SteveStreeting.com

I’ve been an advocate of digital distribution for a while now; I think packaged physical distribution of a product which is essentially entirely complete as a stream of data is hugely wasteful financially and environmentally. Ever since publishers stopped bothering to give you anything worthwhile in that game case – manuals these days are rubbish, carbon-copy affairs that rightly no-one bothers to read because the in-game tutorials are more interesting, and Ultima-style cloth maps and runes are consigned to history – physical game cases are doing precisely nothing but take up space in my house and making me get up to fiddle with disks when I want to play a particular game. My only possible use for a physical product these days is resale value – but then I don’t often sell on games these days anyway, and publishers are getting wise to ways to make this harder / less attractive (see Mass Effect 2’s free DLC for those with an original one-time only game code).

This was only reinforced by an article in the LA Times which included a chart about the average breakdown of a $60 game:

Basically what this indicates is that, on average, $26 of the $60 price tag, or almost 50%, goes to physical overheads – things that have absolutely nothing to do with making the game itself, and everything to do with shifting bits of plastic around. It’s also interesting to see that the platform royalty (paid to Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony) is only $7, or about 12% of the price (compare this to a typical 30% on current digital distribution). From this you can see why the platform holders are quite keen on cutting the retailer out of the loop, and game buyers would benefit significantly too.

So what would that latest AAA game cost to you and I if it were on digital distribution on launch day? This is hard to judge because currently this only happens on PC where games are already cheaper (via Steam and Direct2Drive, among others); consoles currently only offer smaller or older games so are harder to compare directly. Let’s assume for a second that the platform royalty would be higher (to pay for bandwidth, assuming they host it), but not as high as the typical indie 30% because that can no doubt be negotiated down for big publishers / releases. So let’s assume 20% for sake of argument, still quite a bit more than the return platform holders get now. Working back from that, and assuming that the publisher needs the same absolute amount of money to fund development, marketing etc, that means AAA digital games releases should cost (at launch): 27 / 0.8 = $33.75.

That’s pretty astonishing. I know some people are attached to the physical manifestation of a purely digital product – frankly, I don’t understand this attachment and all the indications are that the new generation of gamers, raised on digital music and grabbing films from the internet, don’t either – but surely if you’re offered this kind of deal for the same game, plus not having to walk down to the shop in the rain, it’s a no-brainer.

This chart actually came from OnLive of course, who propose doing things very differently. I’m not convinced that particular approach will work well enough (particularly since our local internet speeds put us at the arse end of the developed world), but I’m absolutely convinced that digital distribution in some form will be increasingly dominant in the coming years. The only people who will lose out are the retailers, everyone else stands to benefit in both price and convenience.

Of course, what’s likely to happen in the immediate term is that publishers and platform holders will have ridiculous prices for digital distribution that bear no relation to the cost structure above; the primary reasons being that:

1. Big influential retailers will pressure them not to undercut (effectively forming a cartel, which should be illegal, but it happens already)
2. They like to eat money

But, slowly and surely, provided there’s real competition, prices can’t help but come down. Personally I think radicals like OnLive are key to providing this genuine competition – there’s always talk that having competing proprietary consoles means competition is maintained, but I don’t buy it; console manufacturers know full well that they have a captive audience once a consumer has invested in the console (barring the minority that have all of them) so price elasticity for games is very much higher than normal for other products; no other company can publish a game for that platform and compete after all. It’ll take external competition to make downloadable content cost what it actually should, which means the next console cycle (most believe this will kick off in 2012/3) could be very interesting indeed.

I’ll make a prediction here: the company with the best, most practical, and most reasonably priced digital distribution model will have a massive advantage next time around. And, I wouldn’t rule out this being none of the current encumbents either. People scoffed when the iPhone came out, but effective digital distribution had an absolutely massive influence on its success; I’m sure that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the usual suspects.

It’s precisely 10 years to the day that I registered OGRE on Sourceforge, so in some ways, today could be considered to be OGRE’s 10th birthday. From most other people’s perspective that won’t come until next year though, since I only made the first public release to CVS in May 2001, over a year later, which really kicked the whole thing off. The delay was down to me not really being able to start work in earnest until late 2000 because of a course of study I was on at the time, but I already knew in February 2000 what I wanted to do, it would just be a few months before I could start to realise it.

So OGRE, like the Queen, has two birthdays – a public and a private one I should start planning something for the official public 10th birthday next year, but this anniversary is an important personal one for me, since it represents my mental commitment to the project, the original kernel of the idea, so to speak.

It’s pretty mind-boggling to think it’s been this long, actually. I have more (ok, considerably more) grey in my hair than I had when I started, along with a ‘proper’ beard instead of that half-hearted goatee business – and the project has matured with me. OGRE has gone from an experimental project for personal fun, to a pretty well recognised name in open source real-time rendering with a global team, underpinning a surprising amount of production software across all sorts of sectors; games, public interactives, architecture, simulation, science, advertising, training, hardware devices, and more.

I haven’t even tried to tally up the amount of time I’ve spent on OGRE in the last 10 years, I’m sure it’s a scary number of man-years. Totally worth it though.

I’d read about One Big Game in EDGE this month, and it was a great idea – kind of a developer-led version of Child’s Play with a more significant UK presence, and where funds are donated from game sales themselves rather than only from related activities.

So, I was keen to see what their first game Chime was like, produced by Brighton-based Zoë Mode. At first glance it appears to be a hybrid of Tetris and Lumines, and undoubtedly shares a lot of visual and gameplay styles from those games, but actually it brings plenty to the table on its own too. And in fact, it’s actually channeling Qix very strongly as well, since the main aim is to achieve ‘coverage’ of the board through quads rather than keeping it clear (although not leaving fragments behind is important for scoring efficiency). The use of 5-section blocks (rather than 4 as in Tetris, and square shapes with coloured sections in Lumines) adds a number of extra variations, and because there’s no gravity you have a lot more flexibility in placement, which seems like it would be too easy but isn’t at all.

The musical element is great too. Lumines of course did the sweeping track marker first, with musical triggers on completed sections etc, but Chime takes it up a notch; while it uses the same idea, the music adapts a lot more fluidly and naturally via a number of variables – normal blocks encourage certain elements of the track, different shaped quads trigger different sounds, and the music itself morphs as more of the board is covered. It’s great, quite soothing in an ambient / chillout way (the complete opposite of the ‘jumping Mexican coffee bean’ level in Lumines).

The one potential downside is that there aren’t that many levels. But, this is one of those games where you can play and replay the same levels anyway and still have fun, and regardless there’s a couple of factors which make it a non-issue anyway – the price (a mere 400 points or £3.40), and the fact that most of the proceeds go to charity. That just can’t be argued with. I actually prefer the game to Lumines anyway, which was considerably more mercenary, nickel-and-diming you for certain play modes which was pretty underhand.

I’m disappointed that Microsoft are still taking their 30% cut on this though. The legal pages on the game set out how the game revenue is split for charity, and it’s clear that the 30% Microsoft tax remains – surely they could have reduced or waived that to let more go to charity? The developers are donating over 80% of the remaining 70% to children’s charities (works out at 60% of the whole purchase price).

This could have been 800 points and I still would have bought it. My wife loves it too, being a big Lumines fan – and I like it for her because I don’t have to listen to the Lumines Mexican bean track any more.

I highly recommend it to you if you have a 360, and I hope they port it to other platforms too to maximise their revenue from it (and maybe one of the other publishers will shame Microsoft into dropping their 30% charge). Here’s the launch video for the game, which probably oversells the ‘club scene’ element a tad, but there we go

Yesterday saw world-plus-dog in the technology sector glued to Apple’s announcement of their new tablet device, which has now been officially dubbed the iPad. Basically, when you boil it down it’s a super-sized iPod Touch with optional 3G support and a few more apps.

Reaction has ranged, as usual, from the ecstatic “I’ve seen the face of God, and his name is Steve”, to “What a useless piece of junk”, stopping at most points in between. In the more negative camp, lots of talk has centred around what it doesn’t have (multitasking, a camera, a USB port, Flash), and that some people seem to find it hard to grasp the usage conditions of a device that neither fits in your pocket, nor does everything a laptop does.

Personally, I’m cautiously optimistic. The device was never supposed to be a phone or a laptop, so I’m curious why people are comparing it to one – the point is that it’s something else. I can actually think of multiple use cases where a device of this form factor and capability would be useful to me. Here are a few examples:

1. I’ve thought about buying an eReader before, but have always been completely unsatisfied with the existing solutions: current e-ink devices are fine for reading black and white novels, but don’t handle A4 formatted content at all well, can’t do colour, take far too long to flip through pages, and are basically unusable for keyboard input, making searching impractical – and therefore these devices do not satisfy my need for a reader that replaces my bookshelf (physical and virtual) of reference material at all. The iPad, however, looks like it would be able to do that much better.
2. Sometimes I’m in the living room or kitchen and I’d just like to look something up on the web; maybe check some news or look up a recipe maybe – just a 5-10 minute thing. Firing up the laptop just for this is overkill, but the pages are too small to really read properly on a phone. In the end I do one of these things anyway but it’s never ideal. Again a tablet form factor would be perfect for this.
3. When we’re showing photos to family and friends, these days we do it on a laptop because we never print anything. It’s not ideal, even the most elegantly built laptop requires everyone to crowd around the screen behind you or similar – it’s awkward. If I had a tablet to do it, one I can easily hold up and pass around, that would work much better.
4. When I’m in a social situation when it would be useful to have intermittent access to some documents or other information that’s too big to fit on a phone screen comfortably, currently you need a laptop to do it. Laptops are really, really unsociable to have out on a table with others around (say at a meeting), because of the way they need to be used, with a screen forming a psychological barrier between you and whoever else is on the opposite side of the table. This happens all over the place: I strongly feel that laptops are the scourge of coffee shops today, turning a social space into a cluster of virtual mini-cubicles with individuals hunched behind screens not talking to anyone. I also play pen-and-paper RPGs socially, and over the years I’ve tried to use a laptop with many highly useful applications as an accessory, and it’s never, ever worked. Even the smaller laptops are too obtrusive, but a phone is just too small to be useful. I’d love to try using an iPad with some dedicated apps for tracking things.

I’m sure there are other examples. Basically I think people need to get over the fact that it doesn’t improve on what they currently use their phone or laptop for – that’s really not the point. I see the iPad as a ‘gap filler’ – and I can certainly see some gaps for it to fill in my life.

The price is much better than expected too, mostly because it’s an upgrade of an iPod rather than a downgrade of a laptop. I’d skip the 3G option because it’s pointless for me, I’d only use it on wifi, so that makes it not that much more expensive than a top-end iPod Touch.

But, it’s not all roses. The lack of Flash is an issue for web compatibility, although at least video through HTML5 is starting to happen (YouTube added it recently). The lack of multitasking is a bit disappointing, but might be relaxed in an OS update later. The GPU capabilities are a bit unexplored online so far, it seems that it’s probably as powerful as an iPhone 3G, but falling short of the 3GS (so GLES 1.1). I’ve also heard today that iBooks might not be available in non-US countries at launch, which definitely undermines the offering as an eReader.

So, depending on the practicalities when it’s released over here, I may or may not grab one. I can definitely see places in my life where a not-a-phone-or-laptop device would be useful, and frankly, I’m intrigued by the possibilities of where this kind of device may go in future.

So, I’ve been a little quieter than usual since the new year, and that’s because I’ve been in  a rather reflective mood as I plan out how I’m going to spend my time in 2010. That’s right – planning! Talk about the final frontier

Basically, as you may have gleaned from my previous post, I’ve been looking to make some significant changes to the way I do things in 2010. I spent 2009 reeling from a back injury and trying to figure out how to deal with that given that I’m self-employed (ie I don’t get paid when I’m not working, regardless of the reason), and a leader of an open source project (with the inherent time requirements that comes with). This meant working out on the fly how to stay afloat financially, and still keeping my own interests and open-source plates spinning, without slipping back into the ‘permanent voluntary crunch mode’ style which triggered my back problems. I can’t stress enough how difficult that transition has been for me – it’s not like anyone was forcing me to work/live that way, I did it because I wanted to, but then it suddenly had to stop. When you invest so much of your time and perceived identity in something, backing away from it is very, very hard.

Of course the economic climate wasn’t great either, meaning I spent a lot of time jumping around between many small projects, leading to more overhead dealing with admin & business relations. I ended up just going almost month-to-month on-demand, not  planning very much and just being grateful to be able to work a decent amount at all – which given how unwell I was at the start of the year was definitely something to be glad about. But, now I’m back on my feet and pretty confident of my future health again (within reason – I’m not going to be bungee jumping any time soon!), I’m ready to start being more pro-active again and to map out some plans.

One thing is for sure, there’s no going back to how I used to do things. My days of saying ‘yes’ to almost everything and being at the keyboard until past midnight most days, and most of the weekend, are gone forever. I don’t regret doing it, despite the pain it ended up causing me, because OGRE wouldn’t be here otherwise and I learned a vast amount and had a ton of fun – but I’ll leave that to the under-35s in future; have fun guys From now on, I’m being ruthless and somewhat selfish about what I work on, and concentrating on things that maximise my personal love-growth-cash triangle. It means I’m passing on a lot more projects, and concentrating far more on things that are strategically significant to me, rather than anyone else.

I’m still planning to lead OGRE, so long as the community is happy for me to do so, but by necessity I’m stepping back a bit to let other people take more responsibility where they want to, and to refocus my time on mentoring and advisory roles rather than trying to be everywhere at once. We have some great people in the team and in the wider community, and I hope our MIT license will foster even more in future. Both I and the community have gotten used to perceiving me as the ‘go to guy’ in the first instance, with responsibility for pretty much everything, but in practice for some time now it’s been very much a team & community effort, just one that I happen to lead (and financially support where needed). In fact one of the things I’m quite proud of is the way so many others have picked up on the way I do things, and taken things forward themselves in a way that I wholly approve of. That’s open source in action, and I’m glad to be part of it, even if I can no longer have my fingers in absolutely every pie with an OGRE symbol on it

Here’s to 2010 anyway. It’s going to be different, but change is good.

I’m far from being a gamerscwh0re who mines every game for every last Achievment, but nevertheless they’re fun to get. I like the ones that encourage you to do something memorable rather than the rather less imaginative “complete game on difficulty X” or “scour the world to find all of item X”.

Having picked up a number of games for Christmas I’ve had something of a boost recently, but last night while playing Assassin’s Creed II (which is a vast improvement on the original which had great atmosphere and free running mechanics but was riddled with tedious repetition and hence I never finished it) I completely accidentally landed on precisely 10,000 gamer points at the end of the night:

How can I possibly play anything else now? I’ll never, ever have a score that perfect again!

I’m not sure why my gamercard is currently in German (‘Bereich’), thanks dodgy XBL site localisation.

Although many popular films and TV shows don’t seem to use the convention of using roman numerals in their copyright statements anymore, the BBC has, as far as I’m aware, always consistently used them. It used to be kind of fun to see who could figure out the roman numerals first, although my wife was always better at it. For anything made since 2000 (MM) of course, it’s become a bit boring, since you only need to know how to count to 10. For some reason this occurred to me today as I considered that, after this year, we won’t see as simple a roman numeral representation until 2050 (MML). This year of course, we have to live with the knowledge that our year is named after a SIMD instruction set. But hey, it was funky, right?:

So anyway, 2010 is here. I’ll be keeping an eye out for black obelisks, but since we didn’t come up with an equivalent of Hal by 2001 I’m beginning to suspect the books weren’t that prophetic a vision of the future after all. It’s a new decade that we have to find yet another awkward moniker for – the ‘noughties’ was pretty rubbish but the ‘tens’ isn’t much better. Frankly, I couldn’t much care for the significance of entering another decade – after all, it’s all arbitrarily counted anyway, and after you’ve seen the passing of a new millennium (in all its vastly anticlimactic glory) it’s hard to get excited about any piddling small numbers any more.

I can’t say I mourn the passing of 2009, which despite a few high points (returning to Canada on holiday, seeing the viral success of Torchlight, getting 1.7 out the door, and so on) wasn’t an ideal year for me. Better than the end of 2008, when my back injury was at its worst, but due to the economic climate and needing to recover my health, I’ve been juggling lots of smaller jobs in 2009, and as such have not felt a great deal of attachment to most of the projects I’ve worked on. I’ve also had to consciously hold myself back from over-committing for fear of putting my recovery in jeopardy. By nature I’m an ‘all or nothing’ kind of character, so I’ve found this deeply unsatisfying at times. It’s kept the financials ticking over, but it also comes with lots more admin overhead (= wasted time) and doesn’t motivate me as much. I intend to change that in 2010 – I can’t go back to the kind of hours I was doing in 2008 and before, but I intend to try to fill the hours I have with things I can feel more personally committed to. OGRE is one of those things of course.

In the meantime, I wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2010!

My friend Damien was blogging about his early experiences with computers & programming yesterday, and it reminded me of how I got started. Specifically, it reminded me of an influential magazine I read at the time called “Input”, which taught BASIC programming for the ZX Spectrum and BBC. It was a short-lived, esoteric British thing, but I was astonished to find that not only does Wikipedia have a page on it, but they also linked a TV advert of it which has been lovingly archived on YouTube:

This brought back some serious memories. I remember that as well as the demo snippets there was an adventure game of sorts which was being published bit by bit in the magazine, as an incentive for you to buy them all. Like most magazines of this type there were regular typos that you’d scratch your head over, but in a way that was a good thing since it taught you to debug other people’s code.

I was 10/11 years old when this magazine came out, and I can probably trace my programming beginnings directly to it. It’s probably a bizarre concept to the younger generation, now that they have instant access to almost limitless information on the Internet. What I would have given to have the Internet back then when I was learning, instead of scratching around for information in magazines like this.

I hope everyone had a good Christmas, I certainly did. I received a number of new games, which was good (will blog about them individually at a later juncture), but I also encountered something I haven’t done before – Evil Red DVD Tag Syndrome.

For those who, like me, haven’t encountered these before, some shops in the last couple of years have been adding red theft-prevention strips to some DVD cases. These strips, as shown here, run through slots in the DVD case and not only hold it firmly closed, and include a security RFID thingamabob to set off the alarms at the door, but they press against the underside of the clips that hold the disc in so they cannot be released- so even if you manage to pry open the case, you can’t (easily) get the DVD out.

One of my game gifts this season still had this tag attached, and given that I doubt my mother-in-law is a shoplifter, and the RFID tag hadn’t set off the doors, I assume that the shop staff had forgotten to remove it. It was completely new to me (all my other games have just had RFID tags taped to them), and was surprisingly difficult to defeat, which is the point I suppose. Marie suggested I took it back to the shop to get them to do it, but a) I’d have to get hold of the receipt to avoid being assumed to be a thief b) that’s way too much hassle, and c) this was a logistical challenge that simply had to be solved without outside assistance, in order to prove…something. It’s a male thing.

In the end various implements (knives, forks and pliers) were involved, but I managed it without destroying the disc or (surprisingly) even the case. But, there’s certainly no way you could do this in the shop without being completely obvious, so I guess this is a ‘good’ security system, if only the stupid employees would remember to do what they’re supposed to. I was going to post a series of images of this, but then I realised others have already posted videos of it which were similar to my technique anyway, so here’s one for the similarly afflicted:

Merry Christmas!

[Edit 20th Dec] We did it! Rage Against The Machine is number 1 for Christmas, proper music fans in Britain give Simon Cowell and his manufactured karaoke bullsh*t the finger. Very, very happy!! Best Christmas number 1 that I can ever remember.

I detest reality TV with a passion. I think it’s low-brow, cheap nonsense that bare-facedly celebrates the very worst elements of human nature; promoting the idea that being famous (for anything) is somehow a laudable goal in itself, and indulging the public’s cathartic desire for a feeling of superiority and power over others via venomous gossip and voting people off. It’s a corporate goldmine of course, given how they don’t have to employ writers, directors or anything – just stick a bunch of people (preferably at least 75% maladjusted) in a house/jungle, give them a set of half-assed tasks that are preferably as humiliating or conflict generating as possible, and just sit back and watch the money roll in. Repeat ad infinitum. Reprehensible drivel – and it seems to me that it taps into the same psyche as that which was seen two thousand years ago in the arenas of ancient Rome; sure, it’s illegal to watch people fight to the death or be fed to lions anymore, but it’s basically the same thing, just on a psychological level instead – right down to a modern equivalent of the chanting mob influencing which way the emperor’s thumb goes. It’s a depressing indictment of how primitive the human race really remains, for all our swanky suits and digital watches.

Compared to the likes of Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity, X Factor is almost a saint, but it’s still got plenty to answer for. Every year what is basically a glorified karaoke competition determines what will be the Christmas Number 1 single in the UK. Now, of course anyone with even a remote taste in music doesn’t pay any attention to what the charts say anyway, particularly at Christmas (oh the horror of Bob The Builder and Mr Blobby in previous years) but it is pretty depressing that every year at Christmas we get the same thing – airwaves filled with some over-produced cover version of yet another soppy ballad from someone who will most likely be mopping the floors in McD’s in 12 months time, once the corporate mangle has wrung all the commercial opportunity from them.

That’s why the Rage Against The Machine for Christmas Number 1 campaign got started, encouraging music lovers in the UK to protest and to mass-buy the anarchic single Killing In The Name in the week which will determine the Christmas #1, to send a message of disapproval. I like RATM anyway, but even if I didn’t I would have joined the campaign just for the protest vote. So far, RATM has been winning, but as of today only marginally and all the predictions are that this will be overturned on the last day of chart sampling (Saturday) as the mob descends on town centres around the country and hurry bleating to the counters with the latest production-line tat from the X Factor machine.

I hope with all my heart that somehow RATM can win – not because the charts matter, but because it would be a symbolic gesture, and an affirmation that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, there are sizeable numbers of people in the country with a decent, independent thinking head screwed onto their neck (yes, I’m aware of the irony that to prove this requires the use of crowd behaviour, that’s not the point). If you’re passionate about music, even if you don’t like RATM, I encourage you to buy the single Killing In The Name today or tomorrow, just to make a stand (iTunes, Play – or others, allegedly it’s uncertain whether Amazon counts in the charts though so avoid that one).

Here’s the video of BBC Radio 5 Live’s interview with RATM and a live rendition of the song. The band was supposed to avoid the swearing, but at the end either they got carried away or just decided to adhere to their own lyrics (“F*** you I won’t do what you tell me”) and so got frantically pulled from the airwaves at that point (this version which came from the BBC website is censored, the live version was not). Well, it was in the spirit of the thing after all, what did they expect?