Gamasutra posted up an article that has been bouncing around in my documents folder for a little while. The original title was “A Services Strategy for Casual Games”, but the new one is a bit more punchy. One response that I’ve heard quite a bit is that portals will never allow user data to be released back to developers. This is quite true for most established portals that have traditionally focused on selling packaged goods […]
I had a chance to sit down with Andrew Tepper, the designer for A Tale in the Desert. His game is a good example of a village game, one of those small MMO that flourish in the dark corners of the internet. They’ve got a small group of dedicated developers making a wonderful, profitable game that is invisible to much of the world. They bootstrapped themselves into existence without selling their souls and are planning […]
So World of Warcraft has reached five million accounts. Good for them. You have a population that is substantially larger than the size of the Netherlands during the Dutch Golden Age. Now there was a culture that gave us some great fruit paintings. (And wonderful droppe!) Will online games one day give us a meaningful world culture? This got me musing about how major cultures of the world formed and what it would mean for […]
Most metropolitan areas sport a wide array of bands that eke out a reasonable living by touring about the nearby countryside. At every stop, they get a bit of cash from the till, sell a handful of t-shirts and maybe even an album or two. If they are good, they build up a sizable population of groupies that worships the ground they walk on and follows them from show to show. Very few people outside […]
Here’s the newsarticle. There will be people saying that paying for virtual goods is an poor practice that drives customers from the game. The reality will be that most people are willing to pay and that the revenues they generate will easily offset the lost revenues from the players who are morally outraged. I’d be surprised if a substancial portion of the next wave of MMOGs do not have some form of non-subscription revenue model. […]
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