By Therese Poletti
A DOW JONES COLUMN
At last week's Game Developer Conference, there was still
palpable animosity toward the cute, simple and easy games that are
played on Facebook, smartphones and now tablets.
The tension in the industry was highlighted in a few panel
discussions. Even in the keynote by Nintendo Co. (NTDOY, 7974.OK)
President Satoru Iwata, he raised concerns about the impact cheap
or free games will have on the pricing of future games.
A panel discussion entitled "A Debate: Are Social Games
Legitimate?" morphed into whether or not they were evil, with one
attendee in the audience asking whether social games exploited the
mentally ill or people with addictive personalities.
Designers of hard-core game titles, who take players into other
layered worlds like Activision Blizzard Inc.'s (ATVI) best-selling
fantasy game "World of Warcraft," or its shooter game "Call of
Duty: Black Ops," have a hard time taking games like Zynga's
popular and simplistic FarmVille and CityVille seriously, where
players run a farm or build their own city, but their moves depend
on the help of friends or on buying virtual goods.
Like it or not, these and other even simpler games for
smartphones are expanding the industry, providing a new engine for
growth and a more democratic arena for developers to get a game
into the hands of the masses.
"Unless they worked for a publisher, the homegrown casual games
never found any distribution," said Colin Sebastian, an analyst
with Lazard Capital Markets. "For a lot of those independent
developers, Google Inc. (GOOG) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) are white
knights for the industry." Sebastian noted that the traditional
publishers have such high-quality thresholds that most independent
developers were "locked out."
The stores where both Google and Apple sell applications,
including games for their respective smartphone ecosystems, offer
games from prices ranging from free to 99 cents to a few dollars.
Apple approves all applications sold on its App Store, but Google
does not, and it recently had to pull some apps that contained
malware.
Still, the industry arrivistes didn't come off very well in one
panel discussion. The "are social games evil?" debate included two
social-game developers: Nabeel Hyatt, whose gaming company Conduit
Labs had been acquired by Zynga last summer, and Curt Bereton of
ZipZapPlay, the developer of a Facebook game Baking Life.
They told moving tales of a Zynga office manager who meets
weekly with several of her Cafe World-playing friends to play
together in real life, and of creating special cupcakes in the game
Baking Life to engage more with their families.
"How many people talk about "World of Warcraft" with your mom?"
asked Bereton.
Those syrupy comments had many in the audience siding with Ian
Bogost, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of
Technology, who made an analogy of social games and Facebook with
the widespread use of high-fructose corn syrup--an insidious
sweetener used in more foods and beverages than Americans would
like to acknowledge.
But another panel was called "No Freaking Respect! Social-Game
Developers Rant Back." Brenda Brathwaite, chief operating officer
and game designer at social-game developer Loot Drop had her own
rant, in which she recounted various moments since 1981 when
developers have been called evil or accused of ruining games,
including when the title "Doom" was blamed for the Columbine school
shootings.
Brathwaite clearly wants to improve casual games and make them
more respectable. "We want casual, and we want hard core. We want
to make a great game for the 43-year-old Facebook mom, because damn
it, she deserves a great game too," she said.
"This is another one of those moments where it seems like there
is a tremendous division, but there really isn't," Brathwaite said
in an interview. "I believe that the game developers entering the
space now from the social side are looking to change games for the
better."
The economics show that social games are actually expanding the
industry, even as overall console sales fell last year. "The casual
platforms have expanded the market for games," said Lazard's
Sebastian. "There are more games than ever before."
According to NPD Group, U.S. sales for 2010 of all videogame
content, including used, downloaded, social and mobile games, were
about $15.4 billion to $15.6 billion, which is flat to down 1%
compared with 2009. Consoles and portables, on the other hand, fell
13% to $6.3 billion.
Sebastian and some game developers at the show said that all the
different forms of games will coexist. The really popular games
will be developed to run in different versions, from "bite size to
snack size to full size," the analyst added, depending on whether
the game is for a smartphone, Facebook or a videogame console like
Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) Xbox 360 or Sony Corp.'s (SNE, 6758.TO)
PlayStation 3.
It would seem that the hard-core developers are going to have to
live with the social and casual developers. As social games
improve, more developers may even switch to working on them, much
as one panelist described his own decision to get into the social
category.
Hard-core developers, who continue to look down on social and
mobile games, had a bit of a comeuppance in a lecture by a
well-regarded game designer. Brian Moriarty, now a professor at
Worcester Polytechnic Institute spoke on the last day of the
conference on how he had to agree with movie critic Roger Ebert,
who created a big stir when he wrote that videogames cannot be
art.
"Videogames are an industry," Moriarty said. "You are attending
an industry conference."
He also remarked that games in general, including chess, are not
art, in part because they are all about choices--and "choice is an
expression of will."
"Sublime art," Moriarty continued, "is fragile and lives and
dies in the details." He described his definition of art as the
"still evocation of the inexpressible." Moriarty likened videogames
more to pop and kitsch art.
Maybe the creators of FarmVille and "World of Warcraft" can at
least find some common ground in that.
(Therese Poletti is a special writer for MarketWatch. She can be
reached at 415-439-6400 or via email at
AskNewswires@dowjones.com)