We’re sorry but we just can’t get excited about the new connected TV game forum, despite some of our loves being TV games and networking. In fact perhaps that’s why. TV connected to gaming, while gamers are networking among one another is one of the key ‘anti-boredom’ ingredients that will entice future generations.
But the members of this new forum announced at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas this week, are all European including Accedo, a Swedish Broadband company; Betfair, a UK gambling site; PlayJam, a UK casual online gaming site; RallyPoint, a UK fantasy sports specialist and Two Way Media, which offers skill-based games over IPTV and is also based out of the UK.
The Forum partners say they believe games will act as a prime motivator for consumers to connect their TVs to the internet. Well they might, but if they had looked really hard, they would have realized that hard core gamers, on games consoles already connect their TV to a console and that console connects to the internet and it is already a multi-billion dollar business ‘ except not in the way they imagine.
It cannot have escaped this group that Microsoft is both the originator of Xbox 360 and the leading supplier of IPTV middleware ‘ and that the two (i.e TV and gaming) have been pushed together by the major pay TV platforms in the US on Cable, delivered by a primary US technological eco-system.
The group cites the more than $500 million that is generated every year in micro-transactions in online gaming as a prime motivator for consumers to connect their TVs to the internet. What they mean is it is a prime reason for operators to connect their TV viewers to games, games which they control. But if you spread that $500 million across all the operators which have IPTV or Cable ‘ in other words an interactive return path, it is a drop in the ocean.
The Connected TV Game Forum aims to lead a common approach for interactive platforms, but we can’t see it. There are so many other vested interests here that a handful of local gaming companies are not going to drive much weight.
To us there is something dishonest about casual gaming, where gambling is involved, anyway. It is very different from Playstation or the Role Playing Games of online worlds like Second Life, to put your life savings at risk through gambling addiction and we probably don’t see Betfair as likely to be part of any organization that has the consumer at heart. In the US, online gambling is illegal, so anything that comes out of this group is unlikely to make the trip back to the US
Separately, casual gaming is only popular right now, because it is a world where you can drop in for a few seconds, a few minutes or you can kill a few hours. One of the best things about networking all types of games, is that you will soon be able to play them where you left off ‘ play them while waiting for someone, stop at the drop of a hat, and resume at any point later. Casual games are mind numbing and pointless because they require this level of simplicity, and we think they will be replaced by more sophisticated game, which are interactive and yet which have gaming depth (i.e. story line, character consistency etc’)
Operators intuitively know that one gamer can take up a whole TV set and leave the rest of service inaccessible for the rest of the household. At least Nintendo Wii games involve the rest of the household’