I’ve got a real challenge for you. Write a poem on Areae without divulging any secrets, directly at least.
Well, more of a poem about what I spent some time thinking about at work last week…
Network Optimization
Packet size, packet size, info little lump,
This coded, that coded, TCP’ed and dumped.
Piling into buffers, stacking up the K,
Header bettered, ack lettered, MD5ed in clumps.
Read More “The Sunday Poem: Network Optimization”
I will be a panelist at When Worlds Collide, an event put on by IGDA San Diego and attached to the Sandbox Symposium which is part of SIGGRAPH. (I think I have all those connections right). The topic is pretty interesting:
Steve Crane, EVP Product Development (Midway)
Raph Koster, President (Areae)
John Baez, President (The Behemoth)
…and another panelist to be announced.With innovations in technology and business, video games (like mobile phones) are becoming smaller and more distributed; at the same time, video games are also becoming bigger and more integrated. Mammoth productions from heavyweight studios supported by hordes of A-list developers and “garage” games developed on shoestring budgets by independent and comparatively unknown developers are now pit against each other in competition for leading positions in the same league.
While worldwide sales of video games are expected to reach $13 billion by 2012, the once-homogenous market for video games has expanded to comprise serious, casual, and mobile games in addition to traditional forms of interactive entertainment. In this panel, leaders and pioneers will meet to share their thoughts on the challenges of diverging markets for video games. As game developers and business executives from both sides of the “big versus small” divide, each panelist brings a unique perspective to the discussion.
Anyway, it’s on the 4th, and there’s pretty limited space, so if you’re in town and interested, head on over to the website.
It was always a matter of time. Here’s the official word.
Investors look for the “Holy Grail” of casual gaming is an interesting article over at Ars Technica, about a talk at the Casual Games Association’s conference last week, given by a managing director at an investment bank. Basically, he outlines the key things that investors are looking for in the space:
Why the interest? Because it looks like these are games that draw recurring revenue from mass audiences, as opposed to drawing recurring revenue from hardcore audiences or no revenue from mass audiences. And costs are low. He specifically says that the Holy Grail is not World of Warcraft, because it’s too small and based on subscriptions.
Heydon’s slides are available here (PDF). One slide claims that in 2007 there were over $135m raised for this sort of project, and he lists some of the ones that raised the most money. Even scarier, he projects almost a half a billion dollars in acquisitions happening in 2007. Yikes.
So what’s the Holy Grail in his opinion?
MySpace + YouTube + Maple Story + Skype + Habbo Hotel = 100 million users.
Clickable Culture notes a new study about how young people use technology which has a number of interesting observations, but this one stood out to me:
Technology enhances, rather than replaces in-person interaction.
I have been thinking a lot lately about my experiences with various social networking services — lately, Facebook. There’s a ton of heat around Facebook right now, with lots of companies landing major funding to build applets to live on top of Facebook; it’s basically the darling of the Valley right now.
