Sony have officially announced the new deal that I wrote about last week. At the time only nine of the ten games had been announced, and I guessed at God of War being the final title.

Unfortunately for everyone, Avatar is the last game to make up the offer. So I was right about it being a third person action game (because another driving game in that line up would have been stupid), but wrong about it being a good game that people might want. Oh well.

It seems the early reports of GTA: Chinatown Wars being in the bundle were also incorrect – the actual game in the pack is Vice City Stories. Which is still great (not that I am in any way biased, obviously. Ahem).

I still see this promotion as being an attempt at dumping stock without having to officially lower the unit’s price. Only now it seems a slightly weaker one, offering one older, and one much worse, game.

Just a few days ago I wrote an article about Sony’s PSPGo, and some suggestions on how to improve sales.

Now they have made an announcement that I think shows their hand pretty clearly.

As the report goes, Sony are offering ten free games to anyone in the EU who has registered their PSP after April 1st (despite the unfortunate date it isn’t a joke).

The ten games are:

• Gran Turismo
• LittleBigPlanet
• MotorStorm Arctic Edge
• Wipeout Pure
• Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice
• FIFA World Cup 2010
• Need for Speed: Shift
• Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
• Assassins Creed: Blood Lines
• and one other game they haven’t confirmed.

This is a great deal for new buyers as the list of titles does a good job of covering the bases and includes some of the platform’s best (I would expect something like God of War: Chains of Olympus to fill the space as the final title).

So, Sony are desperately trying to temp new buyers but without wanting to lower the sale price of the unit (which I’m guessing they think would appear to be more clearly accepting defeat). At the same time they are offering nothing new to the people who have already bought a PSPGo, so their strategy is not one of providing further lasting value to existing customers.

This suggests to me that their current plan is purely to shift stock and empty out warehouses of existing PSPGo units to make way for something new. Almost certainly the PSP2.

I would expect PSPGo stock to be steadily declining from now on as production slows down.

To paraphrase the song “What the Xbox needs now, is love sweet love”. Or, bright colours and fun platform games. Actually that song quote is almost entirely unsuitable for this article. Oh well, it’s written now and there’s no way to delete characters.

Anyway, thank heavens that Insomniac (purveyors of the insanely good Ratchet & Clank series) have decided to go multi-platform today. I mean, it’s not particularly beneficial to me, as I have a PS3, but I can only see it being a good thing for the two parties involved.

Firstly, Insomniac get a wider audience. Their games sell reasonably well anyway, as far as I can tell, but having more potential customers is never going to be a bad thing. They also get the freedom to create a new IP. Although I love R&C, as a series it’s getting a little long in the tooth, and this is starting to show. Flexing their creative muscles on something entirely new is sure to fire up the staff.

Technology-wise they already have a PS3 engine that is more than capable of doing the business. As numerous face offs will attest, this is the harder format to get a multi-platform release shining on, so their engine programmers can focus on the “easier” task ahead.

From Microsoft’s point of view, they have the potential to get a great family-friendly bow in their arrow. Assuming, that is, Insomniac head down the Spyro / Ratchet & Clank line of their past, rather than looking towards Resistance – though given the amount of competition muddy-looking FPS games have on the Xbox I think they would be mad not to.

MS have frequently tried to relaunch the 360 as a family system, yet there is a noticable lack of bright and cheery cartoon-ish games in the catalogue. The only ones that springs to mind are by Rare – the pretty but otherwise dull launch title, Kameo, and the Pokemon-aping but confusing Viva Pinata.

Of course, the final party that benefits here is EA, as they have signed the publishing deal. Which is interesting in itself – after signing with Respawn less than a month ago, they are doing a good job of partnering with strong 3rd party developers. Is this a sign of things to come, and will they be making more use of the EA Partners Program, rather than acquiring developers?

This post was originally drafted up a couple of months ago, when it was called “How to save the PSPGo”. After having a bit of a think though, it seems unlikely that such a chance exists. So I changed the title to better reflect my take on the situation.

So anyway, the PSPGo. A great idea for a product, absolutely wasted on the product itself.

It must have sounded so good. Take the PSP, with its decent catalogue of titles, and make it smaller, lighter, and get rid of that crappy UMD drive that everyone has always complained about and has increased the loading times of games. You also keep all of its media playing capabilities, and its theoretically great links to the PS3 (though I’m not sure how many people actually use that stuff to play their games on the other side of the world).

The actual hardware of a PSPGo is small and lovely – it’s only slightly bigger than an iPhone, and I’m pretty sure it’s smaller than my DSi – and is an improvement in every way over the previous PSP models. It’s very comfortable to hold, has a decent battery life and the load times are shorter than before (though still strangely long on some games).

But the public never warmed to the PSPGo. Admittedly it was released at a time when the PSP had already been on a steady decline, with new releases becoming rarer and rarer (due in some part to developers being scared off by poor sales. It’s sort of a vicious downward cycle).

How could Sony save some face with the PSPGo, and possibly allow it some sort of Indian Summer?

Firstly, drop the price. It was always overpriced, but there is the argument that a high price affords an item a more desirable status. However, it’s pretty clear at this point that the thing is never going to sell gangbusters. You could still improve sales by dropping £75 off the RRP, lowering it closer to an impulse buy for gadget fans. Especially in the face of the (almost certainly true) rumours that a PSP2 is just around the corner, keeping it at the launch RRP seems foolish.

Release more back catalogue titles onto the PSN store. As publishers are apparently reluctant to persue this themselves, they may need some slight financial incentive – so Sony should be offering deals of one off payments per title released. At the end of the day Sony will make this money back in their cut of the game’s sale.

In particular they should be targeting the games that are regarded as big PSP classics, such as Lumines, that currently aren’t available due to licensing issues. Licensing issues almost always can be made to go away with the application of money. While they are looking at the store, work on getting more games released to more stores. With digital distribution there shouldn’t be so many titles locked to one store or another, and currently some territories look very bare in comparison to others.

Scrap the weekly releases. I don’t understand this at all, unless it is an attempt to make the week’s releases look impressive by bundling them together into one update as opposed to spreading them out. But as a customer, I would like games and DLC as soon as possible. Checking the online store is no particular inconvenience to me, unlike trekking into town to go to the nearest game retailer, so I don’t mind doing it multiple times a week. This would also benefit developers slightly, as customers are more likely to buy for small amounts more frequently, rather than splurge a large amount on a number of games on the same day. Developers shouldn’t have to compete with each other for money once a week.

Sony could also enforce a better pricing scheme. Honestly there are so many games that are hugely overpriced it’s just not even funny any more. Who pays £31 for a PSP game? And the pricing differences between regional stores is ludicrous too (Prinny – Can I Really Be The Hero was twice as expensive on the UK store as the US one, for example). Thankfully this seems to be on the mend – or it may just be a one off case of good fortun – as ModNation Racers has released at £16.99 on PSN, compared to the UMD version’s RRP of £24.99. Even taking into account the immediate discounting of online retailers, the downloadable release is still a pound (a pound!) cheaper.

Finally I would recommend that Sony force developers to create the downloadable version of any future PSP titles for simultaneous release with the UMD version. This should be part of submission, with both versions required. Players should not be further inconvenienced and disappointed as titles they are anticipating and want to spend money on are delayed, or not released at all, on their PSPGo.

Fallout 3 has easily 20 hours of gameplay. For most people it would be around the 50 hour mark. I think I clocked up around 80, almost obsessively hoovering up the various side-plots and locations.

Obviously I would say that I got my money’s worth for the £40 I paid for the game – about 50 pence per hour is good value entertainment by anyone’s standards.

But what about a game that offers only 20 hours of entertainment for my £40? Is that still good value? Many modern shooters have single player storylines that last 10 hours, at the most.

I will freely admit to being a little worried about the size of games. And not as a developer, but as a player. As I get on further in life I am finding myself with less and less spare time to devote to playing (this sad state of affairs should be a blog post in itself I guess, if Richard Herring can write an entire book about being a man-child).

And when I recently played Battlefield Bad Company 2, the difficulty selection screen gave me something of an epiphany. “Content tourist” was one of the options (for the easiest difficulty level, of course). That’s my entire game-playing style condensed down to two words.

I like to see all of the broad strokes that a game has to offer – each level location, the range of weapons or cars, what enemies it contains, and the gameplay elements – and I like to do it with the minimum amount of frustration that still offers some feeling of achievement in progression.

What I am wondering now, is are we being too clever for our own good with the various methods being employed to keep a player playing one game? Character investment is a great way of making multiplayer feel less zero-sum and keep people playing your game rather than those of your competitors, but at the same time is it stopping them from buying more of your own as well?

As impressive as Modern Warfare 2′s sales figures are, would it have sold more if its potential audience wasn’t still playing Call of Duty 4 and World at War as well?

Would we sell more copies if we made shorter games, and sold them for a lower cost?

To go back to the start of this article, by the time I had finished my 80 hours of Fallout 3 I had well and truly had my fill of that world, and never bought any of the DLC. I’m also not terribly interested in the upcoming New Vegas sequel. I can’t help but think I would have been a buyer of these if I hadn’t overdosed on the original game.

Well it seems a little pointless to regurgitate the sordid details of the whole Activision / Infinity Ward / Respawn love-hate triangle, so I’m not going to bother. Especially since a lot of the details floating around the internet seem to be little more than conjecture.

What I will do is point out two things that have really stood out to me during the last few weeks.

Firstly, although this has been the talk of the industry for weeks, it appears to have made little to no impact on any “proper” news sites. This suggests to me that the world at large couldn’t give two hoots. Can you imagine it not being news if Spielberg got kicked out of Dreamworks? Developers may have their logos in front of a game, but they are still pretty much faceless.

The other thing I found interesting is that Activision’s share price has not taken a particularly brutal hit throughout the whole ordeal. Shareholders clearly still have confidence in Activision, Treyarch, Sledgehammer etc. to produce the goods.

Whether this confidence turns out to be misplaced is yet to be seen.

As regular readers will know (because I mention it at every possible opportunity) I’m spending some of my spare time writing a game in XNA. As I’ve previously mentioned I’m not terribly bothered about selling this game – making money off it is not important to me – but I would like it to be able to reach a wider audience than this blog manages.

After looking at the options, putting it on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel seems the best bet. This does mean that I have to choose a price point for it, however.

Indie games are not allowed to be released for free. I can only assume Microsoft wishes to recoup at least some of the cost of producing the tools and hosting the files, and their cut of sales is to do this. The price points available to developers are 80, 240, and 400 MS points, with the top option only being available to games that have at least a 48Mb download (why file size is linked to worth isn’t really the point of this article, but is also bizarre, since a developer could just include a lot of data to reach that).

Now, for whatever reason most games are currently being released in the 80 point price bracket, and indeed the 240 price is seen as something of a millstone around a title’s neck.

In this regard the pricing “race to the bottom” appears to be mirroring Apple’s App store. What is interesting here is that it has been shown that psychologically consumers equate greater price with greater quality – ie if something if more expensive then it must be worth the extra cost.

It’s worth stopping at this point to make sure you have all read Tommy Refenes’ recent GDC rant about the bizarre pricing of iPhone Apps, and how his net profit was not hurt by increasing his game’s price considerably. Read it here.

How I see it is that the whole channel is being hurt by a) the enforcing of just three available price points (with only two available to most titles) not giving developers enough granularity to be able to realistically price titles relative to their peers, and b) developers vastly under-estimating the worth of their own work and driving for higher sales figures rather than looking at the bottom line.

It’s often stated that gamers already think of the Indie Games channel as being low quality (due in part to poor box art, and a heavy influx of ‘novelty’ titles such as back massagers early in the service’s life). Now they are being told that 80 points is the most they should pay for anything of quality they do find on there.

As a colleague recently said to me – the chances of someone finding your game are pretty slim anyway (given that sales drop off hugely after the titles leaves the “what’s new” list), so if they do find it and like it there is as much chance of them paying 240 points as paying 80 points.

So, with all of this in mind I have decided to treat Color Zap as something of an experiment (and one that will more than likely fall on its own arse) and price it at the 240 point mark. I’ll let you know how it works out for me.

And to other developers I would say – have confidence in your work, and don’t undersell yourself.

I recently watched Guy Ritchie’s latest movie, Sherlock Holmes, and really enjoyed it. Though as someone who has never been much of a fan of the character before I have no idea how “authentic” it was. Probably not very.

Afterwards as I was thinking about it, and pondering how I mysteriously didn’t want to punch Jude Law right in the face by the end of it, I realised that it had no game tie-in.

Surely, a mostly family friendly action movie coming out around the holiday period should have a tie-in, right? It would be so obvious. Sections of the film lend themselves easily to levels, from early tombs, to shipyards, bridges, and there’s even a sewer in there. What more obvious concession to the art of game design could there be?

Well bullet time, for one. But look! Mr Ritchie even thought of that. At a few points in the movie Holmes is shown in slow motion, plotting the moves in a fight several attacks ahead in order to best incapacitate his opponent. If that’s not ripe for video game treatment I don’t know what is.

Throw in a few slow paced detective levels where the player wanders around some smaller areas looking to pick up clues, slap it in a box, and away you go.

Could it be that the industry is finally shedding itself of poor quality movie licenses, developed on tiny budgets in 9 months in order to launch at the same time as the box office? Did this one instance just slip by?

Or could it be that the video game rights to Holmes aren’t owned by the same people as the movie rights, and it was a legal nightmare to clear? Given that there are a few Sherlock games on the market right now this seems slightly more likely to me.

Anyway, who knows. I’m off to play Wanted: Weapons of Fate.

iPad fever has hit the internet, as you have probably already noticed.

It certainly looks like a swanky piece of kit (I was going to type “little piece of kit” there, but I guess the “little” isn’t so true, though it is very thin), and already pundits are jumping over themselves to either damn it or praise it.

Oh by the way, have I ever mentioned how much I hate the phrase “game changer”? They rarely are. Though Apple seems to have a better track record of producing them, with the iPod and then iPhone.

My own take on it, and I’m assuming that if you’ve read this far you care, is that it will probably sell like delicious hot cakes that come with a free gold bar. But I’m not sure if it will do anything particularly amazing for the games industry.

The doubts I have are based on these half formed ideas:

• It is apparently targetted at a casual user who wants internet, email, etc. from home, but doesn’t like computers. The thing is, I’m fairly sure a lot of these people already do have computers. What is the relationship between this market, and people who are willing to buy a new gadget to fill a role that is already occupied in their household?
• It will use the existing iPhone app store, so will players carry over their current expectation of quality games at very cut prices?
• Most of the existing iPhone apps that have enjoyed great success have been built specifically for the phone and its strengths. ie small bursts of gaming for when you are on the go (or on the can). The iPad is clearly not as portable as the iPhone, I doubt even the most ardent Apple fan would argue otherwise. Will players be expecting more meaty (for want of a better description) games?
• Anything that uses the accelerometer seems to be out of the window. Rotating a phone is one thing (though it’s fairly annoying on that), but watch this guy waving the iPad around while playing a racing game. It’s a combination of annoying, nauseating, and scary (would you be happy flopping your expensive new toy around like that).
• Existing games that use on screen “virtual buttons” are also a bit screwed. Again, something designed for a phone’s dimensions and relative thumb to screen size ratio, double scaled just isn’t that comfortable (according to some reports, which annoyingly I can’t find the link to again right now) to use in the iPad’s scale. Anything that uses virtual buttons, but doesn’t have a dedicated iPad version released, is just going to put its players through pain.

So yeah, I’m sure that provided it sells as expected there will be some great games made for it, and some success stories will provide impressive numbers. I’m also sure there will be plenty of app developers who will continue to make good, but not great, money off it. I’m just not convinced it’s another “game changer” is all.

In contrast to yesterday’s post, it seems that last year was the second strongest for the UK industry, since records began.

Not bad considering the economic climate. Not quite the once believed recession-proof, but perhaps more resistant to it than had been feared?