tag:,2010:/4 2010-03-13T22:46:46Z Movable Type 3.34 tag:worldsinmotion.biz,2010://4.21200 2010-03-13T15:00:17Z 2010-03-13T22:46:46Z

The shift of the game-playing population to internet-based games is analogous to the growth of the American supermarket, according to EA's Ben Cousins. In a talk Friday at the Game Developers Conference, Cousins explained how studying the history of the...

Eric Caoili The shift of the game-playing population to internet-based games is analogous to the growth of the American supermarket, according to EA's Ben Cousins. In a talk Friday at the Game Developers Conference, Cousins explained how studying the history of the American retail experience solidifies his somewhat controversial theory that quick, convenient, internet-based gaming will overtake traditional retail-based products completely. According to cousins, the retail dynamic at the turn of the 20th century was a high-quality, boutique experience - consumers would interact directly with an expert behind the counter, who would suggest and personally package up products. It was expensive, inconvenient, and slow. With the rapid adoption of automobiles and growth of paved roads, what we call "supermarkets" became the norm, and consumers gravitated toward the convenience, speed and lower prices they offered. Cousins argued that traditional packaged retail games are going the way of the old-fashioned market, pointing as many GDC speakers have this year to FarmVille as his primary example. FarmVille's 80 million users make it the most popular game in the history of the Western world, despite the experience not being as high quality as a traditional, high definition retail game. Consumers, he said, are willing to look past a game's quality if the game is free, quick, and easy to access.]]> Battlefield Heroes. The graph showed three spikes. The first revenue spike happened when the game became more accessible, and no longer required a code to play. The second, significantly larger spike occurred when EA started selling in-game weapons and introduced new ways to pay. "The game actually got worse during this spike for some gamers," said Cousins, saying that the availability of purchasable upgrades changed the quality of the game. The third spike, which was minimal and very short-lived, was when EA improved the game by adding a new map, new abilities, and gameplay balances. According to Cousins, this demonstrated that a quality improvement did not necessarily generate more revenue. "As developers we can't afford to be arrogant and ignore the online game world," said Cousins. "I think as developers working in the packaged games business we need to understand this shift to a world of convenience. Let's work on making online game more convenient and cheaper."]]> tag:worldsinmotion.biz,2010://4.21192 2010-03-12T23:00:25Z 2010-03-13T00:16:27Z

Casual gaming portal and developer Big Fish Games announced the release of My Tribe, its second Facebook game and a port of its downloadable Mac and PC game originally released in 2008. The company says the new release is the...

Eric Caoili Casual gaming portal and developer Big Fish Games announced the release of My Tribe, its second Facebook game and a port of its downloadable Mac and PC game originally released in 2008. The company says the new release is the second in a series of social game initiatives its launching in 2010. Big Fish Games has redesigned and extended My Tribe for the Facebook platform, adding microtransactions by letting players level up faster and "enhance [their] gameplay experience" by buying virtual goods. In My Tribe, players pick a unique island with varying levels of natural resources and mysterious objects. Players maintain a group of tribespeople, helping them develop specialties like construction, fishing, agriculture, science, and more. Each member of the tribe grows from child to you to adult, learning new skills ,having children of their own, and becoming respected elders. Players can unlock knowledge as their tribespeople grow and learn, allowing them to create customized clothing and accessories, build shelters, provide food, and make scientific discoveries. Gamers will also earn trophies and quests, and can visit other islands within their friend network to help with those challenges. "Social gamers are increasingly drawn to game experiences that offer greater depth of gameplay in easily accessible, social formats," says Big Fish Games's vice president of social games Will O’Brien. "My Tribe is precisely that." He adds, "What’s cool about My Tribe is that when you’re actively playing, you govern your tribe, but while you are away, your tribespeople will take matters into their own hands. Your teenage tribespeople, for example, may choose to sleep or eat instead of chopping wood!"]]> tag:worldsinmotion.biz,2010://4.21191 2010-03-12T19:00:56Z 2010-03-13T00:02:29Z

Casual gaming network WildTangent announced that social game studio Playdom is incorporating its recently launched BrandBoost advertising platform into the developer's Tiki Farm Facebook title. BrandBoost enables Playdom to reward gamers with virtual items and premium content in exchange for...

Eric Caoili Casual gaming network WildTangent announced that social game studio Playdom is incorporating its recently launched BrandBoost advertising platform into the developer's Tiki Farm Facebook title. BrandBoost enables Playdom to reward gamers with virtual items and premium content in exchange for viewing a video or a "rich media advertisement" within Tiki Farm. WildTangent points to a recent Nielsen survey of 27,000 consumers indicating more than 85 percent of gamers prefer not to pay for digital game content, and that its platform allows gamers the choice of receiving content for free by viewing ads. Launched last December, Tiki Farm has more than 5 million monthly active users. Other companies that have integrated the BrandBoost platform into their games include Sony Online Entertainment (free-to-play MMO Free Realms), MMO publisher and operator Outspark.com, and online gaming portal and developer OMGPOP.com. "BrandBoost offers a new, frictionless option for our players to get access to valuable game items courtesy of trusted brands," says Playdom's Business Development VP Sean Phinney. "This means more of our players will be able to experience the benefits and thrill of premium virtual goods while playing play Tiki Farm.]]> tag:worldsinmotion.biz,2010://4.21176 2010-03-12T01:00:28Z 2010-03-12T04:06:09Z

R.A. Salvatore, the popular fantasy author best-known for his Forgotten Realms novels starring Drow Elf Drizzt Do'Urden. For the past several years, he's been working with Curt Schilling's 38 Studios to produce a game codenamed Copernicus, an MMO. With the...

Eric Caoili R.A. Salvatore, the popular fantasy author best-known for his Forgotten Realms novels starring Drow Elf Drizzt Do'Urden. For the past several years, he's been working with Curt Schilling's 38 Studios to produce a game codenamed Copernicus, an MMO. With the disclaimer "I'm not here to tell you how to create a world. I am certainly not here to tell you how to design a game. What I am here is to tell you the principles I use when I create a world," Salvatore began a journey through his gaming and writing careers and espoused core concepts of his world building methods. "The first thing in an MMO is the size of the world. Any discussion of game design is about hitting sweet spots. For me, one of the most important things in an MMO is the size of the world," said Salvatore. "[EverQuest] is still the game that I look to as the best world in a game," due to its size and scope. As an avid EverQuest fan, Salvatore also said "I've come to believe that one of the problems of gamers going forward if we're not careful is how mechanics will take all of the pain out of the games." At 38, he's gotten in many arguments about death penalties -- EverQuest can actually de-level you if you die. "If you take out of a world two things: the pain of losing, it will diminish the accomplishment of winning. And if you take the element of chance of out it, I won't enjoy it," said Salvatore. "You need that in games. It's harder to do that in a computer game, because your phone lines will light up. Never listen to your customer service guys when you're designing a game." ]]> EverQuest his reaction was -- "I could write 100 books in this world -- this is huge. This is so cool!" He spent several hours traversing the world the first time he played -- naive to the consequences of his actions, as the MMO genre was totally new to him. "This one adventure where I never swung a weapon was one of the coolest experiences I had in my life and I thought to myself, that's world building." At this point, Salvatore said, he decided that "games are going to become the next great storytelling medium." His question: "What's the author's role going to be? I wanted to know what an author was going to be able to do with these games." Almost four years ago, he got his answer in the form of a call from Curt Schilling. "Curt tells me 'I want to build a computer game.' I knew he was like me, he got it. 'I want you to design the world for it. I want you to come in and help us create this world for an MMO.' I think that's a phone call I had been waiting for about seven years." "As they were telling me, my mind started spinning. I knew how this was going work. So we put together 38 Studios." What's the most important thing to accomplish? "How are we going to create a world? Suspension of disbelief. What we did was we built a 10,000 year history of our world. That was what I insisted on. We need a huge history for the world. We need deep threads. So we're all going to be painting on the same canvas. Suspension of disbelief." Salvatore said, "We spent six months just on that part of it. Who are the races? What roles do they fill in the economy and society of this world? Why do these guys hate those guys? With all of that, all of this should make sense to the player." This is important, said Salvatore: "[We're] not giving you these big text blocks -- nothing like that. Just the attitudes [of the characters] make sense. The economy makes sense. All of those little details make the world more believable to you. And if the world is more believable to you, you can suspend disbelief." Salvatore closed with an example from Copernicus that has never been made public before. "I think it pretty much exemplifies the philosophy of Copernicus," he said. "in any MMO, what happens when you die? Death isn't permanent in the game. It's one of the things you have to take for granted in the genre," because player characters have to be consistent, said Salvatore. But "instead of just using that as a given, another thing for you that you have to accept that is the way it is, we built it into our game. In the beginning of Copernicus a device has been perfected, called the Well of Souls. When you die the well of souls will bring you back from the dead if you've met the conditions for the Well of Souls." Now consider the implications -- that's the key, said Salvatore. "Why is that important is because we tell all of the content guys to think about it. To keep in mind, at all times, what does that do to a world? What would happen to our world tomorrow if they came up with an immortality pill? What does it do to the king? What does it do to the religions of the world? What are the implications of this mechanic in the world? How does it play out? What quest lines can we put out to make this make sense?"
 "There's a reason for it and more than that, there are implications to it," said Salvatore. "Think about the power of the people who turned the well of souls in these various cities on, especially if they could turn them off. What would it do to the soviet union and the US in the 1970s if a third party had that power over them and said 'stop fighting'?"]]> tag:worldsinmotion.biz,2010://4.21175 2010-03-11T23:00:36Z 2010-03-12T04:05:12Z

In a lecture Thursday at GDC, Blizzard EVP of game design Rob Pardo shared Blizzard's core design concepts, offering examples of places where the World of Warcraft developer succeeded and failed in creating compelling multiplayer experiences. Pardo offered a plethora...

Eric Caoili In a lecture Thursday at GDC, Blizzard EVP of game design Rob Pardo shared Blizzard's core design concepts, offering examples of places where the World of Warcraft developer succeeded and failed in creating compelling multiplayer experiences. Pardo offered a plethora advice to the designers present, stressing that these lessons may not necessarily gel with other studios and suggesting that everybody go through this same exercise to set down their individual design team's rules. Below are a few of Blizzard's rules that we found particularly helpful. Some may seem obvious, but often it is the obvious advice that we tend to forget about first. Gameplay First Blizzard's core design philosophy is to design around the core fun gameplay concepts, rather than working around other aspects such as tech. By way of example, significant changes had to be made in the world's lore between Warcraft III and World of Warcraft in order to make a more fun and balanced game, despite pushback from some who felt the lore was sacred.]]> Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master More specifically, Pardo says the objective he pushes at Blizzard is more akin to "Easy to learn and almost impossible to master." Because almost all Blizzard games are primarily multiplayer, the company must focus a significant amount of depth to the multiplayer. "When we shipped WoW, people say we dumbed everything down," said Pardo. "Actually, WoW is a really hardcore game, it just happens to be more accessible than a lot of other games." Pardo says that the Blizzard design pipeline is to design the games depth first, because it's the hardest part of design. He suggested that rather than worrying about the multiplayer component of a game last, Blizzard tweaks that component first and feeds what they learn into the single-player campaign. Make Everything Overpowered "We want to take everything to 11," said Pardo. "Every unit and class has to feel like this unit and class can not be stopped. That's the feeling we want to give." The ultimate goal of balancing classes, said Pardo, is to make players feel like every new class they play with is better than the last one. This applies not only to gameplay, but to characters and lore as well. "All of our main characters are fifty feet tall," said Pardo. "And if it happened in the past, it happened ten thousand years ago." Play Don't Tell This is of course a gameplay-tweaked version of the "show don't tell" writer's mantra. Blizzard makes a point to make sure story is told through gameplay, rather than just being told through text. "Use things like text and voiceovers to enhance the story, but not tell it," said Pardo. Make It A Bonus As designers, say Pardo, there is a natural tendency to worry about punishing the player rather than rewarding them, but a clever designer can play with a player's psychology and turn it into a bonus. Pardo related an example of World of Warcraft's rest system: when the game launched, players were punished for playing too long by having their experience gain percentage drop from 100 to 50 percent after a couple hours of play. "Beta players universally hated this idea and were screaming bloody murder," said Pardo. The fix? Turning this into a bonus scenario instead. Players now start at 200 percent experience and drop down to 100 percent. It's the exact same mechanic, but now it's a bonus instead of a punishment.]]> tag:worldsinmotion.biz,2010://4.21174 2010-03-11T21:00:54Z 2010-03-12T04:04:25Z

Independent consultant and lawyer Alexander "The Mittani" Gianturco gave an impassioned talk Thursday at GDC, urging developers to examine the inherent "espionage" metagame of EVE Online and take inspiration from it for other products. "In my opinion, espionage is the...

Eric Caoili Independent consultant and lawyer Alexander "The Mittani" Gianturco gave an impassioned talk Thursday at GDC, urging developers to examine the inherent "espionage" metagame of EVE Online and take inspiration from it for other products. "In my opinion, espionage is the ultimate in user-generated content," said Gianturco. "You don't constantly have to crap out new raids, players will amuse themselves by trying to tear each others' throats out." The metagame Gianturco referred to is practically unique to EVE Online: high-level players may manipulate others through means outside of the game client itself in order to attain their goals, be it that player's in-game currency, the advancement of his affiliated group, or something else entirely. While this is not an official feature of the game, it is supported by developer CCP's hands-off approach, meaning players have practically created it from scratch. "Players in an espionage metagame get to use cunning and manipulation as a skill, which is rare in games," he continued. "For those of us who like that sort of thing, it's a huge draw." Gianturco defines an espionage metagame as having three key components: player-created factions, significant consequences, and a developer-supported environment. "Espinage cannot exist in an arena where nothing is risked," said Gianturco, explaining that a loss in World of Warcraft might result in an annoying temporary setback, but a screwup in EVE can literally cost a player $4,000 in assets. There are of course significant risks in giving your players as much freedom as CCP does with EVE. According to Gianturco, game makers who might allow and foster an espionate metagame must be prepared to field significant user complaints. "You have to deal with people whining and complaining," he said. "If you can't deal with that, you can't have an espionage metagame worth playing."]]> tag:worldsinmotion.biz,2010://4.21171 2010-03-11T19:00:56Z 2010-03-11T22:30:49Z

Social advertising and analytics company Sometrics launched its first direct-to-consumer product, GameCoins.com, a community where gamers can meet friends, participate in forums, and discuss news about their favorites games and virtual worlds. The site is also an online marketplace for...

Eric Caoili Social advertising and analytics company Sometrics launched its first direct-to-consumer product, GameCoins.com, a community where gamers can meet friends, participate in forums, and discuss news about their favorites games and virtual worlds. The site is also an online marketplace for virtual goods and currency. Members can use the Sometrics Offer Solution to participate in advertising offers and earn in-game cash and digital goods for their favorite MMOs, virtual worlds, and social games. Sometrics say that publishers can expand their reach to more gamers through the increased exposure GameCoins.com offers. Sometrics initial publisher/developer partners on the community site include GamersFirst, IMVU, and Playdom. GamersFirst, which created free-to-play first-person shooter War Rock, says the site helps it market its title to new gamers while providing added value to its existing players. "This is the first time we’re going to consumers directly with our virtual currency products,” says Sometrics co-founder and CEO Ian Swanson. "Until now, our solutions for earning that game’s virtual currency have lived within the individual games themselves." Swanson continues, "But with Game Coins we can broaden the reach for all the publishers and games that partner with us. It serves as a hub for consumers, to enable them to share their enthusiasm for a game with others and, while there, discover new games for themselves."]]> tag:worldsinmotion.biz,2010://4.21164 2010-03-11T15:00:46Z 2010-03-11T18:06:39Z

As part of its recent efforts to compete against rival social networks Facebook and MySpace in the thriving social games space, hi5 has announced a new Game Developer Program designed to encourage developers to release games to its platform by...

Eric Caoili As part of its recent efforts to compete against rival social networks Facebook and MySpace in the thriving social games space, hi5 has announced a new Game Developer Program designed to encourage developers to release games to its platform by offering various promotion, distribution, and monetization benefits. The Game Developer Program will provide developers who release their games exclusively on hi5 with a free marketing and promotion package comprised of free banner ads, placement on the hi5 Games page, inclusion on the hi5 Games tool bar, user recommendations, and more. hi5 says it will allow partners to receive a share of advertising revenue generated from their games, too. Select developers will receive access to the hi5 coins payment interface, the site's virtual currency system for in-game microtransactions, which offers more than 60 payment systems through 30 currencies. The site notes that its system allows studios to avoid the technical and business development work required for integrating other payment systems into their titles. Developers working on the platform will have access to game-specific AIs for incorporating user profiles, user achievements, and high scores into their titles. They can also use the social network's newly announced Facebook-compatible APIs, which enable developers to take their games initially created for Facebook and run them on hi5 with "little to no revisions". "To date, social games have been distributed on open platforms competing against thousands of other titles with nothing but their own spamminess to get them discovered," says hi5's recently appointed CTO and president Alex St. John, formerly CEO and founder of casual gaming studio WildTangent. He adds, "As the market has saturated, getting noticed has become more and more difficult and expensive, particularly for smaller developers. hi5’s new Game Developer Program solves this problem by providing great games with free promotion, rapid audience acquisition and favorable revenue share for new content on hi5.com."]]> tag:worldsinmotion.biz,2010://4.21157 2010-03-10T21:00:39Z 2010-03-11T04:57:46Z

Prepaid card company InComm has acquired virtual currency provider Zeevex, a move the two firms believe will help them grow sales of prepaid digital content and speed consumer adoption of open virtual currency. Zeevex offers a platform that supports both...

Eric Caoili Prepaid card company InComm has acquired virtual currency provider Zeevex, a move the two firms believe will help them grow sales of prepaid digital content and speed consumer adoption of open virtual currency. Zeevex offers a platform that supports both token-based and point-based virtual currency models. It provides an open virtual currency through its Zeevex Extreme Game Card, which is sold in more than 31,000 retail locations like GameStop, Blockbuster, and 7-Eleven across the country. Founded in 2008, the company has offices in Atlanta, Georgia and Palo Alto, California. InComm says its purchase of the virtual currency startup as "an integral component" of its digital content strategy that will support its "commitment to innovation in the prepaid environment. "Our move into the virtual currency and microtransaction space strengthens our position as a pioneer in digital content at retail and helps InComm drive value to our digital partners allowing them to monetize their content immediately, at a lower cost than many other options, while establishing an unprecedented connection to retail consumers," said InComm's Consumer Products and International SVP Brian Parlotto. "This represents a great opportunity for our existing digital content partners and the consumers who have come to rely on Zeevex tokens to enhance their online experience," adds Zeevex CEO Ron Williams. "Aligning our virtual currency platform and innovative Digital Locker with InComm's proven expertise in marketing and selling prepaid digital content products at retail will speed the adoption of an open virtual currency."]]> tag:worldsinmotion.biz,2010://4.21153 2010-03-10T19:00:47Z 2010-03-10T23:51:30Z

Level 3 Communications announced an agreement with online game developer and publisher Funcom to expand their current relationship and offer content delivery network services to more titles from Funcom's catalog. Funcom has worked with Level 3 since April 2008 to...

Eric Caoili Level 3 Communications announced an agreement with online game developer and publisher Funcom to expand their current relationship and offer content delivery network services to more titles from Funcom's catalog. Funcom has worked with Level 3 since April 2008 to take advantage of the latter's Origin Storage, Caching, and Download services for game patch updates, as well as large file game downloads for MMORPPG Age of Conan. It has has since expanded its relationship with the firm to include CDN services in all its titles and games currently in development. Level 3's scalable network is designed to accommodate large file downloads of media content for online audiences without disrupting the user experience. The CDN company says that the speed, quality and reliability is promises with its services are necessary for providing "the real-time user experience demanded by online gamers today." "Over the past two years, we’ve been thoroughly impressed by the Level 3 network’s ability to handle simultaneous traffic to our global audience of gamers, which for the Age of Conan has translated to more than 200 million collective hours of play time by its players,” says Funcom COO Ole Schreiner. "As a result of that experience, Level 3 was a natural choice for Origin Storage, Caching and Download services for all of our games."]]> tag:worldsinmotion.biz,2010://4.21150 2010-03-10T17:00:04Z 2010-03-10T20:57:18Z

"Free" has often been a dirty word to the game industry, says Playfish co-founder Kristian Segerstrale -- but it shouldn't be. "Far from being a threat to our industry, 'free' and the lowering of barriers is actually the biggest growth...

Eric Caoili "Free" has often been a dirty word to the game industry, says Playfish co-founder Kristian Segerstrale -- but it shouldn't be. "Far from being a threat to our industry, 'free' and the lowering of barriers is actually the biggest growth opportunity in our industry in the next five years," Segerstrale argued in a Social and Online Game Summit talk at the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. "It allows us not only to bring in new customers, but to interface with those customers in ways we couldn't previously," he said. Piracy has long been a major area of concern for traditional video game publishers, and now there are increasingly frequent claims that free online and social games are crowding traditional console-based experience out. But "we continue to have console blockbusters," Segerstrale observed. "We haven't killed anything. I think all those newspaper headlines about social gaming killing this or that isn't true. We've been hugely additive to the industry." And one of social gaming's additions is the growing pool of knowledge about lowering barriers to entry.]]> Even within the console world, he said, the less expensive and more accessible the console, the higher the userbase. He showed a graph of install bases of the PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii correlated with price, demonstrating that the three systems' audience sizes are in rough proportion with their cost to consumers (and, he implied, their accessibility). iPhone and mobile games, in turn, reach even bigger userbases, he said, based on the affordability of their gaming experiences, and social games outpace even both, largely on the back of free-to-play games. The internet itself has grown from 16 million users to 1.8 billion users in the last 15 years, thanks to lower barriers of entry. And half of Facebook's base, or 200 million of the site's 400 million unique users, now use the site to play games. "We're moving from being a product-driven industry to being a service-driven industry, with the significant change in economics that comes along with that." The internet is driving major evolutions in how games are made and distributed: they're changing from physical to digital, from products to services, from standalone experiences to social experiences, and from upfront payments to ongoing payments. This is a "fundamental change to business model," said Segerstrale. "We're increasing our ability to be flexible. ...And with that, we lower the barrier of entry for players." Social games can be about things like cooperation and competition -- "Those are fare more compelling reasons to play than the journey through some solitary quest a game designer has written, even if it's written very well," Segerstrale said. "That core ability has created an entirely new discipline of game design, which takes game design out of the experience inside the game itself," he continued. Rather, designers now must ask themselves, "How do we create an experience where people will want to talk outside of the game about what's going on in the game, and bring other people into the game?" "We're able to bring games to where people hang out, and not ask them to identify as gamers." "It's a huge difference to a barrier of adoption, as witnessed by 200 million uniques right now. This sense of reaching 'friends,' not 'gamers,' is critical." There leads to a sense of "social adoption" in games, he said. After all, rather than finding games through specialist game stores or dedicated game portals, "you find games through friends." And that experience can bleed out to other platforms. According to Segerstrale, there is no reason franchises shouldn't persist across as many devices as possible, including consoles, social networks, and phones. "What we really have here is a continuum of consumers with different preferences. We have consumers perfectly willing to play tens of thousands of dollars to be part of a game experience every year, because they love it so much," he said. "At the other end, you have people who might be willing to part with ten cents if it's really valuable to them." "These guys are all persistently connected across every device they use; they are all on at least one social network; and they have a pyramid of preferences," he went on. "It's not that they play a social game or a mobile game or a console game; it's that we have people who are more or less interested or willing to invest their time and money into games." "When we think how we can address that whole spectrum, it's going to be increasingly important to offer experiences that are multiplatform," Segerstrale said. "Players should be able to experience expressions of that content on as many devices as possible, "in order to maximize the value of the franchise you're creating." After all, seven of the top eight games on the App Store last year were based on existing brands. "All other things equal," he said, "franchises matter." Platform expertise is important, but as a platform ages and the knowledge of developing for that platform spreads out, franchise awareness becomes increasingly important. All of this is leading to a world where game experiences become more transparent, shared, and connected, and individual platform distinctions become less important. "In the next three to five years, nobody will utter the words 'social games,' because social features are being plugged into every game on every console," Segerstrale predicted. "Saying, 'I'm developing a social game' is going to be like saying, 'I have an electric television at home.'" tag:worldsinmotion.biz,2010://4.21149 2010-03-10T15:00:07Z 2010-03-10T20:50:51Z

MySpace revamped the Games section of its site to make it easier for users to discover and share games, and also revealed new application and analytics tools for developers on the MySpace platform. The new MySpace Games Gallery is designed...

Eric Caoili MySpace revamped the Games section of its site to make it easier for users to discover and share games, and also revealed new application and analytics tools for developers on the MySpace platform. The new MySpace Games Gallery is designed to make it easier for users to stay up-to-date with games through notifications, as well as discover new games through personalized game recommendations, popular game charts, and their friends's streams. They can also now rate games, which will affect search results and recommendations. The social network's new analytics tools enable MySpace platform developers to review application-specific analytics through a new API (e.g. invitation conversions, active users, notification responses, and demographics), and track the source of application invitations and utilization to see how users are finding and choosing games. Developers can now build 3D titles with Unity's 3D engine, which MySpace users can play with a new plug-in. Studios can also tap into Scoreloop, which allows games on different platforms to share leaderboards, achievements, challenges, and buddy lists; and GroovyCortex, a cloud-based solution deigned to provide "low latency push data for multiplayer games". MySpace is hosting a "Game Development on Social Platforms" session today at GDC, where it's discussing "understanding how to build games for social platforms, the business aspects of developing social games, and how developers and designers can tap MySpace's massive and highly engaged audience." The company will announce its MySpace Developer Challenge winners there, too, including: - Best New MySpace App: Paradise Paintball - Most innovative use of the Real-Time Stream API: GeoMeme - Most innovative use of the Open Search API: Social Mention - Most innovative use of the Photos API: Browser Not Included - Most innovative MySpace Integration on Mobile: iSkoot The social network also announced MySpace Neon, an upcoming iPhone app that gives users access to their MySpace games on their handset. Gamers can interact with games on their iPhones, share real-time notifications with friends, and view the Stream with game-related notifications. Furthermore, MySpace Neon gives users access to all games available on MySpace and allows them to remotely install games.]]> tag:worldsinmotion.biz,2010://4.21146 2010-03-10T13:00:24Z 2010-03-10T18:31:58Z

Sony Computer Entertainment America is rolling out a new update to PlayStation Home tomorrow. The company says Home version 1.35 will bring faster load times and a new navigation interface to its console virtual world. The new interface features several...

Eric Caoili Sony Computer Entertainment America is rolling out a new update to PlayStation Home tomorrow. The company says Home version 1.35 will bring faster load times and a new navigation interface to its console virtual world. The new interface features several categories designed to make it easier for users to find their friends and favorite spaces in the Home environment, and to navigate quickly via a category system of favorites. SCEA also aims to make the login process faster and easier through the update. Users can access the new navigator directly from the PS3's XrossMediaBar. According to the company, Home's now up to 12 million registered users worldwide, who average about 60 minutes per session in the world. Players interact with one another via avatars, and in addition to socializing among themselves, they can play games, get virtual items and engage with spaces themed around major console titles. "With new users, games, entertaining new spaces and virtual items added weekly, PlayStation Home continues to dramatically evolve to offer new challenges and experiences with every visit," says PlayStation Home director Jack Buser.]]> tag:worldsinmotion.biz,2010://4.21140 2010-03-10T03:00:31Z 2010-03-10T04:21:05Z

As part of a technical talk at GDC’s Social Games Summit, Amitt Mahajan, lead developer of Farmville, revealed a number of interesting statistics about the game, including current stats of 32 million players per day. Farmville, a Harvest Moon-like farming...

Eric Caoili As part of a technical talk at GDC’s Social Games Summit, Amitt Mahajan, lead developer of Farmville, revealed a number of interesting statistics about the game, including current stats of 32 million players per day. Farmville, a Harvest Moon-like farming social game, is one of Facebook’s biggest success stories, earning the small team huge accolades before being purchased by Zynga. The game took only 5 weeks from conception to launch, developing the back end, using off-the-shelf components when possible, but more than that using best practices from both the web and game development worlds to keep the game extremely portable. Multiple times during development, or even after, Facebook’s API or rules changed, and with a strong web development sensibility at the beginning, nothing slowed the team down significantly. This also helped them avoid user fatigue due to lag or errors. The core team was six web developers, two artists and three designers. After launch, they wound up getting 18,000 users in the first 24 hours. At the end of four days, they had 1 million users per day, all without having ever promoted it. Now, the game has more than 110 million installs, and they recently breached the 32 million daily user mark, though the “official” number is still 31 million, and as Mahajan says, that number is still growing.]]> tag:worldsinmotion.biz,2010://4.21139 2010-03-10T01:00:19Z 2010-03-10T04:20:15Z

Panelists billed as the world's foremost experts on funding, buying and selling game companies have a view of gaming's future that's likely to be controversial to those working in traditional development. In a panel at GDC 2010, Northwest Ventures' Tim...

Eric Caoili Panelists billed as the world's foremost experts on funding, buying and selling game companies have a view of gaming's future that's likely to be controversial to those working in traditional development. In a panel at GDC 2010, Northwest Ventures' Tim Chang, Trinity Ventures' Gus Tai, Pacific Crest analyst Evan Wilson and Making Fun and Minor Studios CEO John Welch discussed what companies and products will get funded today -- and according to them, it's not triple-A. Gaming is still a highly active arena for venture capitalists, says Chang -- and yet every news broadcast on the industry shows the console games business contracting, presenting a paradox of an industry that's "screwed yet growing," he says. Chang, whose firm has backed Ngmoco and Playdom, says the shift in the games business is a mirror of what has happened in the music industry as much of it goes digital. Now, time and attention is shifting to the online space and the social players that are growing the existing game audience. Developers' attention is best served thinking about "how to use all of your expertise to create this engaging, interesting flow that could lead to a proposition where you can make money," suggested Tai of Trinity Ventures, which has invested in Trion and Playfirst. "The industry is in huge disarray," agrees Pacific Crest's Wilson, who believes console game developers are "in denial." The evolving blend between gaming and media is "scary," he admits. "It was easier ten years ago... when you'd just ship a great product and the users pay you up front," Wilson says. "Those days are over."]]> Guitar Hero phenomena, both of which, strictly by the dollars, are beginning to decline this year. But the industry is still paying too much attention to the bottom line, they agreed. Thanks to current-generation consoles, it's now three times more expensive to develop a video game than it was in 2005. But even the most optimistic industry growth forecasts don't call for three times more revenue, even in the next decade, thanks to changing distribution models. So where are the opportunities for new companies? According to the panelists, look to premium social gaming. Thanks to tech like Unity's development platform, which lets developers create lightweight and browser-based 3D games, users will be playing online and social games for longer and be more engaged with them. New ways of looking at design mechanics are also necessary, say the panelists. Examples like Foursquare, a social app with game-like qualities, are part of the investors' future forecast. The era where profitability on a packaged goods item was the main goal is over, they say. Today's environment has number of users and playtime as the ultimate metric -- and given that many of them will never spend money to play with the product, user acquisition must be the ultimate and primary goal for game developers. And with huge social gaming companies like Zynga, Playdom and Playfish already in the pole position, virality's the word for any new company that hopes to compete. "If you're not working for a Zynga, you have to think of how to get users to be viral," says Wilson. One thing the panelists say they've yet to see accomplished is a major game that's inherently viral by the nature of its mechanics -- not a game that spams friends or is Facebook oriented, but makes users require their friends' involvement in order to play, and requires or results in the accumulation of a community. That way, userbases rise simply as a consequence of the game mechanics. "Focus on one thing," advises Wilson: "The cost of customer acquisition, and how do you build that into the design of the game?" ]]>