If you've read this blog for any length of time, you know that I occassionally like to blog about customer service, be it good or bad. Tonight, I found out that my account was banned from the public forums for World of Warcraft. I received a 72 hour ban for discussing a game balance issue with the...
Bing Gordon has certainly earned the right to his opinion on the game industry's latest golden child genre, social games. His successful career with Electronic Arts is evidence of that. Unfortunately, I don't exactly buy his assertion that social games are the singular future of games. His article wants the reader to believe that console games and PC gaming are a thing of the past now that we've discovered social gaming. He supports that argument with the sheer number of people playing these games and their "Mother-in-law"-as-in-not-a-core-gamer demographic. He's also a significant part of Zynga which immediately makes anything he says about social gaming suspect; at the very least biased. While it is true that social games have taken off to unexpected heights and it is true that the analytic mindset of the web is coming to game development, it's folly to believe that social gaming will replace traditional gaming. Instead, the face of gaming will change and evolve in ways we can't truly predict today.
Silicon Sisters is a women's game development company that is making games for women gamers. Information about how they are going to accomplish this goal is scarce and mostly present in today's video game industry media outlets. (ArsTechnica, IGN, Gamasutra) They want to create games that appeal to women without specifically excluding men. The common perception is that the video game industry is dominated by male players and to an extent that is true but I'm not so sure that the statement holds nearly as much weight as it used to. Regardless, every so often someone raises the notion that games can be created specifically for women and I don't buy it. I don't believe you can specifically create video games for women without stereotyping women. If blatant stereotyping is the goal then I'll reverse that statement and tell you that I think it is easy to create games for women.
As I watched some of the online coverage of GDC, I was struck by how much the conference was dominated by iPhone games, Zynga Facebook games and online social games in general. Every other tweet was something to do with how Zynga will have more employees than Facebook this year. I knew there was an infatuation...
In my previous blog posts , I outlined the beginning of why I believe game development is not cheap. In this post, I'm going to reinforce that point by reflecting upon the costs that I associated with starting a game development studio. It's worth repeating that with this exercise I am not building...
In my previous blog posts, I outlined the beginning of why I believe game development is not cheap. In this post, I'm going to reinforce that point by outlining the remaining costs associated with starting a game development studio. It's worth repeating that with this exercise I am not building...
In my previous blog post, I outlined the beginning of why I believe game development is not cheap. In this post, I'm going to reinforce that point by outlining the next set of costs associated with starting a game development studio. It's worth repeating that with this exercise I am not building...
Far too often, I read about indie games being done on the cheap and succeeding beyond the developer’s wildest dreams. Flight Control for the iPhone is a great example. Fantastic game; apparently made for very little money and then launched to commercial success. We see these articles in the headlines...
I’m noticing that more than a couple MMOs are offering lifetime subscriptions these days and I believe that this is about as damaging to the industry as was Origin’s decision to charge $9.95 per month for Ultima Online. Lifetime subscriptions might end up setting a pricing norm in the industry...
Over the Christmas holiday, I received a text message from twitter that declared Metaplace.com was closing. Frankly, I was shocked to see this news. Raph Koster’s a very well known designer and I figured if anyone could make the case for User Generated Content (UGC), it was him. Unfortunately,...
