by Ramin Shokrizade on 06/26/13 08:16:00 am  
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| Coercive Monetization A coercive monetization model depends on the ability to “trick” a person into making a purchase with incomplete information, or by hiding that information such that while it is technically available, the brain of the consumer does not access that information. Hiding a purchase can be as simple as disguising the relationship between the action and the cost as I describe in my Systems of Control in F2P paper. Research has shown that putting even one intermediate currency between the consumer and real money, such as a “game gem” (premium currency), makes the consumer much less adept at assessing the value of the transaction. Additional intermediary objects, what I call “layering”, makes it even harder for the brain to accurately assess the situation, especially if there is some additional stress applied. This additional stress is often in the form of what Roger Dickey from Zynga calls “fun pain”. I describe this in my Two Contrasting Views of Monetization paper from 2011. This involves putting the consumer in a very uncomfortable or undesirable position in the game and then offering to remove this “pain” in return for spending money. This money is always layered in coercive monetization models, because if confronted with a “real” purchase the consumer would be less likely to fall for the trick. As discussed in my Monetizing Children paper, the ability to weigh this short term “pain relief” vs. the long term opportunity costs of spending money is a brain activity shown by research to be handled in the pre-frontal cortex. This area of the brain typically completes its development at the age of 25. Thus consumers under the age of 25 will have increased vulnerability to fun pain and layering effects, with younger consumers increasingly vulnerable. While those older than 25 can fall for very well constructed coercive monetization models, especially if they are unfamiliar with them (first generation Facebook gamers), the target audience for these products is those under the age of 25. For this reason these products are almost always presented with cartoonish graphics and child-like characters. Note that while monetizing those under 18 runs the risk of charge backs, those between the age of 18 and 25 are still in the process of brain development and are considered legal adults. It seems unlikely that anyone in this age range, having been anointed with adulthood, is going to appeal to a credit card company for relief by saying they are still developmentally immature. Thus this group is a vulnerable population with no legal protection, making them the ideal target audience for these methods. Not coincidentally, this age range of consumer is also highly desired by credit card companies. The exception to the above child targeting would be products making heavy use of Supremacy Goods, which I will discuss near the end of this paper. These products target a wider age range of users that are vulnerable to such appeals. Premium Currencies To maximize the efficacy of a coercive monetization model, you must use a premium currency, ideally with the ability to purchase said currency in-app. Making the consumer exit the game to make a purchase gives the target's brain more time to figure out what you are up to, lowering your chances of a sale. If you can set up your game to allow “one button conversion”, such as in many iOS games, then obviously this is ideal. The same effect is seen in real world retail stores where people buying goods with cash tend to spend less than those buying with credit cards, due to the layering effect. Purchasing in-app premium currency also allows the use of discounting, such that premium currency can be sold for less per unit if it is purchased in bulk. Thus a user that is capable of doing basic math (handled in a different part of the brain that develops earlier) can feel the urge to “save money” by buying more. The younger the consumer, the more effective this technique is, assuming they are able to do the math. Thus you want to make the numbers on the purchase options very simple, and you can also put banners on bigger purchases telling the user how much more they will “save” on big purchases to assist very young or otherwise math-impaired customers. Having the user see their amount of premium currency in the interface is also much less anxiety generating, compared to seeing a real money balance. If real money was used (no successful game developer does this) then the consumer would see their money going down as they play and become apprehensive. This gives the consumer more opportunities to think and will reduce revenues. Skill Games vs. Money Games A game of skill is one where your ability to make sound decisions primarily determines your success. A money game is one where your ability to spend money is the primary determinant of your success. Consumers far prefer skill games to money games, for obvious reasons. A key skill in deploying a coercive monetization model is to disguise your money game as a skill game. King.com's Candy Crush Saga is designed masterfully in this regard. Early game play maps can be completed by almost anyone without spending money, and they slowly increase in difficulty. This presents a challenge to the skills of the player, making them feel good when they advance due to their abilities. Once the consumer has been marked as a spender (more on this later) the game difficulty ramps up massively, shifting the game from a skill game to a money game as progression becomes more dependent on the use of premium boosts than on player skills. If the shift from skill game to money game is done in a subtle enough manner, the brain of the consumer has a hard time realizing that the rules of the game have changed. If done artfully, the consumer will increasingly spend under the assumption that they are still playing a skill game and “just need a bit of help”. This ends up also being a form of discriminatory pricing as the costs just keep going up until the consumer realizes they are playing a money game. Reward Removal This is my favorite coercive monetization technique, because it is just so powerful. The technique involves giving the player some really huge reward, that makes them really happy, and then threatening to take it away if they do not spend. Research has shown that humans like getting rewards, but they hate losing what they already have much more than they value the same item as a reward. To be effective with this technique, you have to tell the player they have earned something, and then later tell them that they did not. The longer you allow the player to have the reward before you take it away, the more powerful is the effect. This technique is used masterfully in Puzzle and Dragons. In that game the play primarily centers around completing “dungeons”. To the consumer, a dungeon appears to be a skill challenge, and initially it is. Of course once the customer has had enough time to get comfortable with the idea that this is a skill game the difficulty goes way up and it becomes a money game. What is particularly effective here is that the player has to go through several waves of battles in a dungeon, with rewards given after each wave. The last wave is a “boss battle” where the difficulty becomes massive and if the player is in the recommended dungeon for them then they typically fail here. They are then told that all of the rewards from the previous waves are going to be lost, in addition to the stamina used to enter the dungeon (this can be 4 or more real hours of time worth of stamina). At this point the user must choose to either spend about $1 or lose their rewards, lose their stamina (which they could get back for another $1), and lose their progress. To the brain this is not just a loss of time. If I spend an hour writing a paper and then something happens and my writing gets erased, this is much more painful to me than the loss of an hour. The same type of achievement loss is in effect here. Note that in this model the player could be defeated multiple times in the boss battle and in getting to the boss battle, thus spending several dollars per dungeon. This technique alone is effective enough to make consumers of any developmental level spend. Just to be safe, PaD uses the same technique at the end of each dungeon again in the form of an inventory cap. The player is given a number of “eggs” as rewards, the contents of which have to be held in inventory. If your small inventory space is exceeded, again those eggs are taken from you unless you spend to increase your inventory space. Brilliant! Progress Gates Progress gates can be used to tell a consumer that they will need to spend some amount of money if they want to go further in the game. If done transparently, this is not coercive. For the purposes of this paper, the focus will just be on how this can be layered to trick the consumer into spending on something they may not have if they had been provided with complete information. Now let's break progress gates into “hard” and “soft” types. A hard gate is one where you cannot advance if you do not pay up. The central buildings in Zynga builder type games are a good example. All other buildings in a town/city/base are capped by the level of the central building, forcing a hard progress gate. What makes this coercive is that the player is not told that if they pay through that gate they will just be presented with another hard gate soon that will cost even more money. Thus the consumer may assume they are getting more pain relief for their money than they are. A soft gate is one where the player can get past the gate, eventually. Clash of Clans uses this type in making building times ever longer and allowing the user to spend to complete them. This is a method presumably borrowed from games made by Zynga, Kabam, Kixeye, and others since it is a common Facebook game convention. In order to improve the efficacy of the soft gate, these games also make it so that resource generation in-game increases faster than the player's ability to spend these resources (because building/spending takes so long). Thus these “earned” resources are lost (taken away) if real money is not spent. This is a method of combining reward removal with a soft gate to increase the pain level while at the same time layering, as the consumer may be gullible enough to assume these effects are coincidental or due to some strategic misstep they took earlier. Another novel way to use a progress gate is to make it look transparent, but to use it as the partition between the skill game and the money game. Candy Crush Saga employs this technique artfully. In that game there is a “river” that costs a very small amount of money to cross. The skill game comes before the river. A player may spend to cross the river, believing that the previous skill game was enjoyable (it was for me) and looking to pay to extend the skill game. No such guarantee is given of course, King just presents a river and does not tell you what is on the other side. The money game is on the other side, and as the first payment is always the hardest, those that cross the river are already prequalified as spenders. Thus the difficulty ramps up to punishing levels on the far side of the river, necessitating boosts for all but the most pain tolerant players. Soft and Hard Boosts The purpose of a money game is to promote Boost sales. Boosts that have an instant one-time effect are “soft” Boosts. Those that stick around either forever or until they are converted to something else are “hard” Boosts. The $1 “un-defeat” button in PaD is a soft Boost, as are all of the power-ups sold in Candy Crush Saga. The obvious advantage of soft boosts is that you can keep selling them as long as the player stays in the money game. “Hard” Boosts include things like the random rare creatures that are sold in PaD for $5 each. Having these in your stable effectively lowers the difficulty of the game enough to allow you to get a little bit further with each purchase. A technique that is very popular in Asian games with hard Boosts (PaD included) is to allow hard Boosts to be “merged” to allow for even bigger hard Boosts. This makes the math involved in figuring out exactly how expensive a very high quality hard Boost will be, daunting. It may even be completely invisible to the consumer due to the various drop %s being hidden. Thus the best hard Boosts in these games typically cost thousands of dollars, a fact that is hidden to the user until they are already invested for at least a few hundred dollars. This puts the consumer in the difficult position of giving up and losing the equity already purchased, or going “all the way” and spending some unknown large amount to get the top Boost. Some of these techniques, sometimes called “kompu gacha”, are already facing regulation in Asia due to their excessive layering and lack of transparency. In money games that contain a social layer, this social layer is used as an added incentive to show off your “skills” to other players that may still not realize they are in a money game. This is the purpose of the mini-leaderboards in Candy Crush Saga, to make it look like you need to try harder to beat your more “skillful” friends. Even the “word-o-meter” in Words with Friends can be considered a soft Boost in a money game disguised as a skill game. This would, of course, depend on if you considered it to give an advantage. If it didn't then why are people buying it? Ante Games As described in detail in my How “Pay to Win” Works paper, the key to these games is to start off with the appearance of a skill game and then shift to a multiplayer money game that I call an “Ante” game. The game could proceed as a skill game but never does since once one player spends enough money it becomes a money game. At some point players keep raising their antes, hoping that the other players will fold. The “winner” (and loser) is the player that puts in the largest ante. It is not unusual for winning antes to be over $5000, and some Asian game developers that make only ante games like IGG have “VIP” member sections that you have to spend $3000+ per year for the top level of membership. The target audience here tends to be non-hardcore competitive gamers who need the self esteem boost that comes with winning a skill game, and who for whatever reason never recognize the game as a money game. Some of my peers in the Asian gaming industry suggest that there this is merely a form of conspicuous consumption. I would love to see some age demographics for these “whales”. Last Thoughts The above mechanics are not meant to be exhaustive, but give a basic overview of key techniques used in coercive monetization model based games to defeat a customer's ability to make informed choices about the costs and values in these products. The more subtle the hand, and the more you can make your game appear to be skill based the more effective these products will monetize. Currently I would consider Puzzle and Dragons to be the state of the art. While it's gameplay mechanisms are simplistic, the depth of its reward mechanisms and its adherence to most of the best practices listed in my Supremacy Goods microeconomic model make it quite elegant. Its fantastic use of reward removal in particular is quite impressive. While it is possible to make commercially competitive games without using coercive methods, this is a lot more work. In the current market, especially with most adults and children not familiar with the nature of these products, the environment is still ripe for fast profits, and likely will continue to be so for a few more years. Note that while these methods can be very successful with young and inexperienced gamers, they find less success with older and more experienced gamers, and this population represents a group with potentially very large gaming budgets. |
Sunday, June 30, 2013
The Top F2P Monetization Tricks
Via Gamasutra:
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Ten Years Later, A Terrible Game Is Not So Terrible Anymore
Via Kotaku:
In a rush to cash in on the popularity of the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, publishers Bethesda and developers Akella released in 2003 a very strange game.
It wasn't really a Pirates of the Caribbean game. It had been in development as a sequel to Sea Dogs, a 2000 game that itself was basically a homage to Sid Meier's Pirates!. So despite adding a few characters specific to the film, and the obvious name change, the game actually had very little in common with Disney's blockbuster property.
What it did have, though, was promise. As I remember it, the game that shipped wasn't all that great, a pale imitation of Meier's classic, but the bones were there for something better, something potential modders quickly realised and set to work upon fixing.
And so the Pirates of the Caribbean: New Horizons project was born.
One of the longest-running mods in existence, the goal of the team was to transform the 2003 game into "as full an historical Age of Sail game experience as possible".
There's only so much they can do working within the confines of someone else's game, but what they've done is amazing.
You can check out the complete list of what's been changed, from graphics upgrades to major gameplay tweaks, at the project's site below.
New Horizons [ModDB]
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Google is developing an Android-based video game console
Via Eurogamer.net:
And an Android-based wristwatch. Yes, seriously.
Internet mega-corporation Google is purportedly developing an Android-based video game console, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal (via Joystiq).
Evidently, the console is being developed alongside an Android-based wristwatch, which I presume will tap into the 80s era nostalgia that's totally in vogue right now.
According to the report, the console and watch are being developed as a buffer against Apple, with one source claiming that Google has been keeping its all-seeing eye on the Ouya.
The cubic Kickstarted Android-based console apparently sold out at Gamestop and Amazon US upon its launch yesterday, according to Develop, but it appears to be back in stock now.
And an Android-based wristwatch. Yes, seriously.
The future is a strange and scary place.
Evidently, the console is being developed alongside an Android-based wristwatch, which I presume will tap into the 80s era nostalgia that's totally in vogue right now.
According to the report, the console and watch are being developed as a buffer against Apple, with one source claiming that Google has been keeping its all-seeing eye on the Ouya.
The cubic Kickstarted Android-based console apparently sold out at Gamestop and Amazon US upon its launch yesterday, according to Develop, but it appears to be back in stock now.
AMD And NVIDIA Talk 4K Gaming And Why The PS4 And Xbox One Are A Downgrade
Via Forbes:
While the Xbox One and PS4 took a lion’s share of the limelight at E3, there was more to the event than the console launches and their Day One games lineups. While catching up with NVIDIA about SHIELD at E3 I also heard about some of their plans for PC gaming. Arch-rivals AMD also have plenty to say on that subject, and an AMD spokesperson took a few moments to fill me in on their perspective too.
AMD was quick to tell me that “AMD makes [the] technology that powers the X-Box One and the PlayStation 4, and we also make technology in our Radeon graphics that powers the Wii U. So we’re in all three of the new next-gen consoles.” In the case of the new Xbox and PlayStation, AMD provides the central APU (integrated CPU/GPU) engine, while the Wii U uses AMD graphics. Not surprisingly, this makes AMD console fans.
NVIDIA, meanwhile, don’t have a seat at the big consoles’ table. With Tegra aimed at the Android mobile market and their own SHIELD portable Android console, the company has their mobile strategy in place. But for high-end gaming, NVIDIA now only has the PC as a platform to target. This is an interesting turn of events, because it means NVIDIA, unlike AMD, now has more at stake in pushing PC gaming forward.
NVIDIA’s Jason Paul, director of product marketing, told me: “I think PC still going to be the premiere gaming platform. For game developers who want to deliver the richest, best experiences, they’re going to develop for PC. I think that’s going to keep PC very healthy through this new generation of consoles, and obviously PCs are going to continue to take off in terms of innovation.”
AMD are justifiably proud of their console hat-trick, but it doesn’t mean they don’t care about the PC. After all, the next generation of consoles can now easily game at 1080P, but many PC gamers have been playing exclusively at that resolution for half a decade or more, and are ready to move on to better things.
As I’m standing in the AMD booth, AMD’s spokesperson points across the aisle to a Sharp 32 inch 4K [3840x2160 resolution] display: “Something like that can be plugged into a PC today. You can do 4K gaming right now with the games that are out there now. So on the PC continues to lead and really define the leading edge of gaming. So I don’t think it’s going anywhere; in fact I think it’s actually grown quite a bit because [for] the consoles that have been out there…it’s been a long console cycle.”
As AMD and NVIDIA make high-end GPUs for which a single 1080P display is no longer a challenge, for gamers looking for the next big thing, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One might not be as compelling as Sony and Microsoft hope.
Paul said “…New consoles come out, and they catch up a little in performance, but then they get stale over a while and the PC sort of goes through a Renaissance. PC’s been really strong over the last few years as the consoles have aged. Consoles will close that gap a little bit. But one of the things that’s different about this generation is generally the consoles will catch up to the PC in terms of performance. With this next generation, at least what’s been released so far in terms of specs, it doesn’t look like they’re going to close the gap with PC this time.”
AMD concurs. AMD’s spokesperson told me: “A lot more people have been taking a look at the PC and saying ‘Oh wait, I can get better graphics over here. Oh wait, my experience over here can be different’ like with AMD’s [multi-monitor technology] Eyefinity…. Gaming with a mouse and a keyboard is very different from gaming with a control on a sofa.”
Or as Clay Causin, a senior software engineer at NVIDIA, puts it: “Personal opinion: Consoles they have a place. if you need something basic, you don’t care how your game looks, alright, I guess it works for you. PC gaming is…bigger and better. Consoles are a downgrade.”
There’s plenty of demand, in other words, for the kind of high-end PC gaming parts both companies produce. Boutique PC rig builders will sell you machines for many thousands of dollars if you want, but that doesn’t mean gamers have to break the bank, unless of course they want to.
AMD’s spokesperson said, “You can totally build a gaming PC for $1000 or even $600-$700…. It all depends on what type of performance you are looking at and what you want to do with the product. Although the primary purpose of a user building their own PC might be to game it’s still a computer. It still does everything a computer can do, you can do multimedia steaming, you can do file crunching, you can build and create things, you can use it for work or play.
“It all depends on what you want to do and how big you want to go.”
Just how big? AMD’s spokesperson mentions a Maingear machine that’s using the company’s latest Radeon HD 7990 and Eyefinity to drive five 65-inch video TVs simultaneously. Rather like one of those TV cooking shows where the chef is standing in a kitchen bigger than your house, “It’s fun and a little obnoxious…showing people what kind of cutting-edge technology you can do in big bold ways.”
So, at the end of the day, how important is PC gaming? As Causin puts it: “Well, it pays all of our checks.”
You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and here at Forbes.
While the Xbox One and PS4 took a lion’s share of the limelight at E3, there was more to the event than the console launches and their Day One games lineups. While catching up with NVIDIA about SHIELD at E3 I also heard about some of their plans for PC gaming. Arch-rivals AMD also have plenty to say on that subject, and an AMD spokesperson took a few moments to fill me in on their perspective too.
AMD was quick to tell me that “AMD makes [the] technology that powers the X-Box One and the PlayStation 4, and we also make technology in our Radeon graphics that powers the Wii U. So we’re in all three of the new next-gen consoles.” In the case of the new Xbox and PlayStation, AMD provides the central APU (integrated CPU/GPU) engine, while the Wii U uses AMD graphics. Not surprisingly, this makes AMD console fans.
NVIDIA, meanwhile, don’t have a seat at the big consoles’ table. With Tegra aimed at the Android mobile market and their own SHIELD portable Android console, the company has their mobile strategy in place. But for high-end gaming, NVIDIA now only has the PC as a platform to target. This is an interesting turn of events, because it means NVIDIA, unlike AMD, now has more at stake in pushing PC gaming forward.
NVIDIA’s Jason Paul, director of product marketing, told me: “I think PC still going to be the premiere gaming platform. For game developers who want to deliver the richest, best experiences, they’re going to develop for PC. I think that’s going to keep PC very healthy through this new generation of consoles, and obviously PCs are going to continue to take off in terms of innovation.”
AMD are justifiably proud of their console hat-trick, but it doesn’t mean they don’t care about the PC. After all, the next generation of consoles can now easily game at 1080P, but many PC gamers have been playing exclusively at that resolution for half a decade or more, and are ready to move on to better things.
As I’m standing in the AMD booth, AMD’s spokesperson points across the aisle to a Sharp 32 inch 4K [3840x2160 resolution] display: “Something like that can be plugged into a PC today. You can do 4K gaming right now with the games that are out there now. So on the PC continues to lead and really define the leading edge of gaming. So I don’t think it’s going anywhere; in fact I think it’s actually grown quite a bit because [for] the consoles that have been out there…it’s been a long console cycle.”
As AMD and NVIDIA make high-end GPUs for which a single 1080P display is no longer a challenge, for gamers looking for the next big thing, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One might not be as compelling as Sony and Microsoft hope.
Paul said “…New consoles come out, and they catch up a little in performance, but then they get stale over a while and the PC sort of goes through a Renaissance. PC’s been really strong over the last few years as the consoles have aged. Consoles will close that gap a little bit. But one of the things that’s different about this generation is generally the consoles will catch up to the PC in terms of performance. With this next generation, at least what’s been released so far in terms of specs, it doesn’t look like they’re going to close the gap with PC this time.”
AMD concurs. AMD’s spokesperson told me: “A lot more people have been taking a look at the PC and saying ‘Oh wait, I can get better graphics over here. Oh wait, my experience over here can be different’ like with AMD’s [multi-monitor technology] Eyefinity…. Gaming with a mouse and a keyboard is very different from gaming with a control on a sofa.”
Or as Clay Causin, a senior software engineer at NVIDIA, puts it: “Personal opinion: Consoles they have a place. if you need something basic, you don’t care how your game looks, alright, I guess it works for you. PC gaming is…bigger and better. Consoles are a downgrade.”
There’s plenty of demand, in other words, for the kind of high-end PC gaming parts both companies produce. Boutique PC rig builders will sell you machines for many thousands of dollars if you want, but that doesn’t mean gamers have to break the bank, unless of course they want to.
AMD’s spokesperson said, “You can totally build a gaming PC for $1000 or even $600-$700…. It all depends on what type of performance you are looking at and what you want to do with the product. Although the primary purpose of a user building their own PC might be to game it’s still a computer. It still does everything a computer can do, you can do multimedia steaming, you can do file crunching, you can build and create things, you can use it for work or play.
“It all depends on what you want to do and how big you want to go.”
Just how big? AMD’s spokesperson mentions a Maingear machine that’s using the company’s latest Radeon HD 7990 and Eyefinity to drive five 65-inch video TVs simultaneously. Rather like one of those TV cooking shows where the chef is standing in a kitchen bigger than your house, “It’s fun and a little obnoxious…showing people what kind of cutting-edge technology you can do in big bold ways.”
So, at the end of the day, how important is PC gaming? As Causin puts it: “Well, it pays all of our checks.”
You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and here at Forbes.
U.S. government makes its first-ever Bitcoin seizure
Via The Daily Dot:
The U.S. government may not print Bitcoin, or regulate it, but apparently the feds can still seize it.
Earlier this week, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency reported that it had seized 11.02 bitcoins—roughly $814—from a South Carolina man attempting to buy illegal substances with the world's leading digital currency. It's the first known seizure of Bitcoin by the U.S. government, signaling just how seriously the feds take Bitcoin and the online black markets it fuels.
A report from the DEA notes that the money was netted in April. Little detail is provided about the seizure, which appears on the third-to-the-last page of a 128-page document. Its not even clear what substance the suspect was trying to buy. But for Bitcoin experts, the particulars of this case are less important than the apparent fact that the U.S. government is performing sting operations on Bitcoin sites.
"The DEA appears to have been the first agency to seize actual Bitcoins from an individual with this seizure," wrote Brian Cohen and Adam B. Levine on the blog Let's Talk Bitcoin. "Exactly how the Bitcoin was seized is not known as of this writing."
How the funds were seized is still technically a mystery, but the authors of the Let's Talk Bitcoin piece and others have their theories. The prevailing wisdom is that a Bitcoin seizure could have occurred one of two ways. Since there is no evidence that Bitcoin itself was compromised, a DEA agent would have either had to take control of a computer with an unencrypted wallet and transfer the amount to a DEA controlled wallet, or they would have had to set up a "honeypot" sting on the popular Silk Road Internet black market, where Bitcoin is regularly used to purchase contraband. In that case, the alleged criminal would have unknowingly transferred the Bitcoins to the DEA himself.
These are still just theories on the part of Bitcoin enthusiasts, who wait to see how the official proceedings will play out. What is clear though is that federal interest in Bitcoin continues to grow.
As Bitcoin's value has grown, the U.S. government has begun to more heavily scrutinize the anonymous, unregulated cryptocurrency. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security seized one of the U.S. bank accounts of Mt. Gox, the world's leading Bitcoin exchange. The seizure was the result of Mt. Gox's failure to comply with anti-money laundering laws.
The scrutiny from the U.S. government has gotten so severe that Mt. Gox has temporarily halted all U.S. cash withdrawals while it works to meet government regulations.
Atlus at risk after parent company announces bankruptcy
Via Polygon:
Atlus at risk after parent company announces bankruptcy
Zeno Clash publisher Atlus is at risk of sale or restructure following today's announcement that parent company Index has filed for civil rehabilitation proceedings as it faces bankruptcy.
According to a report from CNET, Index owes debts of ¥24.5 billion — roughly $224 million — and the company's president Ochiai Yoshimi has hinted at his resignation.
Index Corporation states that its previous attempt to acquire businesses targeted at both domestic and international interests did not work as planned, while overseas acquisitions was particularly unsuccessful in creating the necessary increase in revenue to justify the purchase.
We have contacted Atlus for comment and will update the post when more information is available.
According to a report from CNET, Index owes debts of ¥24.5 billion — roughly $224 million — and the company's president Ochiai Yoshimi has hinted at his resignation.
Index Corporation states that its previous attempt to acquire businesses targeted at both domestic and international interests did not work as planned, while overseas acquisitions was particularly unsuccessful in creating the necessary increase in revenue to justify the purchase.
We have contacted Atlus for comment and will update the post when more information is available.
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
The war for the free and open internet — and how we are losing it
Via Sue Gardner's Blog:
Below is the text of a talk I delivered Monday at the 2013 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference in Boston. Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, Icelandic member of Parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir and I spoke on the theme of “Insiders/Outsiders: what is the right approach to change.”
Unlike many of the people in this room, I’m not an academic or a public policy expert and so I won’t be bringing you statistics or analysis or theories today. I run a big website. I’m also a journalist. If we consider ourselves to be in a war for the free and open internet, I am here to tell you some stories from the trenches.
Wikipedia is pretty much the consummate insider-outsider: the #5 most-popular site in the entire world, read by a half a billion people every month, yet written by utterly ordinary people with no special power or authority at all. If they have credentials, they park them at the door.
Wikipedia is a tremendous success story. It launched in 2001 and took off very quickly: by 2006 it had surpassed all the other news and information sites in terms of popularity. Today it’s a behemoth. And people love to point to it as an example of everything great about the internet. There’s only one problem with that. Wikipedia is pretty much alone. It’s NOT the general rule: it’s the exception that proves the rule.
Wikipedia is operated by a non-profit. In Silicon Valley, people often find that astonishing – they ask me why Jimmy Wales “left so much money on the table,” and whether he regrets doing it. (Answer: no.) Sometimes people ask me why we don’t just put ads on the site, and whether we are against advertising, against for-profit companies, against capitalism.
We say no. Our view is that the internet should have balance, much like the offline world. A city has restaurants and shops and banks as well as schools and libraries and parks. Wikipedia is like a park. It’s a public space, accessible and used by everybody.
But where are the other parks?
My first war story happened soon after I joined the Wikimedia Foundation. It’s about censorship in the United Kingdom.
The internet industry is, of course, generally hoping to remain unregulated. In the UK a coalition of ISPs have formed an association called the Internet Watch Foundation, which is essentially a group of retired police officers, paid by the ISPs to investigate complaints of child pornography online. In 2008, that group got a complaint about an image on Wikipedia of an album cover from 1976(**) – an album called “Virgin Killer”, by a German heavy metal band called the Scorpions. The album cover image is a young girl, nude, which has been treated with an effect that makes it look like she’s looking at you through a pane of glass that has been shattered by a bullet. It’s deliberately provocative – it’s heavy metal.
The Internet Watch Foundation decided this was child porn, and attempted to block it from the view of UK internet users. In doing that, they accidentally made it impossible for anybody to edit Wikipedia from inside the UK.
People went nuts. There was a lot of press coverage, both inside the UK and internationally. The Wikimedia Foundation spoke to the press, and individual Wikipedia editors in the UK spoke to the press and blogged and tweeted and so on. And after a few days the IWF reversed its decision.
Two interesting things:
Another story.
In 2011, there was a Wikipedia conference in Mumbai at which Jimmy Wales spoke as well as our Board member Bishakha Datta, and a few of our staff. To our considerable surprise, a popular Indian political party picketed outside our conference and demanded that the police arrest us. They were doing that because the map of India displayed on Wikipedia shows the country’s borders as per the United Nations – with the borders with China and Pakistan “disputed” – and not as per the map defined by the government of India. It is only legal, in India, to publish a map showing India’s borders as they are defined and understood by the government of India.
As you can imagine, the protest made us exceedingly anxious. We knew that although India is a democracy with a commitment to free speech, that commitment is variable and laws and community standards inside India are somewhat volatile. And so we retained a bunch of lawyers. We spent weeks researching the legal and PR issues. Where we could, we took a variety of small non-controversial steps to protect ourselves. And ultimately we got lucky, and the issue seemed to fizzle out.
What we did not do was change the map of India displayed on Wikipedia. Partly because we can’t – that’s a Wikipedia community decision – but also because we shouldn’t. It’s perfectly reasonable to publish a map of India with the UN borders.
What was interesting here, as we researched our position, was what everybody else does. It seems that inside India, every major player except Wikipedia displays the map of India with the borders as defined by the Indian government. If you’re in India, that’s what Google shows you. When the Economist magazine prints a map of India, I was told by our lawyer, the version of the magazine they sell inside India shows a map different from the version in the magazine they sell elsewhere.(***)
It’s also worth noting that the Wikimedia Foundation has a legal team and a PR team, and Wikipedia is a popular site, much-loved by its readers. Not everyone has those resources. Of those that do, most are private and for-profit. Again, some of those players are doing great things. But on the whole, over time, they will put profits before public service. That’s their job and their obligation.
Governments, in my experience, aren’t helping. Mostly they’re just befuddled, but even if they knew what to do, there’s no reason to believe they’d do it. Too often they’re corporate captives. We saw it with SOPA. Today they listen too much to the entertainment industry – the copyright owners. Tomorrow, maybe they’ll be listening too much to giant technology companies. Either way, the voices of ordinary people will only rarely be heard, and I have difficulty believing that more or better civic engagement will fix that anytime soon. I agree with Larry Lessig: structural problems – fundraising, gerrymandering – have made for a powerful incumbency with skewed incentives.
And so, as a soldier in the trenches, my message to this conference is caution and concern.
Aside from Wikipedia, there is no large, popular space being carved out for the public good. There are a billion tiny experiments, some of them great. But we should be honest: we are not gaining ground. Our schools, our libraries, our parks – they are very, very small and they may or may not sustain. We certainly have no information-sharing participatory Garden of Eden, the promise of the internet that we all originally believed in. Though we are not lost, we are losing.
I say this because it’s easy to come together for a conference like this and get excited about awesome experiments and interesting breakthroughs. It’s worth doing! We want to celebrate success! But if you’ve read Tim Wu‘s Master Switch, if you’re reading Robert McChesney‘s Digital Disconnect, you know that the insiders are winning. We are not.
The internet needs serious help if it is to remain free and open, a powerful contributor to the public good. That’s what I’m hoping you’ll discuss over the course of this conference. How to create an ecosystem of parks and libraries and schools online … that supports participation, dialogue, sharing.
Thank you.
(*Turns out I was wrong about this. Mozilla is #60 globally according to comScore Media Metrix, the industry standard for web audience measurement. Therefore, I should actually have said Wikipedia, at #5, is the *only* non-profit in the top 25.)
(**When I delivered the talk I said 2009 and 1979. I’d been misremembering: it was 2008 and 1976.)
(***Since delivering this talk, Tilman Bayer at the Wikimedia Foundation pointed me towards this BBC article, in which the Economist accuses the Indian government of hostile censorship after it forced the magazine to place a blank white sticker over a map of Kashmir in the 30,000 copies of the May 2011 Economist that were distributed in India.)
Below is the text of a talk I delivered Monday at the 2013 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference in Boston. Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, Icelandic member of Parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir and I spoke on the theme of “Insiders/Outsiders: what is the right approach to change.”
Unlike many of the people in this room, I’m not an academic or a public policy expert and so I won’t be bringing you statistics or analysis or theories today. I run a big website. I’m also a journalist. If we consider ourselves to be in a war for the free and open internet, I am here to tell you some stories from the trenches.
Wikipedia is pretty much the consummate insider-outsider: the #5 most-popular site in the entire world, read by a half a billion people every month, yet written by utterly ordinary people with no special power or authority at all. If they have credentials, they park them at the door.
Wikipedia is a tremendous success story. It launched in 2001 and took off very quickly: by 2006 it had surpassed all the other news and information sites in terms of popularity. Today it’s a behemoth. And people love to point to it as an example of everything great about the internet. There’s only one problem with that. Wikipedia is pretty much alone. It’s NOT the general rule: it’s the exception that proves the rule.
Wikipedia is operated by a non-profit. In Silicon Valley, people often find that astonishing – they ask me why Jimmy Wales “left so much money on the table,” and whether he regrets doing it. (Answer: no.) Sometimes people ask me why we don’t just put ads on the site, and whether we are against advertising, against for-profit companies, against capitalism.
We say no. Our view is that the internet should have balance, much like the offline world. A city has restaurants and shops and banks as well as schools and libraries and parks. Wikipedia is like a park. It’s a public space, accessible and used by everybody.
But where are the other parks?
- Wikipedia is the only donor-supported site in the top 50
- Wikipedia and Mozilla are the only two nonprofits in the top 25(*)
- The average person spends practically all their time online on the sites of for-profit companies, the vast majority of them American. (Caveat: mainland China.)
My first war story happened soon after I joined the Wikimedia Foundation. It’s about censorship in the United Kingdom.
The internet industry is, of course, generally hoping to remain unregulated. In the UK a coalition of ISPs have formed an association called the Internet Watch Foundation, which is essentially a group of retired police officers, paid by the ISPs to investigate complaints of child pornography online. In 2008, that group got a complaint about an image on Wikipedia of an album cover from 1976(**) – an album called “Virgin Killer”, by a German heavy metal band called the Scorpions. The album cover image is a young girl, nude, which has been treated with an effect that makes it look like she’s looking at you through a pane of glass that has been shattered by a bullet. It’s deliberately provocative – it’s heavy metal.
The Internet Watch Foundation decided this was child porn, and attempted to block it from the view of UK internet users. In doing that, they accidentally made it impossible for anybody to edit Wikipedia from inside the UK.
People went nuts. There was a lot of press coverage, both inside the UK and internationally. The Wikimedia Foundation spoke to the press, and individual Wikipedia editors in the UK spoke to the press and blogged and tweeted and so on. And after a few days the IWF reversed its decision.
Two interesting things:
- When they reversed their decision, they explicitly said that they still believed the image was child porn, but that the public outcry was too much for them. They backed down because they couldn’t win a PR war against fans of the number five website in the world. If we had been Joe’s Album Art History Wiki, it’s clear the decision would not have been reversed.
- Importantly and invisibly, while this story was playing out, and was being written about by journalists internationally, at the Wikimedia Foundation we noticed Amazon had quietly pulled the Virgin Killer album from its site. It still sold a version of the album that had a different cover, but it no longer sold the version with the image that was being challenged. Amazon didn’t call us to ask what was going on, or to offer us help. They didn’t even silently watch and wait. They pulled the album off their shelves — not just in the UK but worldwide.
Another story.
In 2011, there was a Wikipedia conference in Mumbai at which Jimmy Wales spoke as well as our Board member Bishakha Datta, and a few of our staff. To our considerable surprise, a popular Indian political party picketed outside our conference and demanded that the police arrest us. They were doing that because the map of India displayed on Wikipedia shows the country’s borders as per the United Nations – with the borders with China and Pakistan “disputed” – and not as per the map defined by the government of India. It is only legal, in India, to publish a map showing India’s borders as they are defined and understood by the government of India.
As you can imagine, the protest made us exceedingly anxious. We knew that although India is a democracy with a commitment to free speech, that commitment is variable and laws and community standards inside India are somewhat volatile. And so we retained a bunch of lawyers. We spent weeks researching the legal and PR issues. Where we could, we took a variety of small non-controversial steps to protect ourselves. And ultimately we got lucky, and the issue seemed to fizzle out.
What we did not do was change the map of India displayed on Wikipedia. Partly because we can’t – that’s a Wikipedia community decision – but also because we shouldn’t. It’s perfectly reasonable to publish a map of India with the UN borders.
What was interesting here, as we researched our position, was what everybody else does. It seems that inside India, every major player except Wikipedia displays the map of India with the borders as defined by the Indian government. If you’re in India, that’s what Google shows you. When the Economist magazine prints a map of India, I was told by our lawyer, the version of the magazine they sell inside India shows a map different from the version in the magazine they sell elsewhere.(***)
It’s also worth noting that the Wikimedia Foundation has a legal team and a PR team, and Wikipedia is a popular site, much-loved by its readers. Not everyone has those resources. Of those that do, most are private and for-profit. Again, some of those players are doing great things. But on the whole, over time, they will put profits before public service. That’s their job and their obligation.
Governments, in my experience, aren’t helping. Mostly they’re just befuddled, but even if they knew what to do, there’s no reason to believe they’d do it. Too often they’re corporate captives. We saw it with SOPA. Today they listen too much to the entertainment industry – the copyright owners. Tomorrow, maybe they’ll be listening too much to giant technology companies. Either way, the voices of ordinary people will only rarely be heard, and I have difficulty believing that more or better civic engagement will fix that anytime soon. I agree with Larry Lessig: structural problems – fundraising, gerrymandering – have made for a powerful incumbency with skewed incentives.
And so, as a soldier in the trenches, my message to this conference is caution and concern.
Aside from Wikipedia, there is no large, popular space being carved out for the public good. There are a billion tiny experiments, some of them great. But we should be honest: we are not gaining ground. Our schools, our libraries, our parks – they are very, very small and they may or may not sustain. We certainly have no information-sharing participatory Garden of Eden, the promise of the internet that we all originally believed in. Though we are not lost, we are losing.
I say this because it’s easy to come together for a conference like this and get excited about awesome experiments and interesting breakthroughs. It’s worth doing! We want to celebrate success! But if you’ve read Tim Wu‘s Master Switch, if you’re reading Robert McChesney‘s Digital Disconnect, you know that the insiders are winning. We are not.
The internet needs serious help if it is to remain free and open, a powerful contributor to the public good. That’s what I’m hoping you’ll discuss over the course of this conference. How to create an ecosystem of parks and libraries and schools online … that supports participation, dialogue, sharing.
Thank you.
(*Turns out I was wrong about this. Mozilla is #60 globally according to comScore Media Metrix, the industry standard for web audience measurement. Therefore, I should actually have said Wikipedia, at #5, is the *only* non-profit in the top 25.)
(**When I delivered the talk I said 2009 and 1979. I’d been misremembering: it was 2008 and 1976.)
(***Since delivering this talk, Tilman Bayer at the Wikimedia Foundation pointed me towards this BBC article, in which the Economist accuses the Indian government of hostile censorship after it forced the magazine to place a blank white sticker over a map of Kashmir in the 30,000 copies of the May 2011 Economist that were distributed in India.)
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