The Death Throes of Game: Or Why Monopolies are the ruination of an industry in the long run

Hello there, sorry for the haphazardness of this one. My original idea turned out to be a bit trickier to write about than I had expected, so I've spent the weekend looking for something to write about that might have enough interest and worth to the internet to really consider discussing. It's a relatively slow news day and I've not got any relevant topics to really discuss.

Then of course I read the news about how Game Group Ltd's has had 95% of its stock value completely wiped out, primarily because of how damaging the fact it will not be stocking some of the biggest selling games of this year, including Mass Effect III, Street Fighter X Tekken and Mario Party 9. Because of the largely confidential nature of business and finance, I will try to avoid going the straightforward route and calling Game allergic to money. Because some facts need to be made clear before we lunge at Game with the sporks and runcible spoons.

First of all, their argument is that negotiations with EA have soured due to “unreasonable credit negotiations” which in layman's terms means EA was trying to flog them wholesale for a price they'd never be able to profit on. I've heard in the ballpark of £40 or £45 for Mass Effect III but I'm not entirely sure whether that means for the vanilla version or for the limited N7 Edition. In any case, it would have led to Game ending up in an even tighter pinch than they already were last year, already being tightly pincered in between online suppliers (who can sell them cheaper due to not having to pay for shops etc) and supermarkers (who have such massive profit margins they can get away with selling them for chicken feed as loss leaders to get people into the shops) so they declined, pissing off EA who refused to supply any of EA's March releases (which included Max Payne 3 and Mass Effect III), so that wiped 20% off their stock value; this was followed by Nintendo refusing to stock Mario Party 9 for similar reasons and later Capcom joined the group.

Now, for non-gamers, this is like a music store pissing off Warner, EMI and Sony music in one go, or a book shop pissing off Penguin, Routledge and Scholastic. It's not inherently fatal, but your profitability is going to suffer invariably, not just in terms of losing a vast swathe of very lucrative sales; even if the companies were going to force the games to be loss leaders, the amount of merchandise, strategy guides and whatever else would help to balance the gap. In fact, Game has worked hard to modify their business model in favour of enhancing the profitability of a single purchase (also known as the Bobby Kotick business model after he had the gall to boast that he'd turned a single $40 purchase into a $200 one) and so while still feeling the pinch, the company might still get through with various rethinks. Instead, it made the choice to annoy one of its main suppliers and is paying through the nose for it: their stocks have nosedived, the company's a pariah to the gaming community (who never liked the way it treated them as idiots to begin with) and without the latest stock of games chances are they'll easily lose the casual market they tried so desperately to court. More importantly it'll shatter the myth that just because you have a monopoly you're here to stay.

The Game we know and loathe formed from the purchase by Electronics Boutique (the name licensed from the American company EB Games) buying out its competitor at the time (the Game that wasn't actually that bad if you got to know it). This led to a monolithic Game store that pretty much had two or three stores in every town you could think of. The purchase of various overseas game retailers also helped balloon the relatively small fish's ego and led to a business model that essentially consisted of buying out any potential competitors, leaving only the small independents left. With the purchase of Gamestation before it could really get going, it looked like nothing could stop Game from buying out any other potential national competitors. With a bigger company came bigger hubris, and it seemed for a long time that nothing could go wrong with the company. Until of course a lot of competitors snuck around it, and Game with it's antiquated business model and predatory tactics, couldn't adapt when the tide turns.

The real tragedy of course (along with the poor employees losing their jobs) is the loss of the dedicated games shop you could walk in and have a discussion about games with. Online stores won't quite have that and I somehow doubt you'd be able to talk games with too many of the staff at Tesco unless you know them out of hours. Hopefully the lessons learned from this and the countless other casualties of old guard corporations; a company can go from perfectly healthy to on the brink of collapse on the basis on one critically bad decision.

Stay safe and hug it out!

Huggy Dave

The Undaunted front of Online Activism, or One does not Simply Overthrow Dictators with Retweets.

Hello there loyal reader (I think there is one). I've been struggling over the last couple of days to think of a particularly striking topic to discuss; there were a few interesting things happening in student politics but by the time most people read it the LUSU elections will be a rather distant memory in the minds of people who found their friend's names first, people who had stupid slogans second and RON third. There's a few things I intend to review, including some albums for RocSoc (for some reason they saw the first three and wanted me to write more).

Sometimes, things get too big to ignore though...

At the start of this month, a documentary video on Youtube entitled “Kony 2012” went viral in a big way, and chances are anyone who's viewing this probably already knows about it. For those who don't, I will do my utmost to condense 25 years of the most tumultuous period in Uganda's recent history and try to hopefully demonstrate a point.

Joseph Kony is the leader of a violently evangelical Christian guerilla group (to use the politically neutral term) called the Lord's Resistance Army, who allegedly come from Kony being told by God to spread the Ten Commandments (Kony's own interpretation of them) through Africa. He forces children into slavery either as soldiers or as sex slaves. The accounts about their activities towards their own people or the people of Central Africa don't get much better, involving tales of torture, rape, mutilation, assorted butchery among many other things. It's stuff that I personally don't want to get into and has been repeated by various sources. Essentially he's a bloodthirsty tyrannical African warlord; one of many combatants in one of the most unstable parts of the world, in Uganda, in South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Invisible Children are a charity whose primary aim is to stop Kony, and have made a multitude of films attempting to showcase the atrocities Kony (usually pictured attempting to impersonate Carl “Apollo Creed” Weathers in Predator) has done, Kony 2012, being the most recent of these videos. The video is very much propaganda in nature, as you sort of expect, and is 30 minutes long, a long time for anything to go viral, which makes me suspect most people who spread the campaign haven't watched it. The video's aim and purpose is noble enough; stop Kony. It's intended method for this is to take advantage of the nature of social media and it's ability to allow free thought and expression to be spread across the world, which forms the backbone of rebelling against opression. All well and rosy, although it's idea of social media as an unstoppable force for good and wonderment in the world is something that is open to debate. The video's tone is very similar to 80s fundraising campaigns such as Hands across America or Live Aid, where it seemed that greed was so good the only way to get people to do anything was to fellate their ego, which smacks to me of White Man's Burden.

The basic idea of Kony 2012 is that people will spread it around to everyone they know and buy wristbands and posters from the Invisible Children folks, so that on April 20^th, everyone will 'Cover the Night' and make sure that the collective voice is heard so that the people who can do something about it will do. The charity seems to be at least implicitly encouraging militaristic action targeting America in particular as a country that should be doing something about it. Currently Obama has sent about 100 tactical specialists (essentially soldiers there to help the Ugandan army out in terms of strategy) to Uganda to help, for the record, but Invisible Children is suggesting some kind of joint-operation between at least Uganda and the United States. The fact that the primary focus is on the United States to instigate change in the region again reminds me uncomfortably of White Man's Burden and undermines efforts by the Ugandan forces to arrest Kony. Speaking of Uganda, there is no mentioning of Uganda's somewhat spotty human rights record, nor of the instability of the region, which could get more than a little worse if people just blunder in. Invisible Children for the record responded, mainly by saying that they simplified the entire thing to make it “easy to understand.” All fine and dandy, except that by simplifying the debate, you've completely changed it. Those complications are the backbone, along without wanting to look like neocolonialists. There is simplification and there is changing facts to suit an argument. The latter has no place in rational discourse, and really is the problem with using social media in campaigns: It becomes an increasingly nonsensical game of Chinese Whispers which eventually gets split down two very extreme camps; extreme supporters who call the others child murdering bastards, and the other side who claim that anyone who supports the campaign are vaguely racist sheep.

All this makes me look like a cynical asshole I'm sure, but raising awareness is far from a bad thing, that aspect of the campaign I don't mind at all. Getting and encouraging people to think of the world beyond their front door is always encouraging. I don't know, if you want to raise awareness, be sure that you're not blindfolding them to the full truth at the same time.

Stay safe, and hug it out (Hey, if everyone did that we wouldn't have this problem to begin with )

HuggyDave

International Woman's Day - Celebration or Denigration?

Hello there. Today is International Woman's Day, and is a day of awareness, celebration and increasingly scepticism. All of which are pretty healthy ways to mark such a day, and really I think the serious debate surrounding International Woman's Day (and International Man's day, I know there's one of those too) and what purpose they serve in an ever more cosmopolitan world, whether it is a justifiable celebration of voice unsung because they're not old, white men, or whether it is marginalising female voices, casting them aside to be remembered on one day and forgotten the rest, remaining separate from world history.

I'm aware of what people may be thinking by even mentioning this debate – I'm some kind of horrible sexist (or man haters, both the more extreme misandric parts of feminism and the ludicrous misogynists seem to agree to hate the actual debate) who wants to take away from a day celebrating unsung voices, or minority voices or whatever term they choose to use this week. The issue I have is not with addressing voices that are not usually heard and issues not usually thought about, but the fact that they are marginalised voices and ghettoised leads to a lot of problems in itself.

Several years ago, I did an essay on the representation of women in video games, both in terms of female game design staff and in game characters, and it was a hotbed of marginalised voices and a lack of expression which has only gotten worse in the last 5 years, where female voices were increasingly excluded, and then marginalised and belittled when they do appear. Outside of RPGs, Fighting games and the increasingly nebulous concept of 'Casual' games, female characters and voices seldom appear, and are typically tokenised when they are. People are increasingly concerned with blockbuster films failing the Bechdel Test (http://bechdeltest.com/), however I struggle to think of any major video game released since around 2008 which would pass it apart from maybe Heavy Rain. My point being that this shows a tokenisation around female characters which undermines and silences female voices while at the same time crying that “there are women in this, why are you complaining?”

My solution isn't really existent at the moment, maybe stop talking about it, as Morgan Freeman suggested about Black History month and concern ourselves less about what is different and separate about us and more about what is the same. What are your thoughts? We've got comment boxes below every post so I suppose we really should use them.

Stay safe and hug it out

HuggyDave