Nintendo vs Apple and social gaming

 Posted by (Visited 11391 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Apr 082010
 

Reggie Fils-Aime of Nintendo thinks that Apple isn’t a viable profit platform for games. The picture for game developers on iPhone certainly isn’t all rosy — the App Store has effectively recreated all the bad elements of retail, without the profit margins.

On the other hand, there are literally 50,000 games and entertainment apps for the iPhone and iPad. Fifty. Thousand. Number for the DS? More like 2500.

And now, Apple’s taking a big big hint from the networked, connected world, and introducing a gaming social network to the iPhone OS.

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E3 MMO movement

 Posted by (Visited 6145 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Jul 152008
 
XBox Live avatars

XBox Live avatars and new dashboard

From here, it sure like the virtual world-ish convergence that has long been predicted is hitting the consoles in earnest.

  • XBox Live is adding avatars, akin to the Nintendo Miis, but it looks like they’ll have a bit more spatiality and multiplayer interaction to them — and will be the basic interface for XBL from now on. Oh, and remember when I commented that consoles were turning into PCs? They announced the ability to install games to the hard drive as a major advance. Heh.
  • Nintendo’s next Animal Crossing game is also drifting towards online-world land, though still not truly massive in scale.
  • Club Penguin is jumping to the Nintendo DS, and don’t underestimate Disney’s new DGamer service, which is intended to network all the Disney online properties.
  • Sony has a 256-player action game coming, which qualifies as “massive,” certainly, though perhaps not as presistent. They’re also adding more real-world integration, with stuff like movie and TV downloads, weather service, news, etc.