Movement happened today on the “built-in 3d support for the web” front as a whole bunch of folks announced support for the Khronos standard, which basically puts OpenGL with Javascript bindings in an HTML5 canvas.
PuzzleBloom. Made in Unity, looks like. Very nice.
Jeff Ward has a great article on Gamasutra about the viability of the indie scene these days, which ties right back into the recent blog post on new bosses and old bosses. He analyzes iPhone, XBLA, and PC markets, as well as the alternative funding model of getting investors in advance for a title.
Niels Clark dropped by in the comment thread on the WoW addiction therapy guild to mention that Jim Rossignol has a detailed review of his new book Game Addiction: The Experience and the Effects.
What this means is that Game Addiction is damning of “grind” heavy games. At times, it seems like Clark is betraying his “not anti-games” by painting a deliberately bleak pictures of traditional MMOs. He’s quick to nod towards the complexity of these clever multiplayer constructs, and the positive side-effects of social gaming, but I couldn’t help feeling that grind-based games are beginning to become their own worst enemies when subjected to this kind of scrutiny. It seems like an impossible task to come away with a truly positive picture of their game model, and the way we gamers behave when playing them. They are not games that encourage balance in our lives.
via Rock, Paper, Shotgun: “Don’t push me because I’m close to the…” » Book: Game Addiction.
The discussion thread, needless to say, gets kind of contentious. Sounds worth picking up though!
The wild frontier of the Web for game and app distribution is rapidly looking a lot like the old landscape. The biggest challenge is distribution: the power to get your game in front of users. A lot of folks look to the centralized distribution available on things like the iPhone’s App Store or using Facebook’s apps infrastructure. But as noise rises, you need clout to get seen in the midst of an endless sea of apps.
And the answer to that? A powerful distribution network in the hands of an aggregator. In short, a company that has the funds to commission games and spend heavily to advertise them, to cross-promote them with their other titles (and get economies of scale on that marketing dollar), and to make their titles rise above the noise. In other words, a publisher. Take Zynga, for example:
“We do spend a lot of money on advertising when we want to, like when we launched Farmville,” Pincus said. “We spent a couple million dollars advertising it and we’re not shy about that.”
via Social Game Developers Spending Millions on Facebook Advertising.
That’s more in marketing alone than most apps have in development budget. Possibly more than their makers have in total funding.
