Tim Sweeney, Epic Games (owners of Unreal Engine, and deelopers of AAA games on 360/PS3/iOS): “The most profitable game we’ve ever made, in terms of man years invested versus revenue, is actually Infinity Blade. It’s more profitable than Gears of War.” Touch Arcade has some terrible analysis (don’t listen to […]
games industry
175 posts
In the games industry – especially in the UK – big employers have spent the past 10 years claiming there is a “skills gap” – that not enough people are being “trained by universities” (which shows how stupid the speakers were; Universities don’t do training, and most never will – […]
To anyone in the games industry, this should be a cause for weeping and decrying the Godless universe: http://www.thechaosengine.com/forum/ (I’m guessing it’s just Network Solutions being typically crap and screwing-up the domain renewal)
How about this one: http://sainsburys.jobs/vacancy/details/35959/games-buyer-at-london A “buyer” for Sainsburys: you get to influence the titles stocked by one of the UK’s biggest retailers. I’ve never – ever! – met a games-buyer before, but I know quite a few buyers for more mainstream areas (clothing, fashion, etc), and so long as […]
I’ve played many hundreds – probably over a thousand – games on Kongregate alone, now. On top of all the thousands I’ve played on console, PC, flash, handheld, mobile, etc. I feel pretty confident in analysing game mechanics, and success/fail reasons for given game-designs, based off my extensive experience. I […]
Something like 90% of game developers NEVER get a royalty for their games, and almost as many never get a bonus. But for the handful that work on titles where the studio negotiated a good deal (modulo the Publisher’s legal team using legal chicanery to make all royalties work out […]
No link provided, but should be easy to find the studio email HR address: “Hi All, I’m looking for a QA person to join us at Zoe Mode. I need someone with experience as I need QA for multiple titles of different genres. A sense of rhythm will help. Please […]
TheChaosEngine – private forums hangout for games-industry professionals. There’s an epic thread on there where people post projects they / their team / their employer has published on iPhone. It’s currently 40 pages long, so I went through and pulled out the links to the iTunes pages for each game. […]
According to Sefton Hill: “You just think about quality developers like Bizarre Creations, Black Rock – people who are making really good games and going out of business. Those guys were so talented so how can that happen? Well, obviously, it wasn’t anything to do with operational mis-management, poor commercial […]
http://www.gamepitches.com/ (just discovered this, via TCE): The repository for video game pitches and design documents This site serves to be a free resource to game designers offering them the web’s largest single collection of game design documents and game pitches. It says “resource got game designers”, but … pitch documents […]
Today I was forwarded what looked like an interesting little event: “The Gamification of Everything”. I applied. Or … tried to. The process on all event websites today is: Type in your name Type in your email address Click “attend” 3 steps. This event has a process with … 15 […]
…or at least tries to, when Chris Lewis comes out with quotes like this: “you can be very confident we seek to maximise our own advantage to ensure the playing field is even, and certainly plays to our advantage” Wait, what? An “even playing field” is one which “plays to […]
TL;DR – notch reckons “it’s a scam” (I wouldn’t go that far – “scam” is a strong word, I reckon they’re just too naive/ignorant/foolish/arrogant to realise what a huge mistake they’re making) My gut feeling is: this would be a terrible investment. By comparison, the middleware companies that sell for […]
Any journalist who continues to not only re-hash the self-aggrandizing bull**** of greedy and abusive games-industry managers, but goes further and writes about these people and their behaviour in unquestioning, positive terms … is open-season for ridicule right now. We’ve had enough; developers are starting to get really pissed at […]
Over the past couple of years, there’s been much coverage within the games-industry press about the fall and fall of the UK games industry. Nicholas Lovell has done a particularly good job of tracking studio closures. Many of the big companies, and the trade associations, seem to have spent most […]
ATTENTION: all game marketers: don’t do this… Hi Adam, Although we do not know one another, I notice we share many contacts on LinkedIn.com (Karl Blanks, Ben Jesson, Jason Duke, Paul Billinghurst to name but a few I’ve had the pleasure of working with). Funny; I don’t recognize those names? […]
Another week, another expose of terrible working conditons in a game-development studio. I’m fed up. So … here’s a new site where I’ll post/track each public report of this stuff: http://ilovecrunch.co.uk (the name is sarcastic, obviously ;). co.uk because it’s less than half the price of a .com, and I’m […]
This letter to the IGDA, apparently defending Team Bondi’s alleged abuse of their game-developers, seems to me to be damning with faint praise – or just showing that the author is shockingly naive. e.g.: “I had two kids during the project, Team Bondi offered me each time one extra week […]
Seems a bit Freudian to me. According to Clint, Viking aggression wasn’t caused by eking out a bitter existence in freezing lands without enough farmland and food – a need to cull the local population, and take food from elsewhere to survive – but instead by the fact that all […]