Game talk

This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.

  • The market glut

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 19 Comments

    Nielsen is saying that Club Penguin is stalling out — not much, just a -7% growth year on year from last April to this April.

    Of course, with the quantity of kids’ worlds coming into the market now, this is not really surprising, is it? I mean, I was at the grocery store this weekend, and there was a rack of Beanie Babies 2.0 with giant “play online!” tags hanging on them. It may be that this is the death of “Web 2.0,” when it gets co-opted for Beanie Babies.

    At left here is the rack of game cards available at Target — snapped this weekend, and strongly reminiscent, finally, of similar shots I have taken in Korea, Japan, and China. For years, there was no such rack in the US. Then it was just a couple of cards, and only at some checkouts. Now it gets a rack right between the TV box sets and the top pop albums (you can see REM’s latest CD there, abandoned on the top shelf).

    Besides the cards you maybe expect to see, like Club Penguin, WoW, and Zwinky, there’s also a large stack of ’em for gPotato games (Flyff, Shot Online, etc) And Acclaim, which make their living by bringing over games from Korea. There’s WildTangent cards, and the Gaia cards are almost sold out. The diversity is interesting, as is the lack of cards for most of the core gamer MMORPGs. The strong presence of the often-marginalized Korean games is telling.

    Meanwhile, I hear that Age of Conan has something like 700,000 units in the pipe for day one, which is either a business blunder or a sign of high pre-orders and pent-up demand. WoW players looking for something new to sink their teeth into?

    We’re starting to see the fragmentation that can come from having so many offerings on the market. How many kids’ worlds can actually survive?

    I actually think the answer is “just about all of them.” If online continues to chew through the gaming market, this rack could be the size of a Gamestop someday — one stack of cards per game, in a world where all the games try to drive alternate revenue streams regardless of platform.

  • Flash makes its move

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 7 Comments

    This happened days ago, and I don’t know how I missed it. It’s the Open Screen Project, which boils down to Adobe making a big move with Flash.

    What did they do, and what does it mean?

    1. The file formats will be open. Anyone can write their own player on any device, for free.
    2. Their player is free too, to integrate wherever.
    3. The protocols are open too.

    Here’s a few ways to think about this:

    Read More “Flash makes its move”

  • Is Call of Duty 4 an MMO?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 18 Comments

    Rob Fahey has an editorial up on Eurogamer called “Genetically Modified Gaming” which makes the case that Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is lifting the key elements of an MMO, and is in fact the most important MMO release of the year.

    This definitely echoes things I have said in the past about the ways in which online gaming is taking over single-player gaming. After all, the CoD series has always been about strong single-player narrative despite its multiplayer component. With the latest installment, there’s lots of MMOish things like persistent character advancement snuck in there.

    On the other hand, I think it is worth asking if this is really what we want:

    Player retention and the science of addiction is being expanded upon in innovative, groundbreaking ways

    Put that baldly, it’s rather disturbing. I don’t want my games to be about the science of addiction! There are a lot of other qualities brought to the table by virtual worlds, and to my mind, it’s these other qualities that are better.