Apple’s AirPlay streaming media technology has a neat trick up its sleeve for game developers, enabling them to create multi-screen experiences that allow a player to interact with an interface on a portable device like the iPad or iPhone, and see something different broadcast through their television attached to an Apple TV. One game that takes advantage of this is from Toledo, Ohio-based… → Read More
It’s a little bit sexy and a little bit dorky, but Google Glass has finally arrived. Beyond the initial productivity uses of the device, how important are games going to be for driving its adoption, and what kind of games might work for it? → Read More
While it makes game makers often feel better, the idea that designing games is a science is largely a delusion. The industry often thinks of itself in those terms, and self-reinforces the notion that being successful in games is all just one big engineering problem. Not so. Games are an entertainment business, and that means being crazy and willing to take chances is vital. → Read More
Games app downloads to smartphones and tablets are set to grow significantly over the next four years, according to a new report by analyst Juniper Research which projects there will be 64.1BN such downloads in 2017 — more than three times the 21 billion downloaded in 2012. Key drivers powering this high rate of growth include free-to-play releases, more sophisticated devices & smartphone… → Read More
MinoMonsters launched in early 2011 on a mission to become the Pokémon of social games, allowing gamers to explore a world inhabited by bite-sized, furry monsters, taking them on quests and battling their friends. For this reason — and because founders Josh Buckley and Tyler Diaz were Y Combinator’s two youngest graduates at 18 and 17-years-old, respectively — the startup found some early buzz. → Read More
A lot of recent moves in the gaming space to ban, investigate or curtail certain aspects of its output can seem egregious. However seen in the light of how shady game makers tend to behave, and the need to keep their sleazy tactics at bay, such moves are often understandable. Still, there are costs to games as a medium that this sort of thing keeps happening. → Read More
Following last’s year expansion into merchandise including toys, underwear (!), and more, EA’s PopCap is now taking its popular “Plants vs. Zombies” title to the printed (and e-inked) page. Penguin Children’s has acquired the physical and e-book publishing rights to the game, in a three-year deal. → Read More
The freemium kids’ app party that has seen some parents left with hefty bills because of their kids’ use of games could be heading for a sticky end — at least in the U.K. The Office of Fair Trading has announced a six-month investigation into whether children are being “unfairly pressured or encouraged to pay for additional content in ‘free’ web and app-based games”. → Read More
It looks like some changes are afoot at Booyah, the location-based gaming company best known as the maker of the MyTown franchise. MyTown and MyTown 2 attempted to evolve the location-based check-in model in gaming, allowing users not only check into locations within a city-building sim, but also scan and check into products in the real world. → Read More
Fresh from putting smiles on the faces of tabletop gaming geeks everywhere, with yesterday’s news that it would be helping to bring Dungeons & Dragons to iOS devices later this year, mobile game publisher Playdek has closed a $3.8 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Qualcomm Ventures, with IDG Ventures and ff Venture Capital also participating. → Read More
“This is the original concept shot for Fruit Ninja which was pitched to the company during Halfbrick Fridays. This is literally the very first piece of Fruit Ninja imagery ever created, so it’s historically significant,” Halfbrick Studio‘s Chief Marketing Officer Phil Larsen said in an email to me last week after I interviewed him and his colleague Richard McKinney, the… → Read More
Sokikom, a new startup that wants to help K-12 teachers motivate students to learn using games, is announcing today that it has raised $2 million in seed funding, half of which comes in the form of a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (a research branch within the U.S. Department of Education) and the other half comes in the form of angel funding from former Intel Chairman and CEO Dr. → Read More
Over the last year, it seems that we kept hearing that quality, legit HTML5 gaming was right around the corner. Well, here we are two months into 2013, and the market is still yet to see a single, widely adopted (or even slightly adopted) flagship HTML5 title. → Read More
Fresh on the heels of its partnership with UK educational app maker Mindshapes, San Francisco-based kids’ app platform Fingerprint is today rolling out a new version of its software which introduces kid-safe multiplayer gaming, messaging and more. This news was hinted at in January, when CEO Nancy McIntyre, formerly of LeapFrog, spoke of a forthcoming release which would introduce new features… → Read More
With Facebook deciding to hide monthly and daily active users, we have lost the one game platform that could give us reasonably objective data about game performance. We are back to the Dark Ages of vanity metrics as a result. This is something that needs to change. → Read More
Increasingly, the sentiment in the games industry is that 2013 is going to be a very difficult year. With Facebook effectively over as a platform, social gambling being weaker than anticipated and forthcoming console hardware looking troubled, everybody is worried. As the proverb says, game makers seems to be living in interesting times. → Read More
As fans of D&D will attest, there are not many games as satisfying as Gygax’s original but darn it if it wasn’t fun to try new platforms when they came out. Tunnels & Trolls, created 37 years ago by Ken St. Andre, wasn’t so much a D&D knock-off but an alternative. St. Andre streamlined the D&D rules, reducing the complexity, and added a bit more humor. For folks unable to get the… → Read More
Today, international investment firm Digi-Capital published its in-depth review of the global gaming space, giving us a sense of the size, breadth, and activity of the international gaming market in both a year-end retrospective of 2012 as well as what we can expect from the industry in the coming year.
For starters, Digi-Capital found that gaming M&A “beat all records” in 2012, with $4… → Read More
Perhaps the biggest roadblock facing the development of generation-two social games is the addiction to metrics. Social game makers still believe that fun is about finding the right behaviours, the right metric to measure fun and the right way to maximise that. They are wrong. Fun is, and always has been, a dynamic quality. They need to learn that there is no “fun boson”. → Read More
While the single- and parallel-game types have streaked ahead on mobile platforms, multiplayer games has been more tentative. Particular “local” multiplayer games, of the kind that you play with friends in a location like a pub. However with the arrival of a little game called Spaceteam, I think that may be about to change. → Read More
Discoverability, collapsing social game models, failing gamification and weak levels of excitement for new gaming platforms have all conspired to make 2012 a complicated year for games. For some this means that the business is all about selling shovels rather than prospecting for gold, but maybe it’s more about identifying the causes that players believe in. → Read More
In the wake of a mass shooting or terrorist attack the question of video game violence is raised. Games are often portrayed as little more than drug-addiction meets murder-simulator, and we game makers apologise endlessly. But we are not really being true to ourselves by adopting these apologist positions. In a sense all games are inherently violent. And this is a good thing. → Read More
Back in the olden days, before the kids had their smartphones and their Nintendo tapes and their Tivo, families used to get together in a room, open a paper box, and remove a set of boards and pieces. By following a set of rules, families could play these “board games” together and have loads of fun until the candles burned out and someone died of dysentery. → Read More
The apps gold-rush has resulted in the majority of riches being concentrated in a few developers’ hands: analyst house Canalys says just 25 developers accounted for half of app revenue on the two dominant U.S. app stores, Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play, over a 20-day period last month. Between them, they accrued $60 million from paid-for downloads and in-app purchases over this period. → Read More
When I first saw this tiny gaming cabinet this morning, I was fascinated. Who was the creator, Sprite_tm, and why did he do such and excellent and thorough job of turning a tiny Rasberry Pi device into a little gaming cabinet? In short, how did he get inspired as a maker? → Read More
Most of the talk around games tends to focus on climate. It’s about finding the right customers, funding, platform, business model, partnerships, metric and discovery solutions, technology, route to market and so on. However every always says that the first rule of making games is to make sure that the game is fun. Without a fun game there’s no rule two. True, but what does “fun” mean? → Read More
What do you get the person who already has everything? Sifteo Cubes might be the answer. These innovative little gaming devices work together to create interactive gaming experiences with very tactile, imaginative elements you just can’t get on a standard mobile device. → Read More
Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience.
There are plenty of people in and around games who make their living largely through behaving like wizards. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of gamification. Is a site an opportunity to engage with a user through a journey? Is a reward a way of maintaining a complex conversation with your users? → Read More
Yesterday, I sat down with the folks who bring games to life on Facebook. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, there are a lot of people who like to hang out on the social network and play turn-based games. Sure, it can get annoying, with all of the notifications and requests, but Facebook is apparently trying to do something more than annoy you. Actually, it’s quite the opposite.
Recently, Facebook CEO Mark… → Read More
TinyTap, an iPad application that lets you or your children create playable books and games using easy DIY tools, announced that it raised a $500,000 round of seed funding from Inimiti, a new $35 million Israeli micro venture capital fund. TinyTap is Inimit’s first investment. The additional funding will be used primarily for continued product development, including the launch of new game engines… → Read More
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