I missed OGDC, but Brandon Reinhart has write-ups.

Among the tidbits in there is a wealth of great info about Asian development and business practices in the gaming world.

He provided a case study of the power of pushing a standard game in Korea into the online market. EA was selling FIFA soccor in Korea for several years as an off the shelf boxed product…the kind of thing you’d pick up at Gamestop. Throughout the title’s pre-online lifespan, it garnered an estimated 2 million exposures…90% of which were piracy. Yo fucking ho ho ho. A mere $15 million in revenue…probably making back a fraction if any of the marketing and localization costs for the FIFA titles.

EA contracted Neowiz to adapt the game into “FIFA Online.” This was apparently something like a six month development process. Since launch, FIFA Online has had 40 million exposures with no piracy (you can’t pirate it in the traditional sense…it isn’t a boxed product). It has generated $100 million in a very short amount of time. And it’s free to play!!! You might think monetizing soccer would be hard, but Neowiz is providing all sorts of customizations options for your characters to sell you as you play.

Sounds pretty much like “single-player gaming is doomed” huh? Interesting to contrast this with the negative reaction that Hellgate:London is getting in some quarters with its pricing model.

So my friends over at Slam Games (the same folks who are doing research into game notation) just launched their new site Joyboost, and specifically, their game Spinword, which I have watched evolve from prototype to finished product.

And in celebration, they gave me a discount code to share with all of you who read the blog!

Read More “Spinword: discount for Raph readers”

Reuters/Second Life » UK panel urges real-life treatment for virtual cash

He recommended treating virtual currencies like the Linden dollar as “real money”, including a requirement for virtual world operators like Linden Lab to report suspicious financial transactions, just as for real-world banks and financial institutions.

Well, some of us have been warning of this for a long time. The article concludes with a quote about how once the virtual worlds are set up in Belize or the like, it will all get much messier…

Interesting article on the Guardian about a patent filing from Google based around watching how you play, what you chat about, how you tend to communicate, etc, then building psych profiles of you in order to better target ads. In addition, there’s mention of targeting ads based on game save state — crash a car in a racing game, then have a car pitch made to you with stuff like “this one has better handling!”

I suppose it’s inevitable — given that ads companies already aggressively mine psychographic data from us, extending that into gamespace seems like a natural next step. And of course, virtual worlds in particular are essentially panopticons. And yet, the implications are troubling.

Once Upon A Time, there were many sites dedicated to sharing photos, and videos, and for listening to music. But there was a war on, so the military blocked access to those sites because the traffic was huge, and soldiers kept leaking info they weren’t supposed to, and so on.

But soldiers, being trained to be smart and clever about working around limitations, found that for every Photobucket, there was a Flickr, and for every Pandora there was a private podcast, and so on.

So soon the military started blocking more sites, and asking the sites to help block. Some sites were patriotic and did so. Other sites were patriotic and decided not to do so. Other sites were in other countries altogether. Read More “A brief SF tale”