News Analysis

Eurospeak

Milia ’99 Wrap Up

Only last year Milia was a horribly pretentious event which bore little resemblance to other industry exhibitions like ECTS. It was an interesting show, but it had little to do with video games. In a laudable turnaround in focus, this year at Milia (which took place last week in Cannes, France) the ghastly multimedia and edutainment types were fenced off into their own area. (Well, perhaps it was the game companies that got fenced off – we had to occupy a strange looking tent-like construction outside the main hall, overhung by the moniker ‘Milia Games’). Whatever the name though, Milia obviously wants to become the Cannes Film Festival for interactive entertainment, and clearly the event management sees its setting as good first step along that road.

In truth though, no Earth-shattering news emerged from the event. In fact, I’d say that the biggest news at the show was that the event itself was actually worthy of attendance. The second biggest news was that Milia 2000 should be even better, especially since the construction of the main hall’s extension will have been completed by then, allowing the various game companies to move out of their wretched little tent. In any case, it would have been difficult to imagine twelve months ago that the like of Sega, Eidos, GT Interactive, and Sony would attach such importance to Milia, and it’s even harder to picture anyone from the games industry even turning up to go Milia. The crowds were there, though (6,211 visitors in fact -- not bad for a trade-only event), and the news that even Nintendo, a notorious Europhobe, is rumored to be exhibiting next year proves that ECTS has now got some serious competition.

Infogrames dominated Cannes
In the past Infogrames dominated Milia, to such an extent that surprised some visitors. However, as marginal as that company’s market share is outside of Europe, Bruno Bonnell and pals are the game industry as far as France is concerned.

Bruno Bonnell, Infogrames CEO

Of all of Infogrames’ new product and distribution deals announcements, the biggest news was undoubtedly its purchase of a 50% stake in Canal Plus Multimedia -- currently a wholly-owned subsidiary of French media giant Canal+. That tied neatly into announcements of Infogrames’ game channel expansion in the UK. The cable operating group NTL is poised to launch the first interactive games channel in the UK, complete with content derived from the ‘Game One’ channel, created by Infogrames/Canal+. Infogrames is betting heavily on the emerging television games market, and already it seem to have quite a bit of the medium sewn up in Europe.

Sega makes appearance
I was most surprised to see Sega exhibiting at Milia, and the company did its best to put on a good show. Sega reiterated the claim that it would spend $100 million to market the Dreamcast, and claimed that there would be 30 titles released in Europe before Christmas this year. Curiously though, Sega is leaving one of its biggest announcements – that of the Dreamcast’s Western release date – for the desperately obscure Nuremberg Toy Fair. I think this clearly indicates Sega’s commitment to marketing the machine simply as a child’s toy. The release date has been rumored to be September the 9^th (9/9/99) by Sega Europe, but Sega Japan still refuses to confirm the date. The other "big" announcement that was confirmed by both parties was that the Dreamcast logo will be colored blue in non-Japanese territories, and not red. One can’t help but think that Sega deliberated this decision for far longer than is healthy – particularly as the company still hasn’t decided what to do about the console’s built-in modem.

Not more awards…
One of the more disturbing trends in the European game industry is the recent infestation of award shows. Not a week seems to go by without some award show appearing and disappearing in a fog of obscurity. The general public is totally oblivious to these events, and the winners themselves seem to need their trophies more to remind themselves of the event than to hold up as a symbol of triumph. Just last week, BIMA (the British Interactive Multimedia Association) announced the date for the 15^th Annual Awards, although few can remember what happened at the past fourteen ceremonies.

Wargasm took top honors at Milia

Next were the Milia d’or awards, which were presented to the usual mix of the deserving, the randomly selected,and the pointlessly obscure games. DID’s stupidly named (to the obvious detriment of sales) Wargasm won Best Action Game, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time walked off with Best Adventure/RPG title and Best Gameplay, Bullfrog’s unambitious Populous III got Best Strategy Game, and Gran Turismo was proclaimed the Best Sports Game and also the ‘People’s Choice’.

Starcraft must have bribed its way to the Hottest Multiplayer Game award, while the housewives’ favorite, Le Plus Beau Musee du Monde, won the Excellence in Content award.

Pysgnosis’ absence
One company that was a long shot to appear at Milia this year is the increasingly beleaguered Psygnosis. Clearly the company’s fall from grace has not gone unnoticed by parent company Sony, who recently moved it under the more direct control of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, rather than the general Sony Corporation. As part of this restructuring, all of Psygnosis’ development studios (the ones remaining, that is) must report to Juan Montes, Sony’s President of Software Development. Psygnosis’ development and publishing arms will now report to SCEE president Chris Deering, who just became the CEO of Psygnosis. Deering stated that "Historically, PlayStation titles have represented Psygnosis’ most successful games. I am confident that the new structure will be strategically positioned to build on its earlier success to take maximum advantage of PlayStation resources". A rough translation of which seems to suggest that there’ll be no more monkeying around with non-Sony consoles (and perhaps to a lesser degree, the PC).

Rocky the Dog versus Lemon Dog.

Lemon Dog

For those that have only just stopped laughing over Sony’s thus-far failed attempts to stop Connectix’s Virtual Game Station emulator, there’s been more David vs. Goliath hijinks going on in the courts. Scottish company Inner Workings forced Microsoft to admit intellectual property infringement. An out-of-court settlement resulted in the agreement by Microsoft not to feature its ‘Rocky the Dog’ character from the forthcoming Microsoft Office 2000 suite in any marketing for the product. Apparently Rocky looks altogether too much like Inner Working’s own canine desktop character, ‘Lemon Dog’. Whether or not the similarities between Rocky and Lemon are intentional is not clear. Uncle Bill can just chalk up another failed court case to experience.

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