Might as well post this tonight; I’m sure the Apple tablet is going to demand a whole post of its own.

(An illicit?) review of OnLive’s beta service. Summary: as rumored, the service works OK for games that aren’t “too twitchy,” like FPS. Avid PC gamers will likely be “very disappointed by the experience,” but then again, OnLive probably isn’t targeting avid PC gamers… it’s probably targeting the much larger number of people who aren’t willing to buy an expensive PC and deal with driver conflicts, inexplicable crashes, etc. I should add that the comparison videos in this writeup were interesting… OnLive is definitely scaling back the graphical fidelity of the games it hosts.

Exciting news about the Kindle Development Kit (KDK), which rolls out next month in limited beta and will permit for games on the Kindle. Should prove lucrative for the early adopters who position themselves correctly and make it into the launch portfolio.

Snackable Media generated *$170m* from SMS-based gaming content in 2009?? That managed to slip right under my radar until now. (Snackable’s most popular title is a celebrity & pop culture txt trivia game offering $50k in prize money — it has a million monthly active users paying $10 bucks a month.)

Pocket God and Flight Control both hit 2m units sold on the iPhone. And speaking of iPhone; here’s an article highlighting the effectiveness of in-app purchases.

Microsoft just unveiled Ribbon Hero, a game that teaches you how to use MS Office. Danc advised the team that built it, and rightly labels the fact that it even exists a minor miracle. ;-)

Looks like the market for 3rd party DS games is collapsing, according to Ubisoft.

More than half the most popular e-books on the Kindle are available at no charge. Publishers are offering free versions of digital books in hopes of hooking readers on longer series by relatively unknown writers.

Top Xbox Live Indie Games are estimated to earn between $21k and $130k, according to Kotaku. (I assume that “top” probably means the top 1% of the catalog, give or take.)

I was recently interviewed by Matt Martin of GamesIndustry.biz on the subject of publishers making the transition to Facebook. Since my correspondence with Matt was via email, I thought I’d take advantage and share the full transcript, for those of you who are interested in this topic:

Question: Is Facebook a viable format for traditional videogame publishers? Are there opportunities for someone like EA or Take 2 to make a significant profit? Or is Facebook as a platform over for those big publishers that haven’t already established themselves on the service?

Facebook is definitely a viable platform for traditional publishers. The short-term problem, as I’ve noted in the past, is that traditional publishers simply aren’t geared towards making the kinds of games that succeed on Facebook. In general, their game designers are trained (and prefer) to make games that are fun above all else, where a Facebook game designer needs to be as concerned with designing a free-to-play game that is capable of generating real revenue. And in general, their designers are also accustomed to thinking of player acquisition as “marketing’s problem,” whereas viral player acquisition is clearly a core design challenge on Facebook. But I don’t want to make it sound like design is the only challenge; traditional publishers don’t have much experience marketing these kinds of games, in this kind of channel, to this broad an audience. They’re set up to manage the relationship with Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, to push discs into retail stores, and to blow a wad of cash on TV and magazine advertising. Obviously this is a generalization, but you get my point.

But as I mentioned earlier, that’s all a short-term problem. There’s no inherent reason why traditional publishers can’t build (or buy) fresh studios to focus on this opportunity. They’ve done it before; mobile games are a good example. The traditional publishers will end up wasting quite a lot of money in the process — you can be certain of that — but some of them will ultimately succeed at entering the market.

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For those of you who have been considering making a donation to help the people of Haiti, but who have been deterred by the bewildering array of non-profit organizations currently asking for help, my wife has identified Partners In Health as a group that has been operating in Haiti for a very long time and has relationships, knowledge and infrastructure to leverage during this crisis, which will hopefully make them a little more effective. Here’s a note that we received from Partners in Health after making our own donation.

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When I look at Facebook, I see a games platform that has been thoroughly enjoying the “early glory” phase of maturity. Not too long ago, there was guarded optimism about the potential of Facebook to host profitable games, but few good examples of such games. Less than a blink of an eye later, Facebook has become the apple of our industry’s eye.

While most publishers are laying employees off by the hundreds, Facebook-centric publishers are hiring like mad. Savvy conference organizers are rushing to capitalize on audience demand for business venues to discuss social gaming. The inevitable stories of unbelievable growth have, quite predictably, become common-place. Facebook’s platform managers have finally started embracing our industry and contributing to the hype around their platform. And finally, a remarkable number of developers (and even large publishers) have begun to re-orient themselves towards the development of social games.

Facebook’s “inevitable misery”

All of these are classic signs that Facebook gaming’s “early glory” phase is in full swing. You may therefore conclude, with 99% certainty, that Facebook as a games platform is likely within a single year’s reach of the “inevitable misery” phase of its lifecycle. Probably much less than a year, in fact. As I’ve argued before, this does not necessarily mean that savvy developers should begin to look elsewhere — it simply means that there will soon be a large quantity of blood in Facebook’s waters. The victims of that impending blood-bath are listed here, in no particular order:

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An in-depth look at the reasons Duke Nukem Forever never shipped. This is one of the better articles I’ve read in Wired.

I appreciate time/date and season-specific functionality in games, such as the Christmas-linked “Pure White” mode in Demon’s Souls. Why don’t more games do stuff like this on a larger scale? Make it server-based and you’ve just reduced player incentive to resell games (i.e. you might miss out on cool functionality that only gets unlocked on certain days of the year.)

The free version of Shazam for the iPhone was recently limited to five uses a month, while a new $4.99 version supports unlimited uses. The $4.99 version is supposedly selling well, which should be encouraging to all iPhone developers. (It ain’t easy to convince people to pay for something that was previously free.) Also notable: Shazam has apparently been adding 500k new users every week for an entire year.

Steve Perlman demos OnLive and discusses everything – the technology, the business model, etc. I’m still in “believe it when I see it” mode… but I’m definitely eager to see it. :-)

Things that retail game publishers worry about: 2009 saw 1,099 retail game releases across all major platforms, increasing the total games available to consumers by 55%. At least 50 games (i.e. Call of Duty and GTA) are permanent fixtures on the retail shelf. What’s all this translate to? Less available shelf space, and less average shelf-time per game.

Google’s answer to the iPhone was finally unveiled. Looks slick, but my main reason for being interested in it has less to do with the phone, and more to do with abandoning the train wreck that is AT&T’s overburdened network.

There’s more to life than games:

A remarkably well-written essay about the death penalty; it exposes the flaws in arson investigation practices and tackles Texas’ criminal justice system, in general. Fair warning: it’s a very long essay, but one worth reading regardless of whether or not you support the death penalty.

Israel will become the first country in the world to give people who sign their organ donor cards “points”; these points push your name higher up on the transplant waiting list in the event that you personally require an organ donation. Seems like the only fair system, to me.

Amazing, amazing anti-aging related research! Let the vampire jokes begin…

This article was originally published by Gamasutra on 12/22/09, and later on GameSetWatch. I’m republishing it here for those of you who missed it. I recommend checking out the original articles, as both have received interesting comments that you may appreciate.

In my experience, one of the problems that most seems to bedevil game developers is the problem of timing; specifically, understanding when is the “right time” to begin developing for a specific platform. To understand why this is such a challenge for developers, you need to understand how a games platform tends to evolve.

Here’s the typical scenario: A platform — for example, XBLA, or the iPhone app store, or Facebook — comes into existence. Most people regard the platform suspiciously, for a variety of reasons. It’s an unproven market, for starters. The platform owner’s commitment to growing the platform may be unclear. The pros and cons of working with the platform owner in this context are unknown. There are lots of other platforms to choose from. Etc. Most developers take all this into account and decide to pass on the platform for the time being.

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