(in case you hadn’t been following, this year EA has been putting some particularly nasty DRM on their most-hyped games such as Spore and the Crysis expansion; but unlike previous years, there’s been public outrage)
A couple of things of note here:
EA thinks it can get away with what many consider lieing and cheating – and [...]
2 Comments » So, on this Amazon page, which starts with:
then has a sponsored advert from EA further down the page:
Yeah, um, well. I guess that targetted advertising isn’t quite working out the way it was intended.
Of course, it makes an EXCELLENT pun on the fact that I was *going* to mention that EA has “done it again” [...]
Lots of people are using Yahoo’s Upcoming more and more these days, going by the invites I get (many have switched from using Facebook to using Upcoming recently). But it completely sucks for arranging anything in a foreign country, or where people will be attending from foreign locations. Common examples:
Any meeting, event, or party at [...]
Thoughts on making an awesome conference, #1: Interactive Presentations
(Part 1: The Problem. ATTN: Darius – you know what I’m doing here :))
The problem with interactive presentation is simply that, in its most obvious fashion, it completely doesn’t work.
I’ve seen presenters stand up, with the best will in the world, and say “what would you like [...]
I’m there now, drop me a line (see About page for email) if you’re around.
I’ve just given a quick presentation introducing the ENISA’s (European Network and Information Security Agency) whitepaper on “Security and Privacy in MMO’s and VW’s”. It’s free, and it’s fairly simple (aimed at everyone from consumers to governments), worth a read if [...]
Mozilla just released Alpha3 of Thunderbird version 3; my advice: don’t bother.
Andrew Chen has just written a post comparing the cultural differences between Web industry people and Games industry people. They’re all very interesting, and on the whole I’d say they’re on the money – definitely worth reading (and see if you can spot yourself in some of the either/or’s ;)). At the start of the [...]
(because that was yesterday, you know)
Richard Bartle concludes that, in the great scheme of things (and much as it might nice to think otherwise), it’s not actually that important.
So standing back and looking at it, the answer as to why there is not a lot of fuss over this 30th anniversary is that in the [...]
a.k.a. “An MBA that would actually be worth my time doing”
Background
When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, a new society was founded – Cambridge University Entrepreneurs – which started an annual business-plan competition for members of the university and local community, giving away £30,000 (about $50,000) to the winners, and modelled on the pre-existing [...]
EDIT: LOL, actually, you can Add to Set, I was completely wrong. Thanks to Sulka, and some emailed screenshots, I finally was able to find this feature. It’s there, buried next to “Blog this”, and “view different resolutions of this photo”. I couldn’t find it, because it’s the opposite side of screen from all the [...]
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20655
It’s been a while since I remember seeing a CEO lie quite so brazenly, and so naively try to spin everything his way in the bizarre belief that no-one has access to the internet, and hence cannot effortlessly discover the rather impressively different truth.
Since JR took over, talking a great talk about seizing the bull [...]
Thord Hedengren (TDH) posted for GigaOM a list of things you should and shouldn’t do immediately after launching an MMO. They are mostly specious – I’m afraid I have no idea who Thord is or what he’s done, but from reading the article I get the impression he doesn’t know much about MMOs. Now, I’m [...]
This is getting ridiculous. I just tried to post a comment on someone’s blogger.com blog, and I was forced to use either my gmail account or an OpenID account to post. When I tried to NOT use my gmail account, it force-logged-me-out of gmail in the other window! This is pretty incompetent.
Note to web companies: [...]
I’ve written up my notes for the first three sessions of the VGS last Friday, and they’re in the queue over at FreeToPlay.biz waiting to be approved by Adrian; hopefully they should go live soon.
It was a good conference, some good stuff said, lots of basic sharing of info about things to do / things [...]
This week, I was at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco (my session writeups should appear on http://freetoplay.biz over the coming days). A couple of things struck me during the conference, including the large number of “payment providers” (companies that specialized in extracting cash out of your users via credit card, paypal, pre-pay cards, [...]
…was my first thought on hearing that the Iceland economy was running out of money:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081009/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_iceland_meltdown
If you conveniently ignore that the figures are about 100 times too big, it’s a nice thought to imagine CCP might step in to bail out the banks, or at least offer to prop them up using ISK. It’s legal tender [...]
A missing ” killed it. I *do* have the “correct missing tags in XML” box checked in wordpress, but apparently it doesnt go as far as to check one of the most common typos. Sigh. Would all be OK if they had a working text editor that allowed you to put source code in your [...]
(this is part 2 of “Flashback to 2006: How Kongregate Started”, and looks at the features Kong was supposed to have but hasn’t brought to market yet, and makes some wild guesses at why not)
Microtransactions
What were these going to be? Are they still coming?
In his explanation above, Jim said:
“We’re also opening up the microtransaction API [...]
(Monetization options for Virtual Worlds)
VWFE 2008 (Virtual Worlds Forum Europe) got cancelled because the venue was taken away by the Police, so the organizers arranged an emergency Unconference for today instead. I decided – with only five minutes of prep (this is an Unconference…) – to do a session on “ways to monetize virtual worlds”.
I [...]
A little over 2 years ago, a new startup went into private alpha. Here’s one (of many) announcements about it:
On 9/18/06, Jim Greer wrote:
>
> Hi all -
>
> I want to announce my soon-to-launch Flash game startup to this list – I’m
> looking for game developers and players. The site takes games uploaded by
> indie [...]
