Our future is online right?

Transcription

1 Our future is online right? David Braben

2 Who Am I? I m a veteran/ old timer I ve been writing games commercially for over 25 years, starting with Elite, written with Ian Bell in the early 1980s. I m the Chairman of Frontier Developments Ltd We re 220 people, on the Science Park in Cambridge, UK Developing on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, PSP, DS, PC, mobile. Recent releases include: Roller Coaster Tycoon games and expansions with Chris Sawyer Wallace and Gromit games with Aardman Animations Thrillville and Thrillville: Off the Rails on Xbox 360, Wii, PlayStation 2, PSP, DS and PC with LucasArts LostWinds on WiiWare Other forthcoming projects include: The Outsider on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 & PC Elite IV on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC More in the world of LostWinds Other unannounced projects

3 Life without Shiny Silver Discs Let s s challenge some of the assumptions Online: a silver bullet that can be used to: Address Piracy Give a bigger slice of revenues to developers and publishers Avoid pre-owned (good for developers and publishers, at least) Enable worldwide selling without a giant distribution network Bring cheaper gaming for all? Hurray! Wishful Thinking? We have been willing it to happen for more than a decade Is it really likely to be as simple as that?

4 The Network Cannae Take It, Captain! Broadband in 53% of US homes in 2007 (Leichman Research) Additional ~22% have dial-up/dial up/dial-up speed connections 70% of US homes with broadband by 2012 (Jupiter Research) earch) That s s still 30% of the audience that need shiny silver things Future proliferation of types of access for the other 30%? 3G, HSDPA, WiMax,, EDGE, GPRS, satellite, daisy-chain WiFi etc Cost issue: many of these expect an account per device Challenging bandwidth requirements, especially for 50Gb downloads Dramatic increase in backbone capacity needed Even on a 2Mb link it will take Games 10 Eden hours - May 2009to download a 10Gb game

5 And Many Don t t Want It...? Currently only 40%-50% of Consoles online Expectation is that homes with 360s, PS3s or Wiis will have broadband too. Why do they not connect? Convenience? Lack of appreciation of benefits? Parental issues fear of those benefits? Hacked consoles? Shortly after launch of Xbox 360 was said to be 65% Early adopters likely to want to go online Figure dropped gradually, to ~50% on Xbox 360 (as audience broadened?) Figures lower on PS3 and Wii

6 Can the Local Storage In theory, yes Take It? 500Gb USB external drive ~ 50 ~ new today 1 1 or less for a typical Xbox 360 or PS3 game stored locally Less if it is easy and you have confidence it won t t go away Cheaper still for smaller games like LostWinds In practice, it is not that simple PC and PS3 are fine using external USB hard drives Xbox 360 supports USB hard drives, BUT will not run games from them Wii does not support them at all May also be reliability issues The Stock answer is the Next Generation will sort it out

7 The Generations by Performance Consistent roughly 6 year tick : 1. (1982) 8 bit: Apple II, Pet, BBC Micro, Spectrum, NES, C64 2. (1988) 16 bit: Atari ST, Amiga, Megadrive,, SNES, PC 3. (1994) 32 bit: PlayStation, Saturn, N64, PC 4. (2000) PlayStation 2, Xbox, Gamecube, PSP, PC 5. (2006) Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, (Wii?) 6. (2012?)? Generations defined by performance Until the Wii came along. (So can we rely on this history?) *Overall performance up by ~20,000,000 times **Moore s Law in games sector ~doubling faster than every year ***kflop per kbyte increased >1200 times since 1982

8 Other Big Issues So ideally, we are talking about Internet-enabled enabled consoles With 500Gb+ local storage Fast network connection With all three of these we are happy? No! We need strong DRM Can no longer rely on the shiny silver thing to help us Current consoles have DRM linking games to player accounts Non draconian Not (yet?) subject to the criticism applied to (eg( eg) ) Spore on PC. Relies on the closed nature of the console BUT PS2 suffered from piracy once the consoles were cracked Perhaps threat of barring from online play will deter cracked consoles?

9 Other Big Issues So now we are talking about Internet-enabled enabled consoles With 500Gb+ local storage Fast network connection Strong, reliable DRM With all four of these we are happy? No! We need a route to market The Achilles heel of online sales Closed platforms needed for strong DRM, but mean monopoly outlets? Works well, while there are multiple games platform holders

10 In Summary The end of retail? This devil we know works well enough for the moment We should be careful what we wish for! Music: a cautionary tale Music delivery has moved online in a big way Has enabled massive copying/piracy of tracks Their move from shiny silver things has not gone well Largely because it was unplanned, and user-driven We need to embrace it in a measured, planned way But it is not all gloom and doom LostWinds was the smoothest, most enjoyable game release I have known

11 Thank you for Listening Questions & Answers