A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.
I wonder what the stats are for Flash games, for indie games, for ads on streaming videos or on YouTube?
Movement happened today on the “built-in 3d support for the web” front as a whole bunch of folks announced support for the Khronos standard, which basically puts OpenGL with Javascript bindings in an HTML5 canvas.
PuzzleBloom. Made in Unity, looks like. Very nice.
Jeff Ward has a great article on Gamasutra about the viability of the indie scene these days, which ties right back into the recent blog post on new bosses and old bosses. He analyzes iPhone, XBLA, and PC markets, as well as the alternative funding model of getting investors in advance for a title.
Niels Clark dropped by in the comment thread on the WoW addiction therapy guild to mention that Jim Rossignol has a detailed review of his new book Game Addiction: The Experience and the Effects.
What this means is that Game Addiction is damning of “grind” heavy games. At times, it seems like Clark is betraying his “not anti-games” by painting a deliberately bleak pictures of traditional MMOs. He’s quick to nod towards the complexity of these clever multiplayer constructs, and the positive side-effects of social gaming, but I couldn’t help feeling that grind-based games are beginning to become their own worst enemies when subjected to this kind of scrutiny. It seems like an impossible task to come away with a truly positive picture of their game model, and the way we gamers behave when playing them. They are not games that encourage balance in our lives.
via Rock, Paper, Shotgun: “Don’t push me because I’m close to the…” » Book: Game Addiction.
The discussion thread, needless to say, gets kind of contentious. Sounds worth picking up though!
