A couple of weeks ago, following the E3 trade show in Los Angeles, Kogi Tagushi, Senior Executive Officer at Square-Enix, declared he was “humiliated by the decline of Japanese titles”. Now, Mr Tagushi was mainly talking about the poor representation of Japan at the show in terms of new games and IPs, however the decline of the Japanese games industry has been a popular topic of discussion recently, and a second interpretation can be seen of this, relative to two large Japanese game companies that seen to be willingly putting on a blindfold and driving as fast as they can against a wall, namely Sony and Nintendo.
Let me start with the following statement: E3 has been one of the best events for ICO this year. I had excellent meetings there and I was very happy with the outcome for us. But, Iultimately believe it was an anomaly.
This was my first E3 since 2006, the last “big year” for the show. It went into limbo for 2 years (well, no, it went to Santa Monica but as far as bells and whistles are concerned, that was about the same) to come back to the LA Convention Center in 2009. And while it is not as big as in 2006, bells and whistles are there and very loud. It is shiny again, it has sexy almost naked booth babes again, it is the biggest video game show around again. Right?
A few weeks ago, Thomas and I attended the Nordic Game Conference in Malmö, Sweden. Although most of our time was spent meeting with representatives of the very impressive Scandinavian game development industry, we had a chance to see some of the talks, and came back with a few thoughts on current trends in the online games business.
That’s Farewell in German. Exactly a year ago, Martin joined ICO Partners as the first non-partner employee. It was a big step for us and quite a big risk for him. I remember telling him that there was a chance that the growth we were predicting would not happen and that it wasn’t a “safe” position, especially considering his very secured role at NCsoft at the time. The fact that he actually accepted the offer and made the leap of faith for us meant a lot to me.
We are now a year later, a lifetime at the speed of things these days, and Martin has decided to go back. Back to his first love and vocation, community management. While he had some opportunities to work on that field for some of our clients, that wasn’t the core of his role and it seems the calling is making itself known to him again. But he is also going back to Germany. After 6 years abroad, mostly in England, another calling, possibly cultural, most likely culinary, has made itself heard and won. Read more
Last week, I attended the Paris web Game Conference 2011 organized by the French national videogames developer trade body, SNJV, and the digital university IIM. The program was mainly composed of panel discussions with the leaders of French web/social/mobile games developers : Boostr, Kobojo, Bulkypix, Prizee, Weka, Feerik, Owlient…
I won’t have time for a long transcription, but here were the most interesting remarks from the speakers :
As the recent game announcements have been multiplying, Mobile is the new frontier for online games and MMOs. The technical constraints have been mostly overcome, and the apparition of a hardcore audience playing mostly from home has made the main problem (good enough ping) less painful. The possibility of free apps with in-app purchases have finally make the business part of it sensible. It’s thus no surprise that many games are announced. However, as games like Pocket Legends find success, the room for growth is increasingly moving, like for social games, to outside of the US/English-speaking territories. What’s the market looking like in Europe? Read more