Alex Hardy

Edge magazine has a fascinating piece this month about the state of the PC games industry. To the casual observer, the market would appear to be in crisis - experiencing a decline in retail sales of approximately 10% per year for the past five years. To draw this conclusion is to miss a bigger picture.

Valve’s Steam service is successfully distributing a wide variety of games and their experiment with episodic gaming in the Half Life 2 expansions. The new Sam and Max mini-games are doing well, even if the buzz says they’re not yet as amusing as the original games.

World of Warcraft isn’t the first to show that subscription models and expansions can infinitely extend the boxed game, and Second Life is proving eerily compelling for many. Meanwhile so-called “casual” games like Popcap’s puzzler Bejeweled sell five million copies.

All of this doesn’t even take into account the markets that many of us are oblivious to. Across Asia millions of consumers have access to internet connections that make ours look pitifully slow. China has over 200,000 internet cafes, 80,000 of which own 200 PCs or more and many gamers cite “socialising” as a main motivation for playing. This is a world apart from the ownership model and gaming culture of the West. They are also way ahead of us in terms of in-game advertising and micropayment mechanisms, which continue to meet resistance in Europe and America.

Asian and Latin American games like Audition, Freestyle, Kart Rider and Sudden Attack draw huge communities, but fly completely under the radar of our mainstream press.

Maybe the days of boxed retail software are numbered, but the diversity of PCs and their users means there is no single gaming market. The evidence points to an industry that’s undergoing an evolution to new audiences and distribution channels.

Maybe I should make a game

My portfolio page is live and ready to go

I’ll have the contact form sorted in the next couple of days, then I just need to kick this blog section into shape.

Since its very early days and my monthly visitors number in the hundreds rather than the thousands, I’m just going to pick a quiet afternoon and hack away at the CSS until I’m happy. Naughty? Perhaps… but I reckon I can get away with it. I’ll set up a development subdomain after that.

Before I apply the design to this blog, it seemed a good idea to move to the latest version and make some adjustments.

The backup -> install -> restore settings process of a software upgrade is somewhat reminiscent of the part in Jurassic Park where they turn the park systems off, not exactly sure that they’ll come back on again properly. Samuel L Jackson gets eaten by a velociraptor for his trouble… Oops.

Thankfully the ‘raptors didn’t get out this time, but there were some minor casualties. A couple of my plugins are not working quite right at the moment, but the glitches are in the backend so they aren’t show stoppers.

I think one or two comments might have been incorrectly identified as spam and deleted by an newly installed and incorrectly set up Akismet plugin. I’ve sorted the issue now, so if you commented on a post today and it doesn’t show up, I apologise. Please post again

If like me, you find those Snap thumbnail previews that are turning up on various websites (why, Vitamin… why?) to be an irritation, help is at hand.

Snap’s FAQs page provides a link that you can click on to turn them off. Note: Javascript and cookies are required.

I doff my cap to Daring Fireball for pointing this out.