The Business Plan is a pain that entrepreneurs have to suffer, at least if they want to raise venture capital or other kinds of funding. To geeks, writing a business oriented document sounds just about as exciting as room temperature Jolt with no gas. Oh man! Budgets, risk assessments and silly attempts at future prediction that everybody knows are not going to hold anyway. Oh well, as we need funding if we’re going to make AAA games, we have been writing our business plan with all of those things in it. And for a while, I found it quite frustrating that whenever we spoke with someone with business savvy, they would tell us that we had to describe the problem that our product solves, the demand that it meets. How does it enable? That’s great, but how did we fit in there? The biggest problem a video game can be said to solve is boredom. Obviously, people are making money from video games already, as with movies, music, theme parks and what not, so perhaps the guideline should be extended to this: a company should either enable or entertain. Seems reasonable to me. So instead of focusing on solving a problem, we have now shifted towards how we are going to ensure quality. Quality meaning fun - entertainment.

Recently, it occurred to me that there is actually a third thing a company can do - it can protect. And this is an interesting area because, it seems, the upper boundary to required safety is vague and liquid. I bet Microsoft would be able to release Vista as nothing but a number of security updates. Essentially, protection is of no direct value to the user. In fact, in the best of cases, protection merely causes the user no additional inconveniences such as keys and codes or the loss of processing power. When people are scared, they will pay for protection with their money and by tolerating inconveniencies.
The problem here is obvious: a company that sells protection has an interest in scaring the population. Currently, the story about bump keying is traveling across Europe. It was recently described on national Danish television and the Danish lock smiths have since sold enormous amounts of bump-safe locks. I am not accusing the lock smiths of having spun this campaign but it demonstrates the concept perfectly. As does the strategies of the US Republican Party that seems to be heading for a crash in the mid term elections today.

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