This isn’t your Father’s video game or is it?
By Doreen Carvajal at International Herald Tribune.
Critics may fume about what they term violent “killer video games,” but top manufacturers are on the brink of beating some of their swords into beauty tips.
By the fall season, software developers will start introducing new offerings designed to nudge players to bond with Grandma, balance their hormones and eat their peas.
Ubisoft, the French manufacturer better known for its top selling “Rayman” game and Tom Clancy’s “Ghost Recon”, is betting on an emerging family market with a vocabulary building exercise game called “Word Coach.”
Also in the works is “My Life Coach,” which will be packaged with a pedometer and a portable DS player that analyzes walking and rewards exercise and a hearty breakfast with game play.
Konami, the Japanese manufacturer of rough and tumble sports titles like “Pro Evolution Soccer,” is poised to offer a beauty care guide on DS consoles for women yearning for dewy skin. The game player dispenses customized advice based on the player’s basal body temperature and hormone balance.
Those first soft steps reflect an intensifying trend to “demystify” gaming to attract a global mass market for portable video games that is expected to reap $10 billion in sales this year, according DFC Intelligence, a game research company in San Diego.
The strategic shifts in the game industry come at a time when critics and government authorities like the justice ministers of the European Union are growing impatient with violent, hard core video games, vowing last week to press stricter regulations on the sale to children of “killer games.”
“These companies are doing this not because they want to make a better world to live in,” said Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, an assistant professor with the Center for Game Research in Denmark. He recently founded his own company, Serious Games Interactive.
Nintendo, he said, has solidly demonstrate that there is ample room for growth in the market for casual gamers with its popular DS handheld consoles. The consoles are operated with a stylus and Nintendo’s Wii control, which mixes video games, physical movement and human interaction
“Wii has had a huge impact and so has its game ‘BrainAge,’ which basically showed all the game industry that you don’t have to have great graphics,” Egenfelt-Nielsen said.
“You don’t have to have the most powerful technology. You can do it very simply and quite frankly make a lot of money easily.”
Casual play, though, is getting cutthroat in the video game industry, which is feverishly trying to get in touch with its soft core.
A number of top manufacturers recently created special departments to chase after potential family players. And they will stop at nothing to make a breakthrough, even using their own mothers, as one game developer, Igor Manceau, confessed.
“When my mother played our game she was fine and had fun,” said Manceau, who is developing “Word Coach” for Ubisoft from the company’s Canadian studios in Montreal. “But she needed me there to go through the game and select each one. So we started to focus on accessibility after that.”
In the past, the casual market has largely been dominated by companies like PlayFirst, publisher of “Diner Dash,” and PopCap, which manufactures simple and addictive games like its popular “Bejeweled” puzzles.
But in recent weeks, the bigger manufacturers have started to demonstrate their interest, including Skype, which announced that it would soon launch a casual games portal that would permit game developers to reach their two million registered users.
Electronic Arts, in Redwood City, California, was the latest game developer to announce its foray into casual gaming by hiring Kathy Vrabeck, former president of Activision’s publishing unit, to head a newly created division, EA Casual Entertainment.
It was the first appointment made by the company’s new chief executive, John Riccitiello, who started in April and was pressing the company’s drive into the market.
“With the creation of this new division you’ll be seeing and hearing a lot more about lighter entertainment forms for families,” Tiffany Steckler, a spokeswoman for EA in Europe, said. In Japan next month, the company, known for its FIFA soccer games, is introducing a wine guide game for DS players called “Sommelier,” which is part of a series that will include “Sake” and “Bartender.”
The company is also planning on bringing a karaoke style game to the market called “Boogie” for Wii players. The game allows users to sing and dance along with cartoon characters, Boy George tunes, and the funk song “Brick House” by the Commodores.
Some game developers are braced from a backlash from hard core gamers who are already worrying in blog postings about whether their interests will be eclipsed by mass market forces. “It’s not about moving from our core franchises,” Steckler said. “This is about continuing to bring these franchises along and adding others.”
But clearly, game developers are desperate to reach out to those teaming masses. Ubisoft, for instance, has been testing its new easy play games in special labs in France and Canada, and in a Montreal school where children were monitored as they played with “Word Coach,” the vocabulary builder. Those game tests followed hundreds of interviews conducted by the company to determine why some people are loath to play video games.
“They thought they were stupid,” Pauline Jacquey, who was recently named by Ubisoft to head the French company’s new casual games division, said. “And the reason was always the same: They thought they were losing their time because the game didn’t give them any value.”
As a result of the research results, Ubisoft started exploring games with a purpose.
“My Life Coach,” developed with a behaviorist, will advise players on nutrition and anti-smoking strategies without being judgmental, according to executives.
“Word Coach” was developed to bring grandparents and children into the game with questions targeted to different age groups.
Ubisoft is so convinced that the market is ripe for games like these that it has set an ambitious goal to double sales in the category from 10 percent to 20 percent of the company’s annual revenues of €680 million, or $909 million, last year.