I work at a company where managing and directing a subset of the global core-tech is part of my day-to-day job, and I’ve been trying to find good, positive ways forwards. After a year in this role, I’m looking back and wondering whether it’s working for us, and where it’s […]
games industry
http://www.mmogchart.com/charts/ At long last, the new version of my charts and analysis is now online! I don’t have numbers for every game, but there are quite a few updates, most notably to World of Warcraft, RuneScape, Dofus, Tibia, and NCSoft’s various titles. Also included are preliminary numbers for Vanguard: Saga […]
The following are hand-picked sections from the syllabus of the 3-year Cambridge University CS course. These are just syllabus, i.e. describing what you need to learn / teach yourself.
“In reality, one size has never fit all, but when players didn’t have so many choices, they had to put up with it. Now they don’t. No longer can publishers rely on retailing strategies designed to make money by forcing players to buy what the publishers want them to buy, […]
I’m not happy with the direction games industry conferences are going in; I specialize in online games, and I’ve worked at the forefront of monetizing online entertainment, I’ve actually *made money* out of Web 2.0 – so I have real expertise in making use of the internet – and I […]
I go to GDC every year, and also to 2-3 other conferences, but apart from GDC I vary which exact ones from year to year. These days, I’m a speaker at nearly every conference I go to, and I’ve never yet been paid for speaking, so it’s fair to say […]
http://www.own-it.org/events/details/?eventId=227 Speaking at this panel session tonight. Should be interesting. I get to be the bad guy, the one saying that online businesses in other people’s virtual worlds are morally corrupt, and that all Gold Farmers should be hung, drawn, and quartered, and that the world will end, fire and […]
How do you create a new game studio from scratch? The topic came up recently when someone asked me what I’d do if I had the responsibility to create a new dev studio – what would I do, how would I go about it, etc? I’ve founded a couple of […]
(ARG as in Alternate Reality Game, of course…) http://www.letschangethegame.org/ A new ARG project from Adrian and Dan, in aid of Cancer Research UK. Great to hear they’ve got this off the ground, it looks like it’s going to be fantastic. But it could also become the biggest event in helping […]
The informal meetup for Web 2.0 and Games at AGDC turned out a lot more popular than I’d expected. Looks like we need to make this an official thing next time:
Inteviewed for RPG Vault’s latest Online Worlds Roundtable – http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/817/817490p3.html “Web 2.0 businesses compete directly with the games industry on multiple levels, and anyone who doesn’t spot that and act accordingly will suffer. If your game doesn’t embrace – or deliberately and carefully reject – Web 2.0, you’ll that your […]
I’m talking at Austin GDC on “Caching for Web 2.0”, and I’ll be having a small dig at the games industry and the obsession some people have with “game 1.0/2.0/3.0” on the side, but I’d really like to meet up with anyone interested in how best we can capitalize on […]
An article I wrote for Gamasutra’s Game Career Guide: Part 1 – What to study Part 2 – Practice and Experience …hopefully this will be useful to some of the many people interested in network programming but not sure where to start. Also, you might want to have a look […]
I’ve been in the games industry for some years now, and one of the things I find slightly annoying is that there’s very little discussion of “career progression”, and that what little there is typically focusses on “how to get your first job in the industry”. Career Charts Many years […]