The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
AFKGamer is quickly becoming my favorite blogger written from the perspective of a gamer. Why? He eschews the theoretical and talks about them from a really tangible point of view. No ant farming here, he just wants to tell us why we all suck. Continue reading
I’ve been extremely busy the last couple of days, so I wasn’t going to post, but this is too good to pass up. J the Yellow points out that the Florida Department of Corrections has a website which mentions (fairly glowingly), the ideals and principles set out by the Guardian from Ultima — you know, the Orwellian state run by the megavillain? “John Hosie” sounds like the name of a great philosopher, but it turns out, he’s just one of the biggest Ultima Wonks of all time, filling the web with Ultima Fandom under the name Houston Dragon.
I’ve been re-reading The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al and Laura Reis recently, an excellent marketing book that talks about building brands and focus. Yes, I’ll read anything and try to take a design lesson out of it. One of the interesting chapters is in the addendum “The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding”, and discusses convergence vs divergence. Continue reading
(via Terranova) World of Warcraft has hit 600K subscribers, and 200K concurrent. Let’s see: 600K * 20 bucks a box plus one month at $15 bucks a pop equals… roughly $21 million, give or take. Well on their way to money hats for everyone! Continue reading
So another one bites the dust. Wish being cancelled has spurred a fair amount of discussion here and there.
One of the things that the Wish experience brings home is the importance of having a solid vision of what your game is about, a vision that you can communicate in a single sentence (this is something that Raph has harped on in his GDC talks). Consider the MMOs that have actually shipped: Continue reading
Sorry for being out of touch. Work has been busy lately (endless brainstorm meetings!), and my weekends will be dominated by the football playoffs this week and next. Just to point y’all to interesting stuff to tide you over:
One of the main problems with running an online game is being truly in touch with your community. We sit in our ivory towers, we look at (usually insufficient) data mining, and get our community leads to compile reports, but sometimes, we don’t fully have our pulse on the problems. Continue reading
In the Toyetic thread yesterday, Abalieno said this:
[B]eware when you say that there’s space for a casual MMO, you are also aiming to casual subscribers.
This is, interestingly, very wrong, but most game observers wouldn’t realize this. That’s because ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’ are the most misused words in the game industry. In fact, I misused it in my own comments. Continue reading
In Jamie Fristrom’s Half-Life review, he unveils a new word, ‘toyetic‘. I like it. Here’s what he has to say:
“Toyetic” was a word given to me by a friend who used to work at Mattel who doesn’t like being mentioned in my blog. It means, “like a toy.” An amusing sidenote is that the guys at Mattel are trying to make their toys more like computer games, while we’re trying to make our computer games more like toys. Or toy chests, anyway. The collection of guns in your typical FPS are already toyetic; a set of toy guns, each with their own kind of play. Half-Life 2 gives us a bunch of new toys above and beyond the usual collection of weapons: the air raft, the gravity gun, the dune buggy, the ant lions, portable gun turrets, squads of soldiers. Each toy comes complete with a context to make it interesting, and makes Half-life 2 feel like a brand new game, not a rehash.
Happy new year. I’m still feeling lazy and headache-ridden, so let me point you to AFKGamer’s 2005 MMOG Wishlist.
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