I have linked the following video many times in the past but I will link it again as the introduction, and rest of it for that matter, covers an awful lot of this news lark.
In case that is broken at some point 27c3 Three jobs journalists will do in 2050 is what it is.
So earlier on today we saw a thread in which the FCC (the US body that does various things, including electronics testing to see what kind of RF interference they emit) potentially leaked a revision of the Xbone. http://gbatemp.net/threads/did-the-fcc-just-leak-a-new-xbox-one.422874/ and that got me thinking, not about the xbone but about game reporting/journalism and how to set about it.
Anyway there are four broad ways to play this reporter lark
1) Copy down what other sites say, which in turn are probably just news wires and barely filtered press releases. Laziness is a virtue as far as I am concerned, however this is too lazy for even me.
2) Get your own press releases sent to you, work it up a bit, cross link some stuff, do some other things and get on with it all. The favoured way of doing it for games if 1) is not the case and not one I am going to sniff at.
3) Do the equivalent of wearing out shoe leather, develop sources (someone's dad must work for Nintendo), approach people, know the names of every CEO, CTO, marketing wonk, game director of every division,... for every publisher, developer, sales platform and some more people besides, know the tech, do ninja missions, basically like what they do in the films but probably without a cool hat. This is too much like hard work for me, and seemingly most others playing this game.
4) Meta analysis. My kind of jam really -- take information from a few hundred passive sources, figure out something interesting and press go. I might even get some key word searches going on.
I now want a list of the various sources for this
The three big areas are of course
The US
Japan
The EU
This is not to say other countries are not useful Canada, South Korea, Australia, Russia and probably in a few years then China will probably play a bigger role. Bonus is some of these other countries are often more forthcoming with the info.
Sources of information include
Financial markets of various forms. An odd source of info and not the most useful -- financial markets tend to be dominated by what they think it will be worth next quarter which says not a lot about game quality or interesting developments. This need not be standard stock market prices either as things like credit ratings and annual reports are worth having.
Patent, trademark, copyright and such offices. The vast majority of things they do are public or eventually get made public (either because it is necessary or that is because that is how things work), some places (the US and Japan) even have software patents *spits* which can showcase interesting things.
Health and safety offices. The FCC example above being a good one but there is more to product launches than this.
Censorship places. Many places reckon kids can not handle tits, guns or swearing for whatever reason. They are usually locked up pretty tight but can occasionally cause things to slip.
Website registrations. Take all the websites registered in a day and do a whois on them all, possibly after a key word scan.
Other company press releases -- the history of the Sega Saturn graphics chips being an interesting one there. If a small company lands a contract with a big player they tend to want to shout it from the rooftops. Similarly small indy dev lands a 2 game deal with EA could also say a lot, especially as a lot of the time said indy dev will probably be a specialist in something EA lacks (mobile games are the current hotness but who knows what the next fad will be). Back to other companies then electronics dealing with controllers are a good thing to look for but general electronics that might go into a game console is also worth looking at.
Company acquisitions. It can be cheaper to outright buy a company that specialises in the thing you want and as you probably do not want to waste millions of dollars then it will probably be relevant to what is going on in the future. Even if the purchase is a misdirect (I watch too many bad financial thrillers, they are even worse for me than cheesy medical shows) I do not care.
Bankruptcy courts. Often a good source of info and with the amount of semi creative accounting that goes on then often an even better option.
Job listings. Much like company acquisitions most companies will not post listings for [shiny tech developer] when they are not interested in shiny tech.
Former employee CVs. "I am an expert in [three year old tech]" could be interesting when "worked at [blah] for last 5 years" is also in the CV.
Translation houses. Probably not but I will add it to the list.
Industry get togethers. GDC posts talks from all sorts of people here, however a lot of them are rather closed down (pax dev being a good example). Much like financial markets though these can be tricky to divine much of great merit from.
In most of my posts you would probably have had a sea of links but it is 2am and I would rather not leave this one for the morning. I will however come back then and start putting together some links for all the countries in question, all the major devs/publishers/game related companies. Said game related companies are something I want to explore a bit more as well -- there is an awful lot of middleware out there and I find it quite useful for hacking games (they often provide tools, game lists featuring the tech and possibly some actual info).
If someone wants to add more to the list of sources or start putting links together, or even making a list of companies worth looking at, then feel free.
In case that is broken at some point 27c3 Three jobs journalists will do in 2050 is what it is.
So earlier on today we saw a thread in which the FCC (the US body that does various things, including electronics testing to see what kind of RF interference they emit) potentially leaked a revision of the Xbone. http://gbatemp.net/threads/did-the-fcc-just-leak-a-new-xbox-one.422874/ and that got me thinking, not about the xbone but about game reporting/journalism and how to set about it.
Anyway there are four broad ways to play this reporter lark
1) Copy down what other sites say, which in turn are probably just news wires and barely filtered press releases. Laziness is a virtue as far as I am concerned, however this is too lazy for even me.
2) Get your own press releases sent to you, work it up a bit, cross link some stuff, do some other things and get on with it all. The favoured way of doing it for games if 1) is not the case and not one I am going to sniff at.
3) Do the equivalent of wearing out shoe leather, develop sources (someone's dad must work for Nintendo), approach people, know the names of every CEO, CTO, marketing wonk, game director of every division,... for every publisher, developer, sales platform and some more people besides, know the tech, do ninja missions, basically like what they do in the films but probably without a cool hat. This is too much like hard work for me, and seemingly most others playing this game.
4) Meta analysis. My kind of jam really -- take information from a few hundred passive sources, figure out something interesting and press go. I might even get some key word searches going on.
I now want a list of the various sources for this
The three big areas are of course
The US
Japan
The EU
This is not to say other countries are not useful Canada, South Korea, Australia, Russia and probably in a few years then China will probably play a bigger role. Bonus is some of these other countries are often more forthcoming with the info.
Sources of information include
Financial markets of various forms. An odd source of info and not the most useful -- financial markets tend to be dominated by what they think it will be worth next quarter which says not a lot about game quality or interesting developments. This need not be standard stock market prices either as things like credit ratings and annual reports are worth having.
Patent, trademark, copyright and such offices. The vast majority of things they do are public or eventually get made public (either because it is necessary or that is because that is how things work), some places (the US and Japan) even have software patents *spits* which can showcase interesting things.
Health and safety offices. The FCC example above being a good one but there is more to product launches than this.
Censorship places. Many places reckon kids can not handle tits, guns or swearing for whatever reason. They are usually locked up pretty tight but can occasionally cause things to slip.
Website registrations. Take all the websites registered in a day and do a whois on them all, possibly after a key word scan.
Other company press releases -- the history of the Sega Saturn graphics chips being an interesting one there. If a small company lands a contract with a big player they tend to want to shout it from the rooftops. Similarly small indy dev lands a 2 game deal with EA could also say a lot, especially as a lot of the time said indy dev will probably be a specialist in something EA lacks (mobile games are the current hotness but who knows what the next fad will be). Back to other companies then electronics dealing with controllers are a good thing to look for but general electronics that might go into a game console is also worth looking at.
Company acquisitions. It can be cheaper to outright buy a company that specialises in the thing you want and as you probably do not want to waste millions of dollars then it will probably be relevant to what is going on in the future. Even if the purchase is a misdirect (I watch too many bad financial thrillers, they are even worse for me than cheesy medical shows) I do not care.
Bankruptcy courts. Often a good source of info and with the amount of semi creative accounting that goes on then often an even better option.
Job listings. Much like company acquisitions most companies will not post listings for [shiny tech developer] when they are not interested in shiny tech.
Former employee CVs. "I am an expert in [three year old tech]" could be interesting when "worked at [blah] for last 5 years" is also in the CV.
Translation houses. Probably not but I will add it to the list.
Industry get togethers. GDC posts talks from all sorts of people here, however a lot of them are rather closed down (pax dev being a good example). Much like financial markets though these can be tricky to divine much of great merit from.
In most of my posts you would probably have had a sea of links but it is 2am and I would rather not leave this one for the morning. I will however come back then and start putting together some links for all the countries in question, all the major devs/publishers/game related companies. Said game related companies are something I want to explore a bit more as well -- there is an awful lot of middleware out there and I find it quite useful for hacking games (they often provide tools, game lists featuring the tech and possibly some actual info).
If someone wants to add more to the list of sources or start putting links together, or even making a list of companies worth looking at, then feel free.
