BUBBLE BOBBLE'S FATHER DIES

More bad news for the videogame industry. Another classic designer passed away. This time it's Fukio Mitsuji, aka MTJ, Bubble Bobble's father. RIP. More info here.

SELLING NICHE GAMES

I think one of the pending tasks for this industry is marketing. Or more precisely how to sell niche genre games which can be perfectly profitable but no one cares to market approppiately. Of course this is not something developers can do much about it. Seems to me it’s something distributors and managers need to learn with time.

Apparently publishers don’t want to spend any time on ‘minor’ titles. They want to go for the winning horse, big titles with big profits. Each country division of that publisher release the game on each country, sells a lot of copies and everyone is happy. Sounds quite convenient for them. And a little lazy too.

The market for strategy PC games is reduced these times, but also other succesful genres in the past such as graphic adventures. If you sell those titles on each country you probably won’t get big selling figures individually, but if you put together all the people interested in those genres all around the world it’s worth millions of copies.

That’s why I think digital distribution platforms, such as Steam, should help a lot to these non-profitable-considered genres, allowing to make big profits when selling a product world-wide, instead of locally.

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

Bad news for the Spanish videogame industry. I've been told Arvirago has closed their doors, and Pyro has just cancelled Cops (one of the projects in which I worked) and laid off many people. Up to 21 have been fired.

This is no good at all for Spanish developers. I have huge concerns about the capability of the managers of those companies (particularly Pyro, since I know it best) but any way it's a lot of unemployed guys, and considering the current economic situation it's even worst.

Somehow I think this is the end of the 'old school companies', which rely on the inspiration of a guru-like creative director and their projects often pay little attention to the market needs but the intuition/vision of their managers. Design changes are constant and budgets skyrocket easily. Organization is reduced, and crunch is common. The disappearance of this company type is probably for the best, but in the meantime many people lost their jobs.

ROB PARDO'S KEYNOTE

As you may know I play World of Warcraft. The vast majority of designers I know play (or have played) it too, probably for a reason: Its design is really fucking good. Granted, not perfect, but 11 million consumers paying on a monthly basis can't be wrong.

I was recently given the tip (thanks, Ricard) about some interviews and keynotes available in the internet from Rob Pardo, Blizzard's Design Vice president and Starcraft lead designer. You can click here for a summary of one of his lectures from Raph Koster's website.

I think their approach in many aspects is really useful. Even though you'll understand it better if you've ever played WoW, I still recommend to read it if you're related with design. Enjoy!

BIG IN JAPAN - RETROGAMING

Ok, I gotta talk about Mr. Potato, and by extension about retro-gaming. Yeah, I'm a teenager of the 80s and I had an MSX. Quite popular in Japan but it didn't sell that good in Europe. It was a pain in the ass to find decent games in Cordoba (Spain) back then.

Someone said that in our whole adult life we try to find the things we missed while we were teenagers. In my case one of those (many) things was to play all the cool MSX games that I could read about in magazines but I couldn't get access to.

In case you don't know it, Akihabara is Tokyo's technological district. There are lots and lots of shops dedicated to sell all kind of devices at extremely reasonable prices. By far the thing that attracted me the most was all the retrogaming stuff I could find. Old consoles such as the Megadrive, Super Famicon (known in the West as Super NES)... all in mint condition. And of course, MSX games. Lots of them. And much of them were at Mr. Potato. It's 3 stories of retro-consoles, games and all type of stuff from the 80s. Some british guys were saying loud while entering: 'This is our Mecca!'.

Unfortunately I lost my old MSX, and those were all games in japanese, so I had to control myself and not buy them all. Anyway, it's nice to know those old devices are not dead yet. Someday I'll get an MSX and re-build my old collection of games. Someday...

CONGRESS AT VALENCIA

I recently attended to the Congreso de desarrolladores de videojuegos at Valencia. My lecture was the first of the congress, and it was entitled 'La fase de concepto de un videojuego, o como diseñar un paracaídas mientras caes' (The videogame concept phase, or how to design a parchute while you free fall'. It was a good lecture and I got excellent feedback about it. Some of the other lecturers told me that they were told mine was so good that they got stressed and spent hours practising theirs!

I also stayed in the congress for the rest of it, and even though I originally thought it would be more a developer convention (in fact it was mostly a student gathering) some lectures were interesting and I was surprised to be considered by many people and interlopers as a reference for the spanish design. I guess it's the 'powerpoint effect': If you see someone at the top of a platform you automatically consider him as someone relevant. Even me!

Anyway, here you can find my lecture (sorry, in spanish).

BIG IN JAPAN - GAMING CULTURE

While I was in Japan I had the feeling that their culture is far more game-based than ours. At least more than the spanish, that's for sure. Here in Spain gamers have been traditionally been considered as semi-autistic. If you played some hours per day, you surely had problems.

Things in Japan seem to be different. They play games on a regular basis. Pachinko arcades are everywhere. Videogame arcades are also common, and they seem to be still acceptably populated by youngsters, something we've lost here in the West. There were some unique arcade machines that I had never seen such as a virtual horse racing bet simulator, games based on cards or tokens and fishing games.

I was told that many people went to play regularly just as soon as they left their workplaces. I'm not gonna recommend that for our society, but it gives you a good hint about why they like all those really hardcore games that force you to play over and over until you defeat that insanely difficulty final boss, and endless RPGs that keep them busy for weeks. Someone told me that Japanese people NEED to feel busy with something, and videogames are there.