• New crossgender play stats

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 22 Comments

    Majority of women, men swap gender in MMOs – Joystiq

    A recent study called Gender Swapping and Socialising in Cyberspace revealed that 70 percent of women and 54 percent of men swap their genders when playing online games.

    This is interesting because it doesn’t even remotely match the statistics from older worlds, where gender-swapping was done mostly by males — and to a far lesser degree.  Interesting to speculate on why it might be different now. I presume that the study is based on WoW…

  • The Top 20 PC Games of January

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 43 Comments

    IGN: The Top 20 Best Selling PC Games of January
    US, February 28, 2008

    1. World Of Warcraft – online MMO that is ruling the world
    2. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – online shooter
    3. World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest – oh look, another WoW SKU
    4. World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade – and another…
    5. The Sims 2 Deluxe – casual, and old
    6. Diner Dash – casual, and old
    7. 15000 Games – bargain bin filler
    8. The Sim City 4 Deluxe – casual, and beyond old
    9. The Sims 2 Teen Style Stuff – expansion to casual old stuff
    10. Crysis – online shooter charting, but not actually selling much
    11. The Sims 2 Bon Voyage – oh look, more
    12. Half Life 2: Episode 2 The Orange Box – Steam, where is thy sting?
    13. Battlefield 2 – online shooter, again! BTW, did you see their web-embedding announcement?
    14. Warcraft III Battle Chest – Eeep. I need something stronger than “ancient.”
    15. Pirates Of The Burning Sea – yep, another MMO. Not making enough of a dent though. 🙁
    16. Rock Tour Tycoon – casual, and I bet you never heard of this game anyway
    17. Sim City 5: Societies – gasp! A new game!
    18. The Sims 2 Seasons – another expansion…
    19. Age Of Empires III – this game came out in September of 2005.
    20. Age Of Empires III: Asian Dynasties – …but the expansion is only from late ’07

    Why post this?

    Read More “The Top 20 PC Games of January”

  • PC, Flash, and bits on a disc

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 33 Comments

    At the Luminaries Lunch, I made the comment that PC gaming at retail is in dire straits. This is not a particularly controversial comment in the industry — everybody at the table agreed, though Chris Taylor went further, saying  “PC gaming as we know it is dead.” Sales for PC titles at retail are not very good, and have been trending downwards for a long time. The saving grace is WoW, and other MMORPGs — but even WoW is moving towards forms of digital distribution. I also made the comment that Flash seemed to me to be the next console.

    Of course, this led to a massive pile of commentary and articles on the web, including many many negative comments in the discussion threads, which I will attempt to answer here:

    Read More “PC, Flash, and bits on a disc”