Current Trends:
Amiibo:
Amiibos are made by the company of Nintendo and they are made for Nintendo platforms. Connecting figurines or cards to the Nintendo 3DS/Wii U and using them characters in games, collecting special items, customising the characters and unlocking “new adventures”. Amiibo uses NFC and RFID (Near-field communications and Radio-frequency identification) The Amiibos are there for the players to enjoy collecting figurines and to add more content to certain games. Before the name “Amiibo” was used, they were originally called the “Nintendo figurine platform”. They were released in Novemeber 2014, tying in with the release of Super smash Bros. for the Wii U. What makes the Amiibo idea so great is that you can use the Amiibos across Nintendo platforms. These being 3DS, 2DS and Wii U. It is not just dedicated to one game either. You can get Amiibos for a variety of different games.
Competition:
I guess you could say the competitors in the market with Amiibos are the Disney Infinity figurines and the Skylanders figurines. All 3 have some appeal to everyone. Amiibos are considered to be great for kids and adults, the reason for this is that everyone can recognise the Nintendo characters. Furthermore, the Amiibo line has figurines which are fit for a variety of games. Skylanders is very different to the recognisable figurines Disney infinity and Amiibo has, especially to the adults. Skylanders would be more fun for the kids to play with due to it being marketed for kids and the interesting troll-like designs the characters are featured as. Disney Infinity on the other hand is very similar to Amiibos but different from Skylanders figurines. Disney Infinity uses figurines which are very recognisable to adults and children however, the game actually is marketed for children so it has a very easy play mode that it lives by.
Sales:
It is said that Nintendo sold up to approximately 21 million units being shipped worldwide since when the Amiibos were released in 2014. Apparently the US accounted for over 60% of the Amiibo sales, Europe accounted for 20% of the sales and then japan only accounting for 11% of the sales. These two charts show which Amiibos are most popular in the market in certain places and the other shows where most of the Amiibos have been shipped to. All of the figures which come in individual packs sell for $12.99.
IP:
Nintendo have said that they “respect the intellectual property of other” and what they will do is that if they see anything which appears to “infringe the intellectual property rights of others” they will be able to remove it due to the policy. They have also made themselves contactable in case you see anything that infringes on any “intellectual property right” that you own or control.
Secondary Screens:
A great example of second screen play would be the Wii U GamePad. The Wii U GamePad features a built-in touchscreen. As quoted by Nintendo, the Wii U GamePad “removes the traditional barriers between games, players and the TV”. The Wii U sold up to 9.2 million units in 2015. As the Wii U is a Nintendo product, the IP is the same as what it would be for the Amiibos.
Products and Services:
Nintendo overall offer great support and services to customers. One of their services is “Club Nintendo”. Being a part of club Nintendo allows you to stay up to date with all of the latest Nintendo news, reviews, release dates of games and consoles and more. They help with any error codes that you may have been experiencing, give out parents’ info, have tech support forums and help with repairs (such as give you Warranty Info and Repair Order FAQ). They also offer many other products such as 3DS and 2DS, Wii , Wii U and Wii U GamePad and more.
Financial Problems:
According to Nintendo’s earnings report, it demonstrates that Nintendo had an annual operating loss of £268.9 million towards March 31st 2014. The year before, they had an expected loss of £202.8 million. When the Wii U was released, it moved from 2.72 million units to 6.17 million units sold since its launch in 2012. Compared to Sony, PlayStation sold more than 7 million PS4 consoles just after its release. To conclude, since the Wii U has been out, along with the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, the Wii U selling performance was still poor.
Competition:
The competition that the Wii U GamePad has got is the PlayStation 3 and the PS vita secondary screen. However, PlayStation has used the secondary screen in a different way. What Sony has done has introduced the “Cross-Play” feature. This feature allows the gamer to stop playing on one of the devices and allows them to continue playing on the same game on a different device. Compared to the Wii U GamePad, it doesn’t interact with the game at the same time you are playing it on the PlayStation.
Outsourcing:
When it comes to outsourcing, Nintendo plans to outsource Wii components so they can increase the output of the Wii U. The two companies in which Nintendo has approached are SunPlus Technology and Wistron Corp. Wistron will report idly assemble the console whilst SunPlus Technology will concentrate on the controller chips.
Next Generation Consoles:
Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Wii U are all considered as next generation consoles and they are all competing against one another. However, it seems that PlayStation 4 and Xbox One pull the lead a lot stronger than the Wii U does. As previously talking, I have already compared the sales between the PlayStation 4 and the Wii U, the PlayStation pulled a strong lead from the start.
Next generation consoles have a lot to offer. They offer higher end graphics, bigger hard drives such a 1TB, better connectivity with applications and software such as Twitch TV (Live streaming now available), cross game chat (Skype and Party Chat with the Xbox One) and much more. It was said that after a certain amount of time the Xbox One had been released, they reduced the price of the console due to the sales of the product.
Financial Trends:
The Xbox One sold up to 11,638,701 units, the PlayStation 4 sold 20,215,802 units and the Wii U sold 9,329,635 units in February 2015. You can see that the PlayStation came out on top in February 2015 and the Wii U was at the bottom of the list. It also said that the PlayStation 4 was able to be purchased by up to 72 different countries and regions whereas the Xbox One was only available in 13 countries.
GeoDemographics and Demographics:
It is said that Sony looks to attract women and casual gamers with the PlayStation 4, “I think the key is to have people — and increasingly women — with different sensibilities creating different games. It is not all about shoot ’em up games”. However, in the image below, you can see that more females are interested in purchasing the Xbox One more than purchasing the PlayStation 4.
Augmented Reality:
The technology for augmented reality has been around for a while now. Augmented reality is where computer-generated images interact with your physical surroundings. AR seems most popular with mobile apps. A great example of an enchanting AR mobile app is Google Ingress (which is free to download on Android phones). This app is a MMO game that puts the player into two factions. What happens is both factions fight against one another and you have to control them, the AR kicks in when you have gain a material called Exotic Matter and you do this by simply walking around with your device. The more matter you have the more portals are created and the game progresses and so on. An AR app which you have to pay for (£2.50) is called SpecTrek. What this game is, is a AR game in which brings ghostbusters to life really. It populates your physical surroundings with ghosts you have to capture.
People believe that AR apps may affect the way that mobiles are advertised. AR apps makes the phones more interactive with your surroundings. There are many AR apps which interact with your surroundings by you using your camera and labels begin to pop up telling you what the buildings are or how far away a certain building is. These AR apps are very useful, if android for example had more of these apps they may be seen more popular due to the availability of the apps.
Players are the designers:
A classic example of this would be the game “Super Mario Maker”. This is a game which is available on the Wii U and allows the players to create their own Mario levels. The players can also interact with the game by using Amiibo’s. The Amiibo’s allow Mario to change character. Nintendo announced that the game Super Mario Maker had sold over 1 million units since its release, over 2.2 million courses have been created and the game has approximately been played nearly over 75 million times.
Organisations Plans:
It was part of Nintendo’s plan to release Super Mario Maker in 2015 due to it being the 30th anniversary of Mario. It was also their intention that, from the Nintendo development team to inspire the player’s creations.
Financial Trends:
Nintendo have said that Super Mario Maker has boosted the sales of the Wii U by over 110% compared to august sales. Nintendo have also made the claim of the game selling more than 500,000 combined units over the past month (so over the month of September 2015). Since then, Super Mario Maker has reached its 1 million units sold milestone.
Industry Trends:
Due to how successful Mario is and it being the 30th anniversary, they released Super Mario Maker. It is said that the Super Mario franchise has sold more than 310 million units and counting, so with the Super Mario Maker release, this would sure push the series units sold number even higher.
Nintendo have said that they “respect the intellectual property of other” and what they will do is that if they see anything which appears to “infringe the intellectual property rights of others” they will be able to remove it due to the policy. They have also made themselves contactable in case you see anything that infringes on any “intellectual property right” that you own or control.
Future Trends:
The Oculus Rift
Palmer Luckey was the man who came up with the idea of the Oculus Rift. Apparently the Oculus Rift was a Kickstarter project with an intension of only creating and selling 100 Oculus Rifts. In one of the VR forums a man named John Carmack asked if he could have a prototype and so Palmer agreed to give him one. John then announced the Oculus Rift at an E3 event and from then on, a lot more people were interested in the Oculus Rift Kickstarter Project. When it came to the Kickstarter’s project end, they had raised up to $2,437,429.
In 2014, Oculus VR was bought by Mark Zuckerberg for 2 billion dollars. Both companies believed that they were sharing the same vision and that by combining with one another meant a higher success rate for VR.
Background information of two main people:
Palmer Luckey: VR enthusiast, self-taught engineer and an electronics enthusiast. Palmer lucky was very interested in virtual reality from a young age. It was said that he had his own personal collection of VR headsets. He managed to obtain a variety of different VR headsets by attending industry liquidation sales and government auctions. When Palmer Luckey was 16, he had an interest of building his own headsets.
John Carmack: American game programmer and the co-founder of ID Software. He now works with Occulus VR. He was also the lead programmers for ID video games such as Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
Customers:
Customers can currently buy the Oculus Rift developers version for around $350/£400 however, they will need to continually update their headset with the new updates Oculus VR send out.
Competition:
HTC Vive: Created by the company Valve which teamed up with the mobile company HTC. This HTC Vive will be shipped when the Oculus Rift and the PlayStation VR are shipped.
PlayStation VR: Created by the company Sony. What makes this good contender is that Sony already have tons of loyal gamers to its name and a lot of money which means they won’t find it difficult being able to fund for hardware.
Microsoft HoloLens: Created by the company Microsoft. What makes this a good contender is that Microsoft could pair this up with its console making the headset incredibly versatile with non-gaming and gaming apps. (AR)
Gear VR: Created by Samsung but powered by Oculus. Costs only $99 and is compatible with the 2015 Samsung GALAXY flagship smartphones. This has recently been released and is now available to buy from places such as Amazon and BestBuy.com.
Risks:
The organisations attitude towards the risks are rather positive. Especially towards the VR sickness. On the Oculus Rift website there is a section which is dedicated to how they are going to try and solve VR sickness. What the developers have done have shown and explained different ways of how they are going to change some of the hardware/software to make sure that the customers who are purchasing the Oculus VR will have an enjoyable experience.
VR Sickness: This VR sickness is basically motion sickness and it can occur when the brain is not use to the VR experience. However, developers have said that if you expose your brain to VR quite frequently and over a long period of time then the brain will begin to ignore the previous unusual visuals.
Wasting Money: Facebook paid $2 billion for Occulus VR and its project of Occulus Rift. Considering that this project is still in development they are unsure of its success. If people do not use the products in which Occulus VR are selling then Facebook would essentially be losing out on money.
Behavioural Risks:
The Oculus Rift comes with an avatar. However, people believe that people using the Oculus Rift will treat the avatar as a mask and use the avatar to “channel more destructive behaviours”. The VR environment in which people will be involved in will offer “the same potential rudeness, harassment and stalking as any other communication channel, whilst also making the interaction seem even more real and personal”. In my opinion I find this rather troubling if the interaction would seem a lot more “real and personal” but then again, most platforms which involve communication includes rudeness towards other players/people so I guess it is hard to steer away from rudeness and harassment when the device offers communication.
http://www.rmmagazine.com/2014/10/01/the-real-risks-of-virtual-reality/
License Agreement:
You can currently buy the development kit for $350. There is a license agreement which comes with the development kit that you buy from Oculus VR. Oculus VR have gave developers the license agreement for them to agree to under terms and conditions. The license includes a non-exclusive license with the right to use the RIFTSDK to make the desired applications, games, content and demos to run on the Oculus Rift. You are able to “use, modify, and distribute the Oculus VR Rift SDK in source and binary form with your applications/software”. However there are a few restrictions to what you can do.
“You can only distribute or re-distribute the source code to LibOVR in whole, not in part.
Modifications to the Oculus VR Rift SDK in source or binary form must be shared with Oculus VR.
If your applications cause health and safety issues, you may lose your right to use the Oculus VR Rift SDK, including LibOVR.
The Oculus VR Rift SDK may not be used to interface with unapproved commercial virtual reality mobile or non-mobile products or hardware.”
Microsoft Illumiroom
“RoomAlive builds on the familiar concepts of IllumiRoom, but pushes things a lot further by extending an Xbox gaming environment to an entire living room. It’s a proof-of-concept demo, just like IllumiRoom, and it combines Kinect and projectors to create an augmented reality experience that is interactive inside a room. You can reach out and hit objects from a game, or interact with games through any surfaces of a room. RoomAlive tracks the position of a gamers head across all six Kinect sensors, to render content appropriately”
http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/5/6912979/microsoft-roomalive-research-projector-system
The IllumiRoom works with AR (Augmented Reality) and it basically highlights the edges of games beyond the TV. What happens is it will project game footage on the areas around your TV. So if you have just passed something in game, you will see it pass on your wall too. The best example I have seen so far of the Microsoft IllumiRoom is the bounce feature, snow feature and the star field feature. This bounce feature is where you see a ball rolling towards you on the screen and then it drops off the screen and is projected to fall from your TV and onto the floor. The snow feature works well when playing driving games. When you drive forward, the snowflakes that fall are pushed against the objects in your room and when reversing, the snow is moving away from you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2w-XqW7bF4
Financial Problems, visions, objects and plans of organisation:
It is said that this project would be too expensive for an average customer to afford. According to the head of product planning for Xbox, Albert Penello, he says that “It’s super-neat if you’re in the lab and you’ve got Microsoft money and you could totally set up this awesome lab, but… we looked at, but for an average customer it’s, like, thousands of dollars”. So their problem would be that this projects is just too expensive to put on the market and it will unlikely be released soon. This also proves as a risk to the company. Placing too much money into working in the project and then not being able to sell the product due to the sheer amount of money you need to purchase it. This is probably the reason why this project is seen as just “research” and a “proof-of-concept” project. The Xbox One was one of Microsoft’s next-generation plans which came to life. The IllumiRoom is one of Microsoft’s projects which work with AR. Although, Microsoft do stress that this is a “proof-of-concept project”.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/2/4685178/microsoft-illumiroom-xbox-projector-unlikely-to-be-released
Cloud-Gaming:
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/future-of-gaming/
Cloud Gaming helps reduce the wait for gamers to get updates for newer, high-quality games. “It’s all in the cloud and all we have to do is connect to it with a stable Internet connection and play to our heart’s content. Games will also be cheaper and more easily accessible via computers and even tablets. How much longer need we wait for this? In August 2012, Sony has purchased Gaikai the world’s largest and most widespread cloud gaming service for $380 million and is expected to incorporate it into PlayStation 4. So, not long, fingers crossed.”
Background Knowledge on Gaikai (includes funding and milestones):
Gaikai was founded in November 2008 by Andrew Gault and Rui Pereria. Then in February 2009, David Perry gives a speech to the industry leadership about instant access games. In June 2009, Gaikai presents a live demo of the instant access AAA games at the E3 2009. Towards the end of 2009, Gaikai raided $5 million in a Series A funding, then in Series B funding they raided $10 million in May 2010. They finally launch a live service on the internet of open gaming cloud in February 2011. In July 2011, they raised up to $30 million in Series C funding. A year after they were awarded the “most widespread cloud gaming network” by Guinness World Record and a month after Sony buys Gaikai for $380 million.
Organisations vision and plans:
Gaikai had a vision of solving difficult problems “to create exceptional experiences”. They wanted to achieve what people thought was impossible. An example of this would be, people believed it was impossible to stream a game at high quality with low latency, Gaikai managed to solve that problem and now you can stream games at high quality with low latency. There plans now are to focus on future game streaming and working with PlayStation on the PlayStationTM Now project.
360 Gameplay:
360 Gameplay is where someone plays a game which involves interaction across many platforms. This include a game which is also conceived simultaneously as movies, animated TV series. A game which sort of blurs the line between gameplay and movie cinematics is a game called Quantum Break. This game is yet to be released in April 2016 however it is one of Microsoft’s experimental TV/game titles. This game allows you to manipulate the cinematics to save people and kill the enemies within the game. Other types of 360 play are games such as Angry Birds. Angry birds is a game which includes digital gameplay, board games, toys to play with and other types of merchandise.
The Angry Birds company is worth 5.5 billion (2012). Angry Birds first started out as just a make or break project. After 2 years of the game idea coming to mind, Angry Birds became the iPhones most popular app. After the success of Angry Birds on all phones, Rovio no longer described itself as a games developer, but instead saw itself as a media company. With that in mind, the soft toys, phone case and comics were already considered from the beginning.
The game Quantum Break in which includes manipulative cinematics has that movie-like appeal and feel. The difference between this being a game and being a movie is that, you can change what has happened in the cinematic if you feel fit to change it, whereas if it was a movie, you don’t get the chance to decide what has just happened to the character and you have to accept what has happened.
Sensory Technology:
EEG headsets like the NeuroSky and Emotiv’s headset can detect player’s emotions and facial expressions already. The CEO of neuroengineering company Emotiv, Tan Le already has future visions for what he wants to achieve. What he wants to achieve is, the players currently facial expression translates into their avatars facial expression and other in game avatars expressions are recognised by other players and respond accordingly. They believe that being able to convert facial expressions in a game would create a level of game immersion that doesn’t exist yet.
Emotiv is a bioformatics company which offers a platform for crowd-sourced brain research. There are two headsets which are for sale, there is the Emotiv Insight Brainwear $358.95 and the Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset which starts at a selling price of $399.00. At the moment, the insight headset can interpret basic metal commands such as push, pull, levitate and rotate certain objects, it can also detect facial expressions such as blinking, winking, surprise and smile and monitor your performance by measuring and tracking your focus, engagement interest, and excitement, affinity, relaxation and stress levels.
Emotiv is the market leader within this field (neuroengineering) and have won numerous of awards for its products. They also have a community of developers and researchers whom span over 100 countries. According to Emotiv, they may use contractors and third part service providers but they reassure that they are required to protect any information given.
A competitor against Emotiv would be NeuroSky who apparently has the world’s smallest ECG chip within its wearables.
