users and features competitions and awards based on player activity within the game. Rockstar also rewards visitors to their PlayStation Home apartment with ‘goodies’ such as clothing for their avatar and items and decorations for their own PlayStation Home apartment. Also, X Box Live offers exclusive downloadable content
• Holding back new technology so that people still buy current platforms and drip-feeding innovations into the market to ensure new must have features. Consoles have built in obsolescence.

Many households as a result of the above own more than one platform.

2. Home entertainment hubs besides play games allow users to:

• Download games and expansion packs
• Surf web
• Watch Blu-ray DVDs
• Download films and play films
• Download and play music
• Buy music in games - the developers of GTA IV originally considered letting players purchase music in virtual reality by allowing them to visit an in-game record shop.
• Internet telephone
• Instant messaging and chat
• Store personal data like photographs
• Shop (buy goods online)

This is known as technological convergence.
Console companies want you to replace your DVD player, PC, home phone, stereo system with their system. This will either put other companies who supply these out of business or force them to do deals with Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo.
It will also allow them to reach you easier and sell you new products and services. In the future, there will be less advertising on broadcast TV and more product placement on Xbox live and in games e.g. billboards in Gran Turismo.

How Games are Produced, Published, Distributed and Marketed

Production

In recent years the games industry has gone through a revolution. Game development in the 1980s used to be a ‘cottage industry’ i.e. a single programmer or a handful of programmers working alone producing games that were then bought by publishers such as Electronic Arts.
Now games are produced by hundreds of people working on different aspects of the game sometimes in different countries. Around 150 game developers alone worked on Grand Theft Auto IV.
Overall, Grand Theft Auto IV took over 1000 people and more than three and a half years to complete, with a total cost estimated at £80 million, making it the most expensive game ever developed.
Production companies are more like established film production companies nowadays e.g. Working Title (a company that has made 100s of films e.g. Hot Fuzz) with 100s of people involved in production.
Both films and production companies are called studios. Rockstar, the studio that created GTA IV has also funded films like The Football Factory (2004) and Sunday Driver (2005).
A typical present-day production team includes:
1. Artists who draw characters and settings before they are rendered on the computer
2. Designers who visually recreate the characters and levels on a computer.
3. Programmers who write the machine code to make all the visuals move.
4. Sound engineers (composers, for sound effects and voice acting)
5. Directors for the actors, cut scenes and camera angles.
6. Testers whose job it is to find bugs.
All these would be divided into project teams with its own manager.
Games can be developed by an independent production company or the development branch of a publisher or the development branch of a corporation that makes consoles.
Games now share many of the production techniques of films. Games use famous actors to voice characters e.g. Kiefer Sutherland in Call of Duty, Stephen Fry in Fable 2.
Famous musicians are commissioned to provide the sound tracks e.g. Hans Zimmer who composed the music for Gladiator also composed the music for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
The camera in the game mimics the techniques of films that belong to the same genre. The cut scenes look just like exerts from films. Rockstar’s latest game Red Dead Redemption is inspired by and often mimics classic Westerns such as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and The Wildbunch.
Games are not made until a publisher puts up the money to fund the development process.
E.g. Rockstar developed GTA IV and Take-Two Interactive funded and published it.

Publishing

When you write a book you need to find a company that will print, package it and send it out to shops. Similarly games have to be published.
Publishers can be independent e.g. Electronic Arts or separate branch of a corporation that makes consoles e.g. Nintendo. Independent publishers are known as Third Party Publishers and Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo as First Party Publishers. EA and Nintendo are the top two in the industry. The biggest British publisher is Codemasters.
Apart from funding the development, publishers are responsible for the manufacturing and marketing of games. Larger video game publishers, like EA, also distribute the games they publish.
A publisher may pay a production company £10m to make a game. They then package the game and advertise it. This may cost another £2m. They decide the price of the game and sell as many units as possible. If they sell 15m copies the publisher will recoup its costs and make a profit.
GTA IV cost £80m to make and made £24.4m on the first day of its release and from an estimated 6 million units sold worldwide more than £400 million in revenue was made in the first week.

Distribution

Distribution is the process by which finished games get sent out to members of the public.
The only way to buy games used to be from high street shops such as Game and HMV. As more people became connected to the Internet they bought them from such websites as Amazon.co.uk.
Now, as more people acquire broadband it is quicker and easier to download a game direct to a console or PC.
TV adverts for X Box games now say ‘ready to download’ rather than ‘in shops now’.
As broadband increases in capacity this will become more popular and may signify the end of the high street stores selling games.

Marketing

The marketing of game releases is now comparable to that of films. Games are now embedded in mainstream culture.
Game campaigns now includes:
1. Film style trailers – game trailers often look and sound exactly the same as film trailers.
E.g. trailers for games such as Gears of War 2 and Call of Duty: World of War begin with a slow dramatic establishing shots then aim to excite the audience by quickly cutting to a montage of intense action scenes from the game to a dramatic soundtrack. They sometimes imitate famous scenes from films.
E.g. Medal of Honour: Allied Assault mimicked the beach assault in Saving Private Ryan.
Trailers are carefully targeted. For example, on TV adverts for Wii Fit would be shown when advertisers know families and women are watching e.g. Coronation Street (pre-watershed broadcasts).
Trailers for shoot’em up games would be shown in the cinema before action films such as The Dark Knight and Avatar.
2. Film tie-ins - often games are made to cash in on the popularity of a film.
The games publisher has to pay the film studio to gain rights to the name of the film. Recent examples include Harry Potter, Lord of The Rings and Star Wars.
This can work the other way also with the film studio cashing in on the popularity of hit games. The studio has to pay the game publisher to use the name of a game. This also leads to more sales for the game. Recent examples include Resident Evil, Hitman, Max Payne, Final Fantasy, and Avatar.
3. Soundtracks - Rockstar paid as much as £4,000 per composition and another £5,000 per master recording per track.
Soundtracks contribute to the gaming experience and shape the character of the games. Sometimes game soundtracks are released as albums or compilations in their own right. E.g. Grand Theft Auto IV.
4. Magazine and Newspapers - Reviews of games and magazine articles with actors and designers are covert adverts for games – i.e. they appear to be independent and part of the magazine when they are really just increasing the games’ publicity.
GTA IV was on the cover of nearly all videogame magazines for months both before and after the release (this is known as prior advertising).
Dozens of newspaper articles were written about it e.g. Sunday 4th May 2008 – The Observer dedicated a page of its ‘Arts and Culture review’ section to debating ‘whether or not GTA IV is a work of art’.
The May 2008 issue of Official Xbox Magazine (UK) published the first Grand Theft Auto IV review, giving the game the maximum score of 10/10.
PlayStation Official Magazine branded the game as “a masterpiece”. The film magazine Empire gave the game a perfect 5/5 in its game reviews section, calling it “damn-near perfect”.
5. Ambassadors - people who are offered incentives by companies to promote their games on forums and introduce new users.
6. Online advertisements on websites and forums that are accessed by the target audience e.g. Facebook, YouTube etc
7. Posters in public on buses, billboards etc
8. Viral marketing - this is where people pass adverts or links to each other via their phones, Facebook, Twitter or email and help companies do their advertising.
9. Publicity stunts e.g. live BMX competitions to launch a new BMX game.
10. Email newsletters that feature incentives such as discounts to buy new games.
11. Adverts on the consoles themselves via live Internet connections.
12. Playable demos in stores. For example shopping centres.
13. Celebrity endorsements e.g. Wayne Rooney FIFA Football, The Redknapps Wii Sports, ex BB contestants and Mr T World of Warcraft.
14. Game conventions e.g. E3 generate hype for future releases - Microsoft vice president Peter Moore announced at E3 2006 that GTA IV would appear on Xbox 360, by rolling up his sleeve to reveal a GTA IV temporary tattoo.
15. Sponsor events like football matches and extreme sports events.
16. Free demos – give users a taste of the game
17. Controversy - The prequel to GTA IV, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, created major controversy when released in America in 2005.
A patch unlocked a hidden sex mini-game that led to calls in the media for the game to be banned.
However in the end it only created more publicity for the game.
Similarly Manhunt was banned in the UK – it was eventually released, and the media coverage created more publicity for the game.
18. Bundles – E.g. PlayStation 3 Sports Champion Move Bundle – An introductory package for PS3 newcomers, which includes a PS3 system, a PlayStation Move motion controller, a PlayStation Eye camera, Sports Champions Blu-ray game and PlayStation Move game demo disc.
19. Corporate synergy – As part of its “It Only Does Everything” marketing campaign for Move Sony has entered a synergistic relationship with Coca Cola.

Game Audiences and Consumption

TV, films and games now compete against each other for people’s money.
GTA IV was hyped in the same way a blockbuster film like Dark Knight. TV and films are passive while gaming is becoming more interactive all the time. GTA IV is an example of a sandbox game, which allows users to depart from the game’s narrative and create their own.
In films the audience has to watch the plot unfold in sandbox games there are lots of possible endings the user can choose from. This is known as non-linear game play. The latest generation of games let users create their own content. The narrative and action goes in the direction the player wants it to. An example of this is Little Big Planet.
Online game play has an advantage over TV and film in that allows users to communicate with each other, compete and become part of a community.

Games as Narratives

However, in videogames, understanding how the story elements work often does help players to win. Narratives are most apparent a game’s cut scene which can be thought of as mini movies existing inside a game. They borrow many techniques from cinema, such as camera moves (the pan, zoom and tracking shots) and angles (the mixture of close up and wide). Compare for instance the cut scenes in Red Dead Redemption to the films of Sergio Leone.

Immersion and Agency

Immersion, the feeling of being completely involved in something, is associated with other media.
People often get lost in a good book or film but only games offer what Janet Murray in her 1997 book Hamlet on the Holodeck calls ‘agency’. She defines it as “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices”.
Games provide many opportunities for players to exercise agency which Murray argues makes them more immersive.
The stereotypical gamer used to be a lonely, obsessive teenage boy. Now games are mainstream gaming crosses all social, gender and age barriers. The Wii is often marketed towards women and families.

The (Near) Future of Gaming

Move and Kinect

’Move’ and ‘Kinect’
By introducing the Wii, Nintendo have successfully widened the appeal of consoles by making games more social and kinetic.
Previously, Sony and Microsoft have had nothing to compete with Wii Fit, Wii Sports etc. They are attempting to rectify this and capture Nintendo’s market.
Within the next year, Sony are releasing Playstation Move and Microsoft the Xbox Kinect. Move is a motion sensor system similar to the controller for the Wii but Kinect goes one step further and involves motion capture technology that promises controller free gaming. I.e. your body is the new controller.

3D

A growing number of games are being launched in 3D – Avatar, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Killzone 3 and Grand Turismo 5. As 3D displays including TVs become cheaper expect this trend to continue.

The Death of the Console

A new online service launched recently in America promises to serve games to your living rooms, live, and without the need for a console or a high-powered personal computer.
It is a ‘cloud’ service called OnLive which launched in the USA last June. It instantly delivers games direct to your TV screen, using a small receiver unit that connects to your existing broadband connection.
All the processing that consoles used to do is performed by a network of powerful remote servers using compression routines. Players provide the inputs using a joypad, as normal which are streamed back with almost non-existent lag.
Users will pay a $14.95 (£9.99) subscription fee each month, plus the cost of either buying or renting each game. In this regard OnLive has several very significant advantages: there is no need to invest any further in a game you are not enjoying; you can sample all the latest releases with minimal costs.
OnLive enjoys the support of many high-profile games publishers – removing the need to manufacture and physically distribute games is an obvious and lucrative benefit to them. High profile titles such as Borderlands, Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed are among the launch games announced so far.

Glossary

Avatar - An avatar is a computer user’s representation of himself/herself or alter ego. It can be in the form of a three-dimensional model used in computer games, a two-dimensional icon (picture) or a one-dimensional username used on Internet forums and other communities.
Game engine - A game engine is a software system designed for the creation and development of video games.
There are many game engines that are designed to work on video game consoles and desktop operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
The core functionality typically provided by a game engine includes a rendering engine (“renderer”) for 2D or 3D graphics, a physics engine or collision detection (and collision response), sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, and a scene graph.
The process of game development is frequently economized by in large part reusing the same game engine to create different games.