Magid Associates confirmed through a study that when a gamer rents a video game, it’s unlikely they’ll buy it afterwards.

Their data shows that less than 1 in 10 gamers buy a game after they rent it and then those people only buy 1 game for every 10 they rent.

Some might say this is a reason enough to shut down game renting or even make companies who rent games pay more to game publishers for each rental. What if instead, we turned the situation around and asked game publishers(and developers) to build better games?

The reasons sited for “not” buying included the games being too short and the quality being too low.

Imagine that…gamers are tired of paying full price for games they don’t think are worth the money. Then again, maybe they only have $50 to spend and would rather rent 10 games and play them a few days each instead of buying one game they can keep (and beat) forever?

As the installed base of game machines continues to grow in the US and worldwide, it seems logical that there will be more console players with less money they want to devote to spending on games.

The economic model of online games like “World of Warcraft” solves the rent vs buy issues by having the triple win of great content, a huge amount of content (can’t finish it in a weekend) and only being available with a monthly subscription or prepaid game card. With all the money they are making, it only makes sense that some of those features and benefits will start migrating their way to console products as well.

Link to the article at PC World.

The October 2007 issue of “Fast Company” has an over-title of “Masters of Design” and features an article about “Yves Béhar“. For those of you who can’t match the name, think of innovative designs ranging from Jawbone Bluetooth headset, to Leaf LED lamps, to the $100 laptop, etc. etc. etc. Very innovative and this is his second time as “Master of Design” in “Fast Company”(see his first here).

His quote on page 99, “Design in Silicon Valley is consensus-driven,” Béhar says, “and that isn’ t the best way for strong ideas to come out.”

I agree. In my experience “consensus-driven design” tends to generate a good, and seemingly generic game design ideas that would rate about an 75 or 80 in reviews. It also seems to be the norm in companies where every group outside of the game development team wants to add their own set of features or does not believe in the development team’s ability to make a great game.

The strongest game design ideas I’ve seen were created by a single strong designer, with a vision or insight that came from experience, especially past experience of doing game design in that genre or a previous version of the current game.

I’ve also see this type of “strong ideas” come from the designers who worked on Aldus FreeHand (now Macromedia FreeHand) while I was on that team so many years ago.

It became clear to me in late 2004/early 2005 that “Creativity is a scarce, delicate and precious resource, all too often crushed by ‘committee’ or ‘TPS reports’ or other ‘benefits’ of large corporate office spaces.”

I didn’t get wrapped up in the frenzy of the pre-sales Halo 3 marketing hype. It was fun to watch the game show up in USA Today and other major papers a few days before launch and it seemed like a well executed marketing and PR plan.

The afternoon on the day the game was available, I calmly walked into the local Fry’s, picked up my copy and walked out without seeing a single soul buying another copy. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was hoping for something a little different. Maybe a marching band or something otherwise exciting to make the experience more memorable.

Halo 3 is fun and after a few hours I wanted more. Nice that my expectations were rewarded and the early press wasn’t all hype.

Now if I could just figure out how to stop the “red checkered pattern of pixels from covering the screen” and then the associated system hang…

I just finished up 3 days of talking to a random sample of kids (8 to 14 yrs old) from the Los Angeles area about how math is used in developing video games.

One of the cool parts about doing this sort of work is that I get to find out from the kids which machines they have and they games they are most anticipating.

What I found:

1. Seems like an even split between kids claiming to have Xbox360 machines vs Wii machines at home. It was extremely rare to find someone claiming to have a PS3 at home.

2. Most the boys had all heard of Halo and knew that Halo 3 was coming out soon, with the older boys showing the most excitement about it.

3. As a group, the boys also were very much waiting for Smash Brothers Brawl as well. The younger aged boys in the group there held as much interest in Smash Bros as the older ones did for Halo. They also seemed to have more certainty that they would actually be allowed to play Smash Brothers Brawl (as opposed to the uncertainty that their parents would allow them to play Halo).

4. There was confusion about which platforms are needed for which games. The confusion was painfully clear with one student saying he would buy a Wii just to play Halo3. Anyone else see an opportunity here?

5. The girls that attended the event were barely interested in Halo 3 at all, but had a fair amount of interest in Mario Galaxy. None of them had ever heard of Spore.

6. One of the adults helping organize the event mentioned having a PS3 at home that would likely soon be turned into a media server because it wasn’t being used for gaming. Another mentioned that they might buy the PS3 and use it as a “Blue Ray player that just happens to also play games”.

Draw conclusions as you will, but there’s nothing like interacting with hundreds of kids to find out what is on their mind about gaming.

I spent a good part of last week preparing for a presentation to kids about how we use math and science when developing video games.

Part of that prep time was spent looking at screen shots for Mario Galaxy and that process re-ignited my passion for that game.

GameSpy had some recent hands-on time and has good things to say: GameSpy Hands-on with Mario Galaxy

This game is set to ship in November 2007.

I’m a huge fan of Spore and had the good fortune of seeing one of the earliest prototypes of it while visiting Maxis during the development of C&C:Generals. Yep, Spore has been in development for a long time, but I give huge kudo’s to Will Wright for keeping his vision alive and developing the product in the right way (i.e. keeping the team small until it was ready to grow).

Like most fans of the game, I’m keen to see anything new that the team releases and have been secretly plotting the growth of my own “Spore Society”.

For those of you just catching up, Gamespy put up an article with the latest at the end of August. Inside of the article is a set of videos, with the latest being a great trailer released on Sept 5, 2007 showing the breadth of game play.

Check it out here: GameSpy Spore Article

It’s great to see how the game looks and plays. Fingers crossed that soon we’ll get to learn more about sharing our races/societies/planets with other players. Wouldn’t it be great if that could be done in real time….?

Beyond the interest from players, could it be that casual games offer something game developers have been looking for as well?

When I talk about it with other developers, I get a range of reactions…from waxing nostalgic about “bygone days of creating games that are simple fun” to a “disdain for anything that doesn’t push the latest platform to it’s limits”.

More and more though, it seems that both developers and publishers are starting to acknowledge the reality of casual game market, not just as a solution for the never ending quest to increase revenues, but as an unserved market with a rapidly growing interest from both producers and consumers.

Of course some developers just want to create games that are fun to make as well as play…

EA’s current thinking on casual games, courtesy of “GameIndustry.biz”: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=28124.