Predictions that games will keep growing

For those of you looking to get into the games industry, here’s something to convince those skeptical friends and family members. A recent Arstechnica article reports that the games industry, which has been growing like crazy, is predicted to keep on growing. The games industry took in almost $42 billion last year. A PriceWaterhouseCooper report predicts that it’ll grow to $68 billion by 2012.

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EA releases Spore Creature Creator

Electronic Arts, which will launch Will Wright’s Spore in September, has released Creature Creator — a module that let’s players create Spore creatures.

Technology review interviewd Lucy Bradshaw, Spore’s executive producer, about the use of procedural generation in Creature Creator (Creating Creatures).

The Creature Creator, the first piece of Electronic Arts’ highly anticipated evolution game Spore, launched Tuesday. Created by Will Wright, who’s known for the video games SimCity and The Sims, Spore begins with a player controlling a single-celled organism and progresses through various evolutionary stages until the player controls an entire space-faring race. The Creature Creator part of the game consists of a modeling interface that lets players build their own organisms from a set of highly customizable and flexible … The Creature Creator’s free trial edition is available today. A full version is available for $9.99 on the PC, with a Mac version to follow. The full version of Spore will launch in North America on September 7.

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ZeniMax opening new MD studio

ZeniMax (parent company of Bethesda Softworks) is opening a new studio in Hunt Valley, MD, ZeniMax online. New studio means lots of new hires, as their job listing page shows.

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A new life for physics engines?

You can’t buy any PC these days without some graphics acceleration, and you certainly can’t play games without a decent GPU. Yet add-on physics accelerators have yet to catch on. It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Why would a user spend the money on a physics card if games don’t use it? Then again, why would a game company target a physics card if no users have them? The few games that have made use of physics accelerators have just used them for “eye candy” — fancier explosions or slightly more real incidental animation with absolutely no impact on the gameplay at all. After all, if they required a physics card (as they do for specific GPUs), then many fewer people might by the game.

Well, some recent developments might change that. Several recent news stories report that NVIDIA is buying physics-accelerator company Ageia. Hard to say where they’re going from here, but certainly a combo GPU/physics processor might finally break the deadlock and get enough physics accelerators out there to make them viable.

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Gaming sales growing much faster than music or movies

Ars technica has a post Growth of gaming in 2007 far outpaces movies, music summarizing the health of the gaming industry in 2007.

“2007 was a banner year for video gaming, and the industry has the figures to prove it. The Entertainment Software Association announced today that total sales for 2007 were $18.85 billion, with $9.5 billion of that spent on games (both PC and console) and $9.35 billion on consoles.”

Most of the software sales (70%) were for console games with handhelds accounting for another 20% and PC games picking up the last 10%. But here’s a quote I fund most interesting.

“There were also some changes in terms of who was purchasing the games. Two groups whose game-buying habits changed drastically during 2007 were people over age 35 (guilty) and females. Much of that is due to the incredible popularity of the Nintendo Wii, which has made gaming accessible to a whole host of people who would otherwise have never picked up a controller.”

and then this graph tells the story visually.

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Targetting the high-end sliver of the game market

Seen over at Beyond3D: The PC version of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed requires a dual-core machine with at least two gigabytes of RAM (plus a handful of other requirements on graphics cards and the like that, while certainly not low end, are not unheard of either). I’m a big fan of technology and doing the most you can with the latest and greatest thing out there, but the minimum requirements for most games are pretty pedestrian, with extra bells and whistles if you have something better on your desk. Requiring a reasonably snazzy machine before you say go is a bold choice, but also somewhat risky since they’re potentially missing out on a bunch of potential customers who don’t meet the minimum. Is this the harbinger of high-end games to come, or a decision they’ll regret later? Well, they’ve sold 2.5 million copies of the console version, so maybe they’re just not so worried about those few extra customers.

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THQ buys Big Huge Games

Timonium-based Big Huge Games, makers of Age of Empires III and the Rise of Nations/Rise of Legends series, announced on January 15th that they’re being acquired by games publishing powerhouse THQ.

According to the press release, Big Huge Games, with all 100 employees, will become a wholly owned subsidiary of THQ, presumably staying at their current location in Maryland. They had published some games with Microsoft, but were trying to branch out into other platforms. Since publication and distribution are such a critical component in the success of a game, this is probably a good thing for reaching those platforms. It will certainly be interesting to see what changes, if any, result.

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Online virtual worlds for kids is big business

The New York Times has a story, Web Playgrounds of the Very Young, on the growth of online virtual worlds for young children. Our children live in the same environment as we do and learn mostly by watching what we do. So it’s not surprising that any significant new uses for the Internet and Web can be adapted to a form that kids will take to.

“Trying to duplicate the success of blockbuster Web sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz, children’s entertainment companies are greatly accelerating efforts to build virtual worlds for children. Media conglomerates in particular think these sites — part online role-playing game and part social scene — can deliver quick growth, help keep movie franchises alive and instill brand loyalty in a generation of new customers.
…
“Get ready for total inundation,” said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at the research firm eMarketer, who estimates that 20 million children will be members of a virtual world by 2011, up from 8.2 million today. (src)

The story gives an example, Disney’s Pixie Hollow, that is online in a rudimentary form and set to launch next summer.

“Behind the virtual world gravy train are fraying traditional business models. As growth engines like television syndication and movie DVD sales sputter or plateau — and the Internet disrupts entertainment distribution in general — Disney, Warner Brothers and Viacom see online games and social networking as a way to keep profits growing.
…
Still, the long-term appetite for the youth-oriented sites is unclear. Fads have always whipsawed the children’s toy market, and Web sites are no different, analysts warn. Parents could tire of paying the fees, while intense competition threatens to undercut the novelty. There are now at least 10 virtual worlds that involve caring for virtual pets. (src)

There are many concerns, of course — privacy and safety, exploitation of our children, promoting consumerism, raising couch potatoes, etc.

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IBM using Second Life to build online communities

As seen on slashdot:

IBM has an unconventional take on virtual worlds for business use. Rather than strictly adhering to the laws of physics, IBM is letting its employees hold virtual meetings up in the air and under water. Employees are also being given wacky chores, such as kicking a giant boulder 1,400 kilometers. The virtual world, known as the Metaverse, has been in development for two years. Michael Ackerbauer of IBM says, ‘I’d say more people are still finding it a novelty than a business tool. But … if you build enough tools that they can use, they will come.’” IBM seems to be following a trend of involvement in virtual worlds, which we have previously discussed.

UMBC alumnus Pranam Kolarispent several summers as an intern at IBM and brought back reports that IBM was using Second Life in interesting ways.

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Microsoft launches effort to exploit multicore processors

In yesterday’s New York Times, John Markoff wrote (Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust) about a major new effort Microsoft is making to develop their capability to exploit the new multicore processors being developed by Intel, AMD and IBM.

When he was chief executive of Intel in the 1990s, Andrew S. Grove would often talk about the “software spiral” — the interplay between ever-faster microprocessor chips and software that required ever more computing power.

The potential speed of chips is still climbing, but now the software they run is having trouble keeping up. Newer chips with multiple processors require dauntingly complex software that breaks up computing chores into chunks that can be processed at the same time.

The challenges have not dented the enthusiasm for the potential of the new parallel chips at Microsoft, where executives are betting that the arrival of manycore chips — processors with more than eight cores, possible as soon as 2010 — will transform the world of personal computing.

The company is mounting a major effort to improve the parallel computing capabilities in its software.

“Microsoft is doing the right thing in trying to develop parallel software,” said Andrew Singer, a veteran software designer who is the co-founder of Rapport Inc., a parallel computing company based in Redwood City, Calif. “They could be roadkill if somebody else figures out how to do this first.”

Games and interactive entertainment are among the first application areas to benefit from multicore processors, primarily through the Sony PS3 console.

The UMBC Games, Animation and Interactive Media programs includes the study of parallel and multicore computing as one of the key technologies in the Computer Science track and in partnership with UMBC’s new Multicore Computing Center. This coming Spring, for example, UMBC is offering a special topics course (CMSC 491s/691s) on the topic — Introduction to Cell Processors and Applications.

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