Jon Blow’s Design Reboot

 Posted by (Visited 7063 times)  Game talk
Dec 022007
 

Jonathan Blow has posted the slides and audio to his talk “Design Reboot” from the Montreal conference.I spotted this over on Quarter to Three, where people in the comment thread are to my mind surprisingly resistant to what Jon is saying. Among other things, the comments are made that “videogames do not have the power to affect humanity.”

If that were the case, nobody would play them. 😛

I suspect that some of the reason for the resistance is that people don’t like being told that things they love can be bad for them…

Vivendi buys Activision to create Activision Blizzard

 Posted by (Visited 9588 times)  Game talk
Dec 022007
 

It’s the big news of the game industry today.

The upshot:

  • The Blizzard name gets hurt. This is a shame. Blizz itself is going to retain its name, “Blizzard Entertainment,” but there’s sure to be some degree of market confusion and tarnishing of Blizzard’s brand, which is unquestionably the best in the industry, by having associated with absolutely everything coming out of Vivendi and Activision. Not a good branding choice — we’ll probably all call the new entity just “Activision” anyway. Or “A/B” which I will do because it is shorter to type. 🙂
  • EA will probably have to respond, since this makes them the #2 publisher (!). There’s that Ubisoft purchase that’s been dangling out there for ages… In fact, it may stimulate more M&A activity across the whole industry, and more consolidation.
  • It’ll be interesting to see whether EA and A/B diverge in their approaches; EA has been talking more and more about being “an entertainment company” whereas A/B seems like doubling down on traditional gaming.

The impact to employees will probably be minimal for quite some time to come. Both publishers are enormous, so everyone there is used to that sort of environment.

One states reason for the merger, btw, is for ATVI to get more online expertise. It will be interesting to see whether Blizzard’s online expertise can actually be translated outwards. After all, EA and others failed at that sort of approach.

It’s also amusing to remember that Blizzard was actually on the block not that many years ago. 🙂

Answer this post

 Posted by (Visited 9185 times)  Open thread
Dec 012007
 

…aka, the blogging dilemma…

What with all the new sites that track various sorts of virtual worlds news, it’s getting harder to figure out what to blog about. What’s more, I don’t even really know what the readership of the site is anymore (other than “largish.”) Is it people interested in UO/SWG style worldy games? Theory of Fun/Game Grammar scholarly types? Is it people following Metaplace? How many are general web folks looking for the intersection of games and social software?

I know, “write what you want.” But to some degree, I admit I am audience driven. 🙂 I also don’t want to just end up regurgitating old posts, or reblogging news from other sites. Because of this, I have been posting a little less. Of course, I am also doing a lot of work around the Metaplace alpha, so some of the reason for the decrease in posting is that my energy is just going elsewhere…

Anyway, just wanted to take the pulse.

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