• GDC10: Justin Hall, Fate of a Social Games Company

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 23 Comments

    The story of what happened to PMOG.

    Justin Hall, “Fate of a Small Social Games Studio”

    Justin started writing online 1994, did game journalism until 1998-2004, then USC Interactive Media Division 2004-2007, whih led to GameLayers Inc.

    In mid 2006 saw ppl playing WoW, this sounds great but we are already on computers all day working, why jump back on to play? Could you take the elements of Wow and put them on top of everyday computer life, and get points, levels, etc?

    prototype in May 2006, putting D&D stats on top of popular websites, like flickr and google, get str by surfing LA Times, lower Con by surfing Kotaku. Got funded for 10,000 pounds by the BBC. Use this to teach web literacy! But you need British programmers. So we got a British prototyper and built pmog. A toolbar that sat in an iframe and followed you around the web, classified you based on sites visited, let you level up.

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  • GDC10: Sporadic Play

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 18 Comments

    Liveblog of talk on Sporadic Play, Bryan Cash & Jeremy Gibson

    Sporadic play describes a game where mechanics intentionally limit how often a player interacts with a persistent game world. We’ll talk about history with it, why it is a good thing, design concepts, and a bit about the future.

    HISTORY… IN REVERSE

    Most obvious place to start — Facebook. Look at the top 20 games here. Farmville is #1 and uses sporadic play. Mafia Wars, Petville, YoVille, 16 of the top 20 are sporadic play games. If you add up the MAU, you get 332m people, which is kinda BS, but just in the top 20.

    It has also been around in console and traditional PC games. Animal Crossing, a game where as time went on in real life, events like Christmas happened in the game too. Seasons, real time, limiting what you can do based on the real time of the real. Another one was Kingdom of Loathing in 2002, a web game, limited number of things you can do based on action points.

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  • GDC10: Justin Smith, State of Social Games

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments

    Justin Smith, Inside Social Games

    Explosive growth. Graph shows doubling every year.
    2009: 490m revenues
    2010: 835m

    Virtual goods in Asia 5bn in 2008, 7bn in 2009,
    In the US, 1bn in 2009.

    Three big players in US:

    1. Zynga, 700-900 employees, a few 100m in revenue, growth 50-70%. 3x more DAU than #2.

    2. Playfish, 250+ employees, 75m in revenue, purchased by EA in 11/09

    3. Playdom, 300+ employees, 50m in revenue, #1 on MySpace

    Other players:
    Crowdstar, quick rise to #2 based on DAU
    RockYou, largest ad network on FB
    Slide, was #1 for a long time by MAU (SuperPoke, etc), but not with games. Shifted to virtual goods model.

    Interesting trend: a lot of interest from abroad, esp China. Developers who have been successful elsewhere porting apps to FB. FB is blocked in China. Rekoo (Animal Paradise, Sunshine Ranch), Elex (Happy Harvest), Five Minutes (Happy Farm), wooga (Brain Buddies), and 6waves, which follows more of a publisher model.

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  • There.com is closing

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 25 Comments

    Sad news. There.com has some of the best social interaction design of any virtual world. Be sure to check it out while you can so that its many design innovations are not forgotten.

    But, at the end of the day, we can’t cure the recession, and at some point we have to stop writing checks to keep the world open. There’s nothing more we would like to avoid this, but There is a business, and a business that can’t support itself doesn’t work. Before the recession hit, we were incredibly confident and all indicators were “directionally correct” and we had every reason to believe growth would continue. But, as many of you know personally, the downturn has been prolonged and severe, and ultimately pervasive.

    We’re very sorry to announce that There.com will be closing to the public at 11:59 PM on March 9th, 2010.

    via There – There.

  • Are virtual worlds over?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 88 Comments

    Dan Terdiman at CNet engages in some handwringing over the fact that kids worlds and social games are taking over the hype that used to belong to virtual worlds.

    But to someone who cut his virtual world teeth on more immersive, 3D environments like There and Second Life, these never-ending announcements of new companies trying to jump on the social gaming bandwagon have left me with one nagging question: Where is the innovation?

    The innovation lies in making something that matters to ordinary people.

    Now, I am a virtual world person, obviously. I don’t see much distinction between the game worlds and the non-game ones like Second Life. I have been working with them since the text muds, for over 15 years, which doesn’t exactly put me in the true old dino category where Richard Bartle and Randy Farmer reside, but I think it is fair to say that I have been closely identified with the space for a long long time now.

    And I think that they aren’t over, but the form that they have taken is.

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