Remember that bad idea of a giant Tetris? This is what it looks like after two weeks.
Tetris HD … still going…
(Visited 8157 times) Game talk
Mar 202009
Comcast Town
(Visited 8430 times) Game talk
Mar 152009
So, the commercials definitely caught my eye; vibrant colors, isometric artwork done in pencil lines but apparently inspired by those awesome eBoy posters,that chirpy soundtrack. It was clearly a videogame aesthetic. But they were also terrible at marketing what they were actually marketing… half the time I couldn’t remember what company they were for.
Much less did I even notice that what the actual product Comcast was attempting to market was a virtual apartment builder and virtual interface to their services!
Mar 112009
YoVille bigger than WoW in NA?
(Visited 20980 times) Game talk
Mar 032009
Back in July of 2008, I pointed out YoVille, a Facebook MMO that runs as an app. Back then, it had 150,000 daily uniques.
Today, I’m here to tell you that YoVille is almost certainly more popular than WoW in North America.
The Top 25 Facebook Games for March 2009 and The Top 25 MySpace Games for March 2009 are a pair of posts over at the Inside Social Games blog. And what do they say? That YoVille has 2.26m users on MySpace and 4.46m on Facebook. And yes, these are monthly uniques.
Now, there is probably some overlap between the stats on the two services. And there is little doubt that WoW makes a lot more money, and is a lot more game.
But we should not be quick to discount this. More game and better art can be added. YoVille is a virtual world: it has avatars, money, inventory and housing. It has embedded games. It has a map. It has chat and persistence. And it’s in Flash. Oh, and they picked up 1m users in the last month.
Amid all the hoopla over whether there is room to go around WoW, here’s an answer.
BBC’s dot.life on Flash
(Visited 6059 times) Game talk
Feb 262009
The BBC News dot.life blog has a piece about web gaming and how the industry is changing, with a pile of quotes from yours truly. It was a very fun conversation with Darren Waters.
The relaunch of a 10-year-old video game inside a web browser is not just a chance to wallow in some nostalgia, but also a strong pointer to the direction in which the video games industry is heading, and a potential herald of the future of rich internet media on many types of devices…
…The shift to the network – both in terms of delivery of content and at the end of point of the experience itself – is touching every aspect of the media industry and for video gamers it means a lot more fun in a browser near you soon.
