The Digital Game Monetization Summit

Gamesindustry.biz has an article about the business side of gaming, especially as it relates to the mobile market. Here are some excerpts I thought were quite interesting:

“If you look at what people successfully did on Facebook or the early days of mobile, a lot of it was about cheap user acquisition through the spammy virality that Facebook allowed for a while, or manipulations of the terms of service from Apple or Google on the mobile side. That's gone away,” said Greg Richardson, CEO of Rumble Entertainment. “Of the $50 billion that was spent worldwide last year on games, less than 10 percent was spent on casual content. These companies were really smart around analytics and monetization and very light in terms of product and content creation. I'm not sure any of those things are particularly sustainable. The future lies in going into the larger part of the market which is people that self-identify as gamers, and where the user acquisition and long-term value creation comes from making great games.”

The MMO Market 2012

Interview
Home Site

The Old Is New Again

I’ve been really enjoying the videos of FFXIV: ARR’s alpha testing. I enjoy the old school feel to the game. It’s pretty like only a Final Fantasy game can be, it’s also enormous and I can’t wait to explore the world that SquareEnix is building. All they need to do is tap into the joy I had playing FFXI and they'd be golden, as least for me. I loved the old Everquest vibe FFXI and FFXIV had. More than anything what I'd really want is a slightly, very slightly modernized take on FFXI. Eleven did so many things well; I hope they stick to their guns on how they wish to make a game. So many times I see games with mashups of the "best" feature of other games, but in trying to collect the best of the best, the game lost its soul; I don't want FFXIV to do that.

Great Game, Wouldn’t Play

You ever have a game that impresses you; a game that surprises you with how it does things. You sit down and take a look at the game and you are impressed, but when you get up from you’re seat you think to yourself ‘too bad, great game, wouldn’t play’.

A Tank’s Life

I love playing a tank character in MMO’s. I loved playing Guild Wars 2 but there is something positively seductive about playing a tank. It was one of the reasons I went back to The Old Republic. Everybody always goes for the damage dealers when they play. I understand that, after all my first 50 in TOR was a Juggernaut. I always like to say a Juggernaut in Ravage is the most beautiful sight in The Old Republic. I love the fact that my Juggernaut giggles when she procs a Ravage, it always makes me smile. But I’ve been on a tanking kick the last few weeks. In The Old Republic, none of the three tanking specs play alike.

The Best of the Best IV [Modern Movies]

The best romances in modern movies. Yes romances and not romantic, I loathe most romantic movies; blissfully ignorant of reality. You ever notice how most romance movies never tell anything about the happily ever after; it’s just assumed? Life is the afterwards and yet somehow they always manage to ignore it. I just finished Halo 4; the Master Chief and Cortana. One a genetically modified human who is seeing for the first time cracks in what defines him as the other an artificial intelligence is faced with an all too human mortality. Halo 4 dared to say that War had welded Cortana and The Chief into something even they couldn’t fully understand, something that they knew had meaning beyond all hope. For Cortana, the best romances in modern movies.

Raise Your Freak Flag

I was reading an article the other today espousing the dangers of having too much story or putting too many resources toward story. I read this article a little disappointed. I’ve always loved story and the idea that there can ever be too much story is such a foreign thought to me. As I contemplated the article I began to realize that it wasn’t the article that disappointed me, or the quality of the writing, the me-too feeling of bashing The Old Republic; what I had issue with was far more basic, the idea that story doesn’t matter.