Here’s a question about increasing the profitability and decreasing the development cost of any MMO, although probably no-one except the web-people will recognise it as such (and even some of them won’t get it):
How do you improve the customer support for an existing MMO?
[where do you start, and what do you target?]
16 Comments » The simple guide I found here doesn’t actually work, although it “mostly” works. Several bits are out of date. Even then it only *partly* works, because it leaves all PEAR commands as requiring root to run. That may be what you want, but I doubt it. Not what I wanted.
phpMyFAQ is a nice idea, and mostly it’s well done, but with a few basic mistakes in how it’s been implemented that were so annoying I couldn’t live with them. There’s no Debian package for this app, sadly, so things like “using a better version of TinyMCE” require you to manually fix them all (no [...]
In my joyous travels developing a fun little iPhone game recently, I kept track of all the many tips and tricks and gotchas I came across. There are a fair few bugs in Apple’s IDE (including at least one critical one that bit me), some stunningly bad flaws in the Objective-C language (it’s *horrible*), and [...]
Dan’s put up the slides from his talk at the Let’s Change the Game Conference – but more importantly he’s done a long writeup with the slides embedded in the text, so you can get the flavour of the talk he gave even though you missed it.
He set out to be mean and nasty and [...]
Gamasutra’s just posted an Opinion piece (so it’s not GS’s position, they’re just giving air-time to the author) about the interview process for getting a job in the video game industry.
Right up-front the author states that one of the three aims of the employer is:
“To pay as little as possible”
What?
No.
Don’t work for companies who have [...]
Bienvenue au blog, M. Bidaux!
“There were many reasons, but mainly, we decided against it because we knew that we would be very busy and the blog was always going to be left as a “when we have time” thing, and that always translate into in a “if we have time” thing.
…
The main issue was the [...]
…could be that the “beat your staff with a stick, and if that doesn’t work … beat them harder” style of management was de rigeur for the Norwegian games industry:
AoC, in the words of an (alleged? ex?) employee:
the problem with Age of conan is that the game was in “crunch” for almost 3 years.
…who had [...]
The App Store is just another casual games distribution platform + social network. You can pretend it isn’t (sometimes I think Apple is still pretending that it’s just an extension of iTunes, and ignoring the social side completely – Doh!), but that doesn’t make it true :).
Apple’s had the iPhone version of the App Store [...]
(a.k.a. “How to invest in MMO development … profitably”)
The world is full of games companies that blow stupid amounts of money on making online games (typically “massively multiplayer online games” (MMO)). It’s time to put a stop to this madness; honestly, I thought everyone learnt their lesson about 5 years ago when we had the [...]
As part of our super top secret new startup we’ve been making some educational games, and for fun (in my spare time) I tried porting one to my iPhone. It’s a simple maths game which I thought would work well with a touch-interface. If you have an iPhone, you can get it here:
Download from Apple [...]
Alice Taylor, Channel 4
From the ARGs in Charity and Education conference last week. Alice was forthcoming on real data – and, more importantly, C4’s outlook/perspective – on a bunch of issues. Very useful stuff.
As ever, errors and ommissions my own, and my commentary [in square brackets].
Juliette Culver
Main post on the conference is here.
As ever, errors and omissions my own, and any personal commentary is in [square brackets]
EDIT: updated with some corrections, courtesy of Juliette
This week, I was at the tiny one-day conference on Alternate Reality Games, and their use in charity and/or education, at Channel 4’s offices in London. All proceeds from the conference went to Cancer Research UK (I think it was mainly organized by the team that this year won the competition to get funding for [...]
Oh, wait, actually they’re not. But people love to misinterpret statements with the word Google and the number 20 in them.
As I put in the comments:
Frankly, I’ve generally not bothered to correct anyone who didn’t bother to research it themselves – except in the cases where they were in my own organization, and attempting to [...]
Your possible answers include:
1. Because … Apple engineers have never heard of the concept of a “patch”, and require you to re-download the *entire IDE*, with all libraries, all documentation, all binary code – everything – when they release an update? So the current “SDK” for iPhone (hint for Apple: when most people say “SDK” [...]
Because WordPress is so poor at handling file uploads (AND because the new WP versions introduced incompatibilities somewhere that make some of the original blog pages 404 even though they are in the WordPress folder), I’ve created a SourceForge project for this (http://javanioserver.sourceforge.net/), and uploaded all the files there.
For those of you who wanted the [...]
(”embarrassing, empty, yet still really dirty”)
Courtesy of The Register.
(and some real information here)
Now that I no longer work for a large MMO publisher, I no longer have access to all the juicy numerical goodness, research, and stats that they had on their games and everyone else’s. A chance email recently suggesting I take a look at Xfire’s gamestats led to some quick experiments that came out surprisingly [...]
Please stop spamming the blog, not for me, but for yourself. There are multiple layers of spam filter (you may have noticed that none of your fake posts has got through so far), so I have the luxury of having the few “uncertain” hits emailed to me, because there’s so few. If that changes, I’ll [...]
