SteveStreeting.com

Ok, so my suspicions about the reasons behind Rock Band: AC/DC breaking the usual customer-friendly mould of Rock Band appear to have been confirmed:

The reason “AC/DC Live” can’t be purchased at your local EB Games or Best Buy is because of the deal that AC/DC had already struck with Wal-Mart as an exclusive distributor of their upcoming album, “Black Ice.” The negotiations with AC/DC over the track pack required that Harmonix become part of the existing Wal-Mart agreement.

Even more damning is a quote from Angus Young to the Telegraph:

“We don’t make singles, we make albums,” said Young. “Way back in the Seventies, we drew these figures on the back of an envelope for our record company. We showed them how much they earned from us if we sold one million singles and how much they earned if we sold one million albums. The difference was staggering . . . If we were on iTunes, we know a certain percentage of people would only download two or three songs from the album - and we don’t think that represents us musically.”

Doesn’t represent you musically? What you actually mean is that restricting customer choice works for you financially, because if customers could only pick the songs they actually liked you’d make less money. My only dilemma is which box to check on my ‘why bands ignore their customers and don’t list on download sites’ form: is it the ‘Arrogant snobbery’ or ‘Money-grabbing shill’ box in this case? I think I’ll check both.

Any band that thinks they are somehow ‘above’ the people that buy their music and feel they can disallow customers from buying it the way they want have their heads firmly wedged up their own arses, and deserve everything they get when people download their music for free.

Yes, this is a rant; I hate this kind of attitude and I’m also cranky from not being able to play drums for over a week thanks to my back

I blogged a few months ago about my concern regarding the precedents being set by the Northern Rock and Bear Stearns debacles - that investment bankers and city executives can take outrageous risks, bag huge bonuses and get into a situation that for the sake of the economy, the government has to step in and sort it out.

If only that had been the end of it; I don’t think anyone really thought it was, but since then things have really gone south. In the USA we’ve had the state effectively re-nationalising Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, and they’re now debating a $700bn rescue package to buy bad assets from a host of financial institutions in order to ‘extract the poison’ from the markets.

Now, as before I completely understand that, in the immediate aftermath of a train-wreck such as this, you have to concentrate on damage limitation and short-term recovery. That doesn’t mean, however, that we should stop asking searching questions - the world has been placed in a woeful position thanks to a comparatively small group of people who benefitted from continuously feeding the insatiable credit monster, no matter what the realistic repayment prospects were for those debts. It’s typical commission-based salesman behaviour - close the sale, let the accounts department worry about the rest.

I’m glad to see that the US congress haven’t just rubber-stamped the rescue bill, and are asking serious questions about future guidance & regulation on the market and its operators. The Wall Street guys will tell you that interference and regulation just inhibit the market and make everything worse, but I believe that recent events rubbish that claim; if the market was truly self-sufficient and self-regulating, it wouldn’t have gotten itself into the position where it needed a handout from regular people’s tax dollars to avert a total meltdown. Clearly short-term greed overwhelmed good sense, and those in this market acted like children who didn’t know when to stop eating junk food - except in this case, everyone ends up with a stomachache. Like children, if they can’t figure out for themselves how to behave, then they need a responsible adult to make those decisions for them. Trust is earned, and the financial sector essentially frittered all that trust away having a giant party, and there must be consequences.

Some people will blame the culture of credit and say that the market was just responding to that, and so it shouldn’t be held entirely accountable, and I say hogwash. Sure you can blame the people who took out loans they couldn’t afford to a degree, but come on - these were unlikely to be financially savvy people, and at the end of the day it’s up to the lender to evaluate repayment prospects rationally. After all, if they don’t get their money back, they’ll go out of business. In this case though, the financial wizards concocted another one of their ‘vehicles’ which magically allowed dubious debt to be repackaged and resold, effectively becoming somebody elses problem. What a marvellous invention! We can take all the risks we want, collect our fat bonuses and just keep hiding all our crap under a giant rug in the spare room. No-one will ever find it, right?

This is not responsible behaviour, it’s reprehensible. The vast majority of regular people work hard, are prudent with their money, think hard about lending or borrowing money, and don’t make the kinds of basic affordability errors these so-called financial experts were making. After all, regular people have to live with the results of their actions, so prudence is a wise stance. Mistakes in the financial sector, however, result in damage mostly to the lower echelons of their workforce, crippling problems for the rest of the public, desperate measures from government; yet the execs still get to keep their huge bonuses earned during the previous years.

After all the mess is cleaned up, I hope those that benefitted from the years leading up to this situation are held to account. Enron, Nick Leeson - they were nothing compared to this. The culture in the upper echelons of corporate banking is clearly fundamentally broken, and both governments and the industry owe it to regular people to resolve it, not just with short-term bail-outs, but with fundamental change. Something is badly wrong in the financial sector, and they’ve proven themselves incapable or unwilling to sort it out before it resulted in pain for everyone else. Because of that, they’ve forfeited their right to decide what happens next - behave like a greedy child, and you deserve to be treated like one.

For some reason I was suddenly curious as to how much money I’d spent since last December on digital content for the 360, such as XBox Live Arcade titles and more recently Rock Band DLC. Of course you buy things in Microsoft Points on the 360, which like Wii Points and Disney Dollars are designed precisely to disguise how much money you’re actually spending. The PSN has my respect in this regard for taking the brave step of actually pricing things in units of real money. Quite why Microsoft and Nintendo chose to go against the precendent set by every other marketplace in the developed world (except Disneyland, but that’s intentionally ‘wacky’) I’m not sure - I doubt we’d take most high street retailers very seriously if they required us to buy things in ‘Starbucks Bucks’ or ‘HMV Quatloos’.

Anyway, when I totalled it all up, I’ve chugged my way through 13,000 Microsoft Points in 9 months so far, which in the real world is £110.50, and judging by the dates, about half of that has been on Rock Band DLC, the rest being XBLA titles. I’ve spent more on digitally delivered content on my 360 than I have on boxed games (just software, excluding plastic peripherals) - some of that is because I received most of my boxed games as presents, and I picked up a back catalogue from eBay, but even so, I do think my own habits are a sign of how quickly digitally delivered content is becoming accepted.

Small purchases (micropayments is an often used term, although that usually refers to even smaller amounts) are just easy to mentally justify, even if you end up making enough of them to exceed a larger pruchase that you would perhaps think about more carefully. It’s really easy to slap down £1.36 for a new Rock Band track (that’s less than 2 tubes of Pringles), or £6.80 for an XBLA title (Geometry Wars 2 is particularly a no-brainer); it really doesn’t take much to convince you, particularly when you know exactly what you’re getting - after all you can check out the Rock Band tracks on RockBandContent.com and play demos of every XBLA game before you buy.

Taking out the overhead of the retailer and physical distribution makes products cheaper - that’s obvious. Games are, in general, very overpriced - we pay £40 for a boxed game which required the same budget to make as a Hollywood blockbuster I can pick up across the aisle for a tenner. One obvious reason is that market is smaller, another reason is the silly situation we have where a console platform holder takes a huge slice of the pie just for letting developers deploy on their platform.  All these things are interlinked - the audience is smaller partly because the content is so expensive, which leads to content marketed more at the core audience which spends that money, and larger margins required to make back console hardware development costs, etc etc. Nintendo has broken out of that to some degree, but they’ve mostly appealed just to the mass market, leaving most of the core audience on 360 and PS3. Ideally we’d have a situation where the whole spectrum of game players (’core’ and ‘mass market’ are the most talked about but there are lots of graduations) existed in one place, just like you have with movies, and obviously this is the holy grail that certainly MS and Sony are trying to chase, even though I have serious doubts that we’ll ever get there until the industry rids itself of the counterproductive market segmentation that multiple proprietary consoles creates. I do think that digital distribution helps though, because it disrupts the status quo, creates a more fluid situation that just can’t exist very easily elsewhere, and makes a space for people to experiment more - both as producers and consumers - and to see what works.

I’d love to know the bigger picture of how much money is spent on the likes of XBLA, Steam, PSN etc. I’m sure it’s generally smaller than retail sales, but I’d be interested in knowing the trajectory of those numbers, and in particular which kinds of players they are. Anecdotally I get the impression that digital distribution tends to be good for those ‘ex hardcore’ gamers like me - we don’t buy a ton of games anymore, but like quality bite-sized content and are willing to pay for it. We’re not casual, but we’re not hardcore anymore either.

Anyone else got interesting comparisons of their physical / digital purchase numbers?