Archive for September, 2009

An idiot’s guide to building a web business

September 22, 2009

I’m not calling Dave McClure an idiot. Far from it. His presentation to last year’s Seedcamp on the basics of building a web business is inspirational. He calls it Startup Metrics for Pirates – AARRR! (He did present it on International Talk Like A Pirate Day last year.) By running through the concepts of: Acquisition [...]

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Posted in: Sandbox

Tagged with: advice, dave mcclure, self-publishing, startup, web, web marketing

5 Comments
How much does the UK government spend on games?

September 21, 2009

The UK government has just released figures showing that the nine Regional Development Agencies have invested nearly £2 million pounds in the development of the games industry in England (and I mean England, the figures don’t cover Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland). RDA funding to the computer games industry 2007-2008 Advantage West Midlands £800,000 * [...]

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Posted in: Finance

Tagged with: games, government, investment, politics

7 Comments
Online game design: which of the three business models will work for you?

September 16, 2009

Do you really understand the business model of your online game? Are you focusing on it with laser-like precision? If not, you may be wasting time and money on dead-end strategies. A recent article on Venturebeat got me thinking about how to grow your games business. Eric Ries argues that there are three drivers of [...]

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Posted in: Analysis, Featured

Tagged with: business model, monetisation, starred

10 Comments
When you did you last get an emotional response to a game?

September 15, 2009

A lot has been written about generating emotion from games. I found myself having a strong emotional response from a game over the weekend, and it came from the most surprising source. Shidonni is a freemium virtual world aimed predominantly at kids. The website shows a brightly-coloured world where ladybirds flutter across a hand-drawn landscape. [...]

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Posted in: Opinion

Tagged with: shidonni, starred, virtual worlds

3 Comments
Character Development in Video Games

September 14, 2009

I sometimes get the feeling that although narrative design is all the rage at the moment, maybe it doesn’t get the same level of behind the scenes developmental commentary afforded to the other disciplines. To that end, I recently published an internal character developmental insight / postmortem from Penumbra: Black Plague, and it’s currently doing [...]

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Posted in: Featured, Sandbox

Tagged with: guest post, writing

3 Comments
Is Zynga just buying its success?

September 11, 2009

Zynga’s fabulous growth story at Farmville is not all about virality. Earlier this month, ComScore released figures for advertising on social networks. Zynga spends 97% of its advertising budget on social networks (not surprisingly, given that it makes games that can only be played on social networks). It was the #8 biggest advertiser on social [...]

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Posted in: Featured, Marketing

Tagged with: advertising, social games, social networks, starred, zynga

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Will EA be the first major games publisher to focus on digital casual at the expense of full-price casual games?

September 11, 2009

Casualgaming.biz has a thought-provoking article based on recent comments from John Riccitiello. In a leaked internal memo, published by Bloomberg, Riccitiello says that Madden 2010, “one of our highest-rated and best-marketed Madden titles in years” had disappointing numbers. The memo majored on the successes of the direct-to-consumer businesses, leading CasualGaming.biz’s Ben Parfitt to ask “Is [...]

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Posted in: Sandbox

Tagged with: casual games, electronic arts

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