Dare to be Digital 2007 is going multinational and multicultural, thanks to a sponsorship deal with the Scottish Executive.

Funding from the Executive will enable a team of Indian students and another of Chinese students to compete in the computer games design competition organised by the University of Abertay Dundee.

The Scottish Executive support will also enable Dare to be Digital’s organisers to add a Scottish student to each team of four.

Each Scottish student will act on the role as an international ambassador. He or she will visit the nominated team in their home country before travelling to Dundee together in June for the start of the 10-week contest.

As well as adding their programming and creative skills to the mix, the Scottish students will be able to help their Indian or Chinese counterparts acclimatise to Scotland.

Each team will also have a ‘buddy’ - someone of their own nationality who has been living and working in Scotland for some time - to help them settle in and integrate with the UK contestants.

Recruitment activities have already been started both in India and China with the help from the British Council. Scottish students, who are interested in this challenging role, please visit DaretobeDigital.com for details.

In previous years, Dare to be Digital has sometimes welcomed teams from outside the UK and has also included individual overseas students in Scottish and UK teams. The new arrangement for 2007 gives a unique chance for Scottish studentS to experience working in a completely different culture.

Tom McCabe, Minister for Finance and Public Service Reform said:
“The Executive has no hesitation in supporting this programme for the third consecutive year. We are welcoming the brightest scientific minds from China and India to Scotland through the Dare to be Digital programme.

“The programme brings together Chinese, Indian and UK students and provides them with the opportunity to use their talents and tap into the computer games industry. Scotland has already had significant breakthroughs in computer sciences and this scheme will continue to encourage further innovation.

“Dare to be Digital showcases our own home grown talent as well as promoting Scotland as a great place for motivated and talented people to live, work and study to overseas students.”

The Scottish Executive has joined an impressive list of sponsors for Dare to be Digital 2007, including Scottish Enterprise Tayside, Dundee City Council, the Scottish Executive, NCR, Electronic Arts, AMD, Denki, The Digital Hub in Dublin and Belfast City Council with the Department of Enterprise Trade and Investment’s Building Sustainable Prosperity Programme.

Paul Durrant, Dare to be Digital project director, commented: “This excellent support from the Scottish Executive is going to add a wider cultural and international dimension to the 2007 contest. It is part of our drive to expand Dare to be Digital globally and position the competition as an internationally recognised model for the development and showcasing of innovation and young talent in computer games production.”

Dare to be Digital has established an enviable reputation for producing high-level talent, with many contestants going on to set up their own development companies or being snapped up by major international games companies such as Lionhead, Microsoft and Electronic Arts.

Yuan Yao, a contestant in last year’s event, now works for Electronic Arts in Shanghai. He said: “Dare to be Digital has given me an excellent opportunity to work in the UK with UK students and industry experts with international level. The participation also gave me a chance to meet some of the big players and now I am happy to be working for Electronic Arts Shanghai. I will recommend any Chinese games talent to take part in Dare. It is once in a lifetime experience!”

Richard Leinfellner, Electronic Arts’ Vice-President for Outsourcing, commented: “The Dare model rewards creativity and teamwork as well as risk taking. It is the gold standard for project based competitive team work.”

Dare to be Digital 2007 launched its first call for entries last month. The organisers are planning for 60 to 80 or more talented young game developers from across the UK and Ireland to take part this year - almost twice as many as in 2006.

This year, for the first time, Dare to be Digital will be hosted in more than one location across the British Isles. The Indian and Chinese teams will join four teams from Scotland based at Abertay University for the first nine weeks of the competition.

Dare to be Digital 2007 will also feature a completely new element in the competition: Dare ProtoPlay, a three-day showcase of all the teams’ work, scheduled to take place just before the Awards Ceremony. Dare ProtoPlay will enable the general public and industry experts to not only play the games, but also vote for them as well. In addition to showcasing the games, Dare ProtoPlay will play a big role in games education, helping parents and children understand the “behind-the-scene” features in games creation. They also have the chance to take part in the games creation process itself.

Winners collect prizes from Philips, LucasArts and Sony PlayStation.

16th March 2007. Los Angeles, USA. ISM Agency, the videogame industry’s largest and longest serving business management agency devoted to game development studios, today announced that their poker tournament raised almost $24,000 for the Starlight Starbright Foundation.

120 players from a broad spectrum of companies in the videogame industry attended the tournament, held on Tuesday 6th during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Stew Kosoy, Senior Partner of ISM Agency commented, “We were delighted to see so many people turn up to compete for fun and for charity. We’d like to extend our thanks to the players and our generous sponsors at Philips, LucasArts and PlayStationÒ for supporting the tournament.”

The winners were:
1st. Lee Jacobson, Midway Home Ent – Philips 37” AmbX FlatScreen TV & DVD
2nd. 2nd : Jill Zinner, Premier Search – LucasArts memorabilia
3rd. Douglas Rilley, LucasArts – Custom PlayStation 3

Winner, Lee Jacobson, Vice President, Business Development / Acquisitions Midway Games, Inc. added, “I’m thrilled I won. But most importantly, the winners are the kids and their families. We played for them. I can’t wait to come back next year and defend my title.”

About ISM
Founded in 1996, Interactive Studio Management (ISM) is the largest agency specializing in interactive video game development and represents several of today’s leading independent studios and titles. Over its ten year history, ISM has produced over a quarter of a billon dollars in video game development investments on behalf of its clients. Drawing on more than one-hundred years of direct experience in interactive product development, marketing, finance, sales, and acquisitions, ISM continues to make a powerful and lasting impact on the business of video game development. www.ism-agency.com

As the games get more immersive, look better, sound better, and the artificial intelligence gets smarter most gamer rejoice.  The part that gamers tend not to get as excited about is that as the feature list increases so does the price of the game.  But if you talk to the publishers of the games they will tell you that they are losing money and practically in the poor house and may not be able to keep their doors open much longer.  They have a long list of excesses about why they are loosing money, everything from pirating to people having the nerve to sell their used games once they have played through them.

All of a sudden I realized something, console manufactures make consoles that lose money why can’t game developers and publishers make games that lose money also?

OK, I know that at first that this makes about as much sense as trying as fighting for peace but follow with me for a second.  Console manufactures make a product that at the beginning of its life cycle actually loses money with every sale.  As technology becomes cheaper, and the process of making the console itself becomes more refined they begin to actually make money on the console with each sale.  Now it is also worth pointing out that console manufactures make royalties on the sale of any game and accessory that is made for their console.  While in the initial sale they lose money they plan to make up that lose with the royalties from the games and accessories that are sold for that console.  This is actually becoming a common business model.  Cellular services sell you the phone and lose money with that sale, but then make it up with the profits from the service fee you pay for over the next two years.  Ink Jet printers are priced to lose money, but then they make up that lose later on by selling you the ink cartridges at a price that they recover their loses real fast.  Why can’t game developers use this same business model, selling their initial product at a lesser price in order to sell more units then make bigger profits based on future sales related to that initial sale?  If game developers initially priced their game so they took a lose (or made almost nothing) with every game they sold but sold more copies of their game then they could make more money later on with all the extra options that are now available to game developers and publishers.

Pricing, If you price a game a new XBox 360, or PS3 game at $39.99 chances are you are going to sell allot more copies of your game then you will selling it at $59.99.  If you take a smaller profit initially you will sell more copies of the game and if your game is good you may sell so many copies that you end up making money on the initial game sales.  Then all the extras money make options are just profit for your company.  In order to do this and have this plan work the first thing you have to do is create a really good game.  Games like Gears or War, Lost Planet, Oblivion, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid.  I think it is fair to note that Lost Planet sold over one million copies in the first week.  Capcom stated that the game cost about twenty million dollars to create, and they spent another twenty million dollars to promote.  Now by my math they made some where around sixty million dollars in the first week.  I am pretty sure they made money on that game just from the sales of the game not to mention all the other sources of revenue they have coming in from the game.  Plus how much more money they will make selling the game as platinum hit.

Advertising, the more eyeballs they have in game the more money they can charge companies to advertise in their game.  If anyone has seen Rainbow Six: Vegas, Splinter Cell, or Crackdown you know that in game advertising is a huge deal.  This is all money that game developers and publishers are getting besides the price that we the consumers are giving them for the privilege of playing the game they produce.

DLC (Down Loaded Content), once the game is written, adding more multiplayer maps, and more missions is not nearly as much work as creating a new game.  With the game engine done and a great deal of the character design and sound clips completed, it should only be a minimal effort to create extra loaded content.  If you sell allot of copies of the game itself initially then it stands to reason that more copies of your extra content will sell also, there by making you more money.  Bethesda has really picked up on this with Oblivion.  Releasing additional missions, and extras, as well as expansion packs.  Some of them they give away and others they charge what I think most people would say is a fair price (Not including the horse armor).  I think it is worth mentioning to make this work, you first off if you create a really good game that people will buy.  Creating DLC also helps your company make more money by keeping customers interested in your game and therefore not selling the game to EB/GameStop, EBay, Circuit City or other places that used games are sold.

Music, Electronic Arts announced recently that it is going to start selling exclusive sound track music from the games they publish on iTunes.  I think this is a great idea for finding additional revenue from the games you create.

Game makers need to do something because even analysts are saying that the sixty dollar price point for games is not sustainable.

In the FOX show The War at Home the father states “At my age it is easier to make another kid, then to make a good friend”.  As a gamer in my mid 30’s, and I have found that with work, and family, and just getting older it is really hard to meet new people and make new friends.  Let alone meet people my age who are into video games.  Since I no longer go out with my friends to the bar every weekend meeting new people through existing friends and no longer meet a new batch of people every six months like I did when I was in college, making new friends can be very difficult.  So enter the online world of online gaming.   

The world of XBox LIVE seems to be a great way to meet people and play online with them for an hour or so.  If you enjoy gaming with that player you can simply send them a friends request, and there is not a whole lot of rejection if they deny the request making it a little easier on the ego if someone does not want to be your friend.  In my personal experience some of my online friends, feel are closer to me then a number of the friends that I see in the flesh in my day to day life.  With XBox LIVE I have made friends in various parts of Europe including United Kingdom, and Norway and all over the

Is it just me or is anyone else kind of worried when politicians are trying to dictate what is morally and ethically acceptable in society?  Think about the fact that most of the politicians in the USA were formally Lawyers which means you are not exactly drawing from the highest quality pool of people to begin with when it comes to ethics, morality, honesty, and being an all around decent person.

It seems like in the USA, Germany, and France if you want to get your political career jump started these days all you need to do is introduce legislation sponsoring the censorship of video games, or make speeches about how video games are going to be the down fall of western civilization.  Take for instance Senator Sam Brownback in the USA who I think really does not care anything about the topics of video games and their effects on people, I am pretty sure he just wants to grab some headlines.  What a shocker he is trying to make run for the presidency.  So in order to make the USA a better place he feels that we should stomp out prejudice, disease, poverty, hunger, illiteracy, and crime.  But since all that would actually require work and that would probably keep him from kicking back at camp David and enjoying all the relaxations it has to offer, a better way to America a better place would be to introduce legislation that will require the ESRB to play through every game that is to be released to make sure of its contents.  Actually saying something like this shows that he has no clue as to how many games are released and what kind of a mammoth undertaking that would be.  Not to mention how little of a return in the benefit to society you would see from this massive effort. 

I think we could make America a much better place if legislators in public office actually acted in the best interest of the masses that they represent.  And to ensure this I think a group of people should follow all public officials and video blog their entire lives, and look into every aspect of their lives while they are in public office.  This way we could ensure that they were always acting in the publics best interests.  Yeah, I am sure they will legislate that!  Imagine if congressmen were not allowed to take kick backs from special interest groups, or gigantic campaign contributions in order to ensure they will vote in ways to benefit those companies.  And there were no married congressmen having sexual relations with their staff of the opposite sex or the same sex.  Imagine if none of them ever cheated on their taxes, or held themselves to strictly following the laws of the land.  Honestly I think that would produce much more positive results for our country then making sure that a couple of companies did not hide an Easter eggs in some video games.

Perhaps if all these public officials truly wanted to make America a better place they could first look within themselves, and then to their colleges to lead by example.  And once the position of Public Office has been cleaned up, then move on to other areas where there is improvement to be made.