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.)
