Some Guy: 70% Of Games Lose Money

Luke Plunkett — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 23:30:00 MDT

While certain games are a license for their publishers to, yes, print money - Halo, Mario and Final Fantasy come to mind - most aren't. Most are lucky to capture your attention for a week or two before falling under the crushing tank treads of progress, as you lot clamour for the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. Indeed, so many games fall into that latter category that Chris Deering - who was once boss of SCEE, but is now just some guy - says 7 out of 10 games lose money. Which in reality explains why so many developers and publishers go bust, but in my most socialist of fantasies, would be the catalyst for gaming industry revenue sharing, where Nintendo and Activision would be forced to share their profits with Atari and Midway. You know, just to keep things even. And interesting.

Gaming audience will hit 2.5bn by 2011, says Deering [Develop]

Sony Planned A PSOne "Facebook", PS2 "YouTube"

Mark Wilson — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:40:00 MDT

Former Sony Entertainment President Chris Deering has recently dished out two pieces of fascinating gossip about Sony development for those interested in the "woulda, coulda, shoulda" points in the company's history. The first such program was a social networking platform for the PSOne ala Facebook or MySpace.

We had a secret test program in Europe back in 1997 on PSOne, running a black and white text-based, moderator-led community chat group with a special box called 'Net-Station' that hooked up PCs to the TV. Nick Parker ran it. The project codename was 'Moccasin 5'. I have no idea where it came from.

The second was a YouTube-esque video service for the PS2.

Then, at Sony Europe, we worked on a PS2 concept called 'Central Station' which was planned to stream its own PlayStation TV channel, back in 2002. This was four years ahead of YouTube. But uptake in broadband and wireless routers took longer to reach mass market levels than we expected, and we couldn't get other regions of the Sony PlayStation world to buy in.

These stories are reminiscent of Sony mentioning not too long ago that they had the technology for the iPod in the 90s, but didn't understand how to package it for consumers.

It just goes to show, success isn't just about having a great idea or the ability to pull it off. In many ways, timing really is everything. And I'm guessing that actually releasing the product has something to do with it too.

Sony beat Facebook... to Facebook [MCVUK]

Kotaku: Chris Deering

Some Guy: 70% Of Games Lose Money

Sony Planned A PSOne "Facebook", PS2 "YouTube"