Razer reportedly took out this advert in the Wall Street Journal today. The site it links to, laid thick with nostalgia, rattles off a few minutes on the alleged sheep-think and closed systems of console gaming in a tone of synthesized reproach.
Why would Razer put this advert in the WSJ? No doubt that serious PC gamers lean toward the affluent – graphics cards be expensive, yo. But it’s also got the fingerprints of PR all over it: this isn’t just an advert in an obliging trade publication. This is an effort to make this A Serious Thing. What Razer, as a manufacturer of hi-spec, hi-end gaming peripherals stands to gain from such activity is obvious (yes, I have a Razer Copperhead).
As to what this actually is, well. The emphasis on inclusion and condemnation of proprietary platforms suggests to me that Razer might be about to make some serious moves into cloud delivery, or software-as-a-service. This is where the game itself is hosted on some mega-rig somewhere, and delivered to you over the internet. The benefits are obvious: no downloading, no patching, no idiosyncratic crashes. It also supports subscription models, which to me make a lot more sense in this piratical world. Not many people play games more than once, which is why there’s such a booming second-hand market. Furthermore, they’re pricey buggers and the spectre of buyer’s remorse can loom large even with a title you’re pretty certain about (hello, Limbo. And sorry).
I could, of course, be dead wrong, but OnLive will no doubt be watching very closely…
Edit 23/08/11:
It occured to me last night that it would be strange for Razer, as hardware specialists, to move into software. Maybe not as strange as HP selling off their entire PC division, but hey. Kotaku thinks that Razer might be about to launch its Switchblade, a high-powered gaming netbook with modular keys. I kind of hope not. Two reasons:
1) I’ve long struggled with the concept of ‘gaming’ laptops. A gaming notebook seems an even less comprehensible value proposition. Why? Because you don’t need a mega powerful laptop to play World of Warcraft, and FPSes need a mouse. The online RPG and the multiplayer FPS market are by far the largest. I doubt you’d be able to play these games particularly well on such a tiny device (a big deal for the hyper-competitive FPS scene), but taking them mobile just fundamentally doesn’t make sense to me – it’s not like gamers seem to have a particularly big problem with staying at their home PC for hours on end, and laptops can play most online games just fine. Furthermore… tablets? No? If you’re going to land a bunch of money on a mobile device, chances are you’re thinking of a iPad instead. With that comes a host of high-quality games, some of which are hardly casual. It seems to me that market Razer are pursuing with the Switchblade is pretty much mythical – some sort of extreme 24/7 gamer who is also always on the move and has lots of money and doesn’t want a tablet and doesn’t have a laptop and demands hi-fidelity graphics… but doesn’t mind not being able to play them all that well. Hmmm.
2) It would be a waste of momentum. Razer have clearly ploughed some marketing spend into this and chosen to tap into and make public a current of thinking that’s close to gamers’ hearts. To fritter that away on promoting some new hardware – no matter what I might think about it – seems insensitive. It also doesn’t chime with the rhetoric being employed. I hope that they’re not going to squander this hype on something that falls far short of what they appear to be promising.
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Shadow of the Colossus is the best game ever made. Still.
Released in late 2005, it was unlike anything else anyone had ever seen, and inexplicably remains unbeaten over half a decade later. I say inexplicably because to me, what sets it apart from the rest is quite obvious – and should, therefore, be easy enough to learn from. I suppose it is testament to Fumito Ueda and his studio Team ICO that they made it look so easy.
So, why is this game so great? All you do is ride around an immense, melancholic landscape that whispers vestiges of past civilizations and former glories, delving into the hidden corners of a forgotten world to rouse ancient titans with which to enter into frantic and desperate mortal combat in order to harvest their essences for a gnomic and menacing god with whom you have struck a devil’s deal to return your lost love to life, the morally questionable slaughter weighing heavier and heavier on you each time you draw more of your quarries’ blackened blood until you are fighting to stay who you once were lest your mission, finally successful, deliver your partner to life only to find her savior something wasted and corrupt and unrecognizable.
Wait, that’s a pretty good start.
Behold, Diet Coke’s limited edition can design for September. Clean, sharp, but with a lovely weighting of the text. Check out the bowl curve on the inner line of the D, and the sleekness of the descending swash – especially contrasted to the apex curve of the K. Quite lovely.
Coke. Still better than Pepsi.
On Sunday, I finally chose a tablet. I had been circling what marketers would refer to as the ‘purchase funnel’ for a while, waiting for the Android market to mature (and not screw things up). After playing around with one of Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab 10.1 models for the best part of an hour – I’m thorough – I decided that this was probably the one for me. And I guess that Apple thought enough other people might reach that conclusion too, because they slapped Samsung with an injunction so hard that it put a freeze on sales across Europe. So, despite on-foot reconnaissance of the local stores, I came back empty-handed.
First world problems aside – thanks a bundle, Apple! Especially as it has transpired that their claims seem to be dubious at best. The trouble is, though, that this is just the most public execution in a series of behind-the-scenes assassinations in the tech world. It’s to do with patents, and the trolls that use them.
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A leading photographer has written a stinging invective about Flickr’s failings, concluding that Google+ is looking a lot more like how the future should be. In a way, poor Flickr is yet another victim of the flailing catastrophe that is Yahoo – but what strikes me about the piece is how strongly emphasis is placed on ‘innovation’. I think he may have chosen slightly the wrong word. But then that would stand to reason, as hardly anyone seems to pay attention to the concept of user experience.
I am fairly sure that UX is the most underestimated element of digital marketing today, despite being essentially all that developers, in the broadest sense, ultimately aim to create. So much time and effort is put into features and testing that the actual feeling of using a piece of software gets lost.
I’m not referring here to design, which varies along the usual barometers ticking the boxes of kerning, whitespace, stylistic choices, visual interface and so on. That will always be recognised as being important, and you will find – at least on worthy projects – much attention being paid to the look and feel of a page. Sometimes unwelcome attention, but it must be said that good designers have never worked in a vacuum.
However, the rise of apps, with all the poking and prodding involved, has made apparent the need for a more comprehensive overview. The limited level of visual real estate means that devs no longer have the luxury of shoving columns and frames down the page or in to indicies. Things need to transition, pop over, shadowbox – pages within pages. We’re used to the concept of sitemaps, but apps have forced us to design as though we only have one, very important front page.
Image credit: Sam Spratt
And so we pass a quiet landmark: Apple overtakes Exxon Mobile, completing the greatest second act in a company’s history. When Steve Jobs returned to the beleagured company in 1997, Microsoft were rampant and Apple were valued at just $2bn. In fact, Gates’s company actually helped Apple out with an injection of $150m in a deal that has since been proved a pivotal moment in tech. Today, Apple sit at the top of the stock market with a value of $337bn. That’s +16,750%
The internet probably generates a medium-sized novel per day in praise of Jobs, so I’ll save the rhapsody. Suffice to say the man is pretty damn good at what he does. I think it’s fascinating, however, that we are where we are. We’ve hardly broken our dependency on oil. It is absolutely indispensible – not just as a fuel, but a material that goes into drugs, composites and – of course – plastics. That bottle of water that you buy from Waitrose actually takes about half its content in oil just to make the damn thing. Adoption of vehicles continues to grow worldwide. By all rights, even factoring in the recession, oil companies should be riding high.
Yet here we are, with a luxury goods company at the top of the pile. A company, moreover, that has more raw cash than the US Government – and probably without anything like the credit risks. Isn’t this surreal? I mean, you don’t need an iPad, or an iPhone, or iPod or any of the other i-products. There are way cheaper options for computing than the Mac. These are things that are completely unnecessary for survival. But they’re winning.
There are many ways to interpret the cause behind this change, but the instant obvious fact is that people are buying the products. In droves. En masse. By the goddamn truckload. Because the world is changing, and that change is being defined by technology. Earlier this year, the UN declared internet access a human right – looking at that sentence still seems slightly dream-like even for a tech evangelist, but it’s indictive of where we’re going.
Information is the new oil, and the future belongs to technology.