The advent of Windows 95 cd-rom as a platform standard for game developers, lower-priced consoles, online and network gaming initiatives, and joint ventures between game and cablecos: these are some of the changes pulling the game industry out of a cyclical slump toward growth expected to soon exceed the industry’s 1994 peak.

Sega’s director of marketing Deborah Wardrope says the timing of Sega’s cd-rom-based Saturn game console was one reason for the recent decrease in game industry revenue.

‘Two years ago the Canadian market was around $375 million, today it is about $200 million. New systems are expensive, and you don’t have the same amount of retail sales going through. When the price lowers, the penetration becomes much greater,’ says Wardrope.

‘When we introduced Saturn, it started out at $500; there weren’t a lot of people out there buying. Now, you’re going to start to see it move up. There’s a big difference between $269 and $499. We expect to hit our peak in the next few years.’

Blue dude hits tube: Sega’s sonic convergence

With a 52% share of Canada’s $200 million game market, and initiatives to combine the worlds of gaming, computers, television, and Internet, Sega has convergence written all over it. The company’s plans include Sega Net Link, a game console plug-in which provides Internet access and display on your tv, and The Sega Channel, Canada’s first commercial interactive television project.

‘The company is now subdivided into development groups dedicated to the pc, arcades, and home entertainment,’ says Wardrope.

Gamers tend to be webheads (the company’s website receives some 200,000 hits a day), so it makes sense for Sega to add Internet capability to its gaming hardware, and begin moving games to the interactive, multiplayer world of the Net.

Sega Net Link, scheduled for release in Canada Sept. 29, is its vehicle. A plug-and-play add-on to Sega Saturn game consoles, Sega Net Link contains a 28,800 bps modem and a custom-designed Internet browser, which enables standard Net fare including e-mail and World Wide Web browsing.

Net Link owners can choose their own Internet Service Provider, although plans are in the works to offer a preferential arrangement with one Canadian provider. Ten new games designed for Net play are scheduled for release within a few months of Net Link’s introduction.

Sega Channel, up and running in several key markets on Shaw Cable systems and Rogers, is a $19.95-per-month specialty channel devoted to Sega games, which currently has a penetration of about 7,000 households, according to distributor Graham Duff.

Since Sega consoles do not store data permanently, the games are sent to the home each time they are requested, remaining in the console until the device is turned off – a system that confounds software piracy while encouraging game sales and diverting video-store rental revenues.

Since 70% of Sega sales are currently preceded by a rental, the Sega Channel makes sense for households where the game’s the thing. The initial penetration is about 0.5% of the cable subs, with a 3% target for next year, eventually reaching 5% to 6%, according to Mike Lee of Shaw Cable. Once the cable penetration peaks, a Sega service would be a natural addition to cablecos’ pc access plans.

Sega products appear first as arcade games, followed by simultaneous release as Sega Saturn and pc cd-rom release. Playable versions hit the Sega Channel within 90 days.

‘We’re trying to launch them together, so it doesn’t matter whether you have a Saturn or a pc,’ Wardrope says. ‘With our technology, moving toward cd-roms it is far more lucrative for us because cd-roms are certainly far less expensive to manufacture. And production time is much lower. With cd-roms, if you see something taking off and it’s a hit, it’s easy to press more cds. You can sell on demand.’

Windows 95:

a standard platform

Paul Butler, a director of Artech Digital Entertainment, says his company is concentrating development efforts on the Windows 95 cd-rom platform. With 55 employees (25 of whom are animators) and 16 titles in development, Artech is one of a handful of large game developers in Canada.

‘We’re betting that it’s going to end up this way and that’s why we’ve pretty much dropped some of the other machines,’ says Butler. ‘Some of those machines are too little, too late – or too much, too early. That was the problem with 3D0. There was no 3D0 booth at E3 this year. They were the first machine, and in some ways the best.

‘But there will always be a place for a dedicated games machine, just because of the location in the house. It’s not on Dad’s or Mom’s computer upstairs, it’s in the basement with the kids. It’s a cheap little machine that will do a better job with one specific thing than a computer.

‘It will be cheaper, but it’s a mystery how Nintendo is going to make a competitive product with cartridges, because the cartridges cost $35 each as opposed to a buck or two bucks each for a cd, so they have to sell 17 times as much product to break even, to get back to the same point (as the cd product).’

Butler says the cyclical nature of the games business may be over. ‘There are cycles, but I don’t think they will continue in the pc market because of the sheer amount of machines in people’s homes now. pcs are at 38% and climbing in North American homes. And now we have a platform with Windows 95 – before there were all sorts of platforms and it was a mess,’ Butler says.

‘We’re also supporting the new 3D acceleration cards for pcs, which are bringing in a new generation of gaming; it’s just around the corner. We’re starting to use video now, and there are ways we can take video into a 3D scene, give it the proper lighting and reflection.’

Artech was the developer for Corel of Ultimate Chess, released mid-June. The game, modeled using Softimage software on Silicon Graphics workstations, renders the game in settings chosen by the player, such as a Roman courtyard, and allows the players to choose their point of view and open as many windows as they wish. Players can compete over the Internet, via modem, or over local area networks. The company is also developing a miniature golf game, a motorcycle game capable of simultaneously handling 16 players, adventure and role-playing games.

With a 35% ownership stake from Astral Communications, it’s not surprising that Artech is bringing the worlds of television and gaming together.

‘We’re looking at having a game and a tv show coming out at the same time,’ says Butler. ‘The production work would be done at the same time by the same people. It doesn’t really work to reuse things; it has to be part of the planning stages. We think we can get the animation costs way down, and the quality way up.’

Microforum’s integrated approach

Microforum is involved in computer software development, multimedia production, website design and carrier services, and is a game developer, publisher and distributor with a staff of 125, 50 titles produced in-house to date, and an additional 25 internally developed titles slated for release this year.

‘We’re 99% pc cd-rom, a 50-50 split between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95,’ says Microforum’s Steve Corsi. ‘We see the Windows 95 platform becoming more and more dominant, and two of our key properties in development are being developed exclusively for Windows 95.

The company has just released Virtual Corporation, a role-playing game incorporating voice recognition technology developed by ibm for Windows 95 that allows players to compete for a job and ascend the corporate ladder, playing office politics all along the way.

Readysoft of Markham, Ont. has disbanded its sizable contingent of classical animators to concentrate on the business the company was built on – porting titles to different platforms, packaging and distribution.

Readysoft’s June Brown says the company will concentrate on cd-rom for pc and Mac platforms, Sega Saturn, and Jaguar systems. Readysoft is in the final stages of development for a new release, The Music In Me, with u.s. distribution confirmed and a decision on worldwide distribution pending.

Electronic Arts:

‘platform agnostics’

Electronic Arts, publicly traded on nasdaq, is a federation of studios: three in the u.s. (Origin Systems, Electronic Arts Seattle and San Mateo) one in the u.k. (Bullfrog Studios) and Electronic Arts Canada, the largest studio within the group.

The company publishes 100 to 115 ‘skews’ – platform-specific versions of games – per year, concentrating on sports and action/ adventure titles.

‘There are about 250 people here,’ Keith Dundas, manager of public relations for Electronic Arts Canada, says. ‘EA Canada publishes one-third of the total skews.’

‘We’re platform agnostic. We publish one title on many different platforms. For example, Triple Play 97 is publishing on 16-bit systems, on Sega and Sony Playstation as well as the Personal Computer. Having said that, we’re shifting our focus away from 16-bit towards 32-bit systems, and in the case of fifa International Soccer ’97, 64-bit systems.

‘Being a multiplatform publisher doesn’t mean you flip a switch to deliver a product on a different system. Each has different attributes, things the platform does well. It’s not better or worse, it’s just different. I still play our earlier versions of Triple Play Baseball on 16-bit systems because it’s still fun,’ says Dundas.

The cost of game production has never been greater. ‘Pong’s sound environment was a beep,’ says Dundas. ‘Contrast that with Triple Play 97: the sound environment of this game uses three choices of cd-quality music, combined with sound effects of play, and artificial intelligence used to control the announcer. There are 120 pages of scripts that react in realtime to game play.

‘Now consider that a game is made up not just of sound, but of animation, graphic design, and opening movie sequences. Market expectations for our products are very high because we push the boundaries.’

Digg Design’s metaworldview

‘We’re all making a transition from fixed worlds, fixed stories, to an `open architecture’ game environment,’ says Mark Ury, head of development for Ottawa’s Digg Design. Ury says the future of the gaming industry has everything to do with online game play and the creation of worlds people can populate on their own terms.

‘People will be able to build their own worlds,’ Ury says. ‘They can even attach a url (an Internet file server location), and teleport to other people’s servers and computers to play in their worlds, in an endless location jump.’

It’s a fundamental shift away from the traditional values of storytelling, such as good storyline, and compelling delivery, says Ury. ‘Its about giving people the tools that are fluid enough for people to create their own environments, creating situations for people with hidden surprises to uncover.’

Ury says these environments, sometimes called metaworlds, combined with the use of avatars, characters which players control in an online game environment, are going to have a big impact.

‘Avatars will probably do the same thing for interpersonal communications as the Web did for publishing. When the Web came around, everybody could put graphic displays on their sites. Avatars will become the mode of interaction.’

Ross Maddever (maddever@ astral.magic.ca) is a Toronto writer and graphic designer.