My GDC lecture has been scheduled for Wednesday, 2/20, at 9am in West Hall, room 2002. I hope to see some of you there. :-)

Advertising & Games – Opportunities, Pitfalls, and Competition: This lecture will explore some of the latest research in advertising (in general) and advertising in games (in specific), give tips on making advertising more effective, and share ideas around new ways to advertise with games. This lecture will not be another exercise in affirmation. Attendees will learn what is actually worth an advertiser’s dollar and what is not. Relatedly, attendees will gain some insight into the coming wave of advertising-supported games and “promogames” — i.e. the Xbox Burger King Games — that will change the competitive landscape of the entire game industry will also learn about new game/advertising models, as opportunities and competition.

Hi all — just a quick note to announce that XBLA (and our larger division, “Digitally Distributed Games”) is looking for seasoned producers to help manage our 1st party and indie-published game development projects. You can find the full job description and apply via Microsoft.com. A brief summary of the JD is copied below. PS. While enthusiasm is appreciated and encouraged, please do not submit resumes directly to me. That’s what the website is for! (Seriously. Don’t send me your resume.)

The Xbox Live Digitally Distributed Games (DDG) team is a newly formed organization focused on digital distribution of games via Xbox Live Marketplace. As part of the DDG Publishing PM team, your responsibilities will include driving the complete product cycle of multiple games from initial concept to release. The ability to ship games on a predictable and reliable schedule is paramount.

Qualifications/Skills:

• Passion for and knowledge of games.
• Strong cross-team communication skills. You can talk to creatives (e.g. artists and game designers), technical people (e.g. programmers), and non-technical people (e.g. PR and Marketing) alike.
• Exceptional organization skills. You are detailed and organized. You never let anything fall through the cracks.
• You have experience shipping games through two product cycles, preferably on Xbox 360.

Via Henry, a study comparing the online behavior of US and Chinese teens. Some of the results: almost five times as many Chinese as American respondents said they have a parallel life online (61% vs. 13%). More than half the Chinese sample (51%) said they have adopted a completely different persona in some of their online interactions, compared with only 17 percent of Americans. Lots more interesting stuff in there.

Interesting article advocating for greater use of social media within corporations. Crux of the argument: the top talent of the future will be repelled by potential employers that don’t make significant use of the same media technologies that potential employees use in their daily lives. Quote: “You’re at home…you’re Twittering, posting to your family’s blog and using Google Apps to set up your family’s annual vacation. You go into the office and you’re liberated by…email?” Yet again, this makes me think about the use of video games as employee attractors. (Why should advergames be targeted at consumers alone?)

Steve Meretzky is priceless. Who else could depress you for six minutes and fifty seconds, then make it all worthwhile in less than ten remaining? This video is worth watching. (And Steve, you’re so right.)

Here’s a milestone in the evolution of free video games: EA has announced that an upcoming title in the Battlefield franchise will be part of the company’s new “Play 4 Free” series of games. Revenue to be derived from advertising and microtransactions.

Tom Buscaglia offers some advice to independent developers when negotiating with publishers. His bottom line: don’t forget to ask for your share of ancillary revenue.

Nabeel Hyatt notices an interesting (if unsurprising) statistic: of the top 100 most active Facebook applications, games do not perform statistically better than the average application, but multiplayer games such as Warbook and Scrabulous average 11.4% active daily users, a good 30% higher than the average top Facebook app (8.01%). Given that the very purpose of Facebook is to connect you with others, this makes perfect sense.

Long-time readers will know of my obsessive-compulsive war against spam; a war I’m guaranteed to lose over time, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying to win a few battles. Anyway, I wanted to share my latest small victory with fellow users of the WordPress blog software. I’ve discovered a plugin called Hashcash that, when combined with Akismet, stops 99.9% of spam from getting through. Better yet, neither plugin presents a significant burden to readers (unlike my old captcha plugin), and the combined false-positive rate appears to be extremely low as well. The only downside to Hashcash is that it blocks comments from non-Javascript-friendly browsers, but few enough people fall into that trap that I’m OK with it.

Unfortunately, as Hashcash becomes more popular, it is inevitable that someone will find a way to circumvent it, and their solution will spread quickly amongst spammers. But in the meantime, kudos to the author of the plugin — I recommend that other users of Wordpress check it out.

I’ve debated writing this article for a long time. My hesitation has stemmed, in part, from the recognition that many people have already beaten this particular horse. At least once a year, I hear an excellent presentation on this subject, usually at a casual games conference (where necessity breeds ingenuity). That said, I believe that many developers and publishers are making mistakes — on many platforms, not just XBLA — which if corrected could improve the sales of their games. So what the heck, I’ll jump on the bandwagon and say a few things. Hopefully some of them will actually seem insightful.

PR… it’s not just for Halo

Having a free trial does not exempt a downloadable game from taking advantage of PR; not even in XBLA, where every game gets downloaded by a large number of people. Why? Two reasons. First, that “large number of people” could be a lot larger. 2x (or more times) larger, in fact. Just because a lot of people download every game that comes their way doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore the people who don’t. Plenty of consumers only think to download the titles they are familiar with — that’s why licensed IP is so popular with many publishers.

Read the rest of this post >>>

Call of Duty 4 has apparently struck such a cord with consumers that retail chains (such as Circuit City) are selling it for $40 (i.e. loss leader) to attract foot traffic. Activision must be pleased.

Warner Bros. is going exclusive with Blu-Ray. As I’ve written previously (well before joining Microsoft, in fact), I see this as big news in the DVD format war, but small news in the console war. The jump from DVD to Blu-Ray is far less significant than VHS to DVD. Back then, DVD offered greater functionality, greater quality (to anyone with a TV+VHS), and greater ease of storage. Blu-Ray only offers greater quality to a select few consumers with HDTVs larger than a certain size. And many of the consumers in that category (with an interest in gaming) already own a PS3 and/or 360. Blu-ray wasn’t and isn’t going to save the Playstation. Whether anything else can… I suppose only time will tell.

The Wii is on the verge of selling 20m units. Gonna see a lot of headlines when they officially crack that ceiling. Happily (for me!) the 360 has sold roughly twice as many units as the PS3.

The Electric Sheep Company laid off about one-third (22) of its employees three weeks ago. It also canceled several projects, including the creation of an ad network within Second Life. The CEO noted, “We felt that large scale advertising to the current Second Life user base by real world companies is not a big opportunity in the short term.”

Duels.com, a simple online RPG that enables players to “duel” asynchronously, has reached one million duels per day. Bear in mind that from what I can tell, an obsessive player could rack up 100+ duels in a single day, so this doesn’t mean anything near a million users. What it does mean is that tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of users are willing to grind for “cool” items in a world almost completely devoid of meaningful plot development, entertaining quests, thoughtful strategy or action, etc… as long as the game is free. That sounds more cynical than I intended… sort of. It’s also fairly obvious, but perhaps that’s a cynical statement, too. ;-)