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Mobile
Games All the Rage at ECTS... Massive stands by the likes of Konami, Nintendo, Sony and Codemasters may have helped to bring in the crowds, but much of the action was at the surprisingly large number of stands populated by wireless telecom developers. The game industry is keen on finding mutual ground with mobile phone companies and service providers, and this segment's attentions and outlays might mean that the future of ECTS is all but guaranteed. The shift of focus from games to more alternative products, however, might be yet another reason for publishers to stay away and host their own events. Eidos, for one, eskewed its usual partying tactics and demonstrated a strong line-up at a dedicated press day. The company's focus on next-generation consoles may have helped to dampen the continuous takeover rumours, but it had some disgruntled developers wondering if Eidos might stop developing PC games entirely.
Virgin/Interplay was on the comeback trail with a strong showing and heavy backing from Titus. Capcom, however, threw a wrench into VIE's program by announcing the imminent opening of a new European arm called Capcom Eurosoft. The company will initially handle only Playstation 2 releases, leaving VIE to deal with the Dreamcast and Playstation products. By early 2001, thought, Capcom Eurosoft will handle all of the parent company's releases. Not only is this a severe disapointment to Virgin, but to Eidos also as they handled several big Capcom franchises (like Resident Evil and Powerstone) during Virgin's transition period. VIE's strong presence in the past was mainly due to the fact that Capcom was one of the last major Japanese publishers without its own European offices. One of the more interesting discussions at ECTS was at the Edge Live event. Dave Perry, Gary Liddon, Peter Molyneyx, J Allard, Phil Harrison, Tony Mott and moderater Steve Cooke from HotGen Studios discussed new technology and its impact on the gaming experience. Interesting and valid points were made about the difficulty of getting casual console gamers online, something with which Sega is now having to deal. WAP's up Interesting discussions aside, interesting announcements were few and far between at the show. THQ signed up with Siemens, perhaps the only cellphone company without a deal with a significant developer. THQ will be producing content for all of Siemens mobile devices, including not only WAP but also Windows based "multimedia" devices. The first effort from the company, best known for its WWF games, is Pocket Golf. The game was demonstrated at ECTS on a few Siemens devices like the Multimobile and the Simpad, the latter is a rather nifty transportable touchpad wireless datacommunication terminal. It's doubtful that most of the users of the terminal are into games at all however, which begs the question of just how complex should such games be. People who play Snake on their Nokia phones aren't necessarily interested in anything more complex, except perhaps Solitaire. Another developer tipping their toes into the wireless gaming sphere is Brittian's Elixir Studios. Elixir have invested in Finnish mobile telecom firm G-Cluster, giving the start-up some solid ground to develop on after only six months of existance. Taito's Space Invaders is coming to cell phone near you from a company called On-Line. This is one of the few really old games that the current generation doesn't find completely unplayable, and the Atari 2600-era graphics should run just fine on current mobile phones. According to On-Line, the agreement gives it the right to develop Space Invaders games for WAP and offer distribution to GSM and GS3.
This is all good, but WAP take-up is still low. Current research from Forrester suggests that mobile Internet use is approximately five years away from achieving widespread acceptance. Slow connection speeds and too much technobabble are the main problems, though, connection speeds will be improving by the time GPRS and UMTS become everyday standards. Despite their benefits, HSCSD (High Speed Circuit Switched Data ) mobile phones are not capableof reaching the targeted performance, not to mention pricepoint. PS2 Pre-ordering Dilemma SCEE President Chris Deering commented at ECTS that, contrary to earlier rumours, Europe will benefit from the 3 ½ week Playstation 2 launch delay by getting a significantly larger amount of units than previously thought: around 500,000 PS2s will be made available across Europe in 17 different countries. SCEE promises 1 million shipped units by the end of December with a total of 3 million units released by March 2001. A massive 33 titles will be available during the launch period with almost 60 titles available by Christmas. A massive selection to be sure, but it's questionable if many of these titles will sell in any great numbers. In the UK, Playstation 2 pre-ordering came into effect on September 7th. Consumers were able to walk into a participating store and reserve their console to make sure they would receive one before Christmas. While the 200,000 allocated Playstation 2's were snapped up, many retailers reported that no frenzy had ensued and queues weren't common. Lack of interest on the consumer's behalf wasn't really the problem, rather the whole confusing pre-order system. Certainly cultural differences are in effect here, as pre-ordering a console in the U.S. is common - a fact demonstrated during the Dreamcast launch. Europeans, in general, are much more used to going into the store on the launch day and picking a unit up. Adding to the hype are the upcoming British Playstation 2 magazines that will be cluttering up the already overcrowded and stale UK games magazine market. Future leads the pack with its Official Playstation 2 magazine. Given the popularity of its original Official Playstation magazine, success seems to be guaranteed. Beyond that, troubled Paragon and brand new publisher Engine are aiming to satisfy the need of PS2 enthusiasts as well. The latter is promising to have over 180 pages per issue as well as an unsurprising lifestyle approach. The lifestyle angle has proven to be a succesful formula amongst game publications in bringing plenty of readers during the launch period. In the long run, as both Incite and Future's Arcade have proven, maintaing the success is extremely difficult. Chart Tracking Encouragingly for Sega, many retailers reported that Virtua Tennis drove Dreamcast hardware sales up a remarkable 40 percent during September, a number no doubt helped by the £50 price slash announced prior to ECTS. Activision's financial woes seem to be in the past with Spiderman proving to be a hit across Europe as is Raven Software's sublime Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. The European market has become much more active after the very slow summer which was only highlighted by Codemasters Colin McRae Rally 2.0. The biggest non-surprise when it comes to the year end-launches was the delay of Lionheads Black and White. The team, having made it to beta in late July, has come to the realization with EA that playtesting the hugely ambitious title is going to take a lot longer than expected…hence a February 2001 launchdate. Thomas Puha works for a Finnish cable games/music television channel as a producer/writer of console/PC games programs and writes the European games column for Gamefan magazine, while trying to maintain. He can be reached at thomas@moontv.fi. Thanks to CTW and TN. |
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