Good Old Games is running a $4.99 sale on multiple Sierra titles including Space Quest and Kings Quest. The games come in packages of three and are compatible with Windows (sorry, Mac users, but here’s a consolation prize).
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Trion Worlds, a lesser known game development company headquartered in Silicon Valley, yesterday gave even further evidence that the “deep end” of online gaming is alive and well, announcing that it has raised an $85 million round of strategic growth equity financing from Ontario Teachers Pension Plan and Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments. The round adds to the $100 million the startup has already raised from investors like Time Warner and Trinity Ventures. → Read More
Following its November partnership with TinyCo, social games outfit ngmoco (now a DeNA-owned company) is partnering with game publisher Glu Mobile, Inc. The deal will brings Glu’s popular Gun Bros game to ngmoco’s Mobage gaming platform for Android.
No word yet on whether the rest of Glu’s titles – many of which are more well-known than Gun Bros – will port over as well. → Read More
It appears the iPad gamepad of our dreams has finally arrived. The 60beat is a full-sized gamepad designed for iOS devices and it connects to iPads and iPhones via the headphone jack. While there aren’t many games that support the technology (yet), the concept is fairly simple. The controller works by sending signals through the devices’ microphone jack. → Read More
With all this talk of 360-degree customer service and Zappos ninjas who help babies out of burning buildings while taking orders for clogs, it’s nice to remember that for every heartwarming tale of customer satisfaction there is a dude like Paul Christoforo.
The tale begins with a controller accessory. It’s called the Avonger en-kontrol (my misspelling) and it’s some kind of octopus that helps you press more buttons on your game controller. We wrote it up in February 2011 so you can check it out there. A quick web search will bring up the actual product. I’m not about to give them any Google Juice. → Read More
Playdom’s Gardens of Time took the #1 spot of Facebook’s Most Popular Games of 2011 list. But wait, Zynga’s CityVille was ranked #3 despite peaking at over 100 million monthly active users and 21 million daily active users — far more than Gardens of Time’s peaks of 17 million MAU and 4 million DAU, or its current stats according to AppData. That’s because Facebook’s list was mostly based on Yes / No user surveys of whether they’d recommend the game, and hardly on active user count like it said
It’s almost as if Facebook used its cloudy methodology to keep Zynga from completely dominating the list, as the Mark Pincus machine currently owns all 5 Facebook games with the most DAU and still ended up with 4 of the top 10 spots on Facebook’s list. → Read More
San Francisco-based Fingerprint Digital, a startup building educational apps for kids, is blowing up. The company released its first apps into iTunes on December 1st, and already, it has seen over 270,000 game playing sessions for a combined total of over 2 million minutes played. And, according to CEO Nancy MacIntyre, its apps are about to reach download numbers in the six figures.
In just two weeks, Fingerprint pushed two of its games into the top five in the educational apps’ category: Big Kid Life Firefighter and Big Kid Life Fairy Princess. (And yes, despite what those titles sound like, they are actually games for learning.) → Read More
Well, it looks like hardcore gamers would like to have a word with you, social and casual gamers. Yes, the stories in the media of late have been all about Rovio’s Angry Birds skyrocketing past half a billion downloads, or Zynga and its ilk overtaking social games. Both casual and social games have been growing like gangbusters, but the latest data from Pando Networks reveals some fairly serious growth in the free-to-play gaming industry across the globe. → Read More
Playd is a new mobile application that lets you check in to games the way Foursquare users check in to venues. Actually, the app is more akin to something like Miso, GetGlue or IntoNow - apps which extend the check-in metaphor to other activities, like watching TV or seeing a movie.
The company is one of the first to launch from the NewMe Accelerator, the startup accelerator whose focus is on giving black founders a leg up in Silicon Valley. It was also featured in CNN’s documentary on race and tech entrepreneurship – yep, that one – but lets not hold that against Playd, OK? → Read More
W3i, a monetization and distribution network for mobile app developers, is announcing the launch of a new $10 million “AppX Game Developer Marketing Fund” at this week’s AppNation conference in San Francisco. The fund will provide developers with a suite of free services that offer production support, analytics and user acquisition channel analysis, all of which are designed to help indie developers compete with today’s “AAA” gaming giants.
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LaunchNow.co is a new startup that turns building startups into a game. (Yes, we’re there now.) The idea is that players will pit their companies against each other in order to earn badges, achievements and a “Gamerscore” which is then published to their startup’s profile page. Oh, and here’s the crazy part: LaunchNow is meant to be used with real-life startups, not fake ones. → Read More
It’s not hard to love Mario. He’s had his ups and downs – what, for example, was the deal with Paper Mario? And Super Mario Strikers was pretty hard to love – but darn it if the little guy doesn’t keep coming back for more and keeps you, at the very least, entertained.
Super Mario 3D Land is the latest in the Mario saga. The story is fairly typical – something was stolen (a lot of leaves) and Bowser took Princess Peach. Your mission is to find the leaves (which are special and give you the Tanooki suit) and then find Peach. What you go through to find her, however, is where all of the fun comes in.
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Social gaming network PapayaMobile and the value exchange-based mobile ad network Tapjoy are today announcing a partnership that will combine the power of their two communities to help Android users better discover new mobile games. The jointly developed product will be called “Social Marketplace” and it will serve to recommend new games to mobile users based on their popularity among a user’s Papaya friends. In turn, developers will be able to better target consumers with more relevant ads, which means increased opportunity for engagement and monetization.
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Mobile gaming is big and getting bigger. You’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it one thousand times. Japan’s mobile, social gaming giants are killing it; Android and iOS games now generate more revenue than all of Nintendo and Sony’s portable games combined; and games are the most popular mobile app category in the U.S.
What’s more, according to the New York Times, quoting Gartner, game-related spending is on pace to reach $112 billion by 2015 (it’s expected exceed $74 billion this year, up from $67 billion in 2010), and mobile gaming is expected to increase to a 20 percent share of gaming platforms by 2015. Mobile is expected to hold the largest growth of all platforms over that time. → Read More
The popular social gaming network for Android, PapayaMobile, is announcing today that it’s now expanding its gaming platform to iOS. The company is making its social development toolkits available to iOS developers as a beta release, allowing them to connect users on both platforms (iOS and Android) for in-game features including challenges, game invites, leaderboards and more. → Read More
I took my six-year-old son Kasper to Microsoft’s Kinect For Kids event yesterday in hopes of better understanding Microsoft’s efforts at grabbing the younger demographic. While he’s already an avid weekend gamer, I wondered if Microsoft’s latest immersive play solutions would stir him in anyway. I discovered two things: that the Kinect for Kids initiative, as evidenced by the image above, is a sometimes sad but immersive playspace and that Microsoft has a very narrow age window into which they release most of their games.
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Crowdpark, a Berlin-headquartered game developer, announced today that it has raised $6 million in series B financing from top German venture capital firms, Target Partners and existing investor, Earlybird Venture Capital. Waldemar Jantz, partner at Target Partners, will be joining the startup’s board as a result of the investment. The new round of funding brings Crowdpark’s total to $8 million.
Why should you care? Well, Crowdpark is aiming to give gamers their fix of legal gambling, er, betting. Using its patented “dynamic betting” technology, Crowdpark enables forecasting in realtime for social gaming in much the same way the brave among us play the stock market. Unlike its social gaming competitors, the German startup allows gamers to compete against each other in betting events using virtual currency. This includes the opportunity to bet on real world events taking place in everything from sports and entertainment to news and technology. → Read More
Capcom has let slip that an official Nintendo 3DS add-on circlepad – the circular joystick on the left side of the console – will be available for purchase in February to coincide with the launch of Resident Evil: Revelations. The dual circlepads will allow for more accurate aiming in many titles and I can definitely see the value, even over the 3DS’s built-in gyroscopic sensors. I’ve found that playing games like Star Fox in 3D is quite difficult because you leave the 3D sweet spot.
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Over the weekend, Nokia launched a suite of casual games developed at Nokia Research Center which are meant to demonstrate how NFC can enable new forms of mobile gaming. The three new games include Nokia World Flags, Nokia Shakespeare Shuffle and Nokia Nursery Rhyme Shuffle. All can be played now on any Nokia Symbian NFC-enabled phone including the Nokia C7 Astound, C7-00, 600, 603, 700 and 701.
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So, this isn’t exactly breaking news, but it’s so awesome that it’s worth sharing again in case you missed it. HIV/AIDS has killed some 25 million people worldwide and scientists have been working diligently since the virus was discovered in 1981 to find a cure. While a cure still eludes researchers, several protease inhibitors have been developed to slow its progress. But last week, HIV/AIDS research took a huge leap forward, thanks to the work of gamers. Yes, gamers.
About three years ago, a team of researchers at the University of Washington created a game called FoldIt to allow gamers to contribute to scientific research by playing with the shape and structure of proteins. And last week, FoldIt became more than just a cool idea, or an exercise for scientifically-minded gamers. Scientists have been attempting to decipher a protein called “retroviral protease” for over 15 years, as the protease is one of the key proteins that allows HIV to multiply and replicate itself in living cells. Using FoldIt, gamers were able to identify the structure of the protein — within a matter of 10 days. → Read More
