No.21 - 31 May 2000

You might well think that even an arch-cynic like Devil’s Advocate would be hard pressed to find fault with Sega’s recent decision to give away online Dreamcast puzzle game Chu Chu Rocket for free to every DC owner in the country. It’s great game, it’ll do lots to promote online gaming, and it’ll delight the punters. But frankly, that just shows how stupid you are.

With Sega’s financial problems deepening beyond even their previous catastrophic state, the company has a limited amount of cash to splash around on grand gestures. Retail, also going through a tough time at the moment, has been crying out for a hardware price cut almost since the machine was launched – shops are having to slash £50 out of their own margin AND give away a free game just to shift a few consoles at the moment. And yet, Sega has dealt them a double blow by depriving them of the sales of a triple-A game and refusing to countenance a price cut until, most people now suspect, the PS2 launch in late October, condemning retailers to another five painful months of summer, when business is thin at the best of times.

It may have been done with the best of intentions, but, like the expensive sponsoring of mediocre football teams, the Chu Chu giveaway is another example of Sega misguidedly trying to act like big boys on a pocket-money budget. It’s only to be hoped that, whenever they DO cut the hardware price, there’s still a market left to take advantage of it.

No. 22 - 7 June 2000

It’s difficult to know which side to root for in the bizarre football copyright wars which broke out last week. On the one hand, footballers are perhaps the most obscenely overpaid people in the whole of Europe, taking home more than most people’s yearly wage every week for the onerous task of kicking a ball around a bit. (And then, of course, moaning that they’re “exhausted” when they have to play more than one game in a week, even though thousands of Sunday League players manage to squeeze in a full season on top of having hard-work real jobs.)

But on the other hand, it’s difficult to feel any sympathy for the software publishers who’re trying to get just as rich by selling us the same old game anything up to three times a year, and in most cases not even bothering their arses trying to make them any good. At least the footballers generally go out and try to play their best in every game, if only to make sure they don’t fall off the gravy train. The publishers, though, are happy to rest on the second-hand laurels of their various expensive licences, rather than investing the cash in producing decent software. (Then again, when you compare the sales of ISS Pro to the sales of FIFA or even the dire UEFA Striker, who can blame them?)

Like the judge in the Al Fayed-Hamilton libel case, those deciding this one must surely be tempted to try to find some way in which both sides can lose.

No. 23 - 12 June 2000

Before we start, Devil’s Advocate would like to apologise to non-share-owning readers for going on about the stock market again. But once more, the actions of our lovely pinstriped friends in the City are causing your poor simple-minded columnist bafflement. Last week saw a short-lived but dramatic rise in the value of E***s stock, with the share price increasing by almost 35% in the space of a couple of days. (Of course, it’s been so low lately a 35% rise isn’t quite as impressive as it sounds – a mathematical truth that might also apply, incidentally, to reports of 400% increases in Dreamcast sales - but notable all the same.)

It seemed unlikely that this was entirely due to the prospects of imminent colossal avalanches of cash from a few WAP-phone games, so Devil’s Advocate did a little digging and found that the climb was mostly attributable to hot whispers on the grapevine (mm, sounds like a particularly sultry Herb Alpert track. Or a very rude double entendre) of an imminent takeover bid from Infogrames, seizing on the UK firm’s extreme current vulnerability.

Now, your columnist might just be really stupid, but if you want to profit from E***s being taken over by Infogrames, surely it’s a bit boneheaded to buy so recklessly and ramp the share price up so high that the company’s suddenly too expensive for another firm to take it over again? Is everyone absolutely sure that these are the best people to be in charge of the nation’s economy?

No. 24 - 16 June 2000

Sega’s Dreamcast has, thus far, proved one of the most well-protected pieces of console hardware ever produced. Despite the machine now being over a year and a half old, there still isn’t a pirated-games market, and it’s still not possible to reliably play imported games on a PAL machine, even if you go to the drastic lengths of fitting a modchip. Or at least, it wasn’t possible until last week, when a DC magazine produced in the UK gave away a cover-mounted CD which enables, very simply, a PAL machine to play – with a reported 98% success rate – any Dreamcast game from any territory in the world.

This is, of course, deeply ironic given the pompous moral stance taken by so many mags over carrying adverts for modchipping services (and hey, now we can see why, right?), but the lack of a loud and angry response from Sega at this single-handed destruction of all their hard territorial protection work just might point to the fact that the industry is at last facing up to an unpalatable truth – that for all the industry’s frantic efforts to stop people buying import games, the whole thing is a stupid and futile waste of time which achieves nothing other than to piss off loyal customers, feed the very companies you’re trying to kill and get the Advertising Standards Authority on your back. Could we be quietly heading towards a future of the real six-billion-players console at last? Sega would appear (finally) to think so.

No. 25 - 26 June 2000

There were quite a few smirks and sniggers at both software publishers and PR firms this week when a little stunt went wrong for erstwhile UK independent Gremlin. A few Usenet hackers managed to discover that a series of newsgroup postings purporting to be from happy gamers praising the firm’s new Mario Kart wannabe Wacky Races, all originated from Gremlin’s own servers in what would appear to be a rather feeble and misguided attempt to get the game some grass-roots word-of-mouth going.

But there’s a less funny side to Gremlin’s embarrassment, too. As everyone and his Shetland pony rushes to jump on the e-commerce bandwagon, there’s also a growing tendency among consumers to regard Internet-carried information with wary cynicism. Recent revelations that even huge and wealthy Net publishers were taking a cut from links to e-tailers on review sites (“Like this game? Click here to buy it”), and hence having a vested interest in unduly positive reviews, have come as a nasty surprise to most of the gaming public.

And clumsy stunts like the Wacky Races one, which was immediately seized upon and spread, ironically, by the very word-of-mouth that the publisher presumably hoped to take advantage of, will only increase the punters’ suspicion of online information, and their paranoia about online dealing generally. If we’re not careful, we could yet kill the e-commerce goose before it has the chance to lay a single egg.

No. 26 - 3 July 2000

The spin doctors are at work again. Last week’s triumphant announcement from Sega that they’ve shipped out 100,000 copies of Chu Chu Rocket! was treated unquestioningly in most of the press. Yet the slightest examination of the figures makes for slightly less impressive reading. For one thing, Sega announced that there are now 300,000 Dreamarena subscribers – a figure which shows that even out of those who’ve made the effort to sign up to the service, two-thirds couldn’t be bothered to spend 20 seconds filling out a form in order to get themselves a totally free copy of what’s generally (and rightly) agreed to be one of the best games of the year so far.

And secondly, Sega proudly trumpeted that the attached ad campaign has so far spent £10million on TV advertising alone. A moment’s mental arithmetic reveals that this works out at a £100 spend by Sega for every free copy of Chu Chu they’ve sent out. Throw in the cost of the games themselves, including development, other advertising, production and admin costs, and you’ve got a hell of an expensive way to give people a present without doing yourself any tangible good. In fact, if you add all that up, it would have been very nearly as cheap to simply give away Dreamcasts. Now THAT would have been a bold marketing initiative. As it is, Sega may be flashing a fur coat around, but there’s nothing left underneath it. Any minute now, there may be a gust of wind.

No.27 - 10 July 2000

Rebellion’s out-of-the-blue purchase of sci-fi comic 2000AD is undoubtedly one of the boldest and most imaginative moves made by anyone in the games business in living memory. For what would probably have been the price of a couple of character licences, the developer has got itself an entire going concern (though if recent sales rumours are to be believed, that’s “going” in the “-going-gone” sense), as well as the rights to hundreds of much-loved existing characters (at least three or four of which might conceivably be turned into a game), plus many more which might be yet to come from what’s recently been a particularly purple creative patch for the magazine.

More alarming, though, is the news that the firm is considering using the deal to publish strips based on some of its forthcoming games. 2000AD readers with even medium-term memories still wince at the memory of the last time this happened, a short-lived and deservedly ill-received tie-in with EA’s Urban Strike which embarrassed and degraded everyone who was connected with it or read it. 2000AD is a British cultural gem, and it would be better to allow it a dignified death than see it turned into some crappy editorially-compromised advertising pamphlet. Should this happen, Devil’s Advocate will, it is sure, be only the first in a long line of disgruntled fans ready to deliver Rebellion a Rigellian Hotshot right up the bracket.

No. 28 - 18 July 2000

Online gaming evangelists have recently been, even more than usual, loudly proclaiming the imminent (just like it’s been imminent for the last five years) explosion in popularity of the pastime on the grounds that unmetered internet access was finally about to reach the UK. That view was dealt something of a blow this weekend, though, with the sudden announcement by the LineOne that they were cancelling the free Net-calls deal that they’ve been operating in conjunction with phone company Quip for the last few months. The announcement followed hot on the heels of similar cancellations from a host of other firms, and still more are rethinking the policy - Breathe are no longer accepting applications for their £50-for-life free Net offer, Freeserve are limiting numbers to a tiny trickle, and NTL are quoting potential customers a waiting time of “several months”.

It seems that, for whatever reason, the UK public’s clamour for Net access is so great that it’s simply not economical for any company to offer unmetered calls – after all, if even the obscenely wealthy BT, who own 50% of LineOne, can’t afford it, it seems doubtful that anyone else could. Of course, many pissed-off customers are already suggesting that the whole thing was just a cynical scam by BT to get people onto their expensive Surftime program (the option LineOne, coincidentally, are recommending as a replacement) , but even if that was true, there’s not much anyone can do about it. Widespread online gaming in this country seems further off than ever.

No. 29 - 25 July 2000

If there’s one thing that really puzzles Devil’s Advocate about the British videogames industry, it’s this: Why does no-one ever say what they mean? Reviewers privately despise endless sequels of dull games, yet give them high scores because it’s what the readers expect. Retrogaming packages, on the other hand, almost always get panned, yet visit the magazine’s offices and you’ll find the team playing Galaxian all day. Publishers profess their commitment to original and innovative development, yet instantly can even mildly risky products at the first sign of a profits warning. And everyone applauds and hypes huge, overblown epics like Zelda and Final Fantasy, when all they actually want to do is play tennis.

Every conversation your columnist has overheard for the last few weeks, whether between journalists, developers or retailers, has been marked by the participants waxing lyrical about Virtua Tennis, Sega’s latest Dreamcast arcade port. Despite another stroke of Sega marketing genius (holding back a finished tennis game until September, just in time for the start of the football season), it seems as if this beautifully-executed but inherently simple title is going to be one of the hits of the year. Which is nice, but from reading the trade or specialist press you’d never even know the game was on the release schedules. Why? Well, because it’s just a tennis game. The day we have the courage of our convictions and admit to liking thegames we REALLY like, maybe things will get interesting again.

No.30 - 9 August 2000

Once again, the party season is almost upon us. Yes, it’s just a couple of weeks until ECTS, when the entire videogames industry gets together, meets up old chums, gets drunk, snorts a load of Bolivian go-faster powder, stares at bored models’ tits and shouts itself hoarse trying to be heard over the hideous cacophony of a dozen different stands all blaring out different music at once.

Or at least, when half of it does. This year, as with so many years gone by, most of the biggest names in the business have been posted missing from one of the world’s biggest trade fairs, and Devil’s Advocate doesn’t understand it. The European games market is officially the biggest in the world, bigger than the US and miles ahead of Japan. The ECTS is positioned perfectly to showcase all the games that will be coming out for Christmas, still overwhelmingly the most important time in the industry’s calendar.

And yet, even European-centred games firms rush out to E3 every spring to be trampled by the general public but ignore a God-given opportunity to actually get some business done and get a load of free media coverage right here in the world’s biggest market.  (Because if you think TV companies are going to trek all the way to your poxy little private suites in some anonymous hotel somewhere, you’ve got another think coming.) What’s that all about, then?

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