Jonathan Grant

VentureBeat and Learning to Love Being Co-Opted

I admit to having a reflex bias against outsiders working/covering the game industry. While this knee-jerk has a foundation in valid experience, it’s something I struggle to suppress – coming from an outsider doesn’t make an opinion invalid, it just makes it orders of magnitude less likely to be valid.

Outsider opinions are critical in any entertainment medium, and especially hard to digest given the subjectivity involved. The dynamic nature of digitally-generated media can make this worse; Jar Jar Binks proves that limitless possibilities aren’t automatically a virtue. Add limitless opinions dispensed via the Internet, and you’ve got the beginnings of an explanation as to why the game industry is so insular.

While today’s influx of new bodies into the industry will undoubtedly produce some gems, sometimes I’m overwhelmed by the proportional stream of turds it’s simultaneously raining on us all. Today’s example of these wages of inexperience is the game coverage over at VentureBeat.

First off, let me state clearly that I’m a daily reader of VentureBeat. I’ll explain why in a second.

Dean Takahashi generally writes all the game-related posts over there, and rarely do his entries fail to make my jaw clench at some inaccurate / fuzzy detail. Some examples:

May 18th (On the exercise gaming trend):

“In video games, Nintendo starts the trends and then the copycats pile in.”

Sure, as long as you don’t consider First-Person Shooters, MMOs, music performance games, open world roamers like GTA, or multiplayer games “trends”.

May 15th (On investment dollars continuing to flow into gaming):

“Why should you only be able to get rich -– or lose your shirt — at a Web 2.0 company? Or at an investment bank? Or a cleantech company? Games are a haven from the storm.”

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen people from outside the industry stumble and choke on their external assumptions about game development. This is equally true for investors. Look at Hollywood’s rich history of fleecing external investors as an example of how an entertainment product with demographic-driven attributes (like “fun” and “excitement”) can confuse and muddle an investor.

These are a couple of examples just from the last few days. As I said above, in spite of these kinds of stumbles, I continue to read and enjoy the VentureBeat blog, and that’s the reason for this post.

As game developers, we’re witnessing a generational shift happen in our industry. It’s not uncommon to see young sweethearts list “playing video games” as something they enjoy doing together the same way their parents liked “going to the movies”. This shift is just starting to surface, and the waves it will generate will destroy many of the common assumptions the industry has held to as bedrock. Certainly, you can see this future written in the rise of casual gaming – a huge market most hardcore developers are still willfully blind to.

This kind of blindness is why the fresh (if shaky) perspective of outsiders like the VentureBeat guys is a daily read for me. For game developers, listening to outsiders about the future of the industry is just as critical a discipline as listening to players about the quality of our games.