I recently referred to WNBA as the NHL of women’s sports, thus declaring my disdain for both NHL and WNBA in one fell swoop. Well, perhaps not so much disdain as pity. Both leagues have TV ratings that suck (and ought to suck the life out of both organizations), albeit at different levels (yes, WNBA’s ratings are that bad. But the NHL at least used to be fun, with free-flowing breakaway play and lots of scoring. Over the last several years the NHL has become a major snooze fest, a carnival of holding, hooking, high sticking and zone trapping. I didn’t miss the NHL one bit when it went on its year-long labor-conflict hiatus. Heck, I hadn’t even missed NHL when it was around. Like most people, I couldn’t care less about the league.

But the NHL is back and its return has provided a publicity opportunity for feminist activist Martha Burk, whom you probably don’t remember from her bizarre crusade against Augusta National (a crusade that was whole-heartedly and over-the-top supported by New York Times, the newspaper that used to employ Jayson Blair). Burk has been upset by a new ad for the league, a commercial that shows an NHL player in a locker room with a vague but unmistakable Eastern feel to it. The ad features an ice hockey player who is dressed by a lightly dressed babe, a set up that made me think of warriors in ancient Greece and I figure that was the effect the league was looking for).

Unsurprisingly, Burk finds the ad “offensive on several levels,” which is pretty much how I feel about her.

She goes on, according to Toronto Star:

“The woman is dressed provocatively and when she asks the player if he’s ready, it’s a double-entendre in my view,” Burk said in an interview.

Yes, it probably is, but so what? A double-entendre is not the same thing as “let’s have non-stop sex ’til we die from dehydration!”

For all I know, the NHL may have hired Burk to create a stir. The league needs publicity in a real bad way, and with Burka, I’m sorry, Burk, running her mouth, offering quote-jobs in return for publicity, the league gets it, plus its fans get a cause to rally around. Realistically, though, Burk’s taken on this task all on her own, solicited by nobody but her ego.

You can watch the commercial at NHL’s website. WARNING:It’s only slightly more entertaining than an NHL game.

Our grand children probably wont be drooling over the prospect of playing Grand Theft Auto 46: Salem, South Dakota (controversial content: the top-less co-eds cow-tipping easter egg and the unfortunate “Kill the Norwegians! Kill the Mennonites!” line), so, what games will they be fawning over? Heck, what games will we be fawning over a couple of years down the road? And, not insignificantly, who will finance the development of the next wave of video games?

That last question is one that Mercury News journalist Dean Takahashi asks in his speech I Don’t Get It: Why Is It So *&@#$% Hard To Finance Video Games?” at the Video Game Investor Conference, a “cutting edge event [that] will bring together a visionary group of industry leaders from the video game and investment communities to share perspectives on growing investment opportunities, current strategic trends and up-to-the-minute challenges facing the multiplayer internet-based video game and the wireless/mobile game industry today.”

As suggested by the title of his speech, Takahashi wonders “[w]hy is there such a mismatch between the capital needs of the video game industry and the investment that is going into it?”

Takahashi outlines the economic fundamentals of the gaming industry (volume, profitability etc) and its steady march towards consolidation and bigger development budgets. Nothing wrong with either one, but Takahashi notes how skewed investments are in the industry:

Video games are an attractive market. But there seems to be a lot of fear about investing in them. Venture capitalists have shied away from them, in part because investments in early stage development companies carry huge risks. It’s a hit or miss business, and venture capitalists have no particular skill at picking those hits…

According to Takahashi, there are two areas where VCs are willing to invest: Online gaming and cell phone games. Neither is a bad market, but both combined are just a small niche of the over all video game market.

It doesn’t take much money to get started in this business so companies such as PlayFirst and LimeLife are taking small $5 million rounds. If the games cost only $100,000 to develop, then that money can go a long way. A lot of developers who are refugees from the console wars are taking lessons from this and moving from console games to cell phone games. The economic model is friendlier.

But if you look at the numbers here, something is wrong. There’s an $18 billion market for console software, but nobody wants to invest in it, unless they’re buying EA stock at some very high multiples. EA is so big at around $18 billion market valuation that a lot of the Hollywood studios can’t afford to buy it. There’s a $1 billion cell phone market, and a $2 billion online games market, and the investors are climbing over each other to invest in those markets.

I don’t get it. So why is this the case?

It gets even more interesting from there.

Read it all

In lieu of financing, some developers have to self-finance, as noted in this Wired story from March this year:

In getting Alien Hominid released for the PlayStation 2 and GameCube, The Behemoth did something virtually unheard of in the industry: It fully developed its game before bringing it to publishers.

Originally, the team had developed the game for web downloading, and won over millions of enthusiastic players. But the developers wanted their game to be available for console play. This was no cheap task.

“We self-funded through mortgaging our houses,” said producer John Baez, while another team member sold his house to raise money.

Along the way, The Behemoth spent what its team members call a typical PS2 game-development budget — they wouldn’t be specific — all the while knowing they might end up getting nowhere.

“We were going to take it to the end,” said Baez. “We took a pretty much finished game in to publishers, and said this is the game we want to do.”

But in the end, it worked. The group struck deals with publisher O-3, which distributed Alien Hominid in the United States, and with another publisher for European distribution.

A less interesting and quite windy examination in The Economist of the social role and impact of video games.

Popular low-cost Internet name registrar Go Daddy created a bit of a stir earlier this year when one of its commercials was pulled from the Super Bowl telecast. The commercial featured “Go Daddy Girl” Candice Michelle as a witness at some fictional congressional-type hearing. The offending gag was that Michelle kept having “wardrobe malfunctions” that threatened to bare her ample chest. It was apparently all a bit too much for NFL’s very image conscious operatives and the second of the two ads didn’t make it on air during the telecast, which probably didn’t hurt Go Daddy too much since the incident resulted in a lot of publicity for the company.

Go Daddy has now released eight new commercials, two of which feature Michelle (”Car Wash” and “Art Class”), while the other six are described as testimonials (you don’t think I wasted my time watching those, do you?)

Go Daddy’s president and founder Bob Parsons is a man who knows what he’s doing:

I know that both new “Go Daddy Girl” commercials, as every commercial featuring The Go Daddy Girl, will spark controversy. The vast majority of our current and prospective customers will like the commercials. There will also be a contingent who will dislike the “Go Daddy Girl” commercials, and once again accuse me of being inappropriate and “using sex to sell.”

How one can watch the “Go Daddy Girl” commercials and not accuse Parsons of using sex is beyond me, but, the thing is, he uses sex to get attention, and low prices and good customer service to actually sell.

The new Michelle ads are, in my opinion, appropriately mild, certainly milder than the car-wash-themed mock commercial for the Catholic Church that “The Simpsons” used in one of its Super Bowl episodes (You may recall its tagline: “The Catholic Church - We’ve made a few…changes”).

You can watch Go Daddy’s commercials here.

I’m not a real big fan of Jay Mohr, but, hey, when the guy’s right, he’s right, and Mohr couldn’t have been more right about the woeful WNBA, the NHL of women’s sports: It’s totally pointless and nobody cares.

Do you know anybody who has ever watched a game? Have you ever spoken about the WNBA at work? At home? Anywhere? The NBA and the networks that have aired the sport have tried in vain for far too long to prop up this league as entertainment. If you are entertained by 7-foot, 225-pound women from Poland who have less basketball skills than the worst NBA D-Leaguer then I guess you are one of the few people who cares.