It ain’t easy being a mobile game developer. Between developing an original, good-looking game to acquiring users, honing in on the right monetization strategy without bombarding users with annoying ads or in-app spam (hi, Zynga!), while keeping engagement and retention up, leaves developers with their hands more than full.
PlayHaven launched back in 2010 to try to bring app makers a little… → Read More
Understanding relativity is hard but playing games is easy. What’s a physicist to do? Why, make a game about walking near the speed of light, of course, silly! → Read More
Beyond the levels, badges, reward points and promised engagement increases, there are many behaviourist game designers who see games as persuasive tools for social change. They see a very wide range of possible benefits from games, such as education, health and awareness of social or political issues and so they want to use games to persuade players.
Do they really work though? → Read More
As work on BlackBerry 10 continues behind closed doors, Waterloo-based RIM is gearing up to make yet another attempt to woo would-be BlackBerry 10 developers to its cause.
This time though the company has its eyes set on a specific kind of dev — come November 16, RIM will offer up cold hard cash to game developers who create a game for (or port an existing game to) BlackBerry 10. → Read More
Love it or hate it, Windows 8 is a big deal and it’s only going to get bigger. Particularly the Metro side. The Windows Store will bring app store economics to the PC in a way that most users have never experienced before, and that represents a golden opportunity for developers. However they will have to move incredibly quickly to get ahead of the rush. → Read More
Several people have contacted me and asked whether such-and-such a game would work with crowdfunding, or whole sectors. Could educational games benefit from crowdfunding, for example. Or what about game-like projects, or gaming hardware innovations? The answers to these questions have little to do with the product itself. They are driven by what I call marketing stories. → Read More
GOG (formerly known as Good Old Games) is having a huge Interplay sale that gives you 32 games for $34.99 (or more), or anywhere between $13.95 and $34.99 for 20 titles, or 8 games for whatever you want to pay under that. This is an amazing deal that will get you some classic titles you may well have grown up with. And that could make you feel old, but maybe good also. Nostalgia. → Read More
The Bay Area is the epicentre of a massive disruption which shook the games industry to its foundation. It erupted through what we call social and mobile games, drew huge audiences and changed the fundamental economics of games and introduced a whole new language of play. It even went beyond games into what we now call gamification.
I call it the San Francisco Revolution. And I think it’s over. → Read More
Contre Jour, the imaginative mobile physics-based puzzle game launched in 2011, is now available on the web. Just like with Cut the Rope for HTML5, the Pulse web app and the recently launched Atari Arcade, Microsoft and the folks at Clarity Consulting helped the Contre Jour team to bring the mobile gaming experience to the (touch-enabled) web. → Read More
Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience.
Zynga’s misery continues, yet mobile seems a little rosier. Games using broadly the same game design as many of the successful Facebook types are often at the top of the charts. People ask me whether these new games are examples of generation-two. Are they new, safe, the new frontier? Answer: Nope. → Read More
Editor’s Note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience. He is the creator of the leading game design blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development. You can follow him on Twitter here.
The really big change that social games brought about was proving that the Asian model of monetising games through virtual goods and other free-to-play… → Read More
I’ve backed a few things on Kickstarter in the past year, and I’m apparently not the only one. Today, the company shared some numbers as to what types of things are getting the most funding on the platform. Somehow I’m not surprised that it’s games.
It hasn’t always been that way though, says Kickstarter. Games jumped from the 8th position to the 1st one in just the past year. Here’s the… → Read More
There’s no shortage of HTML5 games (or developers for that matter) out there, but most of them don’t offer much competition for more graphically-intensive, engrossing native games.
“You can run StarCraft on your PC, but the best game you can in your browser is, like, FarmVille,” SpinPunch co-founder Ian Tien told me. While he’s quick to note that there’s nothing wrong with tilling… → Read More
MakeGamesWithUs is a new iOS game publishing company with a twist: its focus is on helping high school and college students to build games. MakeGamesWithUs us will take the kids’ creations, provide professional graphics and art and publish them in the App Store. The kids will own the code, and the company will own the graphics and take a cut of the sales. The company already has a few games built… → Read More
Like many parents, Dan Yang was fascinated by her young daughter’s obsession with her iPhone. As she went through the process of planning the best way to introduce her to technology, apps, and games, she quickly became frustrated with the lack of educational technology made specifically for children. Unlike many parents, however, Yang is an entrepreneur and optical engineer, so she did what any… → Read More
If you were a gamer from a simpler era, you’ll remember Spy Vs. Spy with nostalgia. The game, based on the Mad Magazine comic, featured two spies trying to collect items in an embassy while booby trapping desks, doors, and safes for the other player to trip over.
The mechanics are simple. As the black or white spy, you move through the rooms looking for a secret briefcase, a key, a passport… → Read More
Electronic Arts announced today that it is merging two top mobile game studios, IronMonkey and Firemint, which will fittingly combine to create a new company, called Firemonkeys. (All parties are awarded 50 points for the awesome portmanteau.)
For those unfamiliar, IronMonkey is probably best known for adapting popular EA titles to mobile, like Mass Effect Infiltrator, Dead Space, and The Sims… → Read More
Zynga became a public company with $3.75 billion dollar market cap in part by taking existing physical games and introducing them to your browser and social graph. Poker and Scrabble are just two that immediately come to mind. But, lately we’ve seen Zynga flipping its model, turning to the offline world in an attempt to find new life beyond browsers and smartphones. As Eric reported in February… → Read More
Less than a year after the debut of gaming on Google’s social platform, Google+, two game developers are pulling their titles. Bejeweled Blitz, a popular game owned by Electronic Arts‘ Pop Cap divsion, and several titles from Wooga, the maker of games for children, will no longer be available on the Google+ social network. → Read More
Over the last several months, the biggest Western social gaming companies have been making moves, and attracting attention as a result. Japanese gaming giant GREE bought Funzio for $210 million to help it move into Western markets, and Zynga grabbed Draw Something creator OMGPOP for $183 million. Meanwhile, European social gaming companies, like Sweden’s King.com and Germany’s wooga have been… → Read More
If you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you might be excused for not knowing about this Humble Bundle thing. As a long-time Linux user, the Humble Bundles have always been of interest to me, and I’ve always tried to support them financially. It’s also always been interesting to me that Linux users typically pay more for the Bundles than their Windows or Mac counterparts. → Read More
In honor of today’s arguably lackluster Nintendo presser, I present Sidequest, a game that asks you to do all sorts of side quests. Over and over again. Ad infinitum. → Read More
While some may still cringe at the word (and its overuse), gamification is reaching the tipping point. As Mayfield Fund Managing Director Tim Chang recently wrote in a must-read post, gamification is now moving beyond its early adopting verticals like media and fitness and is no longer content to just play in the realm of consumers and end users. It’s headed to enterprise next.
Last we heard from Game Closure, the young startup had just turned down offers from Zynga and Facebook on its way to a $12 million raise from Highland Capital, Greylock, Benchmark, General Catalyst, and more. Even in spite of $100 million-plus offers, Game Closure CEO Michael Carter tells us that the startup is not eager to sell — not now, and not in the future. Yet, stealing high-placed… → Read More
TinyTap is a new iPad application designed for kids which introduces a different angle on the “record-your-own-voice” storybooks craze, by offering a playable book or game you and your kids can customize with your own photos, camera shots, music, narration, and more. The resulting creations can then be shared with family and friends. And, for a little inspiration, the built-in TinyTap store offers… → Read More
EA’s big shift toward treating games as services instead of packaged goods is going to mean restructuring this year.
Chief executive John Riccitiello said in today’s earnings call that there will be some layoffs as the company increases production of online, mobile, and social games. While EA beat earnings estimates for the quarter ending in March, its shares fell in after-hours trading by as… → Read More
It’s not every day that you see code like this:
*——————————-
* Superimpose “Turn disk over” message
*——————————-
FLIPDISKMSG
lda #flipbox
ldx #>flipbox
jmp superimage
Yep. That’s assembly language, about as far from Ruby as you can get. It’s from the original, Apple II version of Prince of Persia, one of the best games in anyone’s… → Read More
In the world of indie gaming, Minecraft is undoubtedly in a league of its own. The sandbox game has already sold more than 5 million copies and has spawned its own subculture of fan sites and clones. Now, the game’s creator Notch (nee Marcus Persson), has announced his next project called 0x10c: a multi-player space game set in 281,474,976,712,644 AD. Besides the usual space battles, trading and… → Read More
Disney and Japanese mobile gaming giant DeNA announced a new partnership this morning that will see their first jointly developed mobile social games launched on DeNA’s Mobage social gaming platform, beginning later this month.
The first title to arrive, “Disney Party,” was released on March 28th to the Mobage network in Japan, which serves a mobile gaming audience of over 35 million. On… → Read More
Prince of Persia and Karateka, were two of the best action games of their era. Why? Because they gave us an inkling of what real, fluid graphical motion would look like in a few years’ time and, more important, were pretty much amazing if you were used to the Atari 2600 and River Raid. I remember playing Karateka before school at age ten, chopping my way through enemies on my way to save my… → Read More
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