thegamevine

My experience in reviewing games comes from console reviews, specifically Xbox 360. It made sense. I was there to give the game a go, write up what I thought and left it up to the reader to determine if it was worth buying or not. Here in Australia (at the time), the games were $99.95. So a hundred bucks wasn’t spent lightly.

Now there is a whole new barrier to buying a game, with a value far lower than $99.95, but one just as difficult to get Android users to get past.

Sometimes it can be as little as 99 cents.

The fact is there are some games now being released on the Play Store that we normally would pay close to $20 for on the Xbox Live Arcade. Where are these games?

With far less time at home, but now plenty of time commuting, I’ll let you know what I’m playing and whether it’s worth a buck to give it a go yourself.

With the last DLC for Battlefield 3 being released this month – End Game, I’m looking to get together a bunch of people for some XboxLive action on Saturday 16th March. Generally we’re going by 9.30 – 10pm, though there’s no hard and fast rule about that.

Feel free to add me – DarkArmada – if you’d like to join in, otherwise head here to ESGN for discussion around the event.

Last week it was released that the Australian music industry grew 4% in 2012 from the year before. The first positive growth we’ve seen in the industry since 1999. The growth is openly attributed to the growth in digital sales through stores like iTunes and online streaming through services like Spotify or Pandora.

However the good news was capped with a stern warning – “If more action isn’t taken by the government and ISPs to curb piracy levels the NBN could have disastrous results for the local industry…”

Now I’m confused. I don’t see how faster (or only slightly faster in some cases) internet will encourage future growth piracy.

Let’s assume that we’re downloading an album, it’s 100MB. This is actually above average, but stay with me. With a fibre connection you would typically find on the NBN, it could take you anywhere from 8 seconds (100Mbit/s) up to a minute (12Mbit/s) to download depending on the speed you’re paying for.

On ADSL and depending on where you live, it will take you anywhere from about 40 seconds to about 7 minutes to download. Even over 3G or wireless it may only be about 10 minutes or so. We’re not even talking the 30 mins it used to take to download a single song over Napster when it launched back in 1999. For most, it will only take 3-4 minutes to complete a download. It’s already so fast.

I don’t see where added speed will encourage more users to download tracks illegitimately. Alternatively, that same speed will offer faster downloads from paid online music stores and more bandwidth to handle streaming of music along with every other cloud based service we now use everyday. Over time an increase in usage caps should push our own music collections online, as they have started to do with services like Google Music, so you can manage, add and listen to your music library anywhere.

Instead why not invest in the promotion, sale and digital distribution of Australian music. Open up the tightly held classification and protection of Australian music to allow the industry to blossom, instead of promoting fear of pirates under the bed.

Because right now music industry, you’re drunk… go home.

While many people bank on selling social media on it’s complexity and promise to deliver, it’s actually fairly straight forward once you start to translate it your business. Most of the time the act of posting, commenting and engaging on your profiles is just what happens in the middle. The real magic is in working out how your social media efforts can plug in to your current business model and then determining whether your execution has produced the results you expected.

If you simply break it down to PLAN > EXECUTE > MEASURE suddenly what was a confusing and time consuming practice with a difficult story to tell can easily be articulated to the business with recognised and understood value.

To start, as with any business decision, you need to determine whether social media is relevant to your business at all. If it is, you need to define how it’s relevant, how it relates to existing business goals and what metrics you can use to support this.

For many companies, social media performs a marketing function or augments their existing customer support process, while for others the connection is based on lead generation. If social media isn’t somehow directly contributing to your bottom line, either directly or indirectly, then it’s not a good business decision leaving stakeholders asking why you’re spending company money on an activity with no return.

That’s right, spending money. It’s generally free to sign up to these services, but the time, effort, resource and spending required to run an effective social media strategy is not. So it’s important that the execution of your strategy is pre-loaded with tools and mechanisms that allow you to easily track lead generation, conversion rates and repeat business.

It’s also important to note that many companies report on core metrics such as likes or follows. There are mixed feelings on this practice. It is a good idea to show these numbers somewhere on your reports as many stakeholders are familiar with them however, they shouldn’t be used to measure success. It’s much easier to convince your boss of your success with revenue uplift, sales or increase to customer satisfaction, than likes or follows.

Based on this foundation it’s straight forward to determine things like your voice, platforms to invest in, content calendars, resourcing etc in the lead up to the implementation of your strategy.

When making anydecision ask yourself  - “what am I trying to achieve?“.

Overnight iGEA released the Australian NPD results for 2012. To start, it’s a shame that there can only be guess work for total market. Telsyte calls a 35% share to digital/online content. Considering the adoption of casual gaming, mobile device and digital downloads in the Australian market, I don’t think it’d be a stretch to use the US share of 40%, considering the 23% decline in retail sales in Australia for 2012. This leads to a total market of close to $2 billion, with digital downloads making up over $770 million of that. A 23% decline in bricks and mortar retail is huge with clear symptoms evident, GAME shut down their Australian operations and even JB HiFi announced a 2.9% decline in their software business.

While retailers are crying poor about consumer practices like showrooming, where people are shopping for the products they want in store then buying online at the cheaper price, I see this as an opportunity for retailers to turn the market around. This practice is based on set of factors that, if turned around, would retake the share lost:

1. Retailers have products on display and trained staff to assist shoppers personally
2. Retailers pride themselves on the knowledge of their staff and the quality of service they provide
3. Online retailers sell themselves on price at the sacrifice of pre-sales service

As much as traditional retailers think they’re embracing online retail, the fear that it will eat into their shopfront sales limits the investment they’re making into it. In a confusing move, Harvey Norman began offering discounted direct import games at the end of 2011 yet continue to sell titles in store at RRP, while across the rest of their business refuse to embrace any form of competitive online retail outside of Catch of the Day type sales of products not found in their stores. At the other end of the spectrum, JB HiFi have made huge strides in their push online, though generally only offer store prices for online sales, albeit at $1 shipping.

What can bricks and mortar retailers do to turn the tide?

Retailers need to treat online just as they would another store by remaining competitive to online prices, offering free shipping and by treating their stores as showrooms. Why fight the trend? Embrace this activity, encourage consumers to shop online in store by offering online pricing with the ability to take away the product today. For those consumers browsing online, why drive them to purchasing games from overseas? Local retailers have to take advantage of what they have to offer Australian consumers – faster shipping, display stores and in-person customer service. No doubt in the future retailers will reduce the size of their stores and display only those products that are current and have a need to be on display for those customers looking to buy, almost wholly as a showroom, as opposed to the shelves and shelves of products for sale at RRP we see today.

Think outside the store.

Just wanted to clear that up before I kick this off. I’ve read a lot about how to blog, how to promote yourself and how to succeed online. Now I know what I don’t want to do, I can get started on this not-a-blog.

Why tgv? thegamevine was an Australian gaming community a couple of years ago with a fairly active chat, forums and front page. After a while those of us running it ran out of time ourselves, got families and an analogue life. To keep in touch we recently kicked it off again, albeit as a chat room hosted on WordPress to keep it easy and clean.

I wasn’t happy with sites likes tumblr and posterous as far as publishing platforms, I always wanted something more minimal, something cleaner. So I hijacked tgv.

I’m writing this here because Twitter is too short, Google+ doesn’t allow multiple links or images and Facebook is well, Facebook. You can see the site is white text on black background, not the other way around. I didn’t lead in with an interesting image. I’ve done no SEO. I haven’t written an ebook. I’m no expert, guru, ninja, master chef or professor, self proclaimed or otherwise. I’m interested to see how many people will read what I write, irrespective of how I write it.

There is one suggestion I will heed, one that my long time partner reminded me of recently and made me cringe when she made me realise what I was doing wrong.

I’m going to be myself.

After some nostalgia and a few discussions, we wanted to get another chat up and running and what better way to do that than by rebooting thegamevine.com. So here it is. There aren’t any forums and right now there’s little more than a plan to get the chat back up and running, with the possibility of getting some content together for the front page.

The link to the chat is over on the right, funnily enough named “Chat” or just click here. We’ve set it up to use either a Twitter or Facebook login so you’re not needing to register all over again.

Anyway drop in and say hi. Cheers