Category Archives: Articles of Interest

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.

It’s been clear for a while that the iPhone and iPod Touch are evolving into competitive video game platforms, but the announcement of a new Metal Gear Solid for these devices really seems to underscore the point. Look for it in March 2009.

Danc has written a nice article about his lightweight prototyping process using Post-it notes. Anything that encourages developers to experiment and iterate more quickly is (generally-speaking) good in my book.

The difference between copywriting and marketing, as only Seth Godin could put it.

Lots of news about the November NPD data. Here’s the quick summary: 2m Nintendo Wiis sold (breaking all records for that month), 836k Xbox 360s sold, a year-on-year increase of 8.6%, and 378k PS3s sold, a year-on-year decrease of 19%. The Nintendo DS continues to rock, at 1.57m units. Top five sellers for the month: Gears of War 2, Call of Duty 5, Wii Play, Wii Fit, and Mario Kart. Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge both turn out to be big disappointments for EA, sales-wise. Music franchises like Rock Band and Guitar Hero perform less well than expected. Lastly, Wii Fit sales exhibit a curious but encouraging pattern, increasing every month since second month, for half a year, and culminating in November sales of 174k (better than launch.) Bottom line – Nintendo continues to kick serious ass.

Quite a lot of bad news for Sony this holiday. (BTW, I’m not writing this to “gloat,” or out of some foolish notion that my little blog can influence the console war. I’m writing because I have to track this stuff for competitive reasons anyway, so I might as well share what I track. If you don’t like it, don’t read it.) Anyway, in addition to really lackluster PS3 sales — driven, no doubt, by the PS3’s high price and weak-ish holiday title lineup — it turns out that LittleBigPlanet isn’t moving the needle, relative to the hype. The PSN Home beta has been panned (Tycho, of Penny Arcade, went so far as to compare Home with, ummm… the AIDS virus. That dude can be mean!) And as it turns out, most holiday shoppers (92% of them) could care less about blu-ray. Most don’t see the change in quality between DVD and Blu-ray as “significant enough” (I argued that would be the case three years ago, for the record.) Yahoo even called blu-ray one of the worst tech products of 2008.

There’s more to life than games:

New research finds that credit-card holders pay down their debts more slowly when their statements suggest a minimum monthly installment. Those consumers who wanted to pay just part of their bill handed over 43 percent less on average when presented with a minimum payment! In the real world, this would roughly double interest charges. I’ve watched credit card debt hammer some of my friends and family, and it’s not a pretty picture. If you have loved ones in a similar situation, do them a big favor — get them to cut up their credit cards. An ATM/debit card is just as convenient, and much less dangerous.

My good friend, Gummi, is a product manager on Google’s mobile team, an extremely smart guy, and self-professed “productivity addict.” He’s just started a blog on his productivity techniques and experiments, a couple of which seem really promising.

Via Kotaku, “Only 20% of games that begin production will ever finish. Of those 20% that are finished and released to the market, only 20% of them will ever realize a significant profit.” I’d be surprised if these stats were significantly different five+ years ago.

During my IGDA Leadership Forum lecture, I mentioned that a wide variety of studies had called into question the value of bonuses for white collar employees. Dan Ariely has posted some information about related research of his own. From that post: “people offered medium bonuses performed no better, or worse, than those offered low bonuses. But what was most interesting was that the group offered the biggest bonus did worse than the other two groups across all the tasks… We found that as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. But when we included a task that required even rudimentary cognitive skill, the outcome was the same as in the India study: the offer of a higher bonus led to poorer performance.”

PlaySpan has raised $17m for its virtual goods platform and online payments system. “PlaySpan indexes all of the items in a game and markets them to gamers based on relevancy. It takes into account a player’s character and experience level, then offers a virtual good just when a player needs it most.” PlaySpan’s “PayByCash” division has 70+ payment solutions in 180 countries, and offers a prepaid Ultimate Game Card that is available in 20k stores.

There is ever more evidence that video games are great pain management tools. The latest: Snowy Game, a “basic 3D environment where players move along a snowy path and fire snowballs at nonmoving targets. They wear a virtual reality headset that ensures the patients aren’t viewing their therapy, and the challenge focuses their mind on aiming instead of the physical discomfort. The cool imagery takes their mind away from the burning pain, and the ‘shooting’ keeps their minds occupied. This sort of pain management benefits not only the patients, but the staff dealing with burn victims. (Emphasis mine. BTW, for insight into burn-related pain and the way it causes psychological pain to both victim and hospital staff, I refer again to Dan Ariely, who wrote a remarkable paper on his own experience as a burn victim.)

Keith Bakker, founder of Amersterdam’s Smith & Jones Centre (which treats gaming addicts) suggests that 90% of people seeking treatment for game addiction are not actually “addicted,” but instead suffer from severe social problems such as isolation, school bullying, etc. Totally unsurprising to me, and I’m very glad to see someone speaking out on this topic.

Russell Carroll has written a thoughtful review of Wii Music, which has been trashed by most critics. From his review: “Then there came that moment, after an hour plus of rehashing and playing the same song over and over again, where we really did jell together. It created the same sensation of accomplishment that I got when doing piano recitals and band concerts years ago. We really sounded pretty good. However, in watching the video, we saw areas where we could do better. That’s just one of the great moments in the game. An even more amazing moment comes as you push past making a particular song sound great and start making it sound like it is yours.”

There’s more to life than games:

While I certainly don’t agree with him on everything, I am increasingly impressed with the no-nonsense, intelligent positions taken by Congressman Ron Paul. Check out these two Q&As with the Congressman on Freakonomics.

We need to ask ourselves why we live in a society in which it is even conceivable that a holiday sale at Walmart could cause shoppers to smash down the doors of the store and trample an employee to death. (Seems like I read a story of this sort at least once every couple holidays. I know that these are isolated incidents, but they highlight our national, unhealthy obsession with shopping.)

Fun presentation about innovation and games. A part of it reminded me of my favorite PC game, Planescape Torment, which came about when the designer, Chris Avellone, asked himself what typical RPG conventions could be turned on their head? (I.e. if the meta-goal of an RPG is generally “don’t die,” what about making a game in which your ultimate goal is suicide?)

Via Soren, one of the geekiest (and best) political comics that I have ever laid eyes on! 🙂

Henry interviewed Ethan and I about Changing the Game (see parts 1 & 2). Normally I don’t post links to my interviews here, but this one is really worth checking out. Henry has a knack for asking very thoughtful questions.

Yet another story about the creation of Portal. I like this one because it highlights a factor that, it’s clear, really contributed to making Portal what it was… serious resource constraints! The environment, GlaDOS… all a function of insufficient time and manpower needed to blow the game out “more fully.” Constraints can be good.

MIT CMS is putting on its 3rd annual Futures of Entertainment Conference this Friday, 11/21 and Saturday 11/22. Speakers include Kim Moses, exec producer of The Ghost Whisperer; Alex McDowell, production designer for Watchmen; Gregg Hale, producer of The Blair Wtich Project; Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks; Anita Elberse, HBS professor and author of “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?” and many more. If you’re in Boston or can make the trip there, it’s totally worth it.

Tectoy has announced the Zeebo, a gaming console that will launch in Brazil in the second half of 2009. It will connect, for free, to a 3G network via which all content is downloaded and purchased. It will sell for the equivalent of US$258, which sounds completely insane until you realize that the Wii apparently sells for over US$500 in Brazil thanks to import taxes and whatnot.

Soren writes a thoughtful post about used (retail) and new (digital) game sales. Unfortunately, as he briefly mentions, the problem no publisher has solved is how to drop price on digital games without damaging retail relationships. Tough one, that.

A rather original and interesting looking XNA game. Watch the video to the end; it’s a bit slow in places, but worth it.

If you’ve ever been curious about the Xbox and G4W certification process (what it entails and why it matters), the XNA team has published a detailed article on the subject via Gamasutra.

Interesting article that explores the flaws inherent to annual performance reviews, and proposes an alternative way of giving feedback to employees.

Sandy Pentland, one of the MIT Media Lab’s most well-known professors, was recently interviewed on the subject of nonverbal communication (and what it means for businesses.) Fascinating stuff.

In the “didn’t see that one coming” category, PC game distributor and developer Reflexive Entertainment was recently acquired by Amazon.com. Reflexive is the developer of the XBLA game Wik & The Fable Of Souls, among others. It’s unclear to me how, of all the online game distributors, Reflexive managed to woo Amazon, but my very serious props to them!

Wagner brings our attention to a notable debate: people who make a living selling virtual goods within Second Life are complaining about the great many freebie items that are depressing all item values and hurting their profitability. But really, this shouldn’t be surprising. In a free-for-all market with no barriers to entry, the price of most goods will quickly be competed down to their variable cost of production… and the variable cost of a virtual item is zero. Inevitably, only those goods associated with strong IP (and/or having extremely high development budgets, which set them apart from other goods) prove saleable. Sound familiar? It should, because it applies to many video game ecosystems.

Gamasutra has posted an article about missing gamers, aka those 25 to 35 year olds who used to play video games but no longer do. Most of the article won’t surprise you, but I appreciated this one bit: When we introduced one group to Xbox Live and its community features (with something of a twinkle in our eye) we were surprised at the lack of enthusiasm. “How do I update my status, though? And how about adding pictures and links?” The bottom line here seems to be that most games platforms have a “come join our community” ethic, but members of this group of would-be gamers already have well-established, functioning networks of their own. They respond much better to services that enhance and amend these existing groups, both online and in real life. When they discover that games can “come to their community” they are much more willing to invest some time and money.

Seth Godin posts his Nine steps to Powerpoint magic. A worthwhile read if you’re like me and can’t help but pack tons of text into your presentations…

Changing the Game appeared in the Financial Times (print and online). And speaking of the book, Ethan and I finally got around to creating a website for it: ChangingTheGameBook.com. It still needs work, but I’d be curious to hear what you all think of the current incarnation. We’re trying to make it more useful than the typical book brochureware, so we’ve added a bunch of reference material and, of course, a blog.

Nintendo is finally, FINALLY making another Punch-Out. I’ve been saying for ages what an absolute no-brainer another Punch-Out would be, sales-wise! Unfortunately, from the sound of things, Nintendo’s new game may be a remake with little (if any) original content; I’ve been really hoping for a true sequel. But that’s OK — a remake still jumps to the top of my Wii wish list. 🙂

Interesting article in the New York Times on how the F.A.A uses video games to not only train air traffic controllers (no surprise), but also to screen candidates. Most notably, the games used for screening are not the training games — they are “game-like tests, designed by psychologists. In one, a bit like Tetris or Frogger, three parallel belts, running at different speeds, drop colored letters toward the bottom of the screen. The test-taker must try to grab each letter before it drops, and put it in a bin of the appropriate color… The hard part comes when the screen disappears and the computer asks questions like: How many bins were in use? How full were they? What letters were still on the belts? Scoring well on the test is supposed to reveal the qualities that make a good air traffic controller, including the ability to work under pressure and maintain situational awareness.”

Several experts, most notably Ian Bogost (see Persuasive Games), have argued that advergames are most effective when thematically related to the brand that they are trying to promote. Here’s a recent research study backing up that assertion.