There’s tonnes of blogs out there, so I only talk about the bits that other people have missed, or were too polite or inexperienced to cover. Often that means I’m the one pointing out the flaws (most people don’t want to write bad things. Screw that; ignoring the bad points […]
games publishing
23 posts
Six months ago I tweeted a handful of obvious ways that you could make the Unity Asset Store greatly more profitable. One of the Unity folk reached out to me, claimed that Unity was highly invested in improving this and asked for specific suggestions. So I wrote longer, detailed versions […]
Background Every Saturday, thousands of indie / hobbyist game developers publish screenshots of their in-progress games. Unlike most forms of marketing, this is: honest / genuinely representative (it’s actual content) interesting (show’s the dev’s intentions) exciting (pictures of games are usually more fun than words) i.e. … it’s an amazing […]
I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but it’s come up again on Reddit, so here’s my thoughts… IANAL, but … I have been offered more than 100 NDA’s, both as an individual and working in large companies (including a games publisher, and including a funding team). I have signed […]
In the past, I’ve found Thomas’s Kickstarter analysis for game-projects very useful. Today I found something that complements them: an excellent visualization of Kickstarter projects. It takes a little thought to understand how to use it, so here’s some ultra-quick example analysis…
A bunch of indie game devs (including various friends of mine) are doing an AMA right now on Reddit. Go have a look (and ask some questions) if interested. I found the answers this question a bit depressing though, given that the audience has increased 100-fold in the last 2 […]
Unity’s QA dept needs a smack up-side the head. If you get this bug, you’re a bit screwed – the only “fix” is to go into system settings and wipe Unity’s crud. Error message: type == kMetaAssetType && pathName.find (“library/metadata”) != 0 Thanks, Unity, that’s very human-readable and helpful. Not. […]
(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 […]
35 years of game-consoles, and their original retail price, adjusted for inflation: i.e. a (reasonably) direct comparison of how expensive they were at the time they were launched. Some quick observations: NeoGeo and 3DO/Jaguar were insanely expensive – and, of course, sold very poorly and went bye-bye. Until the Wii […]
Jon just published an interesting letter about the current state of cert processes for game consoles / platforms. There are some real problems with certification today. Unfortunately, Jon’s post doesn’t really touch upon them, and seems to go instead after the IMHO untrue and unhelpful claim that iOS is better […]
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 […]
Wow, Pearson has some strange ideas about commerce! To buy this popular textbook as an ebook, you have two choices, both conveniently linked from the front page of the author’s website: Go to Amazon. Buy it, in any country / price you want. Get it immediately. (unless this is your […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
…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 […]
There were a few games that came up in the 10 games you should have played session at GameCamp which I’d never heard of / played. One of these was SpaceChem – sounded interesting (the 5-second description was something like “great game which teaches you how to do real Chemistry”). […]
If you’re an MMO designer, and you *still* don’t grok the griefer-mindset, or you somehow hope/believe that “one day, there will be no griefers”, then maybe this RPS interview with the always-fun-to-watch Goonswarm will help you: MT: We are griefers. If nothing is going to happen then we’re going to […]
This list is WRONG (and it’s on the Internet) …and here’s your chance to challenge it. This was written in a frantic half-hour with 30-odd people with many different ideas and suggestions. My role was to shepherd the opinions towards a concrete list of 10. There *was* a specific agenda/aim […]