The War Inside the Game Industry

This tells you everything you need to know about the game industry today -- console vs mobile --

This Is War (for a Game Industry’s Soul) - NYTimes.com: " . . . Like big-budget movies, newspapers, printed books, DVDs and other once-dominant means of conveying information and entertainment, traditional video games like Battlefield — played at home, with a special console or maybe a souped-up PC and the biggest possible screen — are under digital assault. A handful of programmers in a garage can put together a crude but compulsive smartphone game in a few weeks. These games are designed to be played in snippets, anytime and anywhere, making them ideal for a busy modern life. Mobile games are not exactly complicated. Fruit Ninja involves slicing animated fruit in half. ActionPotato is all about trying to catch potatoes. Candy Crush Saga consists of rearranging pieces of candy — and is played 700 million times a day, its creator says. Immersive games like Battlefield, on the other hand, require years of intricate work by hundreds of software engineers and artists. They demand an investment by players, too: $60 plus quite a few moments of attention. And they are tied to technology going the way of the rotary phone. PC sales are dropping as users migrate to tablets, while sales of the Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation consoles have wilted 40 percent in the last two years.. . ." (read more at link above)

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Obamacare Website Was Destined to Bomb

If you can, you do. If you can't, you get a government job or a government contract --

Why the Obamacare Website Was Destined to Bomb - Businessweek: " . . . . Put charitably, the rollout of healthcare.gov has been a mess. Millward Brown Digital, a consulting firm, reports that a mere 1 percent of the 3.7 million people who tried to register on the federal exchange in the first week actually managed to enroll. Even if the problems are fixed, the debacle makes clear that it’s time for the government to change the way it ships code—namely, by embracing the approach to software development that has revolutionized the technology industry. . . ." (read more at the link above)

See also: How Willful Ignorance Doomed HealthCare.gov - Clay Shirky - POLITICO Magazine

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Google App Engine, mobile apps back end

Google extends App Engine for mobile app back end | PCWorld: " . . . For those who want even more of a turn-key service, Google offers Mobile Backend Starter. Mobile Backend Starter provides a complete back-end infrastructure, further reducing the amount of effort needed to get a mobile app running. It provides a data store, user authentication, push notifications, and the ability to do event-driven programming to facilitate user interactivity. The updated version of the service promises to run seamlessly with the latest editions of iOS and Android. It can now also manage large media files." (read more at links above and below)

https://cloud.google.com/files/blossomio.pdf
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2013/11/connecting-mobile-developers-to-the-cloud-with-google-cloud-endpoints.html
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/endpoints/
https://developers.google.com/cloud/samples/mbs/

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App Smart, Music Games (video)

App Smart: Music Games - Video - NYTimes.com: "App Smart: Music Games
BY DALLAS JENSEN - October 30th, 2013 - Highlights of game apps with a strong musical component, as reviewed by The Times’s Kit Eaton."

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Miami Tech Start-up Scene Heat (video)

Miami's tech start-up scene is heating up: " . . .The Lab Miami hub has expanded to 10,000 square foot facility Knight Foundation is a big supporter of Miami tech scene MIAMI — In a sunny, roomy office overlooking a vibrant bustling Miami Avenue below, Freddie Laker is putting the finishing touches on a potentially groundbreaking app that turns written text into video. He's not shepherding his Gui.de in Silicon Valley, or even in one of the top start-up cities like New York, Boston or the Denver/Boulder area, but way far away at the extreme southeastern part of the country. Miami? Home to hot temps, leggy South Beach models, a bustling Latin American scene and thousands of retirees? "There's more talent here than people give us credit for," says Laker, son of the late British airline mogul of the same name. "Because it's Miami, people assume everyone will be by the pool. They forget that nerds are nerds and they're happy to be inside anywhere." Great weather, cheaper real estate and labor and being the gateway to Latin America doesn't hurt either. "You're lucky if you can carve out a corner for yourself in San Francisco or New York, but in Miami it's wide open," says Daniel Lafuente, co-founder of The LAB Miami, a tech-geared shared workspace in the Wynwood area . . ."

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Zynga blew it, says EA head

Electronic Arts: "Zynga blew it" - GameSpot: ". . . "Zynga blew it. They're not a mobile business," Gibeau said when asked about Zynga cofounder Mark Pincus' belief that in the future, the majority of people would play games all the time. "We're six or seven times their size in mobile. Zynga fell into a hole because they were completely focused on one platform, which is Facebook," he added. Zynga now operates its own platform, outside of Facebook, through Zynga.com. A company representative was not immediately available to address Gibeau's comments. EA has moved away from the social networking site of late, closing some of its biggest Facebook games recently, including The Sims Social, SimCity Social, and Pet Society. "We saw all the Facebook users going to smartphones. You can't play a game on Facebook on a phone," Gibeau said. "Coupled with that was the fact that customer acquisition costs were on a straight line up.". . ."

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Google, Minecraft, Quantum Physics

Google Entangles Minecraft with Quantum Physics | MIT Technology Review: " . . . One reason for the popularity of the video game Minecraft is the way its blocky universe faithfully adheres to the physics of the real one. Google has now released a software package that introduces quantum physics to the game, an area of nature’s laws previously missed out by Minecraft creator Markus Persson (see “TR35: Markus Persson”). Players of qCraft, as the new “mod” is called, can toy with quantum teleportation, entanglement, and objects that exist in a “superposition” of multiple states at once. Google asked Caltech quantum mechanic Spyridon Michalakis to help design qCraft. In a blog post on the project, he expresses hope that the mod will help people from school age and up to understand the quantum world better. Google also partnered with MinecraftEdu, a project run by educators from the U.S. and Finland interested in using the game as a teaching aid. . . ." (read more at the link above)

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Mobile Games, Asian Companies

The $1.5 billion deal by SoftBank of Japan for a majority stake in the Finnish game developer Supercell shows that Asian companies are still building positions in the industry --

Asia, Where Mobile Games Flowered, Extends Its Reach - NYTimes.com: ". . . . The growth of mobile gaming is upending the longstanding business model of the business, which was based on the sale of games — and the devices to play them. The new approach is to give away games away for smartphones and then to earn revenue from in-game purchases, advertising and other add-ons. While the so-called free-to-play model has spread to much of the rest of the world, it was mostly pioneered in Asia. “If the U.S. and Europe are great conceptually, the leading Asian markets are masters of the science of making money from mobile,” said Tim Merel, founder of Digi-Capital. In September, two Asian countries, Japan and South Korea, together accounted for a whopping 62 percent of worldwide revenue from games on the Google Play mobile app store, according to App Annie. The United States represented 15 percent of sales. Over all, Asia accounts for half of the revenue in the mobile game business, and this will grow to two-thirds in 2016, according to Digi-Capital. . . ." (read more at the link above)

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Rare Video Games, National Museum of Play (video)

Atari Games, Street Fighter Machines, and Rare Video Games-Game|Life-WIRED: At the National Museum of Play, Chris Kohler visits an exhibit all about classic video game maker Atari, and he gets hands-on inside the museum's lab of rare games.

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Team Engagement Through Gaming

Engage Your Team Through Gaming | Big Think Edge | Big Think: "Research shows that gaming can have positive social, emotional and psychological benefits. According to game designer Jane McGonigal, "when we tap into emotions like optimism and curiosity and creativity and even love," these emotions stick with us for up to 24 hours after the game was played. As a result, we are more cooperative with team members in our real lives after we have played a social game with them. . . ."

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Productive Design Critiques

9 Rules For Running A Productive Design Critique | Co.Design | business + design: ". . . 8. DON’T DESIGN IN THE MEETING (THAT’S THE OWNER’S JOB) While it’s OK to suggest an alternate approach occasionally, don’t use your design critique to solve big problems. Design work--as with other kinds of critical thinking--is best done by an individual. Identify problems, but leave it up to the owner to figure out the answer. 9. LEAVE WITH A TASK LIST . . ." (read more at the link above)

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DRM, Hollywood, Programmers

Interesting articles --

What Do We Get for That DRM? - Programming - O'Reilly Media: "What Do We Get for That DRM?
The W3C sells out users without seeming to get anything in return . . . The W3C appears to have surrendered (or given?) its imprimatur to this work without asking for, well, anything in return. “Considerations to be discussed later” is rarely a powerful diplomatic pose. Berners-Lee, best known as the creator of the World Wide Web, seems well aware of the tarnish he’s applying to his creation. He acknowledges that: “none of us as users like certain forms of content protection such as DRM at all. Or the constraints it places on users and developers. Or the over-severe legislation it triggers in countries like the USA.”. . . ." (read more at links above)

W3C's DRM for HTML5 sets the stage for jailing programmers, gets nothing in return - Boing Boing: "As St Laurent points out, the decision means that programmers are now under threat of fines or imprisonment for making and improving Web-browsers in ways that displease Hollywood -- and in return, the W3C has extracted exactly zero promises of a better Web for users or programmers." (read more at link above)

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Professional Gamers, Best Games

Best Games For Professional Gamers - Business Insider: " . . . Where does a gamer who's intrigued by the idea of playing for real money start? We've gone through the event lists of some of the largest gaming competitions in the world to find out. No matter what kind of game you're into, there's probably something you'll find that's to your liking. What's more, many of the games are free-to-play. . . ." (read more at link)

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