Just a brief reminder that the earlybird booking for bringing a colleague at half price to my self-publishing masterclass on 25th February in London.
You can find out more at the GamesDev Masterclass website
Hope to see some of you there.
Inside Social Games ran a big interview with Neil Young, CEO of ngMoco, last week. Two things leaped out at me.
Young comes from EA, and you might think he has boxed product DNA in his blood. They’ve had more than ten successful games, all of which have been in the top 25 so far.
But they are now wholeheartedly embracing freemium. As Young puts it:
That’s a big change for a mobile games company. It’s a clear acknowledgement that games are now services, not products. It shows how rapidly the freemium/virtual goods model is developing, and is bad news for bedroom coders thinking that they will still be able to make games and sell them for $0.99.
» Continue reading “Ngmoco: “If we can’t make a game free to play, we’re going to kill it””
I don’t care about the SuperBowl.
I struggle to care about soccer. I definitely have zero interest – none at all, not one iota – in American Football.
Which causes a problem for Zynga. They’ve just sent me a Farmville promotional email for the first time in months. And it was totally irrelevant.
I’m teaching a seminar!
I’ve teamed up with Tandem Events, the guys who bring us the Develop Conferences in Brighton and Liverpool, to teach a Game Developer Masterclass.
It’s about business, as you might expect. But more important, it’s entitled:
How to Make Money from Self-Publishing
9.00 – 17.00, 25 February 2010, London
So what’s it about?
» Continue reading “How to Self-Publish, a masterclass by Nicholas Lovell”
A comment in this interview with Rebellion’s AvP Director, David Brickley, got me thinking recently about DLC. Largely thanks to the online capabilities of seventh gen consoles it’s a sometimes controversial revenue stream that’s grown fast over the last few years, and as a result has come under close scrutiny from industry and consumers alike.
On the one hand, paid-for DLC provides developers an opportunity to release material that didn’t make the cut, extend a game’s lifecycle and generally improve a product without upsetting the money men. On the other it’s often argued that content is intentionally held back as a sly tactic to increase a game’s price point.
Brickley has this to say: “If the content is on the disc already there’s absolutely no justification for studios to offer DLC which is essentially an unlock key or something.” He goes on to support DLC in principle by saying, “But I guess what doesn’t come across to some people is that [...] while [debugging, approval and manufacturing] is going on, it tends to free up resources at the studio, so they can make items that can be added on as DLC afterwards.”
As the voice of creative idealism (or youthful naivety as it’s usually termed at GAMESbrief) I feel like I need to chip in a defence – those complaining are looking at things all wrong.
» Continue reading “DLC: Value For Money Naysayers Are Looking At It All Wrong”
If you haven’t seen Axe Cop, go and read it now.
Seriously.
It’s an amazing collaboration between a 29 year old comicbook artist and his (much) younger brother.
It shows what happens when you give a 5-year old free reign with his imagination. And not only is it brilliant, it has its own internal logic. It positively makes me feel young. Properly, back in short trousers young.
Marvellous stuff.
“Pay with Facebook” is coming.
It’s already live on Happy Aquarium from Crowdstar. Later this week, it’s coming to Farmville, the most popular application on Facebook with over 70 million monthly players.
It’s big news. And most commentators and industry insiders are expecting Facebook to charge 30% commission to companies using “Pay with Facebook”.
And I think they’re wrong. Facebook would be leaving billions of pounds on the table. I don’t believe that Facebook would be so short-sighted when there is a far bigger prize at stake.
» Continue reading “Why Facebook won’t charge 30% for payments and leave billions of dollars on the table”
Last week Times Online published this Iain Duncan Smith piece, in which the former Tory leader talks about children, and tax and booze… and briefly mentions violent video games. The relevant paragraph is this:
“Innocence, he warns, is being destroyed by children’s television and computer games. ‘We are driving children to lose their childhood, and some video games are incredibly violent, like Grand Theft Auto. They are meant to be 18 but nobody cares what it says on the label.’”
Various gaming sites then went on to sensationalise the story with headlines like “MP: Games are destroying childhood”. The point of this post isn’t to rage at the ever low journalistic standards of some hit-counting gaming websites, but to highlight the fact that a politician has said something broadly fair about games. Every week there’s a new story on how games are destroying society – a genuine story – the last thing we need now is to warp the facts in the rare event that anyone says anything constructive.
IDS’s comment is a brief, possibly even vague element in a general piece blaming parenting, alcohol and even the tax system for society’s downfall. What it certainly is not doing is attacking games, or games developers. It’s true that violent games exist, and it’s true that too many children are playing them. That (some) MPs are bothering to get the specifics straight rather than lambasting the entire industry is something we should be applauding.
We can complain ’til we’re blue in the face that no one takes gaming seriously, but until we grow up it’s a battle with only one conclusion.
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