Autumn 2012: NCsoft just cancelled City of Heroes – a game that back in 2009 (when this post was written) was doing fine (although nothing stellar; it was a mid-tier MMO). If you’re interested in my thoughts on that, I’ve written a 2012 followup on the CoH situation in particular. […]
web 2.0
83 posts
The problem It’s a great piece of openness to put your bug lists in the public domain. It makes it easier for your customers and partners to make decisions that save you time because they can see what’s coming and when (and save you money in reduced support requests). It […]
Wifi and internet at all is a priviledge – but Free Wifi is something that in our modern society, and the society we’re set to become, needs to be treated as a right. When I started writing this, I was looking at the benefits we have yet to see (ubiquitous […]
Adam Martin, (me!) Summary I was giving this talk, so … no live writeup this time :). The slides are up on slideshare here: http://www.slideshare.net/guest38ac74/how-to-sell-social-networking-to-your-boss-and-publisher-1215019 NB: I lost my voice the morning of the talk, and panicked, and rewrote the slides to include everything in words in case I couldn’t […]
I just received an “invite” to a pay-for event in London about “smartphone development”: an evening in a bar with a couple of speakers and some networking. So … you can go and listen to an iPhone developer, an ex EA person, and an ex Motorola person, and pay for […]
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 […]
Disappointing No spam filter (there is one, allegedly, but it’s invisible, non-configurable (!), and missing obvious spam words) (there are comments on the official forums from 3 years ago saying “we need some basic anti-spam tools” and the author replying with “we’re working on it”) Annoying No spam controls for […]
Mark Cuban’s blog is an odd one; I really can’t remember why I started reading it (presumably linked by a VC blogger would be my guess), and yet even though I read very few blogs I’ve stuck with his. It’s not like the standard SiValley other investor/commentator blogs. It’s a […]
I can no longer develop iPhone Apps. I am on my eighth attempt to download the 1.75Gb 2.2.1 SDK – without which, XCode refuses to even talk to my iPhone any more, because I allowed the iPhone to upgrade. EDIT: I have it! I HAVE IT! YES! NO MORE PRAYING […]
PHP is weak, crappy, and encourages people to write terrible code. But … if you know what you’re doing, all of those might actually be really really good things. (by the way, if you haven’t already, you should read Eric Ries thoughts on PHP…) “Best Practices” are one of the […]
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 […]
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 […]
(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 […]
Inspired by Andrew Chen (whose question I’ve copied exactly :)), here’s a poll to find out what YOU, thre readers of this blog, would like to see more of. (tick all that apply; if you tick the “something else” option, please comment on this post and say what’s missing) [poll […]
(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 […]
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 ;)). […]
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 […]
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 […]