The games industry is good at experimenting. It is not so good at making sure that when an experiment fails, the company thrives. RealTime Worlds bet $100 million on the belief that it knew exactly what gamers...

At the London Games Conference 2011, I was asked to predict 4 heroes and four zeroes in an era of digital transition. With LGC 2012 just round the corner, where I am going to come up with...

Selling content is what content creators do, right? Not any more. Now that digital distribution has made it incredibly cheap to share content on the web, consumers are increasingly refusing to pay for it.

Earlier this month, UsTwo announced that their game Whale Trail had achieved 1m downloads. I don’t blame them for releasing the figure: the press loved it, it means I’m writing this post and it does mean that...

Everyone knows the dangers of the paywall. They can be good for making money, but in a market where it costs between $1 and $4 to acquire a customer, it is critical to keep those customers. Paywalls...

“Zynga is currently trading at a discount to cash”, scream the pundits. “Zynga’s shareholders would like to pay you to it off their hands” say the headlines. Is it really true? Yesterday’s market value for Zynga was...

Free-to-play games are all about success. That does not mean that players can’t have to use skill (see Free-to-play Design, rule 4: Complexity in layers). It does mean that they get rewarded for just turning up.