Muckbeast

I am seriously thinking about going to GDC Online in Austin, TX this year.  As a game developer and owner of an independent gaming company, it is sometimes difficult to make solid industry contacts. My goal for attending would be to network with other colleagues in the industry, and perhaps meet people who could help [...]

Depending on who you ask or what you read, Macs continue to hover in the same 4-10% market share they have languished in for the last 20 years or so. No amount of marketing seems to make much of a difference.
In fact, if Apple spent a fraction of its marketing budget on making gaming viable [...]

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 headline:
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group Acquires Turbine, Inc. North America’s Largest Privately-Held Online Gaming Studio
That says it all basically. Turbine, one of the biggest privately owned MMO developers is no more. For those of you that don’t know, Turbine is responsible for Asheron’s Call, the now defunct Asheron’s Call 2, Dungeons and Dragons Online, [...]

Apparently, trashing Farmville was the trendy thing to do at the recent GDC (Game Developers Conference). The discussion and trashing have continued on various game developer blogs as well. The common arguments include: “these aren’t games”, “these games suck”, “this is a fad”, “these companies are scammers”, etc. The common fears include: “this is the [...]

The pet rock was a fad in the mid 1970s created by ad executive Gary Dahl.  The concept was a hit for a few years, making Mr. Dahl millions of dollars before it died out. Pet rocks can be found occasionally on eBay, but they are no longer “manufactured” or sold. The pet rock [...]

I read a couple of really good blog posts recently that I highly recommend:
From Spinksville:  You cant heal stupidity!
and
From Bio Break: The Long, Hard Road to Console MMOs
and
From Elder Game: 2009: A year of Shitty MMOs.
For reference, you might find this post from Bio Break really useful: MMO Timeline. It includes dates of every major [...]

I recently published an interview with Andrew Cowan, founder and administrator of The Mud Connector.  If you are not familiar with TMC, it is one of the most important web sites in MUD/MMORPG history. It was the first major MUD search engine/community web site. It helped millions of gamers find an online home.
The Mud Connector [...]

I just learned of this and it is sad news. Near Death Studios, the indie game company behind the resurrection of Meridian 59, closed down on December 31, 2009. One of the founders of Near Death Studios (Brian “Psychochild” Green) is a respected colleague and frequent reader of this blog. Brian announced the closing publicly [...]

This is obviously not a healthy sign for Warhammer: Report: Layoffs Hit EA Studios Including Tiburon, Black Box, Redwood Shores, Mythic.
According to the report, Mythic lost 80 people or 40% of their staff.
EA had a recent investor conference call, and of course they avoided giving hard subscriber numbers for Warhammer. A 40% layoff pretty much [...]

I am going to try not to get too esoteric or philosophical. Lets eschew things like success as defined by making people happy, bettering the world, adding good ideas/concepts to the game design space, or all sorts of totally unmeasurable things like that. For the purposes of this discussion, lets focus a little more on [...]

… while counting their money?
I don’t expect every, or any, MMO to be a WoW killer. But it strikes me as a pretty dang sad indictment of the genre that time after time, big budget, major publisher MMOs come out and fail miserably.
Read on for examples that include Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, and Champions [...]

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while. This article at MMORPG is the final push over the edge.
Most MMOs have gone with the shard/server approach. Each copy of the game has a distinct community. You make characters on a specific server, and the character can only be played on that server. Each [...]

Wolfshead has started a really great discussion on his blog: Waiting for the Next MMO Revolution
The reason why I’m in a perpetual state of angst is that I feel that the MMO industry has squandered all of the great potential that was evident a scant 10 years ago during the first MMO revolution heralded by [...]

By now, many of you have read my article What Went Wrong with Warhammer Online? Is it a failure? Since I wrote the article, new leadership really has not done much to address those issues. In a recent interview, the head dev. of Warhammer put the blame for WAR’s problems on the game being too [...]

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 [...]

According to an article on Gamasutra (Analysis: Why EA Isn’t An Acquisition Target (For Now)) this is not going to happen, but it raises two interesting questions.
1) Would a Microsoft buyout of EA be good for the industry?
2) Would a Microsoft buyout of EA be good for gamers?
My answer is no to both, but I [...]

One thing about Threshold I have always taken a lot of pride in is the fact that our population is almost an exact 50/50 split of men and women. I think this one fact has been vitally important to the strength of our community. This is incredibly common in the MMO industry, however:
“Currently, 64% of [...]