The business of making computer and video games
(This is a quick blog post to reply to a conversation on Twitter about marketing, PR and product development. It was started by Dylan Cuthbert based on a quote from the Steve Jobs biography. Very quickly Javier Arevalo, Mike Acton and Thaddaeus Frogley got involved, and I dragged in poor Adam Saltsman for perhaps no […]
It is an answer. Alex Champandard summed up my entire previous blog post as: Essentially, making self-published games requires the skills running a business — and not everyone has, or wants, those. He should know: He has the skills for running a business as well as deep programming skills. Just look at AIGameDev. Here is […]
Yesterday morning in the office, after my second cup of espresso, I wrote a tweet. And then another, and another, and pretty soon I had about 6 or so: The rise of social games means more developers need to get comfortable with the concepts of marketing, selling and profit. Seth Godin makes a strong argument […]
It’s interesting to trace ideas. In October 2008, Andrew Chen wrote about the cultural differences between games people and web people. Having been “games people” since 1991, but with a strong interest and even, in 2007, a brief stint in the web world, I found this a really interesting post. Especially this insight (emphasis mine): […]
Reuters says Electronic Arts is buying Bioware / Pandemic for $800 million. I think many people saw the Bioware / Pandemic merger, with support from private equity firm Elevation Partners, as a bold move to create a large-scale independent developer. With this news, it looks more like a fancy move by John Riccitiello, who worked […]
Last Wednesday I gave a 90 minute presentation on how the internet is changing the games industry at the University of Applied Sciences / Fachhochschule Wiener Neustadt, a university near Vienna. It was part of the eMarketing course taught by Sascha Mundstein for the Business Consultancy International B.A. programme. The structure of my presentation was: […]
South Korea Taxing Virtual Worlds. It was only a matter of time, and as usual it’s happening in South Korea first. (Via Slashdot Games.)
According to Noheat.com Nintendo and Apple are going to partner on games for the iPhone. Slightly surprising… but I can’t really get excited about it. Odd, and a bit sad, considering the brouhaha over the iPhone not having as powerful an SDK as people were hoping for.
Jamie King, who co-founded Rockstar Games and was VP of Development until he left over a year ago, has started a new company called 4mm Games. That’s all the information that seems to be available right now: if 4MM Games has the same PR strategy as Jamie’s previous company, it will take a while before […]
If you’re only slightly following tech or Apple or games or all of the above, I am sure you know that there was another Steve Jobs keynote last Monday at the WWDC 2007. I was slightly underwhelmed. There were a couple of intriguing announcements involving games though.
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