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.
$35m in profit next year, on $65m in revenue. Yes, that’s a 50% profit margin. 700,000 paying people and 12m registered.
The WSJ says the purchase price is $350 million in cash. Disney could pay up to another $350 million if certain performance targets are reached over the next couple of years, until 2009.
Virtual Worlds News: VirtualWorldsNews Interview: Hui Xu, HiPiHi Founder and CEO
Of particular interest: the idea that HiPiHi plans to work to create standards for virtual worlds across the Web.
Oddly fascinating. Basically, a game of clicking on a hotspot and swiping the mouse.
But the storyline makes a big difference, and the basic metaphor of slap, dodge, and counterslap makes for something that feels different and fresh.
In short, you play a woman born to low station who married into a rich and powerful family. Then her husband died the next day. But as the widow of the eldest son, you are trying to take ownership of the house over two sisters and the mother. Class struggle, lost love, a symbolic rose, an evil matriarch… it’s all very Gothic. 🙂
I have thoughts on Comic-Con as well, but have some errands to run over lunch, so… those are for later. 🙂
I chatted for a while with the folks at Kingdom of Loathing while at Comic-Con. These guys are determinedly indie: they sell merchandise, but they do it just about at cost. For income, they mostly rely on donations for the premium items, but they don’t engage in what most of the industry would call a real microtransaction business.
And it’s working for them, at least at this scale. Some stats, slightly lower than usual because of the usual summer doldrums:
