Muckbeast

So I broke down and started playing a Facebook game recently. Not much has changed. The same lame tricks and the same lame forcing you to spam your friends into oblivion.
Please give this article a read, and let me know what you think.
Facebook Games: Where Monetization Gimicks and User Growth Matter More Than Good Game [...]

In a comment to my Bill Roper – Computer Game Poison? article, BryanM passed along a link to a recent Gamasutra interview of Bill Roper. As always, it is interesting simply because of how disingenuous and dishonest (or at least in denial) this guy is.
And maybe, also at that time, that’s just to where the [...]

A year and a half ago I blogged about Sleazy Marketing in the MMO Industry, and of course Evony was a major part of that post.
Today I learned about this really amusing parody “television commercial” for Evony. It is worth a watch:

I sure hope so. I would love to have the freedom to pop into a number of different MMOs here and there, casually, without having to be completely beholden to one. The subscription system means I can basically only justify playing one MMO at a time, and that’s really a bummer. The subscription system also [...]

This seems like a moderately huge disaster for Frogster, makers of Runes of Magic, a free to play MMO with ~4 million players.
The short version is this. Some group of people claim to have obtained the login details of just about the entire customer base of Frogster’s games (not just Runes of Magic). They have [...]

I have no idea why they are dragging this out and pretending January 25, 2011 is when this goes live. Anyone who wants to can be in the “beta” of free to play. How in the heck there’s a beta for that I have no idea.
This F2P maneuver by CO is one of the most [...]

This little bit of news really makes me angry. OnLive awarded important patent on streaming gaming content. The incredibly broad scope of this patent is an absolute joke.
“The present invention provides a system in which video games may be widely distributed and played without the need for multiple platform-specific hardware units or purchase [...]

1) Ryzom is now open source. WOW. All source code and art are being made available under an open source license. The Free Software Foundation provided additional details. There is also a detailed FAQ about what this all means. What I find most interesting here is the release of art assets [...]

… when will games follow suit?
I hope never, but I fear that is a pointless hope. Last night I read this article: Google Stops Wi-Fi Mapping Project After “Mistakenly” Scoring Personal Data. It got me thinking about the accelerating violation of “customers’” private information for profit by so many companies out there.
Zynga has already gone [...]

One of the biggest reasons I am a huge proponent of the F2PV$ (Free to play, virtual currency) model is that it is much easier to lure back your customers. They can return at any time with little or no barrier to entry (possibly just the download of a patch or a re-download of your [...]

The ugly way Roper drove Hellgate: London and Flagship into bankruptcy is legendary. The greedy subscription model for an action RPG Diablo clone was an exceptionally bad idea. His constant arguing and fighting against respecs was rancid icing on the rotten cake.
In light of that, it was a real head scratcher when Cryptic hired him [...]

This story is amusing at first: Amazon Coughs Up $150K for Lost Homework
But when I think about it in more detail, it starts to make me nervous.
How much is someone’s MMO character worth? What if a character is lost and:

Cannot be restored.
The backup lacks expensive, virtual items.
The account is banned – wrongfully in the customer’s [...]

CO might be a good game. You can read my Champions Online Preview here. But there is a serious problem, and it points to an even MORE serious problem.
Hyper customization is the primary USP (Unique Selling Point) of CO. There are no classes. There are just tons of powers to choose from. This is wonderful [...]

This is a really interesting idea for game financing. It sounds utterly impossible and unlikely to ever work, but it is still worth pondering. Gabe is a smart guy with a great history in the industry (his company is Valve, you may have heard of it… they did Half Life, Steam, Left 4 Dead).
Valve’s Newell: [...]

Adding to the last Free Realms post, one of the Bright Hub writers has posted an interview with the Free Realms Developers:
Interview: Free Realms
I wish I had been able to get her to ask more poingant questions about the harsh dropoff between free and subscriber.

Many of you have heard about Sony’s free MMO: Free Realms. Its release was definitely timed well. It has been able to dominate a lot of the MMO media buzz since there is not much else going on in the industry right now.
Some of you (like me) might wonder what you get for being a [...]

Raph Koster wrote an incredibly interesting and thought provoking blog post here: The perfect geek age?

Was being born in 1971 the perfect time to be born a geek?

Flagship Studios is in its final death throes, and the post mortems and blame games are in full force. Recently some major players in the utter failure that is Hellgate: London finally spoke out. Of course, the interviews and statements were full of the usual weak excuses: players were not patient enough with us, evil [...]