Check out ARhrrrr, an augmented reality mobile phone game prototype that takes a real-world map and uses a mobile phone’s camera to bring it to life — pardon the pun — with zombies.

Sony has revealed that it is increasing the retailers’ margin on the PSP Go (relative to the old PSP.) This is an unsurprising response to the Go’s digital-only game distribution model. Eventually, all consoles will transition to a state in which the majority (if not all) content is distributed digitally, at which time their manufacturers will also need to give retailers a more generous cut of hardware revenue.

Gamasutra has posted its regular monthly estimate of XBLA sales for May 2009. I’ll have to write a longer post about the fate of episodic content on XBLA, PSN and Wiiware, but here’s a sneak peak: I’m very skeptical in the absence of system improvements that enable consumers to purchase a “season” at a substantial discount to the aggregate episode cost. And even then, I think that episodic content on the console will really struggle until one of the console makers and/or a big publisher (preferably both) decides to promote an episodic franchise in a really big way. By, for example, meaningfully integrating it with a TV show currently on the air. That’s probably not something that will happen anytime soon, given the current economics of the XBLA, PSN and Wiiware.

Warning: very long but good article describing the development and distribution of a mobile app for Blackberry. A nice break from articles about the iPhone…

Ravi has posted a nice article about virtual gifting, what drives it, and why it’s good business. Interesting quote: “HOT or NOT pioneered virtual gifting in the dating industry by letting users send virtual roses ranging from $2 to $10 to prospective dates. In an outcome that turns traditional economic theory on its ear, the $10 virtual roses have been the most popular because they send the clearest signal to the recipient…”

There’s more to life than games:

Well written article about some of the most common problems with business plans.

A summary of Cialdini’s Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive.

For those of you following the events in Iran as avidly as I am, here’s a twitter feed (generated by one of the protestors, and written primarily in English) that is widely followed and is a remarkable, gripping, and anxiety-inducing view into what is happening in Iran right now.

The Wii is a funny thing. When it comes up in conversation, half the time I find myself arguing with people who claim it’s just a fad. The other half the time, I’m arguing with people who seem to think that Nintendo is beyond reproach or that anyone who criticizes the Wii simply can’t see past their own hardcore biases.

I think the fundamental issue at play is far more subtle than “the Wii is a fad” vs. “hardcore gamers don’t get it.” You can’t rationally argue against Nintendo’s success at this point… too many units of the Wii and games like Wii Fit have been sold to call this a fad. And you can’t deny that the Wii was a strategically brilliant move on Nintendo’s part. At the same time, it’s troubling to see how many people — casual OR hardcore — are allowing their Wii to collect dust. Why is that the case?

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A couple weeks ago Facebook launched “Pay with Facebook” — functionality that enables users to make purchases within 3rd party applications using credit cards or, of course, Facebook credits. Yet another move that makes Facebook’s 200m+ users that much more appealing to game designers.

NPD estimates that 18% of LIVE Gold members download content regularly. 10% of PS3/PSN users regularly download content. These stats are interesting, but largely incomplete as they leave out LIVE Silver users (though it’s clear they download less content than Gold users) and refer to downloads in total as opposed to free and paid downloads; I’d also like to have seen a definition of “regularly.” So, the only real takeaway here is that digital content consumption on the console is taking longer to really take off than many critics of retailers would like. (Bear in mind that many console buyers never connect their consoles, so those 18% and 10% figures are even worse than they sound.) NPD also reported that 56% of digital game sales came from just three channels between July and December 2008: Steam, Bigfishgames and RealArcade.

Xbox LIVE Marketplace is finally instituting a user rating system sometime this summer! Assuming it’s well implemented, this should have a meaningful impact on Marketplace, especially Community Games (or whatever they’re calling it now; “Indie Games” I believe.) Of course, if required free trials weren’t already enough to throw publishers off their game, required trials combined with user ratings will really throw them for a loop. You can’t just sell a pretty box with a recognizable name anymore.

A very useful reminder for PS3 skeptics like me: Sony has been named the top consumer technology brand by teenagers worldwide, ahead of Apple and Nintendo (!) according to the Global Habbo Youth Survey, which polled 112k teens from over 30 countries. PlayStation was also named the number one console brand, even after all of Sony’s recent missteps. Now if only Sony could get around to selling the PS3 at a price teenagers can afford…

The Sims 3 exceeded 1.4m units sold in its first week on shelves. Advertisers take note: this is the start (not the end) of a great opportunity for downloadable and expansion-based product placements. See just one example from The Sims 2 era.

Scott Foe’s clever Reset Generation is now freely available on Kongregate, where it serves as an advertisement for Nokia. Check it out if you’ve never had the chance to before.

There’s more to life than games:

A robotics research group has created a prototype that was able to open and pass through 10 doors and plug itself into 10 standard wall sockets in less than an hour. Turns out this is a relatively significant milestone. My favorite quote from the article: “Now they can escape and fend for themselves.”

Maybe I’m turning into an old fart, but E3 really didn’t do it for me this year. The show remains utterly console-centric, despite the many exciting recent developments in non-console game ecosystems. The games on the floor, with a few notable exceptions, felt like more of the same (”look, another racing game with realistic graphics!”) At least the new Splinter Cell and DJ Hero both managed to intrigue me. And for those of you who haven’t seen it, check out the Natal teaser video. I thought it was impressive (and I’m particularly excited about the prospect of never having to sign into LIVE again thanks to facial recognition, as well as not needing to touch a controller to fire up Netflix on my 360.)

Regarding the PS3’s motion controller vs the 360’s Natal vs Wii Motion Plus…

I believe that the PS3’s controller is irrelevant because it fails to meaningfully innovate above and beyond Wii Motion Plus. By the time it hits the market, millions of existing Wii owners will have already purchased Wii Sports Resort and/or Tiger Woods PGA Tour. Millions more consumers will have purchased new Wiis with Motion Plus in the box. No one will purchase an already-too-expensive PS3 because its (extra) motion controller is supposedly a bit more accurate than Motion Plus. And if Sony doesn’t announce a big price cut on the PS3 by this holiday, all of this is irrelevant, because the PS3 will be D-E-A-D. (Note: I also still believe that it will take more than a $100 cut to really turn things around for the PS3, but who knows when Sony will be able to manage anything more than $100.)

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Just cranking out one last AoI before the impending avalanche of E3 news necessitates the next one…

Researchers have studied the relationship between in-game violence and player enjoyment. (Example: in one experiment, they exposed people to two versions of Half-Life 2, one with little violent imagery and one with much more.) Results: the amount of violence in a game did not predict how much players enjoyed it, nor did it influence purchase intent for sequels of the game.

For those of you who will be assuming new management roles soon, check out this surprisingly thorough and helpful article about the ways new managers can avoid making a bad impression on subordinates (an issues which, the article notes, can prove utterly crippling to new managers in the long term.)

EA is developing Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online, a free, streaming, browser-based 3D golf sim. No comment yet on revenue sources. Between this and Battlefield Heroes, EA appears to be making a real commitment to exploring f2p gaming, unlike some other major publishers.

Profs. Gee and Jenkins note that educational games that harness and promote player communities might stand a better chance of success. Might seem obvious to some of you, and yet there are very few educational games that actually do this in a meaningful way.

Sony has announced the “PSP Go”, which will sport a 3.8-inch screen, will be 43% lighter than its predecessor, will have 16 gigs of memory and will by all digital (no UMD.) Barring the larger screen, this sounds almost like my iPhone… minus the phone functionality and minus my desire to carry it with me everywhere I go, like I do my iPhone. *grin* (In all fairness, I’ll withhold judgement till I hear the price of the Go…)

2m+ users have registered for SOE’s f2p, family-friendly MMOG Free Realms within the first month. 75% of registrants are under the age of 17; 46% under 13. Notably, nearly a third of players are female.

Google has released an API for Google Talk that permits for asynchronous multiplayer games.

Nintendo is doing some interesting community stuff with Personal Trainer: Walking. For example, every player’s steps is added to a community total, and that total dictates how deeply into the galaxy the community will “walk.” I like it. It would be neater still if the community could interact within the context of the space walk.

There’s more to life than games:

The first black woman to ever be ordained as a rabbi; she’ll also be the first black rabbi to lead a majority white congregation. How lovely. :-)

Youtube: The Vendor Client relationship… in real world situations. This is brilliant.

Check out this presentation of Google Wave, which according to fans will replace email, instant messaging, wikis, forums, and SMS. It looks very cool to me, but I can never guess whether these things will overcome inertia

A couple of months ago, Eve and I played The Maw together, and I’ve been mulling a related post ever since. The Maw, for those of you who haven’t played it, is one of the more approachable titles on XBLA. It has relatively simple controls — for a modern 3D platformer, anyway — and a cute style and theme. I’m quite fond of it. Anyway, watching Eve grapple with The Maw was enlightening, to say the least.

A bit of background for newer readers: Eve is a perfectly capable smarty-pants, but she didn’t grow up with video games and is often frustrated by the few console titles that I have introduced her to. I knew that she would have trouble with camera management in a 3D space; that’s a skill that simply needs to be learned over time. And I knew that she’d have difficulty remembering which Xbox controller buttons mapped to which in-game behaviors, even though The Maw has relatively few mappings; that’s partially an experience issue as well, and partially a consequence of the Xbox 360 controller’s near-magical ability to terrify and stupify casual gamers.

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I’m finally done with all the formalities of setting up my new consulting business. I’d love to tell you that I picked the name “Fuzbi” for some profound and/or touching reason, but no. I picked Fuzbi because it was a five-letter, pronounceable, available .com that (to my knowledge) does not mean anything in any common language. I’ve always liked the idea of picking a name that you can invest with your own meaning, like “Google.” And Fuzbi sounds fun to me, which is good enough for my purposes.

I owe a big hug to Danc for creating the Fuzbi logo. I wasted a good five or six hours making an absolute idiot of myself with Photoshop before Danc rescued me from myself. :-)

So there you go — I’m official. And I’m already working on a few interesting projects for clients both inside and outside the US, so I’m feeling sassy to boot! If you might be interested in learning more about my consulting services, or if you’d just like to hang out and help me celebrate my new business, I’ll be at E3 on the 2nd and 3rd of June. Just drop me a line!

Being social has always come natural to me. I enjoy meeting random people and hearing their stories — be they potential business partners, friends of friends, or my taxi driver of the moment for that matter. My parents like to tease me for striking up long conversations with the waiters at restaurants, which has, on more than one occasion, resulted in the swapping of contact information. :-)

One of the more pleasant consequences of my extroversion is a fairly robust professional network — this was true even before I joined Microsoft, and is certainly more true today. Some people have noticed this and asked me what my “secret” is. I’m always tempted to say something snarky, but rather than be unkind let me attempt to take the question seriously for a moment. I’ve never really had a “method”, but after thinking about it for a little while I came up with the following self observations that might be useful to the network-challenged among you:

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iPhone apps and games have earned Apple just $20 to $45 million, according to rough estimates by Jeremy Liew. (Of course, Apple doesn’t care because the app store is more of a marketing tool for the iPhone than anything else, as far as it’s concerned.) The remaining 70% — $50m to $115m — hardly justifies any real interest in attempting to generate revenue by selling games; giving them away for free and monetizing with microtransactions, on the other hand, is interesting. And of course, I’d expect to see a boatload of (additional) advergames in the near future — perhaps some will even be good!

The iPhone lost its spot as top-selling phone to the BlackBerry Curve in the first quarter of 2009. The Curve succeeded thanks, in part, to Verizon’s “Buy one, get one free” deal and from availability via four major carriers as opposed to just AT&T.

Interesting article about level pacing in single player, hardcore action games.

EA’s digital game distribution revenue has almost doubled year-over-year to $80m, and digital revenue as a whole grew to $400m. EA trumpeted those numbers as heralds to a new age of PC-based gaming.

Nintendo has revealed the global lifetime sales figures for first party Wii and DS titles. For the Wii: Wii Play - 23m, Wii Fit - 18.2m, Mario Kart Wii - 15.4m, Smash Bros. Brawl - 8.43m, Super Mario Galaxy - 8m, Mario Party 8 - 6.7 million. For the DS: Nintendogs - 22.27m, New Super Mario Bros. - 18.45m, Brain Training - 17.4m, Pokemon Diamond/Pearl - 16.8m, Mario Kart DS - 14.6m, Brain Training 2 - 13.7m, Animal Crossing: Wild World - 10.8m, Super Mario 64 DS - 7.5 million

This interview with SOE about the marketing of Free Realms was interesting to me in part because it discusses the use of twitter and pseudo-”exclusive” access to the Free Realms beta as a mechanism for driving consumer excitement. This is one of the several potential uses of scarcity that I referred to in my MBA lessons, Applied lecture at GDC and the IGDA Leadership Forum.

Walmart has leased store space to E-play, which released 77 “Video Game Buyback” automated kiosks at select Walmart locations as part of a limited pilot program. Customers scan a game’s jewel case at the machines, at which point a buy back price point appears on the unit’s screen. If the customer accepts the buy back price, the machine confirms the authenticity of the game disc and issues a credit to the customer’s credit card.

There’s more to life than games:

Another great Gladwell article, “How David Beats Goliath.” Summary: relentlessness and/or unconventional tactics that exploit obvious weaknesses.

Speculation continues as to the timing of an inevitable drop in the price of the PS3. Most people seem to think a $100 drop is coming by end of summer. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say “who cares?” and “it really doesn’t matter.”

The PS3 is currently $400. A $100 price cut will put it at $300. Analysts appear to be fond of saying that $300 and below counts as “mass market pricing” for a video game console — as if timing, the current economic conditions, and the competitive landscape have nothing whatsoever to do with consumer demand.

If it were the middle of 2007, a $300 PS3 might be something to get excited about. But unfortunately for Sony, it’s the middle of 2009. If you’re a true hardcore gamer, by now you’ve most likely purchased the Xbox 360 or PS3 already. A select few consumers might be waiting for price drops to add a second hardcore machine to their collection, but the software libraries for the PS3 and 360 are so similar that most people won’t ever bother. Long story short: the war for the hardcore gamer is effectively over in this console generation.

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