While upgrading Unity, I noticed the current download page is a great example of how it SHOULD be done: Unity 4 has some … issues … with backwards compatibility – but at least they made the “need an older version?” link prominent. And how many old versions can you download? […]
marketing
14 posts
(background: after 8 years as one of the world’s mid-tier MMO games, City of Heroes (+ City of Villains) is being shut down. The community banded together to ask if they could take over running the world that meant so much to them; NCsoft (the publisher, and a company I […]
There’s a growing problem right now with Facebook Connect: it can silently log you in to websites that you *don’t want* to share your private data with. I saw a funny example last month where a porn website had integrated Facebook Connect … so when you visit the site, one […]
(…i.e. “many PR agencies know nothing about social media”) This miserable story of a crappy PR agency working for Nokia just came to light. I’d give it even odds whether the problem was one incompetent employee, or an overall incompetent agency. Read the blog post (and the comments – after […]
If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ll have read my thoughts on the Science part of Marketing, and how much money this makes you. As I explained recently to an Accountant, we don’t have a “business plan” for my current company, we only have a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet […]
18 months ago, Scott and I described our perspectives on the fall of Tabula Rasa. I said that if you’re going to spend $100m on an MMO, you’d better be aware of MMO history and not repeat those mistakes. It would seem that Real Time Worlds wasn’t listening – coincidentally, […]
Mythic Entertainment – End of Subscription (subtitle: EA/Mythic forces themselves into commercial failure) 8 months ago, I tried to play Warhammer Online. Tried, and failed, because EA Mythic told me – in no uncertain terms – that it was completely impossible for me to play. This was after releasing press […]
I got this in my inbox a few days ago, and it’s been forwarded to me by a few people since: (NB: the fact that you still have to login MERELY TO READ THE DAMN FAQ linked from the PR statement is IMHO symptomatic of some of MP’s problems :( […]
I’ll do a follow-up post in a minute with the anecdote that lead me to this. But here’s the general opinion/analysis first. Project history (skip if you know all about Warhammer Online and Mythic already) Huge project (cost in excess of $50 million to develop), based on a 20-year-old IP […]
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been looking at a lot of independent developers’ websites. It’s quite surprising how many of them go out of their way to make their site unusable – clearly thinking that they’re achieving the opposite. But also, today, Wikipedia started actively doing a very minor […]
Reviewing video games is hard. In some ways, it’s an impossible mission: a reviewer has too many conflicting interests: please the publishers or else be denied access to the materials they seek to review please their editor or else don’t get paid; but the editor’s primary source of capital is […]
Sulka Haro, Sulake Summary The intersection between social and gaming, and where that should be going, instead of where lots of people are obsessing about taking it. (I have more to add here later, but I’ve got to run to a meeting; will update the post when I have time)
Maxis (part of EA) has a great competition up right now – use the public APIs for the Spore creature / user account databases to make “an interesting widget or app”. I had a quick look at the API’s – they’ve got the right idea technically (use REST, provide PHP […]
I’m sitting in the Departures Lounge at Helsinki airport, which now has end to end free wifi (I can see 3 or 4 different wifi stations here, on two channels). It’s the “open a web browser window first and hit a button to say “yes, I agree to your terms […]