Kyle Orland’s Workblog

The comic book and videogame industries are pretty similar. Both rely on niche support from big-spending, highly dedicated fans. Both are slowly expanding in the mainstream market. Both have been revolutionized by the internet and are struggling to find a business model that includes digital downloads.

Yet while independently owned specialty shops dominate the brick-and-mortar comic book business, the videogame retail space has increasingly become synonymous with one name: GameStop. The slow conglomeration of mini-chains like Babbage’s, Software Etc. and FuncoLand came to its monolithic conclusion in 2005 when GameStop’s merger with EBGames gave them a full 25 percent of the videogame market (a share that’s surely increased with the chain’s nonstop expansion in the years since). The remainder is almost entirely taken up by big box retailers that sell videogames alongside unrelated products like electronics and home supplies. For most consumers, the small, mom-and-pop game shop is a thing of the past, if it was ever a thing at all.

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A photo gallery detailing the ten biggest moments in the console wars thus far.

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A look at video game’s battle royale between the Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 3 (and the two-year-old Xbox 360) on their one-year anniversary.

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Making money in the video game business is usually a pretty simple proposition: you make a game; other people pay to play it. There may be some middlemen like producers and retailers in there, and the actual payment could be a purchase, subscription or rental, but when you boil it down, the pay-to-play model has defined the business of video games since the days of the arcade.

But the world of free-to-play browser-based Flash and Java games has largely thrown this business arrangement on its head. This is partly because it had to. People have been trained by sites like Hotmail and Google to expect web services — even good ones — to be free to use. The New York Times recently abandoned its Times Select online subscription service, possibly after realizing that people weren’t willing to pay good money for the kinds of opinions that were available for free on hundreds of blogs. Similarly, any online game site that starts charging money for content risks losing players to the myriad free alternatives.

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"Haha, I have more friends than you."

The schoolyard taunt in my instant messenger box was pretty easy to dismiss. For one, it was coming from my 12-year-old cousin, who is always trying to find some petty way to get under my skin. For another, the taunt was based not on a deep, insightful discussion of our social lives, but from a quick perusal of our competing MySpace pages.

I was a latecomer to the MySpace craze, signing up primarily to view the profiles of a few close friends and family members. My cousin, on the other hand, had quickly made MySpace the center of her middle school social life. A quick conversation confirmed that her impressive-sounding list of 180-plus friends was comprised mostly of classmates she barely knew, random strangers that spammed her with friend requests and a few "friends" that were actually her friends in real life.

But all these mitigating factors didn’t really help me shake the annoying feeling I got when comparing her massive friend count to the paltry dozen or so friends on my list. It was an unmistakable feeling at the pit of my stomach that would be familiar to any gamer with even a hint of ego - a feeling that combines the shame of failure and the shame of caring so much about something so trivial.
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I felt like I was losing. At MySpace, of all things.

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The American arcade industry is dying.

Sure, there are still some signs of life in the huge, multifaceted family entertainment centers like Dave & Busters, and your local mini-golf course or bowling alley might have a few antiquated games, but the conventional wisdom today maintains that the real action in American gaming can be found inside the home.

But what if I told you there was an arcade revolution going on right under your nose? What if I told you manufacturers were putting out svelte, flatscreen machines with dozens of games, flashing LED exteriors and 3-D graphics? What if I told you the top manufacturer of these machines currently has 250,000 units on the market, rivaling the imprint of mega-selling classics like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong in their heyday, and brings in over a billion dollars a year?

What if I told you there was probably one in your neighborhood?

The arcade isn’t dying. You just have to change your idea of what an arcade is.

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If a patent is filed in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and no one is around to enforce it, does it make any money?

This somewhat zen query actually hides a serious business question about the best way to extract value from a patent. Sure, there’s some prestige associated with publicly staking your claim to an idea before anyone else, but prestige doesn’t pay the bills. It takes a significant investment of time and money to get a patent — between 18 to 30 months and thousands of dollars in filing fees on average, according to PatentInfo.com. In the business world, the point of such investments is usually to make money.

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When was the last time you were really distraught about seeing a game over screen?

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It’s a point that comes up a lot in arguments about the cultural import of video games. "The medium is still young," defenders argue. "Games may not have reached total mainstream acceptance yet, but just give it some more time. You’ll see."

We hate to break it to you guys, but video games aren’t that young anymore. This month marks 40 years since Ralph Baer’s Brown Box effectively created the idea of interactive screen-based games (and the industry is even older if you count Willy Higinbotham’s 1958 experiment Tennis for Two).

This important milestone got us wondering: how do the first 40 years of gaming compare to the first 40 years of other forms of mass entertainment? Continue reading for a quick historical comparison:

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We think it’s a given by this point that most regular Joystiq readers know that playing violent video games will not suddenly turn you into a violent killer, or even make you any more likely to commit a violent act ever in your life. Still, with media personalities like Dr. Phil and Jack Thompson out there baselessly implicating games in the recent Virginia Tech massacre, we felt younger game players might need something to defend their hobby to parents that don’t have the same familiarity with the medium.

Hence the following declaration, to be printed, signed and presented to any authority figure with the misguided fear that the games you love will lead to a life of violent crime. We hope this declaration will help start a conversation with the non-gamers in your life about why video games are so important to you and why they aren’t the bogeymen some in the media make them out to be.

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