For some time now I’ve been involved with a video game art outsourcing venture called Vykarian, located in Shanghai and founded by my buddy Xin Chung. We’ve been building towards an eventual goal of the “best and biggest” outsourcing venture in China. It’s our plan to establish art “factories” which are capable of cranking out content for all forms of digital media.

As I’ve stated before, my ultimate interest in this venture is directly related to my desire to establish a game and animation film studio under one roof (Twisted Tales anyone?!) It’s also clear to a lot of people that in the near future big publishers and developers cannot build next-gen AAA titles without the assistance of dedicated outsourcing factories. And a best case scenario is to have those factories managed by people experienced with actual game production. That’s Vykarian for you.

During ChinaJoy 2006 in Shanghai this week, Xin and I will be running around promoting the wonders of China art outsourcing. Maybe we’ll see you there?

WGA and Activation Failures Don’t Faze Redmond
While Microsoft insists that problems with the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program are much overblown — claiming last week that “only a fraction of a percent” of the systems that fail the WGA verification are actually legal — Microsoft’s customers keep saying otherwise. What’s worse, the WGA false negatives are leading to increasing number of situations where customers run afoul of XP’s product activation, leaving them to beg Microsoft and/or their PC vendor to help.

A few days ago Windows XP on my primary work computer decided that it wasn’t a legal copy. Strange since the copy running on there was pre-installed at the time that the machine was built by Alienware. There used to be a Windows serial number on the back of the machine, but the sticker has since fallen off. What’s worse, as soon as I started receiving the dreaded, “You may be a victim of software piracy…” notices, I also started noticing increased system instability. All of this culminated in what I can only assume was some form of malware infection, a hardware crash (related to my soundcard), and a pretty complete system failure.

I was angry for a moment, but then I realized: I don’t much like Windows anyway. So I wiped the offending garbage from my machine and installed Ubuntu Linux. All in all a painless process.

The truth is, Ubuntu “out of the box” is a little lacking (can’t play proprietary video formats, run PC apps, is missing much needed apps, etc), but with the use of an installer script called Automatix, I now have a free, highly functional, and stable OS. And it’s pretty to boot.

This isn’t the first time I’ve attempted a switch to Linux, but it is the first time that I’ve made the switch and am going to stay switched.

Hong Kong is a densely packed forest of high-rise business and residential buildings. In many respects it is a modern, high-tech place. But it’s also China, which translates to “a little backwards”. For instance, people often seem unclear on the concept of gravity. There are many tales told of random objects falling from the skies: televisions, construction equipment, windows, ashtrays, and more.

Over the weekend I read in the local paper about a women who was “bombed” by a pair of scissors:

Scissors thrown from highrise lodge in woman’s skull
Sunday, July 23, 2006 13:50 IST
HONG KONG: An elderly Hong Kong woman was rushed to hospital after a pair of scissors thrown from a high rise window lodged into her skull, police said on Sunday

The 78-year old was one of two people hurt by falling scissors on Saturday. In a separate incident a 28-year old man suffered cuts to his forehead when a pair hit him on the head.

And while this woman didn’t actually die, she very well could have. It seems the paramedics felt that she was saved by her frumpy grandma-hat.

If this had happened in the US I’m sure that Senator Clinton would have been calling for a ban on “Edward Scissorhands”  movies to minors. So along with calling for a ban on scissors, I’m also going to demand that everyone start wearing frumpy grandma-hats whenever they go outside. It’s for your own protection.
A few pictures of the newspaper article, taken with my camera phone:

They spew out a ton of polution, but hey, it makes for nice sunsets:

Great news today from Codemasters and Mercury Steam:

Clive Barker returns to gaming
Today, Codemasters announced that master of horror Clive Barker will be returning to video games when Clive Barker’s Jericho ships for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in late 2007. …Jericho is being developed by Mercury Steam, who last worked on Scrapland.

The Mercury Steam guys really deserved, and more importantly, earned the right to work on such a great project. Their vision and exectution on Scrapland made it clear to me that they are one of the best game developers in the world. And I think the new Barker game will give them a chance to show that to the world.

Definitely a project to keep an eye on.

GameDaily is running an excellent opinion article on why the games industry is broken:

GameDaily BIZ: Opinion: The Video Game Business Is Broken
We all know this a year of change in the video game market place. The future of the industry is very much at a crossroads with the big 3 bringing out their new platforms and many questions remain unanswered. Maybe it’s time to say “the Emperor Has No Clothes.” The video game business is clearly broken and is in desperate need of fixing. This is not just another console transition%u2014we are 6 years away from the last one and in a totally different world. Here are my observations on the problems with the current model.

And, you might wonder, what does American think about this? First off, I like to refer to myself in the third person. What’s that about? Second, HELL YES – the industry is broken. But only from the perspective of those who aren’t profiting HUGELY off the existing model, despite how that might translate to general lame-ness for the rest of us.

Lo and behold, I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a while… mostly because, as a little guy competing against the likes of EA, and Sony (not that I’d presume there to be any actual compeition – yet), it is painfully obvious that a full-frontal assault on territory so masterfully dominated by the Big Boys is pure madness. So you have to think outside the box. And thinking outside the box offers some interesting solutions, many of which we’re beginning to see emerge even now.

Things are not so dark as they seem. In fact, I sense that David is winding up one hell of a sling throw.

There’s a book called “Blue Ocean Strategy“, which outlines ways to create new playing fields inside existing industries. It forces you to look at the way an industry works (which usually translates to a heavily protected process controlled by big corporations), tear the process apart, and rebuild it like so:

Key factors taken for granted to be eliminated:
Retail distribution, traditional marketing budget, box product/manufacture costs, gamer jargon marketing/feature lists, in-box AI, initial cost to download/play

Key factors to be reduced well below industry standard:
Cost of development, size of development team, size of initial release, time to initial release, time between subsequent releases, player time investment per episode, cost per hour of gameplay

Key factors to be raised above the industry standard:
Ability to respond to customer feedback on content, quality of AI, mass market appeal with adult and broad narrative, cliffhanger style content

Factors to be created that have never been offered:
Online marketplace for content distribution, star designer content, community content sales, multiple productions inside same universe, artistic flavor to content like HBO films, users can decide which episode to travel to next. AI stream, offsite AI processing (improved AI and adds copy protection).

You ELIMINATE, REDUCE, RAISE, and CREATE factors that everyone is currently taking for granted. When I play around with this, the outcome is the above back-of-envelope model for… online distribution of episodic content with online AI and a host of other “weird” ideas. And while the big publishers are moving towards concepts like this, the great thing for the small guy is that with this model they don’t have to rely on the big publishers to build the product they want to build. We’re finally moving back to the days when companies like id Software could build their fortunes on self-funded games released via the internet.

And while some people are going to hate me for this, I have to say that I believe advertiser funded game development is going to play a huge role in the transformation of the industry away from one dominated by the EA’s of the world. It works for television, and I think it can work for games. At least I know I’d rather play an advertiser funded innovative game than another big-publisher funded film license genre conformer.

There’s no reason why these two models can’t live together in the same universe. Ultimately it means more choice for gamers, and that’s not a bad thing.