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The Sunday Song: Polliwog Sans Warts
Maybe someday the Polliwog will grow up to be a frog prince, but for now it’s still mostly a jam. This version is, I think, less of a trainwreck than the last one. 🙂 The piano’s gone, but it’s all still at 200bpm!
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A la carting games
At work, our biz dev guy forwarded around this highly interesting article about the future of paid video content on the Net: The Ala Carting of Video on the Net – Will it lead to disaster?
He commented that this had relevance for games — something about which I agree completely. I strongly suggest reading the full article, but here’s a brief sampling (which I gather is quoting a report from Bernstein Research):
On the web, early evidence suggests that consumers will tune out – click away – if they are forced to watch more than 30 seconds or so of advertising up front, and maybe another 90 seconds of advertising over the next thirty minutes. Hulu.com, for example, which has already been lionized by many as the future of TV, serves two minutes of advertising for every 22 minutes of programming(i.e. the programming duration of a typical half hour show from television). Assuming identical CPMs for web video and TV, and after accounting for lost affiliate fees, a 30 minute program on the web with two minutes of advertising yields approximately 1/8th as much revenue per viewer.
Are content producers prepared to reduce production costs…by 88%?
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Club Penguin adds 1000 words a day to their filter
MMO Week: Industry has been irresponsible with kids // News // GamesIndustry.biz
Merrifield also thinks that there is an over-reliance on technology that ignores the human element, which is why they’ve decided to devote two-thirds of the company’s staff to positions such as safety moderators and customer service.
“We know the limits of technology, even though I would put our filtering software up against anybody’s, especially because of that human element – we’re adding 500 to 1000 words every day to the filters, simply because of slang that works its way into the language.
Jeez, I know professional writers who rack up less word count than that in a day.
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The five biggest subscription worlds?
Edit: In North America!
NPD has a new report out, where they are starting to track subscriptions. As part of it, they list these as the top five subscription worlds:
1.) World of Warcraft
2.) RuneScape
3.) Lord of the Rings Online
4.) Final Fantasy XI
5.) City of Heroes