Archive for February, 2010

1. Brown punches aide in game-graphics news report. Libel, anyone?

   February 23, 2010

   This is truly extraordinary. A Taiwanese news channel reporting on Bullygate concocts some CGI footage of Gordon Brown punching an aide and throwing a women from her chair. It’s not in English, so I can’t understand the context, but it contains some pretty extraordinary allegations (and a random sweary subtitle at the end). Still, if [...]

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   Posted in: Sandbox

   Tagged with: controversy, politics

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2. How to Publish a Game

   February 23, 2010

   You want to become a publisher, don’t you? Well, your time is running out. This golden era of opportunity for indies is closing rapidly. The new channels like Facebook, iPhone and XBLA are getting crowded, higher quality and more expensive to enter. So if you want to break out from being a work-for-hire publisher, I’d [...]

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   Posted in: Sandbox

   Tagged with: conferences, gamesbrief, masterclass, self-publishing

   1 Comment

3. Deleting GAMESbrief’s weekly tweets

   February 23, 2010

   I’m going to stop automatically posting a summary of my weekly tweets. On GAMESbrief and on other blogs, I’ve found them less useful than live Tweets, and I feel they detract from the other posts. Please tell me if you liked them, or hated them. I’d really like some feedback on this.

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   Posted in: Sandbox

   Tagged with: admin, gamesbrief

   2 Comments

4. How games will change our behaviour

   February 23, 2010

   This is a presentation given at DICE by Jesse Schell that I was alerted to by Shanti Bergel. It’s a full 30 mins, but the first 20 minutes focus on how few game designers really saw the emergence of casual/social games (think Wii, Wii-Fit, Farmville etc). It then points out that games are now *everywhere*. [...]

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   Posted in: Featured, Sandbox

   Tagged with: gamification, jesse schell, video

   1 Comment

5. Why Facebook is dependent on Zynga, not the other way round

   February 22, 2010

   2009 was the year in which Facebook trounced MySpace. Rupert Murdoch’s magical acquisition has been losing its lustre for a while. But, perhaps surprisingly, the main driver of Facebook’s success may have been games. Two reports just released show the process graphically. But first, let’s have a look at Facebook’s phenomenal growth, up to their [...]

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   Posted in: Analysis

   Tagged with: facebook, mySpace, news corp., playfish, social games, starred, statistics, zynga

   4 Comments

6. Guardian profoundly misses the point about FIFA Online

   February 16, 2010

   Oh dear. The Guardian has gone and got me all steamed up. Normally, that’s the job of the Daily Mail. In a blog post this morning entitled EA unveil … Fifa Farmville?, Guardian blogger Jack Arnott reports on EA’s new downloadable, free-to-play game, FIFA Online. Only he turns it into a diatribe against the entire [...]

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   Posted in: Featured, Sales

   Tagged with: business model, fifa online, free games, journalist, starred

   3 Comments

7. Gamesbrief’s Weekly Tweets for 2010-02-16

   February 16, 2010

   That's GDC booked. Shame I left it so late – still £1,200 for economy flights and hotel for a week # Just updated that job loss tracker so if shows 2010 redundancies separately # Just posted: Activision culls up to 400 jobs http://tinyurl.com/yjudgd9 # Just posted: How “Don’t Be Evil” leads to Guantanamo Bay http://tinyurl.com/ygeq4dr [...]

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   Posted in: Sandbox

   Tagged with: twitter

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