From the land of venture capitalists looking to cash on the latest entertainment fad (social network games , as opposed to last year’s virtual worlds), we get this garbage from Fortune magazine: With more than 235 million monthly users, Zynga rules the nascent world of free online games played via social networks like Facebook. Real [...]
About six months ago, I suggested we should check back later and see how DDO’s experiment with free-to-play has gone. The answer, according to Turbine’s current executive this week, is pretty well: The response from players to DDO Unlimited has been nothing short of phenomenal. We’ve known all along how great this game is and [...]
Six months ago I posted that Magic on Xbox Live was a Trojan Horse of sorts: an online ad calling on lapsed players to come back to Jamaica. You know, all of you millions of players from the 90s or early 00′s that have given up the game: try it again! Fall in love with [...]
The good news: Modern Warfare 2, over four million copies sold. The bad news: over four million copies illegally downloaded. Like music and film, games are just data that can be sent over the tubes. Film and games are respectively harder thanks to their larger size, but growing bandwidth will make this point moot. Piracy [...]
It was worth commenting on before, but time flies and here we are. DDO freeplay has gone live. Someday I should compose something of a personal postmortem on the game, but until then, we can talk about this development. Of course, by “free” it’s “freemium,” not absolutely free. There are ways – subscriptions and microtransactions [...]
Since Duels of the Planeswalkers launched a week ago, I’ve donated a few bucks and more than a few hours to Wizards of the Coast and Microsoft. Good friends and I joined in to play this latest digital incarnation of Magic: the Gathering. It’s not often that I take the chance to play CCGs anymore, [...]
1UP and EGM have been savaged by “new business realities.” I haven’t read EGM for a long, long time. But a common experience during my Muni commute is listening to the 1UP Yours podcasts for gaming news, reviews, and entertainment. For my sake, I hope that David, Garnett, and John find a way to keep [...]