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Format Freaking

November 18, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Whether you know a little or a lot about the interactive entertainment industry, it’s worth reading this (short) article if only to see how pervasive the current uncertainty is in all content-driven mediums. You might think the software business would be less at-risk of the internet as a distribution mechanism, or to concerns about formats, but you’d be wrong.

The article is also hilarious in demonstrating the kind of outdated reference that suggests key executives in all content-driven industries are missing the bigger picture:

For example, [Yoichi Wada, CEO of Square Enix] said, films are generally two hours long or less; television is a half hour or an hour, and runs in a series regularly for several months; and a newspaper is delivered in roughly similar size every morning.

Those mediums could have evolved in very different ways, but at a certain point, they standardized, and consumers know roughly what to expect when they experience one.

Newspapers? Delivered? Wha….?

Note, too, the complete omission of reference to the book industry, which is going through its own format freakout. Each industry will evolve in its own way, but if you believe that form(at) follows function (and I do), then all of these format issues are really just an(other) result of the inevitable move to internet distribution.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: distribution, format, internet

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