Sulka's Game

Nielsen on Agile

2008-11-18T19:44:17Z

Nielsen Norman group just published a 95-page report about Agile processes, and how design can work inside the flow. I haven't had the time to read through the whole thing yet, but it seems the overall quality of the papers is pretty good. The report starts with a fairly long bit about agile scrum-style iterative processes and delves into the design bits only later, so even if you're not actually using agile processes right now, the paper should fit you just fine.

I'm not getting a dime out of recommend the thing - the reason I'm pointing you there is that UX and Agile is not necessarily the easiest marriage in the world, and that I'd love to see more companies start using Scrum. I just watched the team give a sprint demo today back at the office, and it's glaringly obvious people are happier now than what they were before we started using Scrum. And we're getting more done, too! :)

MobileMe observations

2008-10-15T18:44:22Z

Given that I think my iPhone is the best thing after the invention of sliced bread, MobileMe sounded fantastic. Push email, calendar synch from the cloud, yay!

I ended up disabling the free trial after a couple days. The service is utterly broken.

The calendar synchronization doesn't actually synchronize the calendars. In addition to not supporting subscribed ics calendars, it actually went and deleted about half of the events I created on my iPhone.

The email push only works for the me.com address and I'm not going to swap to email addresses. And it seemed the push actually only works about 50% of the time.

AIM using me.com account is useless since I don't have any of my contacts on that account. And I don't want to start using the account either, since I won't want to lose the contacts if I later stop using MobileMe.

The iDisk is too small for anything big, and too slow for anything quick.

Having said all that, I hope Apple fixes the service, and lets me on another free trial so I can verify it really is fixed. Until that, so long!

In unrelated news, I think Apple fucked up badly with the feature set of the new MacBooks. I would have been seriously tempted to get one, but the lack of a Firewire port is a deal breaker for me. I've tried using USB for hard drives and the performance just doesn't cut it (in my own "real world copy lots of stuff around and time how long it takes" tests, same drive over FW400 is about twice as fast as the same drive over USB 2.0). And I'm about to shell for 16 GB memory cards for the new cameras, and I'm seriously considering getting a Firewire reader for those, since the USB reader is painfully slow.

October 14 (yet another video)

2008-10-15T09:28:09Z

You need to have some level of Internet cultural knowledge to appreciate this:

(Watch in YouTube.)

Three decisions to make on virtual goods

2008-10-13T12:22:50Z

Eric Ries, one of the IMVU founders, has posted an excellent piece on three key questions to ask yourself when thinking of virtual goods models:

User-generated content (UGC) or first-party content?
Subscription or a la carte payments?
Merchandising or gameplay?

I'm finding the amount of Habbo references interesting, but then I would assume that every virtual goods startup has used the service as a reference.

Two videos worth watching

2008-10-10T08:03:11Z

First a short awesome clip of Little Big Planet gameplay where someone has constructed a working calculator out of more than 1600 parts in the game. Watch it to the end, so you'll see the magnitude of the construction. Boggles my mind.

Second clip is an hour long, but worth watching if you do any design work which results in users making choices. The video shows a talk from Barry Schwartz and deals with the Paradox of Choice as he's putting it - people get paralyzed of all the choice available nowadays, and end up choosing nothing as a result. My head is exploding with the amount of application this has in the design work I do, as well as explains a lot on why life feels a bit hard sometimes.

A simple game design example could be, this explains why choosing which quests to do in which order in WoW is so painful compared to installing an addon that tells you what to do next. Of course, I don't do the quests in the order the addon tells me to most of the time, but having a reference point to compare my choice to makes it faster to decide what to do, and I get more satisfaction for not having to doubt my selection as much.

(Apologies to those with RSS readers that don't show video.)

Adventures of Snotbagel the Squig Herder

2008-10-01T14:19:45Z

Couldn't resist posting after Ben Zeigler reviewed WAR starting with the exact words I'd used to start my review. :)

I now have a level 12 Goblin Squig Herder in Warhammer Online.

What I've liked this far:

I love the sense of humor. And there's lots of it in WAR, more than in other MMOs I've played
The achievements and related mechanisms like earning titles is very cool
Public Quests as means to gather influence that gives better loot is _so_ much nicer than having to do raids
Tome of Knowledge is awesome
The speed of progression has been pretty good, I've felt very little of the things I've been doing have been grinding
The Warhammer world seems to have achieved something I though was next to impossible - almost every player I've met has (accidentally?) chosen a name that somehow fits his in-game race/career, indicating they've all considered their "role" in the game to some extent, even if they're not roleplayers at all. Dwarf names sound dwarven, and orcish dudes have generally appropriate names as well. I think this is very impressive.
The psychological effect of calling PvP RvR is awesome. I hate PvP, but love War's RvR, and the game telling me I've been flagged for RvR doesn't raise the PvP alert.

What doesn't work:

As Ben is pointing out, I have real difficulty understanding the results of my actions in combat. Judging by how I'm scoring in the Public Quests, I'm pretty effective in combat compared to many other players, but I'm having issues understanding exactly why. I think I know what I'm doing right, but there's too little indication of what the underlying game rules are that guide what happens based on my actions. This is resulting in myself finding it hard to form combat tactics, but also I don't actually understand what equipment I should use, as I don't really understand what the different bonuses do.
The game has issues with client/server synchronization. Two issues in particular I'm seeing are that my squig suddenly turns into a mode where it's still following me, but I lose control of it completely (the UI disappears). Second one is when I run to hit an opponent at melee range, and the client tells me I'm not close enough to hit, even though my Goblin is drawn right next to the opponent. The latter happens surprisingly often, and is very irritating.
I've tried to create talismans, but getting the resources and just plain understanding how the crafting works is just too much. This means my inventory is cluttered by a ton of materials for making talismans that I can't really use, but don't want to destroy for fear of needing them. Also the talisman making balancing seems to be wrong right now, since getting access to items with better bonuses than ones from talismans seems to be much, much easier, than trying to use the crafting. In WoW, I could actually use leatherworking to get good stuff for my Hunter, but now the crafting seems to be pretty much useless.
I'm not sure what to think on the subject of the world feeling empty, or full. I've formed a lot more spontaneous parties in Warhammer than I've ever done in WoW, and generally it's very easy to get a team formed for the public quests. However, most of the RvR areas are just empty, and something is causing the RvR scenario queue wait times to be so long that I'm effectively not able to participate in those at all.
Last but not least, GOA is improving but they still aren't doing a good job. Their RSS feed for news has the same content for each headline. The website uses craptastic custom-made DHTML widgets in every place where possible, making the site hard to use. There's no forums. There's no decent manual, and no explanation of anything on the website. And interestingly half of the account management is still offline, so I can't yet give them my billing information! I would have assumed the credit card charging processes would've been done prior to launch, and not after.

So - my current sentiment is, I love the game and will continue playing for at least some time to see some of the content closer to the end-game. I hope the bugs and balancing issues are worked out soon, and that my server gets a better balanced amount of players to both Order and Destruction sides soon.

(Ben's comment on having the game run slow are odd. My MacBook Pro can run the game very well under XP, and that's using a graphics card Mythic says might not work.)

Europe lives in 50Hz and US in 60Hz, or, why the 5D 30 fps video is an issue in Europe

2008-09-25T19:32:14Z

So, if you read the comments to my previous post on the 5D video issues, people are saying supporting just 30 frames per second video capture in Europe is not a problem, since HDTV sets can display a number of frame rates, some of which are some multiplication of 30 fps (such as 60i or 60p - there are no 30p sets). Now, this is true, but this claim ignores the fact that European HDTV penetration is currently at somewhere close to 20%, and just 1% of the HD sets are actually hooked to a HD source (source).

This effectively means that if you want to share any clips shot at 30p, more than 99% of Europeans can only display your footage in a format native to Europe, which happens to be 50i. This in turn means your signal quality will reduce significantly. Oh, and, all European HD channels apparently broadcast using 50i or 50p.

But this isn't the real problem, and I was dumb not to state this in the previous post.

The 30fps support causes issues in thee respects: capturing the footage, editing the footage, and displaying the footage. The displaying is pretty much covered above, so let's continue with the two others below. The part where you especially need to play attention to is the capture part, as that will affect even the users planning to shoot cat videos to display on their own brand spanking HD set.

European electric current is distributed as alternating current (AC), with 50 hertz frequency on the waveform. Simplified, this causes the native operating frequency of any electric device connected to AC to be 50 hertz, unless the device explicitly overrides this by changing the current. Unfortunately, lighting is such a simple form of electronics that vast majority of indoor lighting oscillates at 50 Hz, or a multiplication thereof, such as 100 Hz.

The relevance of this fact comes in when you start to shoot video with artificial lighting. If you shoot at a frame rate which is an even multiplication of the current used for the lighting, you're fine since each frame will get the same amount of light as it'll be in synch with the lightbulb oscillation. However, if you shoot with a camera that uses a frame rate other than the light oscillation rate, each frame will be exposed with a different amount of light. With video cameras, this causes the exposure electronics to start compensating the lighting difference with each frame, causing funky image quality issues.

This is such a problem that apparently TV studios not only synchronize (lock) the frame timings of each camera in the studio to each other, but use the incoming electric current's wave as the synch reference to time the frame exposure perfectly to the light oscillation.

So, in case of 5D with 30 fps which doesn't play nice with European indoor lighting, if you want good quality footage, you can't shoot any video in locations lit by artificial light. No sports videography, no indoor shots.

The Canon pro video department knows this, so it makes me think if they've intentionally sabotaged 5D by not letting the Canon camera department know.

The editing issue is less severe. The problem is also quite simple to understand. If you want to edit a set of footage, there's no magic way to support multiple frame rates in one video clip rendered out as a result of the editing. Hence if you have some footage in 30p and some in 25p or 50i, some of the footage will have to be converted into the frame rate you want to use in the resulting video. This in turn means that if you have any existing footage you want to use with shots created with 5D, the chances are that stuff is in an incompatible frame rate, and something has to be converted, resulting in one of jerky motion, slowed motion, sped up motion, or ghosting. For home users this might be acceptable, but don't expect to be able to ever sell your footage you shot with your 2500 camera since the people purchasing the footage will use other footage as well, and will not want to convert frame rates. And I assume many 5D users will want to sell their stuff.

Where does this leave us? EOS 5D mark II video will be usable to you if:

It's ok the image quality will degrade if vast majority of Europeans try to view it on their TV
You plan to only shoot using natural light
You'll never use anything but 5D footage when editing the video, unless you want to sacrifice image quality
You never plan to sell your footage

That list has more than one show-stopper for me, but your mileage might vary.

For more interesting reading, here's a thread from DPReview, and one in Adobe forums.

The problem with Canon EOS 5D Mark II video

2008-09-24T13:55:39Z

Update: before commenting, jump to the second post in this series.

Canon EOS 5D mark II supports HD video recording, and as can be seen in Vincent Laforet's sample short filmed with the camera, the picture quality is stunning.

There's just one problem. The camera only supports shooting 30 frames per second. This means the camera is effectively useless for Europe, since our TV uses 25 frames (or mostly, 50 fields) per second. You can convert between the formats, but it means you have to degrade the image by either dropping frames, which results in jerky movement or frame blending, which results in image ghosting.

Ghosting is hard to explain, so I created two movies that demonstrate the problem. The first one is the 30 fps movie of a bouncing 5D, and the second one is the same movie, converted to 25 fps using frame blending. If you stop the movement of the 25fps movie, you can see the horrible blur caused by the conversion. Below is a stop-frame from the resulting ghosting:

Now, if you shoot with 5D and post-convert to 30 fps, this issue will only be a problem in some shots. If you shoot mostly static subjects, people won't really notice the difference, except your picture will appear a bit blurrier in movement. However, when you get hit by this with a moving subject on a right kind of a background, it will make your shot impossible.

Given this problem, I think there's only one explanation as to why the camera only shoots at 30 fps: Canon intentionally crippled it. I refuse to believe the designers and executives who made the camera feature calls could be so ignorant that they didn't realize Europe lives in a 25/50 fps world (vs Japan and US, who use 30/60). Hence the call was probably made by whomever controls Canon products in Europe, who didn't want to see his video camera sales suffer.

The option to Canon users with this issue is that we either pressure Canon to implement 25 (and maybe 24 fps) support, or we help our friends at CHDK to hack the camera to support other frame rates. As can be seen by the Rob Galbraith EOS 1D debacle, Canon can be pressured to fix their products.

Canon - the hacking will happen if you don't support the other frame rates, so I recommend you add the support. You can only lose by angering your clientele, and making them jump ship with hacking your products.

I'm really enjoying WAR

2008-09-23T16:14:40Z

I'm not writing a long piece now since I don't know where to start. I just wanted to ping the readers I think the game is excellent - if you are considering ever playing an MMO or are getting bored of WoW, I really recommend checking Warhammer Online out.

I've found I enjoy playing WAR more than WoW, and the game has a ton of design jewels and ideas I've liked. Last night I got an achievement for having clicked myself a hundred times. It's totally pointless, but who cares - it's telling me a bit about what I've done in the game. And my current title in the game is "Run away!" from the achievement of having been killed 10 times by a monster.

Longer piece about the game will come at some point. Right now I'll rather spend my time playing. :P

Squirrelfish Extreme pwns Chrome

2008-09-19T12:58:56Z

The Webkit team went and put out a new version of their next-gen Javascript engine called Squirrelfish Extreme. The performance is pretty awesome - it's twice as fast as the previous iteration. While their new engine still can't match Chrome in Google's V8 tuning benchmark (see this earlier post on the subject), the SunSpider and Dromaeo scores have improved a lot.

Here's a chart with the relative performance of the browsers from the previous story with extreme squirrels added:

I guess we have a winner.

Why the web industry doesn't need to fear the games industry

2008-09-18T19:08:22Z

Warhammer launch is today so I'm excitedly installing the game Amazon delivered right on time. The game has been described to be very innovative so I'm eagerly waiting for the experience. However, the process of getting in isn't exactly smooth. I'm pretty sure the following would not be happening if we were discussing a web startup.

The installer uses 2 DVDs to install and it takes about half an hour or so. There is no expected time left timer, and the progress bar goes to 100% after about 10 minutes, so you're left hanging for 20 minutes wondering if the installation is progressing, or not.

After installing the software, I try to fire it up to start patching while I setup the account. No can do, you can't patch the game before you sign in. Wtf?

I had pre-registered an account on the WAR Europe site. But due to GOA imposing strange new requirements on the password, I had had to choose something I don't regularly use, so I've of course forgotten the password. Now, get this, there is no process for forgotten passwords. You lose it, the account is gone. I could send in customer services request but I somehow think they won't reply within the next couple days.

And you can't even test passwords on the website. You can't log into the account management as there is no account management. There is no user forum.

So off to creating a new account. Obviously the username and identity I'd like to use are locked by the previous registration so I have to invent new ones. Some fucker has thought it's a good idea to implement form elements in the registration using fancy DHTML widgets that both look ugly and don't work as expected so filling in the data is pain. The registration page is also chock full of elements that link to the front page of the site so single accidental click and off you go to start the process from scratch.

Once I managed to send in the registration, it took 10 minutes for the reg email to arrive to Gmail. After this I was allowed to type in the registration code in another form (that asks for the password twice and again requires me to accept the terms I've already accepted during installation and registration).

It then took about 5 minutes for the patcher to think my account is ok, but I had to restart it twice for the patching to actually start. And now that it's started, the patch is 822 MB in size. On the first day? Come on, when were the disks printed?

I don't think I'll be playing the game today, since the patcher has progressed from 0% to 1% while writing this rant. I would assume the patch servers are choking with load and there's probably a lot more people with the same issue.

So - GOA seems to think we're somewhere in the early 90s when it comes to doing games websites. And Mythic, shame on you for the massive patch even before the game has launched.

Google to buy Valve?

2008-09-17T18:56:25Z

Hot on the heels of Bruce claiming it's time to publish PC games as Steam exclusives comes a rumor that Google is about to purchase Valve. Given that Google's strategy seems to have been to own parts of digital distribution, it makes perfect sense. Now that the rumor is out, I'd be more surprised if it doesn't happen, than if it does.

Nintendo profit per employee in 2008: $1.6 million

2008-09-17T13:48:55Z

Financial Times has a pretty incredible story on their site, where they say they're estimating Nintendo is going to be make a profit of $1.6 million per employee.

This makes for an interesting data point in the PS3 vs 360 vs Wii discussion. Sony is saying they're making a loss of $1.16 billion on PS3 hardware this year and I doubt MS is making a ton on their sales either. So while Wii is certainly the least capable of the boxes (as Bruce is quite happy to point out for some reason), it's the machine that's making the profit.

I'm extremely interested in seeing what Nintendo does next. I think whatever they do, it'll either be a spectacular success, or spectacular failure. Probably depends a lot on what the aging designer thinks they should do next.

(Via Daring Fireball).

Canon EOS 5D mark II

2008-09-17T13:05:09Z

So, the Canon EOS 5D mark II is now out and official. It's a freaking cool camera and I had to put it on pre-order immediately, meaning I'll probably sell the old 40D and the Samsung video camera soon. Which I'm not looking forwards to - I hate selling used equipment, probably because I feel I have too much responsibility if the stuff breaks after the sale.

For those uninitiated in digital SLR photography, the big difference between 40D and 5D is the size of the imaging sensor. 40D uses a smaller APS-C film size sensor while 5D has a full 35mm film size sensor. This changes the behavior of lenses when changed between the bodies - the 40D captures a cropped image from the middle of the lens while 5D captures the whole picture.

This means that on 40D, the captured image shows up as if it was shot with a lens that has a focal length that's 1.6 times longer than what the lens really is, meaning wide angle shots require very, very wide lenses to produce. This also means the smaller sensor utilizes the center of the lens which probably has less optical problems with the projection.

Hence, migrating to the full frame sensor camera means every piece of glass I have a home changes quite radically, probably to the point where I'll need to respec the lens arsenal to some extent as well... Bloody hell this is going to be expensive in the long run! :D

Another interesting new Canon product is the Powershot G10 compact camera. I have the G9 and it's a very good compact, to the extent that you can call digital point and shoot's good cameras. G10 looks like a serious improvement over the G9, so I'm tempted to do a switch there, too. If you're looking at getting a compact, I recommend checking that one.

Innovation in WAR

2008-09-16T11:34:14Z

Brandon Reinhart has written an interesting piece on innovations in Warhammer online. I'm extremely happy someone is pushing the state of the art forward.

Drobo - home storage on steroids

2008-09-12T19:23:54Z

I've been worrying over my home storage for some time and I think I've maybe found an answer. Drobo manufactures a cool looking drive enclosure that completely automates RAID 5 -style storage, but makes it better. The product allows putting in one to four disks of any size and it'll store data on the disks in a redundant manner even if the disks are of different size. And of course you can hot swap the disks.

The reason I'm interested in this is simply due to the fact that I have some 50,000 or so digital photographs and slowly but surely accumulating set of HD video files from my videocap. I thought I'd never say it but I'm finding I have more than one and a half terabytes of data on my drives, and it's driving me insane. Backing up this amount of data is a royal pain, and I've learned adding yet another external drive to my collection of external drives becomes more and more painful every time. A starter three or four drive setup plus the box would cost something like 600 euros, but I think it'd be worth it, especially since I could maybe salvage a couple hundred euros from the old drives.

The combination of cool looks and "no worries, it'll manage itself" zero configuration support is very, very tempting.

Publishers are from Mars, Developers are from Venus

2008-09-09T18:56:46Z

Adam Martin has posted a very thoughtful, interesting piece on game developers and publishers, and how development studios owned by publishers are having hard time due to conflicts in interests. Makes me think where this leaves indie development/publishing houses in general.

Legitimizing virtual consumption

2008-09-08T19:32:44Z

Blogging this as a sort of bookmark to myself: Vili Lehdonvirta has published a good post on legitimizing virtual consumption as a reply to an uncharacteristically poor Terra Nova post. Can't wait to get my hands on his paper.

Warhammer Europe Beta is going... not well

2008-09-08T19:05:45Z

So... Everyone is blogging about Warhammer open beta being an epic failure in Europe. Given that GOA doesn't have a very good reputation and that they seem to be screwing around with the Warhammer launch, it's not looking good. What's particularly worrisome to me is the explanation of scaling server capacity up only as needed. From a customer perspective, I expect that'll mean I'll have to queue to play, and I can guarantee if that happens more then three times without giving me free move to a less burdened server, someone is in for a credit card chargeback.

The server issues coupled with Mythic not being sure if my laptop can actually run the game (GeForce 8600M GT with 512 MB VRAM, runs WoW at 60 fps or so), it starting to feel like Warhammer the game is going to be great, but the technical implementation of the client and server will prevent me from enjoying it. Which is very frustrating, since I really want to play the game, to the point where I'm willing to boot to XP to do it. And that's saying a lot.

On the hardware requirements side, I have to confess I'm surprised at the minimum spec Mythic has chosen. The current wisdom seems to state one of the reasons WoW succeeded in the first place was the low barrier to entry with the hardware requirements. I don't know the people in my guild that well, but I'm assuming most of them aren't the kind of people who upgrade computers to run a game. In fact, very few of the people I ever talked to who play WoW are "hard core" enough to purchase gaming PC's. People have been hopeful of WAR being the first significant WoW contender but given the game might not run well on many of the WoW player's machines, this might be a big bump on WAR's road.

Another interesting aspect that will also affect how well War market adoption is the lack of a Mac client. My personal impression is that Mac owners are more likely to be early adopters than PC owners, and definitely are more likely to recommend products they like to everyone they know. This in turn means that Mac users are more valuable for word of mouth marketing than PC users. This combined with the fact that WoW has lots of Mac players (statistic, anyone, please?) who either can't play War at all (if no Windows is installed) or need to boot to XP meaning you can't casually log in (which is totally counter to the Mythic claim of the game being casual-friendly) means WAR will lose a lot of potential early adopter marketing goodwill. And given people form their opinions rather quickly meaning you only get one chance to launch your game, losing the launch game is likely to result in mediocre market performance.

Of course, again, I wish this doesn't happen. I really want to see WAR succeed. Anyway, I think I'll wait for a bit and see if I should cancel my pre-order and wait for the dust to settle. If GOA doesn't get their act together, I can always hit the US servers.

Thoughts on in-game advertising

2008-09-07T19:00:07Z

One of the hot new ways to make money with games and virtual worlds is advertising. Or at least that's what a lot of companies want all game developers to believe. If visit website of any of the in-game ad network providers such as IGA Worldwide or Double Fusion, they have a bunch of press releases out on more and more games including ads, and what a wonderful world has become to the developers.

Nielsen and IGA also published a study in June where they found 82% of gamers didn't mind contextual ads in games. Curiously Nielsen.com doesn't have any more information about the study (contrary to the press release) so I don't know what games and methodologies were used to get the result. I would assume if this was on a racing game, the game would probably feel more real with real ads, so getting such a good result would be quite natural. Had this been about slapping a Coke board on a building in Thunder Bluff, I doubt the score would have been in this league.

Now, it seems the current message being broadcasted to game developers is that putting ads into your game gives you free money. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Andrew Chen blogged an excellent piece about maximizing ad revenue a couple weeks back, which specifically deals with what websites can do to get more dough. If you're doing bulk advertising (banners in any for, be it adwords or video streamed to a medium rectangle), bringing in serious money requires serious volumes, which, if you read Andrew's posting, changes how you make the money on a given network.

Websites can tackle this by integrating multiple networks of choice, but I as far as I know (and I don't know much), there aren't enough of them for in-game advertising to allow for this to happen for games. With relatively little competition, the networks can require exclusive deals, and I'd be surprised if the CPM rates of the networks varied enough to call for this type of an optimization. Further, I'm not sure if too many game developers even think of this level of sophistication when integrating ads into a game, given that most websites don't probably do this. Anyway, this probably means that the average developer who integrates into the current networks should not expect a fat check in the mail, no matter what anyone tells you.

Talking about economies of scale, part of the reason Google is so darn effective in the online advertising is that they can sell targeted advertising to anyone willing to spend any money at all in ads. Joe Bob's Auto Garage from Oklahoma can decide to spend a hundred bucks on people searching for local auto dealers and it's possible. With in-game ads, I doubt getting access to those dollars will come any time soon, which probably cuts off a very significant portion of businesses putting money into advertising. And if your ad dollars come from a small set of big companies, you won't get a single ad in your game if they don't happen to like the content. Modern online advertising has a long tail, and the way to cash that is by serving Google Adwords.

Coming to think of it, it might be worth starting a business that offered developers technology that offered compatibility with any in-game ad network and enabled the developers to change the integration on the fly, rather than relying on a single network. This could be the beginning of making smaller scale ad-funded games a lot more viable than today.

Now, even if advertising in games is it's infancy, there's movement ahead that might make in-game ads a lot more appealing and lucrative in the future. PlayNoEvil had an extremely interesting speculation about upcoming ad war between Google and Microsoft. Given that games can offer a lot deeper exposure than most websites, if there'll be disturbances in the force on the web, advertisers might suddenly start to flock to media where ad-blockers and browser incompatibilities are nowhere to be seen. We live in interesting times!