ALPHA | NEWS
Editorial
Followers of fashion There have been a number of emerging trends over the past twelve months that we’ve witnessed. ‘Embracing failure’ was a powerful message from 2K
More bytes SPECIAL REPORT: Has the pound’s plunge against the dollar boosted the international attractiveness of UK developers?
Boston in its Paris GDC talk on the long and winding road of Bioshock’s evolution. Another was the ‘power of smaller teams’ within existing studios – a view which had two particular champions in the stunning Portal and Develop Awardwinning Lost Winds from Frontier. And then there’s the surprise money-making potential of the iPhone. All stand-outs of 2008 for sure, but perhaps the most disruptive was the notion of seeing game development as less about the shipping of a boxed product and more about providing an on-going service to players. If that sounds too much like business-speak, the thing that should excite you is the potential to launch quickly and on a small scale, adding content and evolving the game itself over time in response to player feedback. It works: Valve’s experience with Team
Fortress 2 lead it to claim that all of its games, even the single-player ones, will be made this way in the future. Another example is London Studios’ PS3 not-socialnetwork Home. Itself a continually evolving platform that will grow based on user and third-party feedback, the team aren’t foolish in their expectations of thirdparty support. They know that there’s a good chance you might not support it out of the box, but they’re banking on this very service model; that as you continue to update, patch and expand your game you might be able to fit some manner of Home support in there too. Make no mistake: as we see elsewhere on this page, the worsening economic climate is going to hit developers, no matter how many industry talking heads will try to assure us otherwise. And yet, it’s in times of struggle that innovation tends to prevail. Perhaps those studios that can exploit the ever-widening revenue generation possibilities will be the ones that don’t just survive the slump, but instead thrive. Have a great Christmas and New Year, and we’ll see you in 2009.
Ed Fear ed.fear@intentmedia.co.uk
06 | DECEMBER 2008/JANUARY 2009
by Owain Bennallack
W
hat’s bad for Brits shopping in New York is good for your local indie studio. The £1 to $2 exchange rate that made iPods in the Big Apple cheap also made hiring UK studios more expensive for US publishers. After two years hovering around the $2 mark, however, the pound has fallen sharply since the end of July, dropping as far as to dip below $1.50 as of December 10th. If you’re a UK company, that means you’ve become 25 per cent cheaper for your US customers, at no cost to you. And if you’re a US publisher, you can reconsider British studios without baulking at the sticker price. “I believe it has been enormously helpful,” says analyst Nick Gibson of Games Investor Consulting, adding
“The dollar to pound exchange rate has been hurting UK developers for the past few years…” Philip Oliver, Blitz
that he has spoken to developers who’ve won contracts due to the weakening pound. “US publishers are very price conscious and understandably so. A ten per cent exchange rate movement for a $10m title has substantial cost implications. Multiply this by the number of titles being developed outside of the US and you have a potential budgeting nightmare.” From the perspective of a UK citizen, the sudden drop in the pound is a cause for concern, even if economists agree that the sterling was overvalued. With the national debt rising and the country headed into a recession, the markets are taking a much dimmer prospect of the UK economy than before. “But every cloud has a silver lining,” says Philip Oliver, CEO of Blitz, “and in this instance it’s the reverting of the dollar to pound