Okay, this isn’t strictly in-keeping with the theme of the blog, but I’ve found random posts like this can be very helpful in diagnosing and fixing problems. Google is your friend, and makes it easy to fine articles that describe your issue. My issue – that my Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi stopped working at some point last week (start of September 2009), didn’t come up in too many searches, and the answers that did come up weren’t very helpful. So here goes with my experience, and a fix.

Symptoms

You’ve got a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi card, and you’re running Windows Vista. It’s got the latest drivers installed. Probably it was working just fine up until the end of August. Windows Update prompted you with an update to your sound card, or maybe it just got installed automatically. Now the sound card is producing no output. Windows Media Player fails to play movies and audio with cryptic errors that basically boil down to “can’t play file”. If you right-click on the Speakers or Microphone in the Sound control panel, and select Test, it pops up a message box saying “Failed to play test tone”, and stays resolutely silent.

Annoying, huh? So you go searching on the web, and find a bunch of posts talking about Audigy cards, and “failed to play test tone”, which recommend that you disable this or that setting in the Creative volume panel, or in the sounds control panel. None of this helps your problem at all. And that’s probably right – because the “failed to play test tone” message could happen for a bunch of reasons – all it really means is that Vista can’t talk to your sound card properly.

As far as I can tell, this is some specific problem with the Windows Update to the sound card. Not sure what, or how, but we have two similarly configured machines at the office, and they both went in the same way, over the same period. Thankfully the fix is a straightforward one, and it’s to re-install the drivers.

Solutions

First off you’d probably just uninstall the drivers and then reinstall, this you can do quickly. We found it didn’t help. Then you think “oh, I’ll go to the Creative site and download the drivers manually”. Great. Except there’s like a dozen versions of the SB X-Fi, all with different connectors at the back, all with slightly different names, and all of which have different drivers. And here’s you looking at device manager which just says “SB X-Fi”. But which one!

So after trying two different versions and getting it wrong (it tells you it can’t find a device of that type on your system), I decided to try a different tack, and this worked right off the bat. Here are the steps:

1. Start Menu -> Computer, right-click and select Manage
2. Select Device Manager from the left hand side
3. Go to Audio devices in the right hand tree
4. Right click on the X-Fi device that should live there, and select Uninstall Drivers
5. It should ask for confirmation – tick the check box that says “delete drivers” – you don’t want the same old drivers to be reinstalled (this is the key step)
6. This should take away your X-Fi, and leave you with no audio device (or even if you had onboard audio like we did, shouldn’t make a difference).
7. In the device manager, right-click on your computer and select “Scan for hardware changes”
8. This should bring up the usual hardware detected icon in the task area in the bottom right. Let it do it’s thing
9. When it prompts you about drivers – let Windows find the drivers for you. It should either download fresh drivers, or download a slightly older driver which comes with Creative’s auto-update software. But basically follow through with the driver install process, and you shouldn’t need to do anything special
10. It’ll probably prompt you to restart your machine. If it doesn’t, restart anyway.
11. It should reboot and finish up the driver installation when it restarts – now you should have your sound back just as before.

Hope this helps people (and if the solution works for people, feel free to link it elsewhere).

So, interesting talks at Develop. As usual, there were some slots where none of the talks were particularly compelling, and others with 2 or more talks all equally appealing. Thankfully this time I had meetings which could be scheduled in the boring slots, which takes the edge off somewhat.

Day 1 (Evolve)

10 Things Nobody Tells You About Digital Distribution and Self-Publishing That You Must Understand to Succeed

A forthright talk from Martyn Brown, one of the founders at Team 17. They’re wading into self-publishing with a vengeance, ostensibly due to their inability to sign Alien Breed through normal publishing channels. And that’s fair enough, if they believe strongly enough in the product to publish it, they shouldn’t have to satisfy a close-minded publisher’s idea of what the market wants. Admittedly, it’s a lot easier when you’re sitting on the big pot of cash that is the proceeds from Worms XBLA, but fair play to them. They did stress the point that self-publishing brings with it many of the same challenges that regular publishing does (e.g. marketing, QA, platform certification), so if you don’t have the capability in-house to tackle that like they do, then you’d better be prepared to deal with others who can provide those services.

Evolve: A Game is a Game is a Game

A reassuring talk from Dave Thomson at Denki, that can be summed up quite succinctly: make the games that you’re interested in. While it’s not a guarantee that others will like the same things that you do, it’s a safe bet that if you don’t believe in the games you’re making, no-one else will either. While I have reservations about this – there still has to be a business case to support making a game. So maybe I’d paraphrase slightly and say “if you’re relatively normal, then the games you love to make and play will appeal to lots of other people too”.

Evolve: Panel: After the iPhone Honeymoon:Where Next for Apple’s Mobile?

This one was of interest because I’ve been thinking about the merits of developing for the iPhone. While I’m definitely a convert to the use of one (I bought a 3GS recently), I’m still not convinced about the merits of the app-store as a distribution platform. And sure enough, the panel were quick to agree on the difficulties of reaching your market. The driving down of price to the 99c point, while bemoaned by some small developers, is indicative of what the market wants. Too many consumers have been burned by poor apps (even ones with good reviews), so they’re not prepared to risk higher prices to be burned. Lite versions are key, but care must be taken not to give away too much. Marketing is key, although it’s very much about advertising through social networks and similar mechanisms. Allowing people to share knowledge of your app through the phone itself is a good thing. There is a market for niche titles, but it is substantially smaller, clearly the cheap/small titles which make high volumes is an easier strategy. If you’re happy with a niche and higher price point, the quality has to be high enough to justify that higher price point. That needs to include update support. Getting the first few positive reviews up there is key, so giving away the first few hundred units to friends for positive reviews is a useful tactic. Above all though, the platform is still the limiting factor in getting true volumes – you need to crack the top X lists to get any sort of decent volumes. Which says to me that the search functionality is still too weak to truly support a quality based market.

Evolve: Panel: Crossing Over: How Working With Other Industries Can Improve Your Games and Your Bottom Line

I’ve talked on this blog in the past about the overlap (or lack thereof) between television media and games. Ofcom’s Public Service Publishing talks in particular have been frustrating to me, because there is clearly money, concepts and talent there, but what is essentially a language barrier prevents us from collaborating. Games developers can’t relate to the funding models, and the glacial pace of motion getting projects going. TV people get the idea of ‘games’, but are unable to grasp what goes into making them, their limitations or the practicalities of producing a title. So this talk about organised brainstorming workshops which aim to get people from all industries together, piqued my interest. Basically locking people away in a hotel together for a week, forming teams with a spread of talents, making them brainstorm ideas for interactive entertainment. Everyone on the panel was overwhelmingly positive about their experience doing it, and it sounded like it did exactly what was needed – breaking down the communication barriers between those in the different industries, and allowing them to collaborate to deliver something interesting. Schedules willing, I’m definitely enthused about the idea of attending one of these workshops, and see what I can get out of it in terms of a better perspective on the wider media industry.

Evolve: KEYNOTE: The Long Tail and Games: How Digital Distribution Changes Everything. Maybe.

The long tail. A lot of this felt like Eberly marketing his own services, but there were some good points, backed with stats. Basically the gist of the talk is that digital is great, it’s the future, but it’s not perfect. There was a lot of puncturing of the idea that digital is without drawbacks, which I think is something that is needed. It’s way too easy to pin all your hopes on the next platform. I think he draws an erroneous conclusion from the current platforms that digital distribution isn’t valid; because he’s basing it on platforms which are severely lacking in the fundamentals needed to make for a healthy digital distribution platform: search, navigation, rating and cross-linking. Amazon has those, but the current games platforms don’t. I don’t believe that we can write off digital distribution as a viable market for the small studio until we see a platform which has all of those things and still fails.

Day 2

CONFERENCE KEYNOTE: Online functionality for your next game? Why not go 100% online

“Hey folks – look, isn’t APB shiny?” Okay, maybe I’m just bitter I got there a little late and couldn’t even get in the room, but it didn’t strike me that the talk had a lot of content. APB did look very shiny though.

Designer mash-up: David Braben and Dave Jones play Elite and GTA

Basically two old school devs playing each others games. And I’m a sucker for an Elite talk. The actual playing of the games, lots of faffing around and not much shown. I think had they prepped a bit more and showed a bit more of the strengths of the respective games. But it was still interesting to hear stories from the old days. Clearly the majority of the people in the room were Elite fans though; although there were a decent amount of questions for Dave Jones, most of them were about Elite and all of the various things. And of course every time I see Elite again it makes me want to make that sort of game again. Someone on The Chaos Engine made a good point – the fact that Elite 4 hasn’t been made has probably been the best thing this industry could hope for, because it’s made everyone else want to step into the gap and has resulted in a bunch of good games. Had Elite kept churning out sequels, I think there might have been that little bit less enthusiasm in general in the industry.

Business: Panel: Why Grey Matters – How to Grow Your Business

This was an interesting and frank panel talk, with some of my colleagues from the Scottish industry – notably Brian MacNicoll and Paul Farley. They talked about the merits of the scheme, which pairs up experienced business people with directors of newer start-ups, giving them an opportunity to benefit from the others’ experience and an independent point of view. It sounded like a fantastically useful programme, I can’t count the number of times when I could have used an outside opinion as to whether I’m doing the right thing with the business or not. I can only hope that TIGA or another UK body will be continuing the scheme once the pilot is complete, and encouragingly the TIGA contingent was present at the talk.

Design: The Life Cycle of The Bonsai Barber for WiiWare

Fun looking little game this, and I can respect the deliberate choice of design principles to keep the gameplay simple and clean. Interesting choice to limit the amount of time the player can play each day, which is a risky tactic, but good if it pays off. Similar to Car Jack Street’s tactic of using real world deadlines to encourage you to come back at least once a week, Bonsai Barber has the opportunity to to make the game more attractive by rationing out the gameplay. While you might easily glut yourself on the game in the first day and never return, by restricting what can be done, you leave the player that little bit hungry for more. Of course, it only works if the game leaves you with a good feeling at the end of each play session, but I think I shall pick it up to see.

Develop Awards

Thanks to my benefactors at Microsoft, I managed to get a seat at a table at the Develop awards, which was nice. Lots of hob-nobbing with industry legends, and a nice meal to go along with it. Sadly I had to leave after the main course to head back to Reading, so I missed the awards themselves. I gather that Media Molecule cleaned up some, but then that’s probably not much of a surprise; these things rarely are. I couldn’t help feeling like something of a small fish in a big pond though, and I’d probably have made more useful business contacts drinking out in the bar with the other indie devs. Still, I got to chat some with David Braben, and avoided gushing over the original Elite, so that’s something.

Day 3

Coding: The Wizards of OS: I Don’t Think We’re in C++ Anymore

I was somewhat hung over for this one, so thankfully it’s on a topic I know well. Looks like the Eutechnyx guys are going through pretty much the same learning curve we did with Brave – the initial excitement of wanting to write all of your game logic in script form, discovering the performance and practical problems with maintaining things in scripts, and shifting some part of the way back to logic in C++. They’ve come to many of the same conclusions I did, which is pretty much that you should use scripts for what they’re good for: broad, high level glue logic, fast iteration without recompiling, and expressive forms for structured data. Scripting is no silver bullet, and its pros always need to be balanced quite carefully against the cons. I think this is an interesting topic, and I’ve some thoughts written up on it that I’ll put into blog form at some point soon.

BUSINESS KEYNOTE: Ship Your Game On Time, On Budget: Seven Highly Effective Practices

Not really much for me here – very much a talk from one of the old school development houses; how to manage large teams, business relationships with large publishers. Nothing too surprising either – knowing when to cut features, knowing how important it is to hit your dates (the developers don’t see this as nearly as much of an issue as the publisher does), and how to manage communication and planning with your publishing partner.

Coding: CODING KEYNOTE: Playstation PS3: Cutting Edge Techniques

Someone here at MGS pointed out to me that Kish Hirani is the same Kish that used to be mentioned a lot at VIS; for some reason I never connected the two names. Now that I’ve seen one of his talks in person, that makes a lot more sense. Some interesting displays of the new motion tech which we weren’t allowed to photograph. It has its own pros and cons when compared to Microsoft’s Natal, but to be honest I think both platforms will stand or fall on the quality of the games made for them, and the PS3 is still fighting its price and install base handicap.

More interesting was the definite sense of sharing, that Sony have a lot of library and middleware code, all of which they’re throwing at developers for free. They don’t want developers suffering on their tech, they know its hard. While the libraries approach might be a little disjointed, it’s good to see that they’ve thrown themselves into developer support so wholeheartedly, and it certainly makes their platform a lot more attractive to us as a small developer now. I can’t quite see us pitching a PS3-only title, but I’m a lot less downbeat about the platform than I was 6 months ago.

Design: DESIGN KEYNOTE: Building LEGO Worlds – online, offline, and everything in between

This talk was mostly only interesting to listen to some of the challenges involved in taking an underlying core concept (LEGO’s concept of play) and applying it to a variety of games, and trying to maintain that concept through-out everything they do. I’ll be interested to see LEGO Universe when it comes out, but mostly only because it will need to do well if NetDevil are ever to put the money into Jumpgate Evolution that they need to. Especially now they’ve saddled themselves with the ailing Codemasters as a publisher.

Design: Rethinking Challenges in Games and Stories

I know a lot of people at TCE are dismissive of Ernest Adams’s credentials, but to be honest I’ve always found his articles to be interesting and well written. His talk at Develop was similarly interesting, covering a lot of topics relating to play mechanics, and exhortations to designers to break out of the traditional stifling models of play. But to be honest by this point I was exhausting from a gruelling week, and was happy to just listen to a fun talk before heading back to Reading.

So, since I was just a stones-throw (okay, two and a quarter hours by train) from Brighton, I took advantage of Develop this year. I’ll cover the interesting talks in a subsequent post, but for now some thoughts from the conference itself.

My boss at Microsoft was kind enough to let me go through them for a pass, which allowed somewhat cheaper rates, at the cost of having all of my independent developer peers see my badge and run screaming from the representative of the big-bad-evil corporation. They were mostly tempted back with sweet and soothing words, but I did have to spam business cards as far and wide as possible to reinforce my credentials as a similarly small and indie business.

Sadly the last train back from Brighton was too early to partake in the kind of party networking that goes on after conference hours, but since I’m a total lightweight, that’s probably a good thing. Less potential business partners scared away by Professor Drunk and all of his loud and firmly held opinions on the failings of the industry.

That said, I was pleased to find kindred spirits amongst those I talked to in the early evenings – conferences are always a good way to gauge the general sentiment of the industry, and get a view from your peers untainted by media bias. Of that, the main themes I took away this year were: a) boxed retail games are not a good place to be, b) digital distribution of smaller titles is the only way to go, but is sadly lacking in many respects, and c) the funding gap between the retail behemoths and the self-funded indies is ever-widening, and still a barren wasteland.

Most of those are things I’ve been saying for a while now, but I’m glad to hear that it’s not just us, and these are industry wide issues. There is much optimism, and cause for hope. But the market we operate in is still settling, and no-one has any sure wisdom. What has become clear is that Nintendo’s strategy (or lack thereof) with WiiWare has condemned a promising opportunity for indies into something of a dead end.

While it’s cheaper to develop for the Wii, it’s still not ultra-cheap; the massive install base is very much skewed towards non-traditional customers who are unlikely to hunt out WiiWare and the Wii Shop in the same way that a traditional gamer would; the Wii Shop itself suffers from all of the terrible navigation issues that I’ve complained about before. The simple fact is that it’s an effort to buy things through WiiWare, and the only way we could tempt all those Wii-Fit to part with their cash is if it were suggested to them as part of using the system. Of course, I realise that we could reach them with targetted marketing, but let’s be frank, if we had the money to do targetted marketing we wouldn’t be in this position.

What we’d like, as indies, is a marketplace with customers actively searching for goods; where the quality of our titles is the differentiating factor, and the cost to bring games to market is as close to the cost of producing the titles. When you’re as small as your average independent, cost to get to market is key. Let’s imagine a title that costs £150K to develop. If we pitch it at a platform which requires £500K of advertising or other costs to get it to market, it doesn’t matter that would return £800K. Sure, that’s a decent return, but we don’t have £650K to put in. We’ve probably got the £150K, if not in cash then at least in sweat equity. But there’s not a queue of financiers out there willing to front the additional costs to get to market.

Although on this note I was chatting to Chris Swan of Blitz, without even realising who he was. And I must give much kudos to Blitz for being one of the few players prepared to put their money where their mouth is, and work with small independents.

So I’m both heartened and disheartened by my time at Develop. Heartened by the young and successful independents who I had the pleasure of meeting and drinking with, but disheartened that there are no platforms (or platform holders) with the vision to foster a market where smaller independents can operate

Sadly, after 3 long years with us, we must say goodbye to Bertie, our faithful and loyal company mascot. Your tank was never too smelly, your incessant sucking and dropping of the gravel never too annoying, and your occasional freaking out and bopping your head off the top of the tank was always a welcome sound to startle us from otherwise mundane work-based reverie.

A picture from happier (i.e. less dead) times

Yes Bertie, you shall be sorely missed. It may seem as if we are replacing you, with a slightly differently coloured, and hopefully more hardy version, but you may rest assured that no fish will ever hold quite the same level of affection in our hearts. Apart from Tim’s heart of course, he never took to Bertie like the rest of us. In fact, if I wasn’t so sure he understood that his job was on the line if he were to kill Bertie while I was away, I might have suspected foul play.

But no, it was simply Bertie’s time. He has lived a long and full life, amongst those who cared for him, and has now gone to that great big fish bowl in the sky, with a slightly superior grade of coloured gravel, and somewhat less algae and fish crap in the water. Farewell dear friend.

Just a quick note, mostly to push the sunshine post off the top because it’s cooled down a bit (and I’ve correspondingly gotten less grumpy). Off to Develop Brighton tomorrow, which should be good. I’m not too eager to take the days out of my MGS work, but I have to think about longer term business as well. It’s all too easy to get focused on a nice tangible problem that we can solve, and neglect the other important things. But there are games to be made, partners to develop with, and lots more interesting stuff besides.

Definitely looking forward to meeting up with my contemporaries who I have been sorely neglecting, and finding out about new opportunities, and just generally being nosey about other people’s business (and in certain cases, other business’s people).

It might just be my Scottish breeding showing through, but when it’s hot like this, I just want to curl up into a ball and die. It doesn’t start that way; I just wince a little at the bright sunshine and shade my eyes. After that, I gripe a little when it feels like the sun is scorching down on me when I have to go to or from the office. And the sweaty back from hardly any exercise makes me grumpy. But after 6 solid days of unrelenting, stifling heat with no respite, I start cursing the sky and generally rambling on and being  this mad old bastard that is having trouble dealing with the world.

I think it’s the fact that I’ve done everything, up to and including lying in a bath of cold water, and it only gives me a temporary break from the heat. I do realise there are many places hotter than 30 degrees out there, that’s fine, I wouldn’t want to be there either. I like Edinburgh’s climate. It’s cold and it’s grey and it’s windy, but you know what? I never find myself sitting in a chair in a stifling room, knowing that every other room in the damn house is worse, thinking about how  nice it would be to just get a single bloody nights sleep. Against all my pre-conceptions about the way the world is supposed to work, it doesn’t get any cooler at night. I can’t even see the sun, why is it still so damned hot! Anyway, you get the picture. Heat = grumpy Chris.

I made a trip into London on Saturday (where it was equally hot) to meet up with some folks from The Chaos Engine, which was nice (if too hot). I made the joke with Professor Schminky that a meeting of industry people who know each other only through an anonymous internet forum was bound to be fraught with issues, but it turned out my suggestion that we all wear paper bags over our heads with our forum avatars printed on the front was unnecessary. Thank Jeebus for that, because it’s really hard to drink wine through a paper bag.

That’s about all the interestingness I’ve had the mental capacity for recently. Tim tells me that Edinburgh is suffering the same blistering heat that Reading is, but at least he’s in a basement office with a north facing window. Right now I daydream about being back in the office, just because I know how lovely and cold it can get. Mmmm, cold…

For too long now, I’ve been attacking my to-do list in a rather sporadic way. RememberTheMilk.com is a wonderfully flexible way of storing and categorising a task list, and given how mobile I am the web-access is great. The idea that on my own I would be able to remember all of the myriad of different things that I need to do on a regular basis to keep the business operating smoothly has long since been discarded as a pipe dream. Tax returns, bills, server maintenance, paperwork, and that’s not even counting the one off tasks which I can’t do right away but can’t afford to forget.

My problem, as is pretty typical for a task tracking system, is that it needs to be a matter of habit to check my task list every day. Which I do. But the very act of having a task list is by definition a triage action for managing things I need to do, and so if I’m not tackling the tasks quickly enough then they start to accumulate. If my list of due tasks is clear, then it’s fine, because I then look ahead, see what’s coming and act on it in advance. But every task has it’s own priority level – 1 means ‘can’t afford to let it slip’, 2 is ‘must do, but the world won’t end if it is delayed a little’, and 3 is ‘needs done when you get a chance’. So when time is pressing, the priority 3 items get left, and so my overdue tasks list is no longer clean and empty, but now has an item lurking there, untouched.

Once that psychologically important barrier is breached, then it’s oh so very much easier to let the next item on the overdue list slip as well. After all, I know I’ve fallen behind, but it’s okay because they’re all low priority. Before too long, the overdue list has a dozen items, and I’m no longer tackling tasks in advance, I’m just picking off the important ones when they appear on the overdue list. Some of the items on there are 2 months overdue, but even though they’re low priority, I don’t want to just change their due date to the future. That would be hiding from the problem – they are two months past due, and I should really tackle them.

And so, since I’m down here in Reading this weekend, and I’ve already done most of a day on our Evolution work, I’ve taken some time and made a concerted effort to tackle every last item on the list, even the low priority ones. Including the last one – “write blog entry”.

Done.

You know, I wouldn’t ordinarily mock applicants to the Company, but sometimes I get someone who makes my teeth grind so badly that I can’t help it. Such as the email I received earlier this week, entitled “Application for the post of Web trends Technology Ananlyst”[sic]. Hmm. Yes. Right. Spelling and capitalisation issues aside, WebTrends? What possible reason could you think that we would have to use WebTrends?

To be fair, this girl's been hard done by, as this image is used everywhere despite being a blatant photoshop job. But to indicate idiocy in all its forms, you can't beat it.

I refer potential applicants again to this post, although it should be noted that the unspoken rider to that post is that morons need not apply.

Right, I’ve had enough of the sad kitten at the top of the blog now; you can only stand so much cuteness before the mind rebels. Time for a quick update on status, as I’ve been quite heavy with the waffling and opinionated posts recently.

This post is written courtesy of the wi-fi in a B&B in central Reading, where I’ve been installed for the last week. It’s not my favourite accommodation in the world, I’ll admit (far too many chavs hovering outside the window when the pubs kick out). Luckily, I’ve found a decent room to rent which I’ll be taking up from the end of next week, where I’ll be for the majority of the next few months. Why? Our new client of course – the behemoth that is Microsoft Games.

This is indeed the tools gig I hinted about previously, but sadly that’s as far as I can go in terms of details; not because I’m working on anything super-secret, but because the contract is just generally confidential. Suffice to say it will allow me to indulge my passion for making process improvement tools and automated build systems, and deploy them on a scale that is far beyond our range as a tiny software shop.

Sadly though this requires me to be away from Edinburgh for much of the time, which I’m still getting used to. I’ve lived in Edinburgh for so long it’s hard to adjust to living elsewhere, it’s a city that spoils you for anywhere else. This will also leave Tim minding the office in Edinburgh on his own, but hopefully he won’t be rattling around the place too badly. I’ll still be working with him remotely on our work with Evolution, but he’ll have to keep Bertie alive on his own…

On the bright side, since I’m kept away from all of my usual distractions in the evening, I’m hoping to use the time productively to get some serious effort into our internal prototypes. That being said, in the 3 weeks away so far, I’ve managed no more than a few hours, but I put that down to the fabulous selection of pubs in and around the Rare studio in Warwickshire where I spent the first fortnight – it’s really hard to feel creative and productive when you’ve just had an exceptionally tasty portion of steak and chips for dinner! I’ve settled for keeping the usual pile of paperwork under control. Speaking of which – I must sort out last quarter’s VAT return before I miss the deadline…

Why don't you have a decent search facility WiiWare? Why?

It’s true. One of my biggest issues with the games industry as it stands today is with the digital distribution stores (DDS for brevity) in place on the various platforms. I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon with others who have predicted the imminent death of physical retail stores; I think there’s still a large place for brick-and-mortar game shops, and they’re certainly not going away any time soon. But I think a large part of the continuing need for retailers is down to the failings of the various digital providers. Let’s list the most relevant ones:

• Amazon
• Steam
• WiiWare
• XBox Live Arcade
• Playstation Network
• iPhone App Store

Amazon of course isn’t really a DDS, although I believe they’re changing that. It’s really just a retailer of boxed products – the shop-front might be on-line, but the products are generally posted to you; however the problems it faces and has overcome are very much relevant to all of these services. Steam is much more relevant to the discussion here, as it’s a proper DDS, and it has learned from many of Amazon’s lessons; sadly it is let down by uncompetitive pricing and the lack of community integration.

Really though, my irritation comes from the remaining 4 DDS – each of which is the only means of buying product for their respective closed platforms (Wii, X360, PS3, iPhone). All 4 suffer from the same problems, all of which have known solutions as demonstrated by Amazon, Steam and others. And the 4, together or separately, represent a massive market of game-hungry users, with cash to spare, who just want to find the good games and ignore the crap.

Here are the main problems, in order of importance to me (the user):

1. Navigation: How do I find games that I want to buy
2. Selection: How do I choose when I’ve found those games
3. Purchasing: How hard is it for me to buy the games once I’ve chosen them

Navigation is the real fundamental problem here. All 4 providers suffer from the same issue: their services are popular, so developers make many titles; users are then swamped with choices. Without any external information (reviews, friends’ recommentations), all products look mostly identical, with only a superficial information (title, image, etc.) to distinguish them – assuming the user wants to read through every title’s description in the hope of finding something they like. If the average quality of titles is low (i.e. shovelware), then great titles are lost in the noise of rubbish, and customers are forced to take a punt on titles when they have little idea of their quality. Once they get burned once, they’re reticent to come back, and likely to dismiss the entire shop as shovelware.

All 4 holders recognise this as a problem, but take varying strategies to get around the issue:

• Top X lists (sales based): Popular products are easy to find. Great. New products have little chance to generate sales because the titles in the top X list keep selling (because they’re the only ones the user can readily find).
• Title searching: Allow the user to search for a keyword in the title or description. Great. As long as the user knows what product they want in advance. Little to no chance of discovering relevant products.
• Limit the number of titles in the system: The console DDS do this more than the iPhone, simply by maintaining high barriers to entry (requiring approval prior to development, enforced QA standards, etc.). But at best this delays the problem from becoming serious. XBLA recently wanted to implement a policy of culling poorly reviewed/low selling titles which was a clear attempt to tackle this issue, they’ve since backtracked on this in favour of better searching (yay!)
• Highlight particular titles: XBLA prefers this approach – titles get a week of being featured prominently on the front page. Great. Now you have to make enough sales during that crucial week to build enough momentum to get onto the top X list. Miss your week, and you’re shafted. Better hope you’re not featured during the same week that GTA4 comes out, eh?

The approach of limiting the amount of titles in the system is pure short-termist madness. Maybe it is just a short-term fix until a proper storefront system can be made, but XBLA has had what, 3 years now to mature their navigation systems? The solution is one already demonstrated by Amazon. Navigation is the key issue. Searching is only one potential fix. Products need to be categorised into groups so that users can find the set of products they like by interest. Products need to cross link to each other: “Liked this title? Why not try X and Y, also from this developer?” “Customers who looked at product X ended up buying product Y and Z.” “Customers who viewed these titles,” etc.

Random title prominence: this is so underrated. Sure, the front of your store is prime real-estate, and you probably want to sell it, but you can come up with a system which allows games to be featured if they’ve paid, or if the users have rated it worthy.

I can see the DDS people’s defence: “that’s too complicated a UI to put on a console, it needs to be kept simple”. Well maybe you’re right. That brings us straight to point 3: ease of purchase. Why is the game store only on the console (or phone)? It needs to have a properly integrated equivalent on the web. Customers like shopping on the web. They prefer it. They’re used to it, it’s more flexible, and it supports a much more pleasant experience. Ever tried to enter your credit card number using a joy-pad? It’s not fun. Why are you making me do it? I want to be able to browse a game-store on my PC that gives me as much functionality as Amazon, purchase my game, and then press two buttons (Shop, Download Purchased Titles) on my console to get that game downloaded.

Sure, some times it’s nice to be able to buy direct from the console, but it’s not my first choice. Keep it there as a more limited option and I’d be fine with that, as long as the web-store was nice. But as a developer, I want to be able to publish links to my game on a web-store, so they can get straight to our games, and get them onto their console in minutes.

Back to point 2 though – choosing products. I don’t trust reviewers as to what games are good. I certainly don’t trust the platform holders, since they have a financial interest in the products doing well. I trust the customers. Not individuals, because there are clearly nut-cases out there that rate highly or lowly depending on whether they took their medication this morning, but aggregate ratings over time.

Tell me what games sold big in the last week, or month (doesn’t have to include numbers). Tell me the average rating in the last week or month, and how many people rated it. Publish customer reviews, and professional reviews, and metacritic scores. Put all of the rating functionality into the search system, so you can find titles that rated over 4 stars in the last month in the flight simulator genre. Show me the all-time classic RPGs, based on ratings since the store first open. Maybe I’ve a hankering for high quality old-style adventure games, let me find those.

None of this is crazy blue sky thinking. It’s all been done, it’s all been shown to have worked. Build a better DDS, and you’ll sell more products, we’ll sell more games, the customer gets more games, and they get better games so they come back and buy more. I can’t think of any good reason why they wouldn’t want to fix their stores, other than to make little kittens cry.