Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

I am not a gamer - but this might change in 2008

You should really watch (if you speak French), one of the last episodes of "Plein Ecran", a french Tech show on TV and on the web. Great summary of what's going on in the gaming world, a market at 35b$, expected to grow to $59B in a couple of years. Huge.

I've never been much of a gamer, getting really bored and impatient when I had to set up a character in Dungeons and Dragons about 25 years ago, and any modern incarnation of that. Hence I've been a very casual gamer with simple games such as FrozenBubble (one of my favorites), or Lights Out (on the iPhone). Tetris, Blackjack, or Block escape are other of my favourites. I don't really like the others such as Deminer, Solitaire...

Hence, I've never really played console games (except for Mario Kart on the Nintendo Game Cube - market cap = those of Vivendi + Peugeot PSA ??? !!!, or Avalanche 1080°).

A couple of weeks ago I tried 2 nights at WoW, and got to level 9. At some point game play seemed boring to me : kill more of the same or more powerful enemies, and get more experience. Get a barter currency, and get more gear, energy, medecine, you name it. Boring.
I do sense some really interesting aspects in playing WITH other people in order to defeat enemies or solve puzzles. But my 10 day trial account expired, and I'm not really in the mood of buying an account for that.

Watching the LCI episode above, I discovered the newer generation of games and consoles. One really caught my attention, in terms of realism, graphics, story, gameplay. Still not available on PC (on a Mac one day ?), but already for sale since November on PS3 and Xbox 360.

Watch the trailer : (updated from original file, quality on youtube was low)

 

and a demo of the gameplay:

What do you think ?

I've seen the light

Imagining moving from a 2-D battle field (most games today still rely on a 2-D vision of game interaction, including Second Life (everything is laid really on a floor, you just jumb between locations using the fly mode).

 

Here you are interacting in a full 3D mode... impressive, and inspiring.

just installed Second Life

I’ve never been much of a gamer. When I bought my PSP in January at Fry’s in Las Vegas, the sales clerk asked me what 2 games I wanted with it (maybe $10?). I said “what?”. “yeah”, he said, “we have a special promotion, you can buy 2 games with your new PSP for just xxx $”.

“Nah…” I said, as I really seldom play anything.

Actually I have a great desktop at home. Dual screen, bi-pro, lots of RAM (3 GB), dual pro. And I have NO GAME installed. Maybe I should find one that would suit my style: I don’t like shoot them ups, beat them up, kinda games. Nor the complicated ones where you have to spend hours of your time just trying to figure out how they work.

Every now and then I hooked my son’s Nintendo Game Cube to play with him. We have 6 games, but the only 2 I play with him (and he doesn’t play much either) are Super Mario Kart (I like the dirt track only), and Snowboard 1080° (or something like that). On my phone, I only play Sudoku. I tried “grand theft auto” on the PSP the other day when Smooth lended it to me. 20 min was all I could take on that one

So, unless you guys have an idea of what I should be experimenting with… And I know that the game market is larger than the cinema industry… Probably I should get into it at some point. I saw an Xbox 360 the other day. I’m interested for its windows MCE capabilities, not really for the games. Anything good in there ?

So back to the title of this post: Eric Rice at vloggercon showed me what he was doing on Second Life: trading goods, buying / selling land, hosting concerts in his conference center; he told me about what the BBC was doing there, how people were setting up virtual record labels, how the vloggercon conference was streamed live inside it (and Supernova will be streamed live as well), etc. Now this is REALLY getting me interested. 

I touched upon the economics of WoW in an old post, and more recently in the possibilities of a Habbo-hotel-like venture, called Taatu. I will explore this new business world more in the future. I’ve seen the many posts that Joi Ito has devoted to WoW. I can only guess he was also looking at the economics of the new world as well.

By the way, anyone else out there on SecondLife ? My character is called “Rodrigo Television.

update: interesting article on Trademark issues in second life.

3GSM: a chat with Thomas (CTO infusio)

 

Download movie (.mov)

Update: the official site of in-fusio is here.

World of Warcraft screenshots

Attacking the Ancient Core Hounds patrol we aggroed in MC, originally uploaded by Joi.

Have a look at Joi Ito's series of screenshots of this game on flickr. Rather impressive environment.

I am no player of any video game, but am impressed by the economics of online gaming.

Who's playing WOW these days ?

I’m really not much of a gamer myself, as I really spend too much time on the net and reading books. I rarely watch a DVD although it was my full time trade earlier this year. I’ve been reading a couple of posts of very serious guys (example 1, example 2) doing * cough * research on something called World of Warcraft, the category killer it seems in the areas of massive multiplayer games. It’s also expanding onto the mobile world [FR].

So, what the heck, I now click once in a while on articles relating to them. Check these quotes on this NYT article, as they are really impressive numbers:

“Since November, World of Warcraft has signed up more than four million subscribers worldwide, making for an annual revenue stream of more than $700 million. About a million of those subscribers are in the United States (with more than half a million copies sold this year) and another 1.5 million are in China, where the game was introduced just three months ago. By contrast, EverQuest II now has between 450,000 and 500,000 subscribers worldwide, with about 80 percent in the United States.

Just a year ago, numbers like that would have classed EverQuest II as a big hit. The original EverQuest topped out at around a half-million players, and many, if not most, game executives came to believe that the pool of people willing to pay $15 a month to play a video game had been exhausted. The conventional wisdom in the industry then was that there could not possibly be more than a million people who would pay to play a massively multiplayer online game.

Now, World of Warcraft has shattered earlier assumptions about the potential size of the market.”

Bored this summer? Try Chess tactics

Interesting site:

Currently 20,969 tactical chess problems with a degree of difficulty ranging from trivial to ambitious are provided to be solved against the clock. Your tactical performance will be measured by the Glicko rating system. The problems are rated too.

You can sign in completely anonymous as guest to get familiar with the chess board interface, browse some problems or just look around.

(via David T.)

Bobby Fischer inspires a new variant of chess: Chess960

Waow:: I had never heard of the a new chess variant invented a couple of years ago by the great chess grandmaster, Bobby Fischer. Check this Wired article:

The rules of Chess960 are mostly the same as orthodox chess -- but the setup incorporates something once considered anathema to the game: chance. Pawns begin where they always do. However, the pieces behind them on the white side are arranged at random, with the proviso that bishops must end up on opposite colors, and the king dwell somewhere between the two rooks. The black pieces are lined up to mirror the white.
That makes for 960 different starting positions in the game, instead of just one. The point of Chess960 is to free chess from the yoke of memorization.

French online DVD leader, Glowria, announces a 4m€ (~$5m) round of financing

Isn't it a nice day today ? Glowria announces this morning a 4 million euro round of financing by SPEF Venture, the private equity arm of French banking federation, Natexis Banques Populaires.

Bernard Nabet & Arnaud Filhol from SPEF will be joining our historic investor (Mousse Partners) and a number of Business Angels as our equity partners; their investment brings the total money raised by the company to over 8,5m€ so far. What for? I'll let you have a look at Mihai's blog where he describes some of our plans in marketing, video-on-demand, and recruitement.

He also describes how the company has developped recently: we have extensively developped our partnerships with our "suppliers" (the studios) and with our "distribution networks" (major ISPs and portals); our portfolio of products and clients are now profitable; the VOD platform is ready, etc.
If you were wondering what I had been up to in the past few months, aside form writing on this blog, now you know...

The road ahead is huge: Mihai mentions that glowria has the ambition to become the leader in this space on continental Europe. Indeed, lot of work ahead.
Enough said, the press release is here.

On a final note, don't you like French Entrepreneurs lately ?
- LBA announced a Business-Angel round a couple of weeks ago of 2,5m€
- Boonty (leading games distributor, and our partner at GlowriaGames) announced 8m€ last thursday
- Photoways (online picture printing service) announced 24m€ on Friday
- grosbill.com was sold to Auchan the other day
- and I hear a couple of other guys will be announcing shortly, before the summer break.

It's indeed a great time to start a new company, to develop your dreams and aspirations. I'm sure the VCs that read this blog will agree with me as well. In the meantime, here at RISC Partners, we have a couple of projects we're working on, and I'll be posting job descriptions shortly.

Nota: the press is already carrying the story: for instance NetEconomie.com ;)

Digital Games Distributor BOONTY receives $10m series B round of financing

This piece of news is fantastic: the Nouzareth brothers, co-founders of boonty, have just raised $10 million to further expand their games business (~ 8m€). The press release is just off the press, and if you want to hear it straight from the horse's mouth, here's a video of Mathieu that I shot last week (bloggers always respect embargos ;).

Download Boonty_gets_10m.avi

Well done! It is great news for French entrepreneurs, and for the VC community. The sector is waking up, and a few more rounds of financing should be announced this month!

ps: Glowria Games, our games offer is - of course - powered by Boonty!