By now, most of you have read about the serious flare-up ignited by Mike Capps at the IGDA Leadership Forum. (For those that haven’t — Mike is CEO of Epic and formerly a board member of the IGDA, and he made some comments which sounded like he was endorsing crunch time and, some would argue, putting down people who reject crunch time.) This has already been covered extensively by the press and debated by prominent IGDA members, so I’m not going to discuss it in depth. I’ll simply say that it’s fair to accuse Mike of being careless with his words, especially given his position in the industry and in the IGDA, but it’s also probably not fair to brand Mike a “management dickhead” or to equate Epic with EA during the “EA Spouse controversy” days. Epic is not EA, and Mike is not someone who views employees as expendable resources. (Epic’s employees don’t seem to feel horribly unappreciated, either; according to Mike, Epic’s voluntary turnover rate averaged around 1.1% from 2006 to 2008. For reference, average tech industry turnover rates, pre-recession, were approximately 20%. Anything below 5% was considered shockingly good for a company with more than 50 employees.)

So anyway, I’m going to sidestep the question of whether or not the IGDA should be taking a hard stand on quality of life issues (which, to be clear, are a big deal to me — I’ve never appreciated our industry’s dismissive attitude towards work-life balance.) That is, frankly, a much less important question than this: what exactly is the IGDA supposed to stand for, and who does it represent?

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I’m happy to share the following announcement, brought to you by the current generation of MIT Game Tycoons. :-)

Digital distribution, marketing, and in-game advertising are the themes of MIT Sloan School of Management’s inaugural Business in Gaming Conference being held on Friday, May 8, 2009 on the business school’s campus. Ken Levine, president of 2K Boston and creator of BioShock, will serve as the conference’s closing keynote. Other speakers include: Susan Bonds, 42 Entertainment’s president and CEO, John Rizzo, CEO of Zeebo, and Curt Schilling, three-time World Series champion and founder of 38 Studios.

Ethan and I will be on a panel together in the afternoon. Sadly, I won’t be around for the rest of the conference (coincidentally, there’s another event at MIT that I must attend that day) so if you’re attending BIG, please say hello during the brief window that I’m present!

My “Changing the Game” co-author, Ethan, was one of several individuals who worked on Celebrity Calamity, a casual game that teaches important personal financial lessons through roleplay as the business manager of a virtual celebrity. Testers who played Celebrity Calamity showed a 55% to 70% improvement in knowledge of concepts like credit limits, finance charges, etc. A video about the game and people’s experiences with it can be found here.

Trip Hawkins on the iPhone: “We make as much money with [iPhone games] as we do putting a game on 100 different cell phone platforms.”

Gamasutra has attempted to estimate the sales of those XBLA games released in March.

Nintendo will release Wii MotionPlus on June 8th. Finally, the Wiimote will not suck, and it will only cost you $20 (per device!) to rectify that suckiness… or more, if you want the Wii Sports Resort bundle. I plan to be one of those people dutifully enriching Nintendo, though I will mutter an evil curse while I do so.

Thoughtful article by James Portnow on “faux choices” in games: “Many games attach rewards that effect gameplay problems to choices, thus reducing the choice to a simple equation. For example: how many times have you been offered a choice to be nice to an old man or to ignore him and had the reward for being nice to him be X experience (or ammo or money) and the reward for ignoring him be Y experience (where Y is less then X, and often zero)?”

NCsoft has launched a mission creation tool available to all users of City of Heroes. Of course, it allows users to rate one another’s submissions and stories, and players can earn in-game rewards for highly-rated content. Certainly cheaper than attempting to replicate WoW’s army of designers; I wonder how long it will be before a popular, big-budget MMORPG launches with this kind of functionality? (Update: Kotaku reports that within 24 hours, CoH players created more content than had ever been created by the devs, and that ~14% of that content was rated 5 stars.)

Metaboli (now owner of GameTap) discusses its business models, both subscription and download to own. Subscription, unsurprisingly, is higher margin. I always thought XBLA should create a subscription or rent-to-own offer, though I worried that either (if very successful) might skew developers away from short-but-sweet games, which are under-appreciated enough as-is.

Doug Creutz shares his take on the current developer value proposition for PS3/360 vs Wii in the US: “There is a 19m unit installed base for the Wii versus 22m units combined for the 360 and PS3. Assuming some overlap in the 360/PS3 installed bases, they’re roughly equivalent. In addition, Nintendo is the dominant publisher on the Wii with over one-third of software market share on its platform. Guitar Hero and Rock Band account for one-sixth of sales. So the addressable market for third-party Wii titles is only about half of what the installed base would imply. The situation on the 360/PS3 is less daunting, with less than a quarter of software dollar share going to first-party publishers and Guitar Hero/Rock Band.”

There’s more to life than games:

Researchers at DePauw University have found that people who frowned frequently in photos taken when they were children are five times more likely to get divorced later in life. Interesting way to evaluate the people who are hoping to marry your kids, siblings, etc. ;-)

Nice article by Tom Brokaw exploring how the US could save untold billions by consolidating local government entities. Example: “It’s estimated that New York State has about 10,500 local government entities, from townships to counties to special districts. A year ago a bipartisan state commission said that New Yorkers could save more than a billion dollars a year by consolidating and sharing local government responsibilities like public security, health, roads and education.”

My grandmother turns 90 this week, so I’m in Houston celebrating this wonderful milestone with her. Each time we get together (which isn’t often enough), we spend a little time talking about her experiences during World War II. These conversations almost never last very long; she inevitably breaks into tears and I’ve never had the heart to push things further once that happens. So I end up hearing very brief snippets of what life was like in Romania during the war, which I’ve tried to piece together into a coherent story over the past many years. It’s like so many stories you’ve likely heard before; long periods of suffering punctuated by brief moments of hope, of kindness and of horror.

This morning, my grandmother told me another story. It takes place shortly after the Russian army (which had been occupying her town) retreated from the territory. The Romanian army re-entered the area and began to round up all individuals who had supposedly “collaborated” with the Russians — including my grandmother’s family. (She believes that most of the people accused of collaboration were Jews, but she is 90 and her memory isn’t perfect, so it’s hard for me to say for certain if that is accurate.) The Russian army had already stolen most of her family’s material wealth, so there was nothing left for the Romanian army to seize except for her land and home.

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GDC always makes for a big Articles of Interest! Let’s get to it:

The subscription-based MMO market grew by 22% in Europe and North America in 2008. Revenues reached $1.4B. WoW, of course, represents the bulk of that amount.

Quite the avalanche of news around OnLive, the new digital distribution service that will supposedly make consoles (and indeed, clients in general) irrelevant. Dean Takahashi kick-started things with the most enthusiast writeup I’ve ever seen published by a professional game journalist on ANY subject. There was plenty of followup; the two best articles I’ve found are a positive take on the implications of a service like OnLive (not necessarily OnLive itself) by Soren, and an article by Richard Leadbetter that challenges the technical feasibility of OnLive on multiple fronts. Both are very worth reading. My take? OnLive is awesome — revolutionary even, if it works as well as claimed. But I’ve spoken to several gifted engineers who I trust, and none of them believe it. Conclusion: OnLive is probably cranking up the hype in hopes of leveraging it to sign key partnership deals and to raise funds that will enable the company to eventually turn the hype into reality. But who knows… maybe my sources (and Leadbetter) are wrong. I really doubt it, but maybe.

Another sign that the economy hasn’t hit the games industry too badly: over 17K people attended GDC, just shy of last year’s numbers. (Great job, Meggan!) Kim has been kind enough to identify some of the best things at GDC this year — check out his writeup.

Nintendo is proving that it is ready to take DLC & Wiiware seriously by adding SDHC support to the Wii and by making it possible to launch games directly from a SD or SDHC card — no more shuffling!

For those of you who appreciated my post on long-lead PR, Seth Godin has some related advice. “The idea of a ‘launch’ and press releases and the big unveiling is nuts. Instead, plan on the gradual build that turns into a tidal wave. Organize for it and spend money appropriately. The fact is, the curve of money spent (big hump, then it tails off) is precisely backwards to what you actually need.”

At GDC, Qualcomm announced the launch of the Zeebo console, which is intended for emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Zeebo has positioned itself as a piracy-free alternative to traditional consoles because all content is downloaded via 3G wireless. Zeebo is also much cheaper than its next-gen competitors, but also appears to be pretty underpowered even in comparison to the Wii. From what I’ve seen, most forum posters from target markets like Brazil seem totally unimpressed. They’ve pointed out that a PS2 is no more expensive but is significantly more powerful (and has a better library of games that they can pirate!) They’ve also pointed out that 3G is currently unreliable, even in some major urban areas. There were other criticisms; bottom line, I’m not seeing the excitement yet.

Information about the sales of XNA Community Games is finally coming to light. There is at least one game that has sold nearly 10k units for $31k revenue (Word Soup), but most games appear to be doing far worse. The sales of certain key titles, like DBP winner CarneyVale Showtime, have not been announced yet so perhaps there is more to this story. That said, it appears that the interface and merchandising challenges facing XNA Community Games have really stunted its early growth — I’d expect to hear much more about “big winners” early in the life of an ecosystem that has benefited from so much overt promotion and community interest. That was certainly the case with XBLA and with the iPhone.

Sony is offering to match the development costs of qualifying independent PSN games in return for their exclusivity. Sony will also aid in design and marketing, and will not claim ownership of the game’s IP. An inevitable (but educated) move, given the competition from XBLA.

Facebook and MySpace social MMO YoVille has reached 7.8M monthly active users, monetized via microtransactions and banner advertisements. Two months ago I’d never even heard of YoVille…

Interesting excerpt from a new book, “Team Leadership In The Game Industry.” I enjoyed the case studies.

There’s more to life than games:

Someone made a song about Paul Krugman (the Nobel Prize-winning economist and editorialist for the New York Times.) This part alone makes the whole thing worth listening to:
I mean, don’t you have some influence?
Why aren’t you secretary of the Treasury?
For God’s sake, man, you won the Nobel Prize.
Timothy Geithner uses TurboTax.