Aside from those talking to Europe, I know very few in the US who use Skype for voice/video communication. I’m not sure why it’s so big there (maybe phone call prices for more frequent cross border calls? maybe they’re smarter and don’t mind the settup process for cheap voice/video? who knows), but here it’s primarily just another IM technology. My business partner is european and a major Skype user, who periodically asks me to get on voice with him (across town), but I don’t see why I’d use fairly lousy voice when I could just use my unlimited voice minutes on ATT. I have dozens of Skype users in my list, but the americans tend to stay gray, and those that are active IM me, while the bulk of active users all light up during european activity hours.

In terms of the massive number of Skype users that Wagstaff mentions, it does seem like all of Europe is on Skype. I’d suggest that this isn’t the same early adopter audience we used to see on Skype, as much as it’s just everyone who wants to save on phone calls, so integration with social media isn’t the no-brainer hit he implies. I feel that perhaps Skype’s primary competitor in the US is the chronically underrated MagicJack, which exploits the complexity of competitors’ installation processes to rule the market.

Also, although it’s a bit difficult to track the actual usage of a freestanding app like Skype, it’s even harder to track Twitter usage, given the heavy reliance on third-party apps for usage, although Fred Wilson puts in a credible attempt. I’m just not sure that Skype really eclipses competitors within the social space in the way Wagstaff’s numbers assume. Especially as I’m not sure it’s really a social thing as used in Europe today. -Vivox is much more a product of the social era.

In a recent interview, Josh Silverman described a situation in which “1/3 of usage is video, despite the fact that video calls can only be 1-1. Voice calls are multi-party.” Which shows that Skype actually isn’t doing spectacularly well with multi-party voice calls for social purposes, where new players, like Vivox and Ventrillo are highly active and and have cultivated strong relationships with that audience.

If Skype can do some brilliant things involving integration with social nets on mobile devices (bypassing carrier voice functionality), maybe they do win big worldwide, but I think that will be a hard space to take, and I’m not sure they’re actually the best positioned to do that right now.

superfluid is all about fair value for participants; it’s built to facilitate utilization of unsold or spare time, and to compensate each participant fairly within the system. This is also a great way to create a project from scratch, without the insecurities of buying into someone else’s vision, or giving a piece of your project to someone who may or may not be the ideal partner in the long term.

I believe that in general, the existing models of executing on a concept tend to be less than ideal, and don’t draw on community in the wholesome, yet self-interested way that superfluid can. One conventional path to completion of such things is for an entrepreneur to spend enough, from savings or debt, to fund the project. Another classic path (especially in open source) is for one person with the vision, personal magnetism, and technical skills to start the project, to work like mad on it until eventually it’s complete enough that he can draw others in to join him on it. In this context, a shared vision brings in others who join together to create the finished project. -The problem with the latter is that the timing, personalities, and skillsets don’t always necessarily align to enable even a brilliantly conceived concept.

It’s simple to use superfluid for such a project. You’d first want to define your needs (programming, design, project management, marketing, etc.) then assess how many Quids this is likely to cost you from vendors in superfluid. Then sell your own services into the superfluid system and claim Quids to convert into a project. If you’re a programmer, you sell programming into the system (possibly to other concepts at startup stage), if you’re a marketing expert, you sell that, and so on. You keep your own project and everyone else keeps their own projects, while the organic whole allows for execution of as many projects as possible.

btw: If you’re a business (game developer, designer, marketing folks, etc.) that’d like to participate in superfluid, for a limited time you can submit for the beta here.

-Nathan

Both rely for now on the lack of  universally available connectivity or hardware to combine with the lack of a universally compelling business model, to drive certain specific users to their locations. -Neither is yet broadly enabling under a new philosophical reason for existing. But, as Bijan’s posters note, in fairly short term, the barriers will indeed fall in both of these situations. This leaves, in the case of game specialty retailers, thousands of high traffic locations and a brand well known to a lucrative demogaphic, that, for appropriate shareholder value, really should/must have value beyond the place where boxes are moved. And, in the case of libraries, an important social asset that goes beyond simply being the place where users get books, to being a safe place for kids, and an important safety net.

Both are gathering places for youth, and for each the medium should be secondary. Kids will always draw together physically, no matter what they have in the way of online media, both because there’s a basic human need for proximity and because their homes won’t always be safe, useful places for them. That doesn’t mean that they’ll be buying discs or checking out books. So, the question is; what do you do with your physical space to make it useful?

Connectivity is good, combined with a physical space from which kids won’t be ejected. -Although, given the ever-changing nature of connectivity, and the promise of ubiquitous 3G and beyond, proximity-based connectivity is a transient benefit. In a mall, store managers will often switch off interactive kiosks (gameconsole demo machines), in order to keep kids from dawdling; this is the wrong approach. Stores should create and use in-store technology that keeps employees part of the physical and online community. Growing social aspects of retail beyond anything yet seen, is what would save a GameStop. As they stand, relying on logistics to enable massive, very fast distribution of soon-to-be redundant media, they are an elephant, but they could fairly easily be something significant that won’t lose value in the new environment.

Libraries are a bit similar; their masters often think of them simply as places that hold books, and see the end of physical books as the end of library value. But they are a critically important place for youth, and as importantly, they create an alternate distibution model for knowledge in our society, which is not a bad thing. If libraries take as a starting point those two elements, there are a hell of a lot of useful forms they could take. Even at the most primitive concept of being on one hand a place for people to borrow kindles (or perhaps an open licensed e-reader) and load them up with content, and on the other a quiet place to study and take in face to face education.

If libraries or physical game presence die over the next few years, it won’t be because it’s inevitable, it’ll be because the people behind them lack the vision (or funds, in the case of libraries) to take a necessary next step to something even better for a new era.

The game media websites have been handy resources, as they provided easy searchability for the in-depth reviews that are required to drive such a considered purchase. But still largely the same old content; deep editorial previews and reviews, cheats, walkthroughs, etc.

Don’t get me wrong; at the time of their inception, Gamespot and IGN (or at least the interesting part of its amalgam, Gamespy) were unique and groundbreaking beyond such simple content. It’s just that they’ve atrophied and their founding sparks have departed, as conventional media entities have taken over. Gamespy, with community building/user-generated content and the early integration of their matchmaking technology into frontline games, prefaced most of what’s interesting and groundbreaking today in the web generally, so many years later. Gamespot had a sub-focus on collecting all of a user’s interests into something presaging a semantic web sort of solution (that its founder is focused on today), and a content-licensing model that worked uniquely well, built on consistency of quality. If Surfas and Broady were building their game businesses now, they’d certainly be something a lot more interesting than what their abandoned offspring are up to.

Today, there far are better solutions for gamers than conventional in-depth static content. Integration of game content (via XML feeds, add-on functionality, etc.) facilitates play in a much more satisfying way than the simple aggregation of non-editorial game info (cheats, etc.). -It sort of makes you wonder if the conventional media entities will always be buying the dying limbs on the tree. Ziff’s creation, then shedding, of 1Up to Hearst, sort of epitomizes the inclination. The trend for these publications seems to be static or downward, and definitely has the feel of print pubs of 2006.  The Escapist does a nice job of providing depth and analysis for anyone wanting a good and informed read about a game or the industry, with value based upon its quality and bloggy style and structure; rather than all-inclusiveness or hardcore dissection of gameplay. And as we come closer to a business model for game sales that actually works, and we really do seem to be on that course, editorial and news from Kotaku (and, on the indie side, playthisthing.com) should be the sort of resource to drive game sales. Because that provides a much more appropriate and useful level of information for a category of entertainment product that’s now so much more diverse and flexible in form.

As has been pointed out, Amazon, the most interesting of these from a usage perspective, is fairly insignificant when you look at actual market share. They may do well on the model of having users ship games in to them, and nobody is better set up to do so, but this isn’t a new model, and it hasn’t taken off yet for others.

Toys R Us has only 585 stores in the U.S., so that’s pretty much a destination store with only a limited demographic overlap with GameStop. -Probably incremental pre-owned sales, which is great for GameStop, but seems set to rile publishers.

Best Buy’s depth of involvement appears fairly undefined at this point, although they do look like the most direct threat, if they choose to get heavily involved. But there are several factors that make BBY seem less likely to be wholehearted in this area:

• They make their money on hardware, and brand is meaningful here; now, though, in the current economy, this is less true, and it may well be what they feel gives them the chance to move further into pre-owned games. But, nobody knows better than BBY that content on physical media is transitory.
• They are aggressive in moving toward support of digitally distributed product. -You’ll remember how they jumped on music distribution, and that would have been even more substantial earlier if they could have gotten their buyers more into line. It is an odd time for them to double down on sales of games on disks.
• If they’re going to push publishers on anything at this moment in time, it doesn’t make sense for it to be pre-owned. If I were Best Buy, I’d threaten to do this, then find a way to partner on sales of digital content revenue. Best Buy could stop selling games on disk entirely, because their bottom line comes from other categories, and this is a key strength they have over GameStop. Getting more reliant on physical media today, at the cost of vendor relationships seems unlikely unless just it’s bizarre desperation.

These moves from retailers do however seem to combine with an economy in which:

• Developers have a hard time finding backing or loans to make full frontline titles.
• Larger publishers and developers are laying off talent, freeing up creative for other projects/models.
• Users still buy a lot of games, but are likely to buy them in smaller pieces, if they can.

To form a perfect storm for accelerating the move to digital distribution and more varied content models.

Now we’ve pretty much cleared out the black box technologies from post-production, and created a more flexible and less expensive production environment. This is all fairly obvious, certainly, as the PC has by now certainly achieved something similar for most businesses. Unfortunately, (thus far) there hasn’t been a powerful living room solution with similar openness and practicality, probably because of technical and usability reasons (as well as the Cable MSOs having a limited model that won’t well enable a strong technology here). On the game device side of things, dedicated hardware has been the best solution, given the useful model of software subsidizing hardware.  But, for the past few years, we’ve seemed on the verge of enabling an organic and extensible model on the consumer/gamer side, with network-connected hardware in this generation of consoles that were positioned to be the primary settop box. xbox is certainly furthest along in attempting this, with its Netflix relationship in place, although it remains so much a game-centric device that it’s questionable whether it can ever the primary living room device. I do realize that any time this sort of conversation regarding multi-use hardware is engaged, some will bring up the unappealing toaster/refrigerator example of its overuse; but, in the end, processing power and a screen is processing power and a screen.

Now, though, on the mobile side, Apple seems to be doing a bit better with enabling a general purpose device that does games so well that the dedicated black box looks increasingly less attractive. And one of the big rumours coming out of MacWorld was that the iPhone is about to get a lot more processing power. It seems that this would likely kill the PSP, and potentially force future generation of mobile Nintendo devices back down into the less lucrative youth/gameboy demographic. Which Nintendo can probably live with, as they’re quite smart at optimizing for this sort of thing, and since a primary strength of iPhone is third-party sales while the core strength of Nintendo is first-party product. Additionally, a more powerful iPod touch could easily be primarily a game device, and it’s not that far from the DS in price…

On the mobile phone side of things, of course, carriers have long-subsidized the handset sale, based upon their contract revenue expectations. -They then hobbled the market for mobile game sales by demanding an exhorbitant revenue share for any games sold over their networks.

Now, along has come Apple with the iPhone, which does create a better ecosystem for game sales (better store, better revenue share to devs/pubs), but simultaneously muddies the water in several areas:

• Intuitionally, somehow it does bother me that a device for which it is so simple to create applications, and which is in the hands of an everbroadening and general audience, should be throttled, with only approved applications being enabled. This is the user’s device for everything, encompassing all aspects of their personal and business lives.
• The only hardware subsidy for the iPhone is from ATT, and is based upon the existing subscription paradigm. So I don’t feel that I’m getting my hardware subsized by the software markup. Apple restrictions of any sort just feel odious, unlike Microsoft’s restrictions on XBLA, etc., which only seem like self-inflicted wounds on their part.
• The iPhone is ubiquitous enough in its class that it is beginning to feel like a monopoly player. The proportion of startups developing applications for iPhone as opposed to all other handsets is impossible to measure, but it feels like a massive difference. There is no effective competitor in the U.S. in the area of rich functionality smartphone devices; if you can’t distribute it on iPhone, you’re out of the market. Of course, this is only the case because Apple is so good at what it does, but that’s the reality.
• By virtue of its usability and functionality, the iPhone makes the carrier’s network a pipe to everything I need for daily life. I just don’t have any expectations of restriction in that. A problem is that Apple, in all of its products, sets up a basic expectation that its products will do what you want, when you want, and very elegantly. Which is fine on the Mac, where their profits come from expensive hardware, and software upgrades, or limited-function iPod, but doesn’t fit so easily with being the carrier-selected front-end to a big pipe of data. And Apple’s need for complete control within the iPhone environment leads to some controls that are beginning to strike users as a bit yech, primarily not allowing Adobe Flash, or the use of other browsers which might enable such a thing.