N’Gai Croal at Level Up has a pair of interviews with Sony and Microsoft marketing about the 64/36 sales split of Grand Theft Auto IV on the Xbox 360 and PS3 at Gamestop. The close to 2-1 advantage in favour of the Xbox is a clear victory… for everyone!

You see, while there was a 64/36 split on GTA purchases, there is a 70.7/29.3 split on U.S. installed Xboxes and PS3s. While the 360 won on pure sales, the PS3 came out slightly ahead per capita. In other words, it’s a wash. Watch how each of them plays with the numbers and analysis to tell their story.

Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg has the easier job. The raw numbers look very good for the Xbox 360 and so the only real task is to dismiss the per capita advantage of the PS3 by arguing that they expected it to be worse. Taking advantage of the email interview, he completely ignores the final question, hits ’send’ and then knocks off for some lunch.

Poor Sony’s Peter Dille has to really make the numbers sing. Using the magic of rounding, the sales advantage becomes a mere 60/40 and the console advantage swells to 3-1 (3-1 would be 75/25). Given these new numbers, Playstation is doing FINE, in fact it’s practically 50/50! Later, when talking about the console race, Dille, perhaps realizing that there such a thing as being so far behind that you’re just a loser, quietly revises the earlier rounding and scrappy underdog PS3 pulls ahead to a respectable 70.1/30 install ratio.

The endearitating thing about Dille is that the tactic WORKS. As other blogs,news outlets and fansites pick up the story, they paste Dille’s money quote (“If I had an installed base advantage of 3-1, I wouldn’t be crowing too much about a 60-40 sales advantage.”) uncritically, letting the dodgy math stand.

Way back before Daikatana came out, somewhere around Columbine, someone, I think Paul Keegan at the New York Times, wrote an amazing article about the FPS industry, especially Romero, and how they were handling the fallout. Old Man Murray linked to it, I think. I remember a key line about John Carmack being the anti-Romero.

I’ve searched and the best I can find is this letter to the editor which seems to refer to it and this comment (scroll down) which pastes some of the article (but frustratingly has a “*stuff deleted cause it was boring*” section). Anyone know if I can find the full article anywhere? Why won’t the NYT give it back?

Update: Here’s the full article. Thanks Sam!

Of the many things I like about James Portnow’s weekly design challenges (and there are many) my favourite thing is the way that it quietly breaks down the oh-so-common myth that good game ideas are hard to come by and need to be kept secret.

It’s stunningly common in the industry for people to try to hide ideas. I used to interview candidates for an entry level positions at the last company where I worked. When it came to talking about game design ideas, so many of them clammed up (and so weren’t hired). They claimed they had ideas, but they didn’t want us to steal them. You see this over and over again on message boards, with prospective designers asking how they can approach a publisher with a new game idea for funding without risking that the publisher will take their pitch document and run.

Here’s the thing. Every company has a massive vault of ideas that they’d like to work on. At Capybara it was an excel spreadsheet with hundreds of entries, which grew every time we had another pitch meeting. There would be 20 ideas of which 5 were good with only 1 slot for a new project. We had a running joke for every good idea on our list: Within 12-24 months, someone would announce that they were making the game. It happened over and over again. Every idea you have, someone else is already working on or has thought about and rejected for one reason or another.

Apparently, George Lucas has people who’s job is to open every letter to him, destroy the ones that have suggestions for improving Star Wars, pass on the rest and then never talk to him. You could argue that he might have been better off if he’d peeked at a few of them but this is so that he can’t ever be sued for accidentally coming up with the same idea as someone else.

Game developers and publishers don’t need your ideas. The limiting factor in this industry is not the rate and which ideas are being produced. It’s the rate at which ideas can be implemented, tested, tweaked polished and shipped.

Good design is about the thousands of tiny decisions that happen at every step of development. Consider the hundreds of tiny decisions that led to Juiced instead of NFS: Underground 2.

So I love James Portnow’s design challenges, because they get people to approach ideas the right way, as disposable sparks that need to be examined, explored and subjected to criticism by your peers in order to have any value. Design exists in a context of creation, and the realization of the ideas is far more important than the dreaming of them. We all know what happens to those who forget this truth and start shouting “design is law”.

Listen to this episode of More or Less, featuring a charming tribute to Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons. It makes my point exactly about the benefits of stealth teaching.

A generation of young male nerds constructed elaborate fantasy worlds and flights of imagination while getting intimately acquainted with probability and basic statistics to a degree that grade 8 teachers can only dream. It really is unfortunate that the popularity of DnD was focused on a particular subset of the child population.

This raises an important question for the designers of future teaching games: Was the limited popularity of DnD because of the subject matter (Orcs and Elves) or because of the degree to which the math was near the surface of the play? Could you recreate the success for other groups of kids by changing the packaging, or would you need to make the math teaching even MORE stealthy?

Raph Koster’s post today got me thinking (again) about Danc’s excellent 2005 article about the touring band as a business model.

The thing about the touring band and about micropayments that gets everyone excited is that there is NO UPPER LIMIT to how much a devoted fan can spend on you. I’m embarrassed when I think about how much money I have spent on pretend Magic cards and judging by the evidence over in Korea, a lot of other people are doing the same kind of thing for all sorts of games.

There is another benefit to micropayments that I haven’t seen people talk about as often: it’s much easier for players to slip in and out of fandom. When I broke my WOW addiction, I cancelled my account, cutting myself off from play. It’s unlikely that I’ll ever return. Meanwhile, on some server in California sits my neglected Magic: the Gathering Online collection. Any time I want, I can drop back in and play a few games with my old cards. How many casual games can I stand before I break down and start buying packs again? I’m scared to find out. Free-to-play micropayment models allow the kind of “oh hey I remember this band” nostalgia to take hold more easily, dragging recovered addicts back in to the fold.