Yesterday’s announcements of layoffs at NCsoft (both in USA and Europe) caught many people by surprise, judging from the number of emails and conversations I’ve had where people have brought it up. I think it’s interesting to try to understand why this is happening, and given Scott’s point that this […]
massively multiplayer
56 posts
In the online games industry, if we keep quiet about the causes, the hopes, the fears, the successes, and the failures of the best part of $100million burnt on a single project, then what hope is there for us to avoid making the same mistakes again?
In the best tradition of ignoring 100 years of the Scientific Method and the concept of a Control Group, the FCC Commissioner has been talking about American students dropping out because of computer games, MMOs especially.
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 […]
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 […]
…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 […]
(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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
(from Nic Brisbourne’s blog) NB: I can’t actually try it, of course – Microsoft is still subscribing to the classic anti-Web 2.0 ideal of making it “zero information from our walled-garden until you pass a detailed user-verification process; visitors will be shot; guests are not welcome here”. The interesting piece […]
Someone asked me: How many people play online games globally in 2008? A simple answer …and with a quick mental calculation I estimated 1 billion *unique registered accounts*. (I’ve been tracking and calculating this stuff a lot recently). That wasn’t good enough – they wanted something to put in a […]
On this site I have a rather subtly-hidden Blog Roll. When I started blogging, the site had less on it, and the roll was easy to find – and short. Now it’s not. And it’s long. And each link on there has been carefully considered. There’s some gems in there […]
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 […]
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 […]
(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, […]
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 […]
From the latest newsletter, at the bottom (after the big graphics and announcement about “moshlings” – aka mini-moshi-monsters (my – this is getting a bit infinitely recursive, isn’t it? Now your child’s pet has a pet :). I’m still trying to attract an interesting Moshling (the minigame to get them […]
Jussi posted an excellent writeup of how there’s been over $350 million invested in social games etc worldwide, and commented that he the European side wasn’t really included in his sources. But I’ve been tracking the European side for a while, and since I’m preparing a new MMO / Education […]
This is a quick review of free tools for web analytics / stats-analysis / weblog analysis. I’ll follow up with some more detailed posts about non-web tracking. Follow-up posts will extend this into game development, but this post is purely about web stuff.
With some WordPress-Fu, I’ve added a page that’s a category and auto-includes links with custom meta-information. Or, in other words, there’s now a page where I can effortlessly post all my various bookmarked links to do with MMO development – and add my own commentary to each link – which […]