Weekend News Spin — February 24-25, 2001

What women want

Jessica Mulligan's Biting the Hand... column at Happy Puppy takes a look at how the gaming industry has been befuddled as it tries to figure out what women gamers want. It's lively reading.

More recent studies have indicated that slightly over 50 percent of online gamers are women.

OK, so more women are playing games. That still leaves the males who overwhelmingly dominate Executive Row in this industry, some of whom have been leading us for 15 years and more, with a perplexing question: why? They look at the figures and see that women play a wide assortment of online fare, such as card games and trivia games and a darn good share of the MMOG subscription market. Then they scratch their heads and say to each other, "Do you know why? Should we make more card games?" At that point, they just look at each other, shrug and head for the nearest strip club, where they slip dollar bills in the dancers' thong panties and, in between treating each other to lap dances, continue the discussion about how to figure out why women play games.

Mulligan is one of the better game writers you'll encounter, but we think she fails to address some questions in this column. She notes that 50% or more of the online gamers are women now, but lumps the free online games like Hearts in with the hardcore games like EverQuest. How are publishers supposed to make money with free games? She never really comes out with a prescriptive that will actually entice women to buy games, besides noting that "...products that feature some adventure and originality, sales spike for both males and females. For example, Diablo II, Half-Life, and The Sims are all million-plus sellers."

All fine and good, yet that doesn't explain why games strong on story and adventure like adventure games no longer sell. And for every game she mentions, we can come up with similar games that haven't sold as well.

So what do women want when it comes to games? Post your comments in our forum.

The Motley Fool ogles Oni

Spotted this at Evil Avatar. The Motley Fool takes a look at how Take 2 is spending money to market two of its games, Oni and Surfing: H30. Oni is a big budget title that Take 2 is spending $5 million on and Surfing: H30 is a budget title that they spent about $1 million.

Take-Two targeted the extreme sports market with Surfing: H30. Adapted from Surfroids, developed for Japanese gamers by ASCII, Take-Two also aimed at the European market (for which surfing might be more of a novelty). It purchased publishing rights for $750,000, then paid ASCII another $250,000 to adapt it for Western gamers. It contributed the marketing and quality assurance, as well as the approval work Sony (and other console makers) requires to publish a game for their systems.

The company gets its revenues, for both games, by selling them to retailers at wholesale prices. (Those prices are generally higher for console games than PC titles.) Take-Two collects about $40 per game for Oni, compared to about $32 for the more modest Surfing: H30.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Nintendo speaks and warns of a shakeout

Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo's president, has some interesting observations about games in this interview at Video Senki. Here's his comment about all the venture capital that has been poured into game companies the last couple of years.

They give money to people that really should be unemployed, and they in turn round up some friends, start a company and begin creating software. But is this really the best way to go about this right now? The more amazing graphics and sound you put into a game, the longer it takes to finish. Not just a year, but now, more like a year and a half or two years. So then your development costs balloon, and when you finally put it out you have zero guarantee of it selling. That's what the game industry is today.

Because of that, I've been saying since last year that this industry will undergo a major shakeout between now and next year. The general public doesn't realize it yet, but most people in the industry know it's happening. I've just been saying that pretty soon, even the public will be forced to recognize what's going on.

Is Yamauchi right? Have game companies been seduced by the promise that better graphics equal higher sales and are in for a rude awakening?

Post your comments in our forum.

3am

We noticed in a USA Today interview with George Lucas that Lucas says that he's not interested in doing episodes 7-9, so this current triology may be the last of his Star Wars films. After the disappointment of Phantom Menance, he can just stop now if he wants.

Click here to read yesterday's news