Games Brief

A debate on free-to-play

Cliff Harris and I exchange views on free-to-play gaming, and then share the conversation with you.

Taptitude – a Windows Phone Success Story

FourBros Studio began developing Taptitude early in 2011. This article is going to look back over the last year as the game has evolved to see how far we’ve come and how we got here. For those not familiar with Taptitude, it is a free Windows Phone 7 game with a collection of over 60 competitive minigames. We initially launched Taptitude in March 2011 with just a handful of relatively simple minigames, and have since updated it every week adding new games and platform features.

How much are Tablet users spending on Virtual Goods? ABout $62

Magid Associates have released their latest gaming trends research (although 10 minutes of Googling and I still can’t find the original. I’m relying on GamesIndustry.biz’s write-up). The key stats that leaped out at me: Where are the active gamers (%age playing games on a platform in a week): 50% played console games at least once [...]

Kickstarter and the Gartner Hype cycle

Yesterday, I wrote about the inevitable bursting of the Kickstarter bubble. (The post was originally made on Gamasutra).

I had meant to check out the Gartner Hype Cycle and a link from Tadhg Kelly reminded me to do so. Here it is:

What’s the use of contracts?

As I see it, in most circumstances there are only two main reasons for having a contract, and for caring about what it says. The most important is this: to make the parties think about things before the contract is signed.

How long before the Kickstarter bubble bursts?

There are currently 314 projects live on the Video Games Channel on Kickstarter. Several are fully-funded already (like YogVentures). Others never will be (I’ve seen at least two massive open-world sandbox games proposed by people who have never made any games before). The ones I worry about are the ones that combine the two: fully funded projects by wildly-optimistic promoters. That is where the trouble will start.

The age of interaction: the rule of 1/9/90 doesn’t work any more

Do you remember the rule of 1/9/90. It was rule of thumb for web designers that 1% created, 9% commented and 90% consumed. If your business depended on the 1%, you were typically in trouble.

New research from the BBC suggests that interactivity has broken through apathy and thanks to new technologies that make participation easier than ever before, the rule of 1/9/90 may be outdated.