Mar 172008
 

Big.

Online Games by the Hundreds, With Tie-Ins – New York Times

On Tuesday Nickelodeon is expected to announce the first of 600 original and exclusive games for its network of Web sites, as part of a $100 million investment in game development.“We don’t believe they have enough homework,” joked Cyma Zarghami, the president of the MTV Networks’ Nickelodeon Kids and Family group.

To some that joke is not funny, but frightening, of course. 😉

  6 Responses to “How big is the kids’ online thing going to be?”

  1. there are out there for them), but Nickelodeon’s stable does include Neopets and Nicktropolis, both of which are super-casual virtual worlds. Basically, online gaming for the youngster set is huge, andonly growing bigger. And while what they’re playing now isn’t too exciting (most of it is all clones of each other, with not much more social interaction than chatting between minigames), today’s AddictingGames.com players are the MMO players of tomorrow.

  2. game. Tapping into this desire, media companies are increasingly entering the marketplace for online games — called casual games — and treating them as new programming, not just online add-ons to their television properties.” Raph’s Website :How big is the kids’ online thing going to be?

  3. That’s about $170 000 per game, by my count.

    Dear Nickelodeon:

    i am sorry for saying your virtual world looks like ass, even though it does. Please give me $170 000 and i will build teh gamez for you with my company, which i have.

    Sincerely,

    Ryan Henson Creighton
    President, Untold Entertainment Inc.

  4. Dear Nickelodeon:

    Give Ryan Henson Creighton & Untold Entertainment Inc. $170,000 to produce real game.

    Blood and Thunder,
    Wolfgang Wozniak

  5. “To some that joke is not funny”

    It’s only funny to me because I realized my daughter didn’t have enough homework yesterday and I gave here some chores. hehehe

  6. Hundreds? I don’t see the point of this. I don’t think I’ve played that many games in my life time. The idea of just pushing out hundreds of games on a huge budget sounds over the top. It’s like there’s this concept here that I’m trying to solidify in my mind.

    I think I have it now. Right. This announcement would mean a very strange, expensive, and possibly revolutionary experiment?

    I think it’s interesting how a game like Halo can make hundreds of millions of dollars, which goes into who knows what. Then we have the Nickelodeon Website which can’t even maintain itself and undergoes design changes every now and then which are nothing but pure crap. We have flash developers, kids such as myself, who make games for nothing, some of which have been very impressive to me.

    Now we have hundreds of games, managed in some way or another, being pushed out with a $10 million budget.

    ^ – Knowing all this, it’s even more interesting to see how much trouble researchers have getting funding.

    Maybe I’m just angry that the casual/hobbyist gaming market is being stolen from me by people with money. Hobbyist doesn’t necessarily mean casual, of course, but I’ve been programming for years. The type of game I want to make tends to take months or years. I feel threatened by the much more powerful gaming immigrants invading my market 🙂

    Also, I actually give a damn about anyone who plays games, and wouldn’t go around making children’s games just to make money, but spend lots of time doing research to teach them. Back when I was in school, we had a great library of educational games. From Math Muncher to Brain Blaster. They incorporated casual elements with grade-based education. And they were fun.

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