No. 51 - 25 June 2001

Here’s a thought that just occurred to Devil’s Advocate the other day. We’re all tired of hearing everyone banging on about the “transition period” as an excuse for their terrible figures. But why, in fact, is a transition period a bad thing? As we can plainly see (but not for long) from the chart figures, what a transition period means is that everybody still sells big numbers of popular-format games, while also taking advantage of the boom from early adopters spending a lot of money on new machines and software to go with it.

However, if we fast-forward 12 months or so from now, when the transition is likely to be more or less over, what do we see? The two most successful videogame formats of all time – PSone and Game Boy – will more than likely be all but dead. The lingering sales still enjoyed by the odd Dreamcast and N64 title will be a thing of the past. And as Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all bang their heads together like a bunch of frustrated stags, the chances that any of the new formats will have reached such stratospheric heights to replace all those lost sales seem pretty slim (especially since everyone’s going to have to sell twice as many copies just to get their dev costs back). It’s not the transition period we should be worried about, friends, it’s what happens when it’s over. Right now, we’ve never had it so good.

No. 52 - 11 July 2001

It’s nice being here on this page, but gloomy old Devil’s Advocate has always felt a bit jealous of all the other “fun” features like the Top Ten, so this week your humble column proudly presents its own TOP TEN THINGS YOU CAN BUY WITH A FUTURE NETWORKS SHARE. (Previously £9.37. Statistics correct at time of writing. The value of stocks can collapse as well as plummet. Devil's Advocate accepts no responsibility if you lose 97% of your money inside the first hour.)

1. Nine-tenths of a Crunchie.

2. A copy of the Guardian (weekday), minus the G2 and sports sections.

3.  One-and-a-third first class stamps.

4. One Game Boy Advance-size battery from a market stall.

5. A 3-amp fuse.

6. Two ounces of Kola Kubes.

7. Four seconds of a mediocre lawyer’s time.

8. Half a shoelace.

9. Two Future Network shares this time next week.

10. (Looks at watch, checks Yahoo Finance.) No, wait, make that three.

Videogames – the kids just can’t get enough of them!

No. 53 - 25 July 2001

Surely, you might think, even a columnist as miserable and unpleasant as Devil’s Advocate could find nothing dismaying in this week’s blockbusting sales of the long-awaited PS2 flagship Gran Turismo 3? But, like you always are about everything ever, you’d be wrong again. Because even if, as seems likely, GT3 has shifted a staggering 100,000 copies in its first week on sale, Devil’s Advocate isn’t so sure that that’s actually all that great a result.

After all, you’ve got over half a million UK PS2 owners who’ve been salivating desperately for a single must-have game for almost three-quarters of a year now, and GT3 is one of the two great white hopes that they’ve been pathetically clinging to all that time. And yet, now that it’s here, and though it’s been hyped to the heavens for over a year, and though it more or less delivers everything it promised to, and there’s absolutely no competition in the PS2 charts to speak of… even then, around 85% of all UK PS2 owners couldn't’find it in themselves to go and get a copy. Perhaps more alarmingly, the kind of Internet frenzy seen so recently on web and Usenet forums and discussion groups surrounding the release of the GB Advance is conspicuous by its absence for GT3.

First-week sales of GT3 were always going to be sky-high, and 100,000 copies is in itself obviously a great achievement, but is Devil’s Advocate alone in sensing a distinct anti-climax? What IS it going to take to really excite the PS2 audience?

No. 54 - 8 August 2001

With the PS2 finally getting a much-needed kick up the sales pants thanks to the release of GT3, and everyone continuing to be excited about the Gamecube, conventional wisdom within the industry has recently been of the opinion that Microsoft’s Xbox was in for an uphill struggle. However, at the eleventh hour before Nintendo and the Seattle giant go head to head, the Xbox has just had a massive boost, in the shape of an announcement from Trip Hawkins that the 3DO Company is distinctly reluctant to commit itself to the format.

What that means, of course, is that the Xbox might well be the only videogames console available this Christmas that ISN’T afflicted with three or four mind-bogglingly terrible Army Men games. So numerous, and so dreadful, has the entire series been that we may well see consumers stampeding into games shops in their thousands, hurling thick wads of cash at terrified retailers in the knowledge that they’re almost certain not to be affronted by a diabolical licence cash-in programmed by two work experience kids in a fortnight.

If Devil’s Advocate was Microsoft, it would be preparing a multi-million pound ad campaign right now. “BUY AN XBOX – IT’S THE CONSOLE WITH ABSOLUTELY NO ARMY MEN GAMES!” You’d get killed in the rush.

No. 55 - 20 August 2001

It’s not just Devil’s Advocate who can see how bad the recent round of games-mag ABCs are, of course. At what should be a great time for console mags especially (three major new machines released in the last 18 months, and two more imminent), a quality mag like C&VG shedding a third of its readers in six months is obviously a worrying sign.

But more alarming than that is the state of the PS2 magazine market. Supposed to be leading the way out of the current slump, the figures for PS2 mags are nothing less than shocking. Official PS2 is stuck with a zero rise despite having had the likes of GT3 on the cover demo disc, PSM2 shows a nasty fall despite throwing loads of money at a monthly DVD, and Engine closed after just four issues. All of this, of course, has been achieved despite the PS2 userbase having more or less tripled between the previous ABC period and this one. Future in particular has a hell of a lot riding on the next six months’ worth of games-magazine sales, and while the second half-year set of figures is traditionally always healthier than the first, these figures leave a genuinely daunting amount of ground to be made up. After all, 50% market share is nothing to shout about if everyone else is getting the hell out of the market as it sinks into quicksand.

No. 56 - 6 September 2001

It hardly seems like twelve months since Devil’s Advocate last found itself heaping criticism on a limp lettuce of an ECTS, but this year’s set new world records in expensive time-wasting pointlessness. Said by several attendees to have more closely resembled a car-boot sale than an exhibition of the latest in electronic entertainment, Devil’s Advocate can’t actually offer a personal opinion, as despite pre-registering several weeks in advance, your reporter’s badge has as yet still failed to arrive. However, the fact that the Game Of The Show award went to a GBA puzzle game that could have run quite happily on the Atari VCS speaks volumes for the dearth of exciting new software on show.

Now, calling for everyone to give up on the ECTS is both unoriginal and impractical – the European software industry does need some sort of event at which everyone can meet everyone else and get some business done. But as it stands, the ECTS is clearly not that event. There is one blindingly obvious difference between ECTS and E3, the trade show that goes from strength to strength every year – public access. A public day changes the whole meaning of the show, and means the expense of taking a presence at least serves a double purpose, taking some of the weight off your advertising budget at no extra cost. Remind me again why we’re so desperate to keep the people who actually buy our product at arm’s length from it?

No. 57 - 19 September 2001

While Devil’s Advocate would naturally like to add its voice to the huge list of people totally unaffected by last week’s appalling terrorist outrage in New York who nonetheless feel the need to proclaim publicly the controversial view that killing thousands of innocent civilians is wrong, your columnist is somewhat baffled by the response of the games industry. Changing the artwork of Red Alert (depicting the NY skyline in flames) or suspending Microsoft Flight Simulator for a while are just about understandable, but the announced postponings of, among others, Activision’s Spiderman 2 (features a tall building, much as the still-on-sale first Spiderman does) and Sega’s Propellor Arena (features a flying machine) strikes your reporter as rather gratuitous and misguided at best.

It would take a columnist far more cynical even than Devil’s Advocate to suggest that overenthusiastic marketing departments are at work here – for surely absolutely no-one would even contemplate using thousands of hideous deaths to grab a quick bit of cheap publicity for their forthcoming releases, would they? – but if we’re going to can every game with a building higher than five stories or any kind of airborne machine in it, we’re in for a heck of a quiet Christmas. Watching the news like everyone else, Devil’s Advocate is pretty sure the human race, and the population of New York, is a bit more resilient than that.

No. 58 - 2 October 2001

It’s only a few weeks since ELSPA bemoaned the Electronics Boutique-led emasculation of the Chart-Track charts into the figures-less waste of space that they are now. ELSPA’s main complaint was that removing the sale figures from the weekly charts made it difficult for the industry to effectively promote itself by shouting about its successes and trumpeting exactly how much money the latest blockbusters had brought into the nation’s economy. Apparently, widespread public knowledge of the games chart was good news for the industry.

Devil’s Advocate was left somewhat baffled, then, by last week’s announcement that ELSPA are to use state of the art encryption technology to ensure that, from now on, no-one who hasn’t forked out an ELSPA subscription fee will be able to discover the chart’s contents through an impenetrable shield of “sealed HTML”, whatever that is.  Frankly, your columnist suspects that within a couple of months, you’ll have to turn up in person at ELSPA HQ, in triplicate, recite the first 80 verses of the Koran backwards and hand over one of your children’s lungs just to be allowed to find out what’s No.1 in the Playstation budget chart. It’s easy to see what ELSPA have to gain from this arrangement, but quite what good it does the industry whose benefit ELSPA is supposed to serve is something that’s proving a little more elusive.