Morons In A Hurry Can Figure Out That There Are Different Facebook Mafia Games

from the kiss-of-death dept

Apparently, today's mobsters are intellectual property lawyers. Back in February, we wrote about a ridiculous lawsuit between the creator of an online game, Mob Wars, and the online creator of the game Mafia Wars, claiming copyright infringement. Of course, the whole claim was silly since the game itself is based on a rather common game concept that was around for ages before either of these games existed. Rather than fighting a silly court battle, why not actually compete on features? So now we've got a new battle, between Zynga (makers of Mafia Wars) and Playdom, the makers of yet another game, called Mobsters, with Zynga claiming trademark infringement due to the way Playdom is running ads for Mobsters.

But the details seem like this is an abuse of trademark law to harm a competitor rather than a legitimate complaint. Zynga's complaint is that Playdom put up an ad that read: "Like Mafia Wars? Click here to play Mobsters. Its [sic] got henchmen, mini games, message boards and sophisticated style." Zynga claims that this is somehow confusing because it doesn't include Playdom's name anywhere. However, it seems abundantly clear that the ad is for a different game and they're just targeting players of Zynga's game. That's not trademark infringement. That's targeted advertising. It's why Pepsi is allowed to run ads trying to get Coke drinkers to switch. You can use the name of your competitor in an ad.

What's especially disappointing is that some of Zynga's investors, such as Fred Wilson and Brad Feld, have long complained about misuses of intellectual property law to stop competition -- and now they're supporting a company that appears to be doing the same thing. It's a waste of money that should be going towards competing and making a better game, rather than worrying about what competitors are saying in their ads.

Filed Under: ads, games, mafia wars, mobsters, social networking, trademark
Companies: playdom, zynga

Valve Exec Explains How To Compete With Piracy

from the service,-value,-pricing dept

Last month, an exec at Valve Software noted that "Pirates are underserved customers" and said when someone realizes that, they also discover: "I can do some interesting things and make some interesting money off of it." It looks like the company is sharing some data to back that up now as well. A whole bunch of you have been sending in reports from Gabe Newell's keynote speech at DICE. Newell is the founder and managing director of Valve, and he provided plenty of reasons that show that "piracy" is not the issue at all: service, value and pricing can easily trump piracy.

He started out by pointing out something that we've discussed in the past: digital content is best viewed as a service, not a product. As a service, you focus on providing continual value -- and people are paying for that future value (which is a scarce good prior to delivery), rather than an infinite good already created. There's value in paying for that future (scarce) service, and it trumps paying for an abundantly available good.

From there, he noted that the reason "piracy" is doing so well is that the "pirates are ahead not just on price, but on service." In fact, he noted that since DRM decreases the service value for customers, it also tends to increase piracy, rather than decrease it.

Then, he showed how that combination of service and smarter pricing allowed the company to run experiments and make a lot more money -- competing quite successfully against piracy. The most stunning example: last weekend, the company ran an experiment with the game Left 4 Dead. It heavily discounted the price, and sales shot up 3,000%. And this wasn't just a case of building off a small base. The sales over the weekend were more than when the game launched.

In fact, it looks like a big part of the problem facing the industry is that they charge way too much for their products. Here are the numbers Newell shared from Valve's experiments with "sale" pricing:

• 10% off = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
• 25% off = 245% increase in sales
• 50% off = 320% increase in sales
• 75% off = 1470% increase in sales

Newell then says when they decrease the price by 75%, they are making 15% more than when they were charging at full price -- though, I'm not sure how that math works out from what's stated above (I've been playing around with the numbers, and something is missing...).

Between all of this, it's pretty clear, yet again, that "piracy" is hardly the issue. If you provide a valuable ongoing service at a much more reasonable price, there's no problem at all. Once again proving that the issue is a business model issue, rather than a legal issue. It's too bad so few old school content providers are willing to recognize this, and quite troubling that some folks in our government are still missing this as well. It's going to lead to bad laws and even worse enforcement of the law.

Filed Under: gabe newell, games, left 4 dead, pc games, piracy, pricing, service, software, video games
Companies: valve

Online Game Shutting Down All User Created Levels That Reference Someone Else's IP

from the IP-enforcement-gone-mad dept

Plenty of video games have the ability to create user-modification and user-made levels. Back in the 80s and 90s, this was made popular with games like Castle Wolfenstein and Doom. Many of these user-made versions involve famous characters. In fact, one of the first such cases was when some high school kids remixed the original Castle Wolfenstein to create Castle Smurfenstein, replacing all the Nazis in the original game with smurfs. In Matt Mason's book The Pirate's Dilemma, he talks about how these early mods helped shape and grow the video game industry.

But, apparently, some game makers either don't know their video gaming history, or are too afraid of lawyers preventing similar things from happening again. The makers of the game LittleBigPlanet, which allows users to create their own levels, have apparently started deleting any and all levels that include any mention of anything that might be construed as someone else's intellectual property. This seems both extreme and unnecessary. It's certainly not going to keep fans particularly loyal to the game.

Filed Under: copyright, games, user-made levels
Companies: littlebigplanet

Trent Reznor's Latest Trick: Reward High Scorers In NIN iPhone Game

from the keep-evolving dept

One of the things to understand when we talk about various business model innovations that companies can use, is the idea that successful implementation of these business models doesn't mean merely copying what someone else did, but continuing to come up with new ideas and new innovations. One of the common retorts to this, often found in our comments, is that if everyone's doing x then it loses all value. But, of course, that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what we're advocating. The whole point is that everyone doesn't do x, but they keep innovating and doing different things. And, for those who claim that there really are only so many things you can do, I'll point you to the words of economist Paul Romer:

Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding: possibilities do not merely add up; they multiply.

Or, even better, I'll just point you to the example of Trent Reznor, who, despite being quite far ahead of the pack on many attempted business models, doesn't seem to want to rest on his laurels. Instead, he just keeps innovating. We've covered many of the business model innovations made by Trent Reznor over the last few years (and I'm actually preparing a presentation on the topic for a music industry conference next year -- which I'll be talking about more in the future). His latest is to embrace the iPhone game Tapulous, which is sort of a rather simplified iPhone version of any "push a button to the beat" music game, a la Guitar Hero or Rock Band today (or Dance Dance Revolution in the past).

Now, the easy (boring) thing to do would have been to just create a Nine Inch Nails version of the game, which is now available. You can now play Tapulous to various songs from NiN's recent albums (whose releases we've discussed previously). However, much more interesting is tying the game even further to the band, such that those who score a certain level of points can submit the score back to Tapulous, and get entered into a contest to win floor tickets to see NiN perform or, for one lucky winner, a Les Paul guitar signed by Trent Reznor.

Despite the fact that many would say that Reznor has done much more innovating than many other musicians these days, the important thing to note is that he keeps on trying new stuff -- and each time gets more attention and wins over more fans with his actions. And the folks who complain that no new business model will work because everyone will be doing it? They're not getting much attention at all.

Filed Under: business models, contests, games, iphone, music, nine inch nails, trent reznor
Companies: tapulous

Disney Giving Away Free iPhone Game To Promote Movie

from the that's-how-it's-done dept

Reader Terry Westley points us to yet another example of how companies are recognizing that content is advertising. Disney has apparently released a free iPhone game that's fun on its own, but which also serves to help promote an upcoming movie release. While some will dismiss this as just being a cheap way of advertising, you have to wonder what happens when movie makers start making these sorts of games really, really good. Then what happens to game developers who think they can get away with charging for their mobile phone games? Suddenly it becomes a lot harder to support that model if there are other businesses that are using a model where, the more games that are given away for free, the more it helps the rest of their business.

Filed Under: games, iphone, movies, promotions
Companies: disney

Sony Exec Tells Frustrated PSP Users To Get Games Via BitTorrent

from the did-he-really-just-say-that? dept

Sony, as a company, has had something of a split personality on issues having to do with unauthorized file sharing. The content side of the business is obviously very much against it. But the consumer electronics side of the house recognizes how it can be quite beneficial towards raising the value of consumer electronics. Even so, it's still a bit of a surprise to hear an exec basically tell fans to just download unauthorized content. Reader Yakko Warner points us to the news that Sony Computer Entertainment Europe CEO David Reeves was telling frustrated PSP users in Australia and New Zealand that they're going to have to keep waiting for games to show up there... or they can just download them off BitTorrent:

"You can wait for it and you can have it in good quality, you know you can get the stuff from Bittorrent if you want to and download PSP games, it's up to you."

One would imagine that the legal team at Sony isn't exactly thrilled about the "it's up to you" line at the end there.

Filed Under: bittorrent, david reeves, games, psp
Companies: sony

Virtual Video Store Clerks Take On The Geeks For Netflix Prize

from the wisdom-of-the-movie-geeks dept

We've been fascinated with the Netflix Challenge for a while now. That's Netflix's offer of $1 million to whomever can improve on their system for recommending movies by 10%. While there were a lot of early success stories in making improvements, all of the attempts seemed to bog down, making much more gradual improvements, but not getting close enough to hit that 10% mark. Earlier this year, we wrote about the surprising run up the leaderboard by a (previously) anonymous individual who approached the problem from a very different perspective, that of a psychologist, rather than a coder, which apparently was quite helpful in getting good results through a very different method.

Now some other folks are trying something completely different, relying on more of a "crowdsourcing" system, combined with a gaming element. They've set up a virtual video store, called Video Store Clerk, and set it up as a game for movie buffs. The game players act as a video store clerk, and can see how particular users rated three movies, and are then asked to predict how they would rate a fourth movie, with points given to correct answers. The idea is that they'll be able to use these crowdsourced predictions to create an even better model than the purely algorithmic model being worked on by various teams.

This reminds me of the research work by Luis von Ahn to do things like tag images via the "ESP Game." von Ahn has had numerous successes in creating fun casual online games, where the output data is actually very useful for taking on some sort of problem that is quite difficult to do algorithmically (such as identifying what's really in an image). The real question, though, is if movie recommendations really work that way as well. Perhaps I need to be a bigger movie buff, but so far, I'm not particularly good at figuring out how others would rank a movie. And, unlike the ESP game, frankly, the Video Store Clerk game isn't all that fun as currently designed. After playing it once, I had no desire to try again. Still, I'm intrigued by the different approach, and wonder if a more advanced (and more fun) version might be much more effective.

Filed Under: competition, games, netflix challenge, online games, video store, virtual store clerk
Companies: netflix

The Wii Is Popular, But Wii Users Aren't Buying Many Games

from the wii-sports-is-plenty dept

The traditional economics of the video game console market are fairly well known. You sell the console itself at either cut rate margins or even at a loss, and then make it up in selling very expensive games for the console. That's worked in the past for the various version of the Sony Playstation and the Microsoft Xbox. But, apparently things are a bit different with the Nintendo Wii. While the Wii has been a huge success, opening up a tremendous new market of console buyers and users thanks to its unique input mechanism and gameplay, it turns out that Wii owners are buying noticeably fewer games than owners of competing consoles. In fact, it appears that many Wii owners haven't bought any games and are satisfied with the Wii Sports package that comes with the Wii. At this point, I should admit that I'm in this group as well, though part of the reason is simply not knowing which types of games are likely to work well with the Wii controller. As such, it's not worth spending a huge amount to find a game that's simply disappointing. The article suggests, also, that since Wii buyers tend to be very different than other console buyers, the marketing and advertising strategy for Wii games is all wrong. The real question, though, is whether or not this is really a long term problem. The Wii itself (unlike the PS3 and the Xbox) is sold at a profit, according to most assumptions. So, while selling more games is important, it's not as important as with the other consoles.

Filed Under: games, wii
Companies: nintendo

Catching Real Fish With Your Mobile Phone

from the don't-play-with-your-food dept

Well, here's an amusing one. Some folks in Japan have put together a game for mobile phones that lets you go fishing for virtual fish. That, alone, isn't particularly interesting of course. What makes it worth writing about is that when you catch a virtual fish, you then can get a real fish delivered to your door from a local fish wholesaler. There's a bit of luck involved, as once you've "caught" the fish, you then have to have numbers match up on a virtual slot machine, but it could get people thinking about more creative ways to make ordering any kind of product more fun. We've already seen various crazes for "virtual pets" come and go -- but why not attach them to real life outcomes? Need fish? Catch a fish. Need bread? Manage a virtual farm to successfully grow wheat. Want a dog? Successfully take care of a virtual one first. Obviously, some of these ideas are a bit silly, but you could see some more interesting ideas developed out of them, potentially offering people discounts on the actual products if they partake in some of these games that either have subscription fees or advertising.

Filed Under: fish, games, japan, mobile phones

There's A Reason One Thing Is Called 'Work' And The Other Is Called 'Play'

from the hint:-they're-usually-not-the-same-thing dept

Back in early 2006, we first heard about Seriosity, a company that was trying to take the ideas in video games and apply them to enterprise software. It's the type of story that is intriguing... but is it actually working? It's hard to tell, but so far there isn't much evidence. The company keeps getting press, but there never seem to be any success stories -- just a focus on the concept and what a great idea it is. About the only thing that's come out of it so far is a silly idea to add fake currency to email that doesn't make much sense once you think it through. The NY Times wrote an article about them earlier this year as well, and after reading it, all you could think was that their ideas for making enterprise software fun... didn't sound particularly fun. Now the BBC is taking its shot at as well, with yet another article, again predicting that this could be a big business. Could be... yes. But, is it? So far, it doesn't seem like there's much traction as none of the articles seem to have much to go on. It seems like it's a good story for the press to write about, but most companies are much more concerned with overall productivity than making work seem "fun." If they're going to convince companies to sign up, there needs to be a bit more substance behind what the company seems to be pitching.

Filed Under: games, work
Companies: seriosity