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.

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.”

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

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.

My “Changing the Game” co-author, Ethan, was one of several individuals who worked on Celebrity Calamity, a casual game that teaches important personal financial lessons through roleplay as the business manager of a virtual celebrity. Testers who played Celebrity Calamity showed a 55% to 70% improvement in knowledge of concepts like credit limits, finance charges, etc. A video about the game and people’s experiences with it can be found here.

Trip Hawkins on the iPhone: “We make as much money with [iPhone games] as we do putting a game on 100 different cell phone platforms.”

Gamasutra has attempted to estimate the sales of those XBLA games released in March.

Nintendo will release Wii MotionPlus on June 8th. Finally, the Wiimote will not suck, and it will only cost you $20 (per device!) to rectify that suckiness… or more, if you want the Wii Sports Resort bundle. I plan to be one of those people dutifully enriching Nintendo, though I will mutter an evil curse while I do so.

Thoughtful article by James Portnow on “faux choices” in games: “Many games attach rewards that effect gameplay problems to choices, thus reducing the choice to a simple equation. For example: how many times have you been offered a choice to be nice to an old man or to ignore him and had the reward for being nice to him be X experience (or ammo or money) and the reward for ignoring him be Y experience (where Y is less then X, and often zero)?”

NCsoft has launched a mission creation tool available to all users of City of Heroes. Of course, it allows users to rate one another’s submissions and stories, and players can earn in-game rewards for highly-rated content. Certainly cheaper than attempting to replicate WoW’s army of designers; I wonder how long it will be before a popular, big-budget MMORPG launches with this kind of functionality? (Update: Kotaku reports that within 24 hours, CoH players created more content than had ever been created by the devs, and that ~14% of that content was rated 5 stars.)

Metaboli (now owner of GameTap) discusses its business models, both subscription and download to own. Subscription, unsurprisingly, is higher margin. I always thought XBLA should create a subscription or rent-to-own offer, though I worried that either (if very successful) might skew developers away from short-but-sweet games, which are under-appreciated enough as-is.

Doug Creutz shares his take on the current developer value proposition for PS3/360 vs Wii in the US: “There is a 19m unit installed base for the Wii versus 22m units combined for the 360 and PS3. Assuming some overlap in the 360/PS3 installed bases, they’re roughly equivalent. In addition, Nintendo is the dominant publisher on the Wii with over one-third of software market share on its platform. Guitar Hero and Rock Band account for one-sixth of sales. So the addressable market for third-party Wii titles is only about half of what the installed base would imply. The situation on the 360/PS3 is less daunting, with less than a quarter of software dollar share going to first-party publishers and Guitar Hero/Rock Band.”

There’s more to life than games:

Researchers at DePauw University have found that people who frowned frequently in photos taken when they were children are five times more likely to get divorced later in life. Interesting way to evaluate the people who are hoping to marry your kids, siblings, etc. ;-)

Nice article by Tom Brokaw exploring how the US could save untold billions by consolidating local government entities. Example: “It’s estimated that New York State has about 10,500 local government entities, from townships to counties to special districts. A year ago a bipartisan state commission said that New Yorkers could save more than a billion dollars a year by consolidating and sharing local government responsibilities like public security, health, roads and education.”

Interesting stats on where online play is happening. The PC attracts 87% of online game players (no surprise.) The Xbox 360 grabs second place, with 50%. The Wii comes in 3rd at 29%, and the PS3 brings up the rear with 20%. Seems like a repudiation of critics who claimed that Xbox would never get away with charging for LIVE Gold.

Wii Fit has sold 6m units in the US; more than Halo 3. Especially impressive when you consider that Wii Fit is significantly more expensive, has been on the market for less time, and had less brand equity to lean on (unless you count the generally positive glow around all Nintendo 1st party titles!)

Apple has sold over 30m iPhone and iPod Touch products, and its App Store is home to over 6k games. More interestingly, with the upcoming v3.0 of the iPhone OS, iPhone games will now support DLC and microtransactions, as well as peer-to-peer wireless play (via bluetooth). There’s other new social/multiplayer functionality in there too, like support for in-game chat. The shine just won’t come off this Apple! (I know, horrible pun. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

Via Raph, check out this free Flash game that can best be described as Portal meets Lode Runner.

There’s more to life than games:

Ever since I realized that the NYT Online was no longer hiding the fantastic writing of Nicholas Kristof behind an ill-conceived subscription model, I’ve been drinking up his articles with great pleasure. Check out this article highlighting the debate between traditionalists and those who argue that “the aid world is stunted because groups are discouraged from using such standard business tools as advertising, risk-taking, competitive salaries and profits to lure capital.” Another article worth reading, on the subject of the increasing polarization of the US population: “When we go online… we select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about… there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information, but rather information that confirms our prejudices… High school dropouts had the most diverse group of discussion-mates, while college graduates managed to shelter themselves from uncomfortable perspectives.”

Advice from Seth Godin on how to apportion equity when starting a new company: “today, your partner’s share is worth 50% and yours is worth 50%… a year from now, that number can’t possibly be right. You may have acquired six more pieces of software, raised millions, traveled the world, closed sales and sold the company. Wow. Or, you may have done absolutely nothing. So, my best advice is to say, Today, right now, your contribution is worth 5% of the company and my creation of the company is worth 5%. The other 90% is based on what each of us does over the next 18 months.”

Another XKCD comic that I can identify with. In fact, I’ve had this dream several times over the past decade. I thought it was just me!

Interesting Gamasutra article discussing ways to maximize your revenue as a flash game developer.

Raph reports on an absolutely wonderful story out of Eve Online. Quick summary: Eve has been dominated by a huge player alliance for a while now. A single double-agent, working for a competing alliance, found a way to disband and utterly ruin this mega-alliance, completely changing the balance of power in Eve and setting off an explosive free-for-all. The best part, aside from the fun of the story itself, is that this outcome is probably best for the long-term health of Eve. As Raph puts it: “what is fun about EVE is the struggle, not the victory condition. The victory condition is boring.”

Seth Godin offers five useful tips for better online surveys. (Surveys, like focus groups, are a pet peeve of mine. It’s much harder than most people realize to design a good one. Getting the data you need, without accidentally biasing respondents by asking the wrong question at the wrong time, is really quite challenging. I’ve met a few developers who were convinced their game was awesome because of a poorly-managed focus group or survey… these turned out to be costly mistakes.)

An article in Slate provocatively asks, “What’s Killing the Video Game Business?” An overly-dramatic (and misleading) title, but I liked the following conclusion: “EA doesn’t need to find its own Grand Theft Auto — it needs to let 1,000 Portals bloom.” Reminds me of a post I wrote back in 2007 arguing that publishers should place more bets, even if it means spending less per bet. Still one of my favorite GT posts.

Some insights into the business model of Quake Live. Bottom line: pay a premium to run your own game servers, host private games, call time-outs in games, have referees, etc.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this elsewhere, but anyway: researchers argue that increasing the number of competitors in an ecosystem can decrease competitive motivation and degrade individual performance. I bet someone could easily write an entire book just dissecting the implications of this for online game players and (economically-speaking) for digital game ecosystems.

For those of you unfamiliar with the basics of free-to-play game business models, Soren has written a good primer.

Amazon.com is now selling used games, and accepting trade-ins. Customers ship games to Amazon for free with a printable shipping label, eventually receiving an Amazon.com gift card. I suspect that Amazon will have more success than other companies that have tried to challenge
GameStop in this market. That said, it seems from forum posts that many users are adopting the following attitude “If I have to print a label, ship my game, and wait a few days to get paid, I might as well sell the game on eBay where I’ll get more dollars per game.” Seems like a reasonable perspective to me; I wonder how effectively Amazon will be able to overcome it?

Advice from Seth Godin: Call your customers. Or write to them. “I know that times might be tough for you. Is there anything I can do to pitch in and help?” Perhaps more practical for some companies than others, but I bet the spirit of this idea can be applied in many thoughtful ways.

PlayMesh, an iPhone game developer, has found an ingenious way to integrate microtransactions into its iMafia game. Since Apple doesn’t support or allow in-game microtransactions, PlayMesh has cleverly linked iMafia currency to the purchase of other PlayMesh games, like Chess Puzzles and Speed Shapes. In other words, if you purchase Speed Shapes, you get not only that game, but currency that can be spent within iMafia. Brilliant.

I just discovered this New Yorker article written by Malcolm Gladwell in 2006, about companies that can supposedly predict, with far greater success than experts, the likelihood that a song or movie will be successful. Unfortunately, the article is so breezy that it’s hard to evaluate the claims within it; but still, interesting!

Soren has written an excellent article about in-game economies… the kind of article that begs for a follow-up or two. (Hint, hint…)

Given the level of passion that our customers have for our games, I’ve always wondered why more developers don’t invite fans (via a competition) to create compelling and unusual print/online advertisements for upcoming releases. Here’s some decent stuff that Street Fighter 4 fans created voluntarily. Now imagine if Capcom had explicitly requested submissions and offered a decent prize. Maybe give every entrant some purely-aesthetic but really cool-looking free DLC in SF4, on top of that. I bet that the top results would put to shame more than a few professional design firms.

Lots of interesting iPhone related stats: iPhone users made up 14 percent of mobile downloaders in November. Thirty-two percent of iPhone users said they downloaded a game during the month, considerably higher than the market average of 3.8 percent. Overall, the audience for downloaded mobile games grew 17 percent. For the same period, 20.5 million users said they played a downloaded game on a mobile device, or 8.9 percent of all mobile subscribers.

Amazon has announced the launch of their casual game download service, as expected ever since they acquired Reflexive. The most notable part of the announcement: games will be priced at $9.95 or less, instead of the more common max of $19.95. Also, Amazon won’t be offering any free games (advertisement or microtransaction supported) for now. My thoughts: it would be foolish to discount the potential impact of Amazon’s entrance into the market — they understand online merchandising better than anyone, and have a huge, loyal customer base that they can leverage. That said, I bet Amazon will be surprised by the resilience and effectiveness of its competitors in this space, most of which have been toughened by years of intense competition, and many of which have developed effective tools for retaining customers (i.e. Pogo’s tokens, badges and avatars; Kongregate’s “Kongai” game; the many forms of free-to-play content, in general.) One sign that Amazon’s new service isn’t having an explosive start: Totem Tribe, Amazon’s #1 Editor’s Pick, is currently ranked an abysmal 38,175th out of all video game-related products in Amazon’s catalogue. Kim has shared more thoughts of his own here.

There’s more to life than games:

For the democrats and geeks among you, a really funny patch log for the presidency. For example: “Leadership: Will now scale properly to national crises. Intelligence was not being properly applied.” Oh, and “Messages to and from the President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.” :-)

Coraline is now one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s a 3D, stop-motion animated film based on Neil Gaiman’s work. This is the kind of movie that will literally have you muttering out loud, in amazement, on more than one occasion. The 3D effects are incredible (we’ve come a long way from the cheesy blue/red lens films), the story is wonderful and the pacing is perfect. It’s safe for kids but perfectly entertaining for adults. Go see it in the best (preferably high-def, digital) theatre that you have access to!

More work and personal life productivity tips from Gummi.

Nintendo is working with The National Association for Music Education to put Wii Music into schools in 51 US cities. The goal: to help children with rhythm, song structure, etc.

Good, if brief, list of common mechanics that tend to spoil the gameplay experience.

Some very interesting news out of Apple over the past couple weeks. First, it announced that anticopying restrictions would be removed from all music in iTunes, and that record companies would no longer be limited to selling songs for $0.99. (Great move, IMO.) Second, just one week after announcing that he was suffering from a simple “hormone imbalance,” Steve Jobs reversed course and said he was taking a six-month leave of absence due to more serious health issues — triggering an SEC investigation. Finally, Apple’s quarterly profits blew past analyst estimates due to strong sales of iPods, iPhones, and laptops; an impressive feat given the state of the economy.

Microsoft announced that Doritos: Dash of Destruction had been the most downloaded game in the second half of December, with almost 1m downloads. (Not bad for an advergame…)

Via Warren Spector, a delightful reprinting of clever New York Magazine language competitions. One of my favorites: “Prequels” — which elicted submissions such as “Two Dalmations”, “Prince Kong”, “Malcolm IX”, and “We’re Running Low on Mohicans.”

There’s more to life than games:

God bless the new President of the United States of America, Barack Obama! And for all our sakes, good luck to him…

MSMR shares a pricing study with two interesting conclusions: 1) The negative effects of unethical corporate behavior have a substantially greater impact on consumer willingness to pay than the positive effects of ethical behavior, and, 2) No difference in consumer willingness to pay was found between products that were 25%, 50% and 100% ethically-produced.

EA will begin distributing via Steam, despite having its own digital game delivery platform (EA Store).

The RIAA has abandoned its policy of suing individual users for sharing copyrighted songs and instead will “work with Internet service providers to cut abusers’ access if they ignore repeated warnings.” Overdue but welcome.

NYTimes examines Tap Tap, which is becoming the Guitar Hero and Rock Band of the iPhone. Not because Tap Tap is particularly imaginative or even particularly good, but because the developer of this music game platform has quickly and effectively leveraged its first mover advantage on the iPhone. Can Tap Tap still be displaced? Sure. The quickest method: find a way to let me download the tracks from my existing Rock Band games onto an iPhone version of Rock Band and I’ll switch in a heartbeat and never look back. Obviously, I’ll have to pay something for the privilege (flat fees? ongoing subs? something else?)

Towards the end of the holiday period, Activision discounted its’ blockbuster, Call of Duty: World at War to $49. A symbol of both the effects of the recession and too much competition… it will be interesting to see what happens with prices over the next three months.

Via Raph, news that in the third quarter of ‘08 laptop shipments exceeded that of desktops for the first time ever. And he asks a good question: what does a true AAA game designed for a netbook look like?

Also via Raph, one of the most clever games I’ve ever played. It only takes a couple minutes — check it out.

Seth Godin writes, “Organizations staffed with sports fans or true believers worry me, because they often use their passion as an excuse for poor performance.” We’re certainly an industry populated by true believers… so how about it? Have you seen evidence of this inside or outside your organization? I believe that I have.

Useful reminder: the Wii may be the best-selling next gen console, but which console accounts for the greatest share of gaming minutes? The PS2, at 30%. The Xbox 360 is next, at 18%. The Wii clocks in at 13.5%. Not an indictment of the Wii, but yet another reminder that if you’re a third party, other platforms may represent better investments. And that the PS2 is still a force to be reckoned with.

There’s more to life than games:

Yet another great XKCD comic. I don’t know about you, but the personal time I spent messing with computers had a far greater impact on my career than anything I learned in high school…

And yet another funny post by Scott Adams’ (more funny if you’re a dog lover.)

I’m probably one of the only people on earth who can claim their sister is a professional puppeteer (and a darn good one at that.) She recently made a new website with photos of her work.