Which means you’ll now have up to a 30 minute delay seeing feed updates.
Month: August 2008
My last post (where a conference organizer had explained that they wanted me to speak not because of my speaking ability but because of the name of the company I worked for) has drawn some really interesting feedback both from conference organizers and from conference speakers. Some of it’s been in email conversations, but you can see some good stuff in the comments to the blog post.
It’s touched on several things that I’d really like to see improved about games-industry conferences. Here’s my personal list of high-level changes I’d like to see, with a detailed explanation of each:
A conference organizer for Virtual Worlds Forum Europe approached me a few months ago asking if I’d speak at their conference this autumn, saying they’d specifically been recommended me as a speaker. I was a little cautious because the recommendations they described seemed to be for things I haven’t spoken about in a long time, but they had suggested some interesting topics and the conference was close by so I thought it would be fun and interesting to do (and not too disruptive). So I said yes.
I recently needed a reference-list of world-wide MMO publishers … and I couldn’t find anyone who was maintaining a list of them. So here’s one I put together, and hopefully next time someone needs a list they have a chance of finding one. I’ll also include approx how many MMO games they’ve published, which country they’re based in, and … whether they publish 3rd-party games (i.e. if you’re a developer, is it worth talking to them about a publishing contract?)
So, spurred by the recent updates to Moshi Monsters (http://moshimonsters.com), I though I’d take a look at the product overall.
Moshi Monsters has launched two major updates recently, one cosmetic (allowing your monster to buy “clothes”), and one functional (changes to the Daily Puzzles computer game, which is the core of the MM product for now, since it’s practically the only way to gain money to spend, and is required to level-up and purchase a wider range of items and clothing.
I used to work at Mind Candy a few years ago, and was one of a couple of people who worked on an experimental casual game that bore a huge similarity to the Daily Puzzle section of Moshi Monster (even had the same name :)). My interest to see how MindCandy would develop that idea over time, and where it might end up, was one of my initial drivers to keep playing Moshi Monsters in the early days. With the recent updates, I thought it would be interesting to do a quick review of how it works now, and to offer my own guesses at some of the motivations based on the first (unsuccessful!) attempt at Daily Puzzles.
PlayGen has just launched an interesting new game – FloodSim – which is quick to try and quite fun, but that’s not what this post is about.
This post is about detailed metrics on who’s playing, what they’re doing in game, and *what they think about it*.
Believers are wonderful people. I hire less talented believers over talented heretics every time. Three-star ability with five-star drive is how you want it. The other way around leads you to hell.
I missed the talk, but Sulka told me about it afterwards. I’ve just seen that Scott’s commented on this too, and a lot of people are complaining that this is a Bad Thing. The thing is, how many people have actually tried it?