Collectible Card Apps?

Sure, there's been CCGs as software; you can play Magic: The Gathering online, after all. And virtual card games are all over the place, it seems, on a variety of platforms. Toy Fair is seeing a new take on the idea, though, from Nukotoys, with their Monsterology game pictured above. Apparently you flick one of their cards against your iPad or iPhone screen and it will appear inside... check out the video here.
This may or may not fly, of course. It's far too early to tell, and besides you have to see what sort of marketing they have lined up. And if the game is any good; its not easy to design a good card games. It's also not clear how much collectibility they are planning for, either.
Still, it's another interesting trend to keep an eye on for traditional gaming companies.

Boardgames, Meet Apps

When Life hands you iPads, make apps.

The convergence of boardgames and tablets is happening fast. Check out what Hasbro is showing at Toy Fair: Monopoly, Battleship and The Game of Life in special appified versions. The iPad sits in the middle of the board, and the spinner is on the iPad. As are funny videos that play as you move through the board, from Americ'as Funniest Home Videos. Will they fly? They may not right away, but at the rate tablets are being adopted it shouldn't be long before this becomes popular. (Estimates are that Apple alone may sell more than 45 million tablets this year, and that may be conservative once the iPad 3 hits and they (maybe) reduce the price of the iPad 2.)
Then there's this app, which is shown here:

You have pieces you move around the outside, which integrates with the software (the board knows where your pieces are). I talked to these guys at CES, and tried to convince them to go to the GAMA Trade Show and sign up some adventure game companies.

Really, the adventure game industry (RPGs, boradgames, and miniatures alike) needs to get over to smartphones and tablets ASAP, preferably last year. The ability to completely distribute digitally is an amazing transformation of the business. Not to mention cost savings, and the fact that the core adventure game demographic overwhelmingly has a smartphone, and tablets are growing even faster than smartphones now.

The future is arriving at a rapid pace; get with it or you're history.

Game Industry Sales Down 34% in Jamuary

Yeah, it's pretty much like that.

Remember how NPD was saying for months last year that sales declines were just a blip, that things would look better in the 4th quarter with all sorts of strong titles being released, and that sales for 2011 would be flat from 2010, maybe down just a smidge? And then the numbers for December hit: down 21% from December 2010, and overall sales for 2011 were down 8%. Time to panic? No, no, everything will be fine in January; this was just lots of sales getting pulled into November, January will be back up.

January sales dropped 34% from January 2011.

OK, time to panic.

That is, if your sales are still all based on shipping boxes to retail stores, you should be wondering how long that will last. Sure, EA and Activision seem to be doing pretty good, selling more boxes than ever... but only of the biggest titles. The midlist is quickly going away, and companies based primarily on less than AAA titles (hello, THQ) are having a very rough time.

Unless they've transitioned to digital distribution, social and especially mobile games. Free-to-play is whacking the business of $60 retail boxes pretty hard, too.

That transition to digital distribution that was going to take many years suddenly doesn't seem so distant. A few more months like January and things will change very fast indeed. I predict that 2012 will see another year of dropping physical retail sales, possibly into the double digits unless the Wii U does amazing business (but it's likely to only have a couple of months of sales in this year).

GameStop better hurry up with those new initiatives into digital.

How Not To Market Gaming Accessories

Actual poster at a CES Booth

Sometimes you just have to wonder why nobody stood up at the marketing meeting and said "No." Or maybe "Have you lost your wits?" Apparently no one did for this company that makes gaming mice and gaming keyboards. Somehow they though that this slogan would appeal to those crazy Americans.

Really, guys (I presume guys; women usually don't seem to stoop to this marketing level of juvenilia), what the hell were you thinking? Looking at this (which is also the backdrop image for the booth, by the way) I have no idea what they're marketing or why I should care. Features? Benefits? Nope, not there. Odd image of a cat outline with an American flag design over it? Sure, that's there. Whatever that means. And did I miss something or did the Germans actually invade America in World War II? I thought they never got here... I must not know as much history as I thought. Of course, countries that did have legions of German "tourists" during World War II don't exactly have fond memories of the time period.

Save the lame jokes for when you're at the hofbrau knocking back some lager. When you're marketing, try to at least point to the product or service, and maybe even hint at a benefit or two.

Miyamoto Retiring?

This guy doesn't look ready to retire.

A rollup of stories from IndustryGamers this week, as featured on Kotaku can be found here. There's been a lot going on, and perhaps the most interesting flap has been over an interview that Wired conducted with Nintendo's star designer Shigeru Miyamoto, where he talks about retiring. Of course Nintendo, no doubt worried about their stock price, rushed to say he's not really resigning. I think the truth probably is Miyamoto wants to shift his responsibilities some, and maybe not "retire" in the Western sense of the word (as in not work any more), but maybe change from overseeing development efforts to being more hands-on.

Somehow Nintendo would like to get Miyamoto to sprinkle his magic dust over every title they do, or at least make investors think that he does.

Although I think what is really important is to get a whole crop of designers who can do what Miyamoto does, or at least approximate it. If he could train up some developers, that would be hugely useful to Nintendo. I'm not sure if that;s even possible, though, but it's certainly worth a try.

This Week In The Business

If only making money from games was this simple.

My son rightly pointed out I should link to this post on Kotaku, which rolls up a number of the top stories on IndustryGamers for the week. It's a good overview on the important stories in the game business for the week.

Nintendo Enables Paid DLC

Here's a story that I've just posted to IndustryGamers.com, about how Nintendo will be enabling developers to put DLC online in the 3DS eShop and actually charge customers money for it. This is apparently something Nintendo is doing because developers have asked for it, not because the Big N particularly thinks they should charge for DLC. I'm sure gamers everywhere cheer at the thought of free content, especially more free content for games they've already purchased. But is this really a good idea, ultimately, for a business?

After all, the biggest change in smartphone games is the shift to free-to-play, going form only 12% of smartphone games to a project 92% of them in a couple of years from now. If the games are free, how will they make money? Sale of virtual goods... AKA, paid DLC in another guise. If that's the right path in smartphones, is it necessarily the right path for consoles?

Well, maybe, maybe not. I think part of the reason (a big part) that free-to-play (F2P) is taking over smartphone games is that there are so damn many games out there it's hard to get people to commit to buying one. If it's free, then people have one less barrier to trying it out, and then if they like it they might spend money on buying things for it. So F2P is a way to encourage discovery. On a platform like the 3DS, though, there are very few games (compared to smartphones, orders of magnitude fewer), so buyers aren't as overwhelmed... and therefore maybe they don't need to be enticed by free games to make a buying decision.

I see that counter-argument, but I think the bigger picture for consumers is that they see "Hey, I can get a smartphone and have thousands of free games" which may lead them away from choosing a dedicated gaming handheld. Oh, the hardcore gamers will see the advantages of the dedicated handheld, but that audience isn't very big compared to the size of the smartphone buying audience. The comparison between $30 games on a 3DS and free or $1.99 games on the smartphone isn't helping dedicated handheld sales at all.

The real tough part is that making a game F2P means fundamental design changes; you can't just take any old game and make it F2P and expect it to work properly. And many $30 games aren't really worth the full price, especially when it's easy to find them used. I think games have sustained really high prices for a very long time, but the party is rapidly coming to a close. For every Call of Duty or Skyrim, there's dozens of games that don't even cover their development and marketing costs.

I think Nintendo's fighting a rearguard action here, but the industry as a whole is inexorably moving to lower game prices up front (in many cases, free) and looking to make their money after the initial game acquisition. Companies are trying like hell to increase customer engagement with game brands, using Facebook and multiple tools to keep you continuously interested in their game. Companies are racing towards this goal of comprehensive, multiplatform brand engagement, but I'm not sure what exactly they'll find at the end of the race.

2011 has been a year of big changes, but 2012 may be even bigger.