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Facebook and mobile gaming? Duh, #winning!
March 4th 2011, 19:38 CET by m0nty Iwata gave the GDC keynote the other day, in which he bemoaned that game developers are not appreciated for their talents by customers paying top dollar for games that cost millions to make. It seems that Facebook games like Angry Birds have devalued the gaming experience for the masses in that they now expect the free-to-play model rather than actually having to pay for software. Then again, the new generation of game players are a lot more casual in their gaming habits than the hardcore, seeing as a large proportion of them skew old and female, part of a demographic who never would have played a game on a computer more complex than Solitaire before getting addicted to Crackville. Despite "traditional" computer game industry veterans like Brian Reynolds at Zynga and Raph Koster at Playdom moving across to social gaming companies and having a solid amount of success, it seems that old style game designers are being pushed out of the development and iteration process by marketing mavens watching real-time analytics from users interacting with features, such that intuition is now being replaced by metrics. The social games industry on Facebook went through a massive growth period which ended recently when Facebook turned off or restricted a lot of the virality features that had led to J-curves of word-of-status-update to produce gigantic injections of user numbers, making the likes of Zynga and Playfish the juggernauts they are today. All of these companies are bleeding users fast nowadays, and those who are adding users are relying on less noticeable spamminess that is still allowed. I am developing a social game myself, which is why I have immersed myself in this new world where the metrics are MAU, DAU, ARPU and sparkles-per-second. A couple of years ago, people were complaining about how PC games were being dumbed down to fit in the console model, but wait until you see the facebookification of your favourite games. This chart shows where all the growth is, and it's not in consoles, it's in social games. There's already a Facebook version of Saint's Row. This is the tip of the iceberg. As part of my research into the subject, I have been playing a few Facebook games myself: Madden NFL Superstars, CBSSports.com Franchise Football, plus a bit of Galactic Trader just to see what it was like. What about you and your social gaming habits? I know a couple of you play Frontierville (*cough*Bobandjjz*cough*). Would you be okay with the concept of acheivements that you're all used to from consoles to be even further extended to the ____ville mechanics of collection and gifting? Is there any actual gameplay in social games or are they just Cow Clickers? How much multiplayer content is there really, when your main interaction with other players is to send each other gifts? This is a fast-moving industry, but there's still a question mark on whether it's moving downwards to sudden oblivion, or whether these clicking grannies will ever move to more hardcore games with synchronous gameplay. I look forward to this topic being hijacked as soon as possible. Viva Libya! |
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Topic: Facebook and mobile gaming? Duh, #winning!
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Gah. |
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Anybody know where to find a good locksmith? Please provide about 50 links so I can contrast & compare. Thanks! Zep-- w0rd up!
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plonk "Testiculos habet et bene pendentes" - "He has testicles, and they dangle nicely."
"LP, your big balls are a religion." - Jibble |
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#159 by gaggle What argument are you making now? The context is super convergence, you yourself proposed a device that would do everything: "replace everything in your entertainment center (save for the receiver and TV) with a single device". I'm saying I don't see that device coming true because it's much easier to make the processing power available where it's needed most. Today, perhaps. But think of where processing power will be in 10 years time. How about 25 years? 50 years? You'll reach a point where a handheld device is powerful enough to replace all of those devices. Either that or cloud computing reaches a state that you don't need the processing power inside the device at all, which is I guess what you're suggesting. Either way it's the same eventual conclusion. You have one palm-sized thing that lets you do everything, anywhere. Keyboards/mice/controllers/remotes sold separately and operating via bluetooth (or whatever comes along that's better than bluetooth). Quite simply put, people like having access to their stuff wherever they are. That means set top boxes will eventually go away. I could easily see Sony or MS or Nintendo shifting their focus to producing the best cloud computing clusters available and making their games exclusive to that cloud-based system. You buy access to the cloud instead of buying the thing that sits in your living room. |
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Cloud computing clusters? You think they're going to execute and render the game in the cloud and then stream the results to your TV? With Netflix HD streaming it doesn't sound so impossible, but I'm not sure what the infrastructure/market will support in 20 years and still think it is an unlikely avenue. I think you will always need a set top box, be it Xbox or PS3, or Google TV or Roku or Apple TV, etc. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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I don't see how a tiny little convergence device that does everything is making itself available though. Until technology is some long-forgotten hobby of ours and our meta-conciousnes roams the universe for hydrogen to make new stars from we're facing the fact that a small formfactor means sacrifices. Not just technological sacrifices such as processing power, battery, display size, etc. etc., but also a human part of the equation where separate dedicated boxes makes for better usability. "Normal people", if you'll excuse the term, do not all want hyper-advanced do-it-all devices. The iPhone does less than its competitors after all, and we're not all going to be super advanced nerds in twenty years time. In 20 years alone, all of the kids that are so attached and accepting and needing of everything being online and at their fingertips are going to be adults. They are all going to want something to have their information available to them at any time. Your youtube video was cute, but a touch interface is already being seen as too slow and too touchy (i.e. - able to be fat fingered to easily). It will either be thought at or voice managed for most things. Think Ironman, his robot assistant that is throughout his house and he can talk to set up appointments, look up information, etc, etc. That is where we are going. I doubt it will be exactly like the movie, but something along the lines of that. A computer made to be personable and helpful and translate human talk into computer do. Most people will not have to learn computers, they will instead just have to get used to using their computer buddy. /me sings My Buddy! This is all speculation, but I would kill for a simple system that I could use from anywhere, that I could communicate with like a person, rather than with this archaic interface originally made to slow my down my interactions (the keyboard). "programmers talk from a very deep gnome cavern, full of gold mechanics" - wisdom from the ancients
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#168 by CheesyPoof Cloud computing clusters? You think they're going to execute and render the game in the cloud and then stream the results to your TV? With Netflix HD streaming it doesn't sound so impossible, but I'm not sure what the infrastructure/market will support in 20 years and still think it is an unlikely avenue. Thinking long-term future, it'll probably be less expensive (and potentially more profitable) to do it that way instead of producing and shipping units to people and having to deal with warranties/repairs. Obviously this is probably 25+ years out, but I can see it happening. I think you will always need a set top box, be it Xbox or PS3, or Google TV or Roku or Apple TV, etc. See, I'm not so sure on that. I can easily see them replacing all of that with a dockable (or wireless, to avoid having to have a separate remote) portable device. You can already watch Netflix on your phone. The obvious issue, as others have pointed out, is battery life. Perhaps the solution is a single set-top box controlled by a smartphone-like device. I guess we'll see what the market brings us. One of the saddest things about the limitations of human life is that there's so much cool shit you'll never get to experience. |
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#169 by Matt Perkins This is all speculation, but I would kill for a simple system that I could use from anywhere, that I could communicate with like a person, rather than with this archaic interface originally made to slow my down my interactions (the keyboard). Yeah, the fuckin' MAN designed that keyboard to keep you down. Sometimes it's really hard to agree with you. |
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One of the saddest things about the limitations of human life is that there's so much cool shit you'll never get to experience. A fucking men my brother. My aunt was talking with my Dad once and they got onto talking about living longer and she literally said, "No, this life is enough, I do want to live any longer." That blew my mind. I would love to live a couple thousand years, and even that is too short. And I would settle for just a couple hundred. Things are going to change so much. Carl Sagan was right, "A still more glorious dawn awaits, not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise." If what we are guessing at now, that we were seeded by comets/metorites and we are not alone, then think of the worlds out there. I would like to spend thousands of years exploring the galaxy, the universe, seeing what other places are like. Seeing what humans become, see if we make it at all. "programmers talk from a very deep gnome cavern, full of gold mechanics" - wisdom from the ancients
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Yeah, the fuckin' MAN designed that keyboard to keep you down. Sometimes it's really hard to agree with you. Maybe this is wrong, you cranky mother fucker, but this is what I learned about the qwerty layout. The early typewriter used a mechanism with that included characters on the end of a bar. Christopher Sholes, who designed the first typewriter, noticed in early prototypes that the bars would collide with each other and jam. To avoid this problem, he decided to arrange the keys with the most common letters in hard-to-reach spots in order to slow typists down. So not the man keeping anyone down, but the interface most commonly used today was originally designed to slow us down. Fucker. "programmers talk from a very deep gnome cavern, full of gold mechanics" - wisdom from the ancients
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Jibble: One of the saddest things about the limitations of human life is that there's so much cool shit you'll never get to experience. The flood of electronic gadgets are probably my least concern in that regard. She's probably had sex with like 4 different guys by now and has no idea who he is anymore, his face lost in a memory sea of dicks.
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#170 by Jibble Thinking long-term future, it'll probably be less expensive (and potentially more profitable) to do it that way instead of producing and shipping units to people and having to deal with warranties/repairs. Obviously this is probably 25+ years out, but I can see it happening. Thinking about it, I don't. I think there is more money in it for them to ship/sell a physical piece of hardware to you. If you remove that you're cutting a lot of revenue and profit. That said I'm not sure the technical challenges can be overcome, even in 20+ years. The bandwidth probably isn't a problem (caps and whatnot that are being introduced in the market, and maybe high speed penetration in the US), but I think latency will always be a problem. Charles gets angry talking about latency between the xbox and the TV, I don't think introducing hundreds of miles of network in the middle will help that, ever. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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That account of the invention of the QWERTY typewriter layout has long since been debunked. Also, anyone suggesting that Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony et al would design custom hardware to support their cloud computing initiatives does not understand that the entire purpose of cloud computing is that you don't need specialized hardware, just rack after rack of commodity hardware. |
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#175 by CheesyPoof Thinking about it, I don't. I think there is more money in it for them to ship/sell a physical piece of hardware to you. If you remove that you're cutting a lot of revenue and profit. How so? The margins on consoles are thin (or, in Sony's case, negative) and it's hard to believe they wouldn't jump at the opportunity to charge monthly usage fees (plus more for individual titles) to every single person who wants to play Xbox/PS3/Wii games instead of dealing with all the logistics and shipping and production. That said I'm not sure the technical challenges can be overcome, even in 20+ years. The bandwidth probably isn't a problem (caps and whatnot that are being introduced in the market, and maybe high speed penetration in the US), but I think latency will always be a problem. Charles gets angry talking about latency between the xbox and the TV, I don't think introducing hundreds of miles of network in the middle will help that, ever. Quantum whatever! I could certainly be wrong, but it seems like the kind of thing that will eventually be solved given enough time and technological advancement. |
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Sony is still selling the PSOne and PS2. Those machines have legs and they know how to use them. With respect to the PS3 I think Sony really wanted to win the Bluray/HD disc war and used the PS3 to help with that, so they took a hit on that console. I'm not really sold on the whole 'consoles sell at a loss' thing that gets bantered around all the time, too. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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Besides, like I said in my other point, the cost/profit of a console is moot as latency will always be an issue. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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That account of the invention of the QWERTY typewriter layout has long since been debunked. The article they link to as proof suggest they did a careful reading of history and found that the QWERTY keyboard won out by trial and error and superority...but they do not seem to offer an proof that the commonly though history of the original QWERTY keyboard was wrong. Only that compared to other systems, it is just as fast. That is not quite the same thing as saying it was not originally designed to slow down typists, even if it turned out to be just as fast in the long run. Plus, other history seems to suggest exactly what the common history is believed to be: As with previous attempts the keys were in an ABCDEFG layout, and the typists soon got too fast and jammed the keys. The key levers hit the platen from underneath and then fell back down under gravity. He didn't think to put return springs on to fix the problem. ... The immediate result was people typed painfully slowly with the Qwerty layout. No one could type nearly fast enough to jam the keys, so it appeared his typewriter was working. The other result was it made the typewriter very difficult for typists to learn, which kept them slow. The by-products of Qwerty were to make the fingers travel further to type words, making fast typing difficult, and to help cause the thousands of cases of RSI (Repetitive Stress Injury) that we see today. To answer criticism that Qwerty was designed to slow typists down, Sholes argued that wasn't his intention, he only meant to stop the keys jamming. Some believed him, some didn't. But the fact was it slowed typists to a crawl for some long time, until teaching methods for qwerty were devised to get round the problem he had created. Simply because he didn't think of return springs. Rebuttal? "programmers talk from a very deep gnome cavern, full of gold mechanics" - wisdom from the ancients
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Besides, like I said in my other point, the cost/profit of a console is moot as latency will always be an issue. One way or another, within our lifetimes, latency will no longer be an issue. I predict this! Assuming that turns out to be true, then we have to reassess the entire business model... "programmers talk from a very deep gnome cavern, full of gold mechanics" - wisdom from the ancients
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Matt: Think critically for a moment. If the original purpose was to prevent keyboard jams and that problem was quickly overcome, but qwerty remained because it was as fast or faster than other alternatives, then maybe the qwerty layout's resolution of the jamming issue had nothing to do with affecting the speed of the typists generally. If the converse were true then the original layout considered by Sholes would have bested qwerty in speed tests after the physical jamming factor was resolved. Also re: latency: physics |
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G-Man I like your optimism and that is also the exact reasons that your original link gave. My pessimism says that whoever pushed hardest in the market got their standard. QWERTY has been proven, over time, to not be worse than anything else in the long run. Fine. But that does not mean it was a reasoned and logical follow through that got us QWERTY. It is not always the best standard that wins. We have seen that over and over. Why would is be different for keyboard layouts? In other words, logical and marketplace hardly ever go together if one of the competing standards is not vastly superior. In this case, none of them were. So who ever pushed hardest, Remington, got their way. "programmers talk from a very deep gnome cavern, full of gold mechanics" - wisdom from the ancients
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#182 by G-Man Also re: latency: physics In the future we will overcome physics. |
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Quantum whatever. Any day now. |
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Jetski. Game Developers: Don't forget the zombie monkeys.
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table |
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Cheese. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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jetski cheese, for every table! "Testiculos habet et bene pendentes" - "He has testicles, and they dangle nicely."
"LP, your big balls are a religion." - Jibble |
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I've just watched Johnny Mnemonic. Not, uhm, a great movie. The first couple of scenes are completely laugh-out-loud bad, and the rest is generic 90ties badness. Also, his brain is exploding from carrying 320 gb, four times as much as his already extreme capacity normally allows. L0lz, etc. One thing bothered me: I can remember a scene where the leads are in an undeground area and a train goes by super-duper quick, but I totally didn't see that here. I was waiting for that scene and everything. I guess I got the shitty movie edition. Not a terrible loss though because on the other hand it's a pretty shitty movie in and of itself. </blag> |
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Just watched Iron Man 2. Not horrible, not great. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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Henry Rollins is the best thing about that movie. Oh, and Ice T. And that's really all that needs to be said. |
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Ice T is slouching in every. Single. Scene. Truly a gangsta, even whilst wearing scifi ski-goggles and random face paint and acting opposite an animatronic fish. It's a fish! And this is life-affirming to the max! It's a chat roulette video that simply shows how wonderful humans can be. Awww, so sweet. Fuck you if this doesn't make you smile. |
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It made me smile, but one dork on chat roulette does not redeem a whole race. "programmers talk from a very deep gnome cavern, full of gold mechanics" - wisdom from the ancients
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Don't forget dolph lundgren. He was in that movie too. |
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Hey, I'm moving to the bay area. Who's up there that I can studiously avoid? |
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Henry Rollins was also the best thing about The Getaway. She's probably had sex with like 4 different guys by now and has no idea who he is anymore, his face lost in a memory sea of dicks.
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Had an appointment with a mortgage advisor yesterday after getting advice directly from 2 banks. Buying a house is even more expensive than I thought. It's going to be a few skinny years at first. She's probably had sex with like 4 different guys by now and has no idea who he is anymore, his face lost in a memory sea of dicks.
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Wait til you sell a house. It was amazing how much of my equity ended up in the pockets of the realtor, the title companies, the mortgage companies... |
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The UN has greenlit air support against the forces of Gadhafi. Way to cut it close, but a wild change don't you think?? |
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I'm really tired of the assholes calling Afghanistan "Obama's War" now calling for us to help out with this. One of our planes goes down and suddenly we're going to have to invade a third country. We got a dog. Well we arranged for a dog. We'll have a dog in about three weeks. I'm dreading it/excited for it. |
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#201 by jjohnsen We got a dog. Well we arranged for a dog. We'll have a dog in about three weeks. I'm dreading it/excited for it. Cool, what kind of dog? I can't wait until I get a bigger house/yard so we can get a dog. |
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One of our planes went down? <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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But this is not an invasion.. The mandate specifies a no-fly zone and airstrikes to protect civilians that stand to be crushed within hours or days because of their pro-democratic rebellion. This is above and beyond what the UN is about! Imagine the waves of relief in Benghazi happening right now, by all accounts they were facing destruction and were entirely dependent on the international community responding. And now it is! I'm not a politically active person but I well and truly hope this works out. |
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This. "One part disembowels me while another slowly eats its way through the gas line. As I bleed out on the floor, it reminds me that I need to buy milk." - Jibble
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I'd say let the French enforce the no-fly zone, they're pro-rebel and it's practically their backyard. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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The French? But won't they just give him the county back as soon as an aa battery is pointed at a plane? I know but it had to be done. Don't forget garnishes such as: Fish shaped solid waste.
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There certainly is joke material aplenty. I mean, it is his country and continues to be. It's not like one country forcing a government change on another country's people, haha who would do such a crazy thing? I know, bad form. I can't resist these jokes either. |
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#204 by gaggle But this is not an invasion.. The mandate specifies a no-fly zone and airstrikes to protect civilians that stand to be crushed within hours or days because of their pro-democratic rebellion. Both Clinton and Gates said that a no-fly zone starts with bombing various targets to disable their aerial combat abilities. We may not have troops on the ground yet, but this is much more than just telling them they can't fly planes there anymore. Not to mention that if it's not effective, we essentially become pot committed to helping the rebels win lest we look like an ineffective superpower. This is basically us entering yet another protracted war. |
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One should also keep in mind that Libya has the largest oil reserves in Africa. |
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Yeah slippery slopes are ever present to be sure. From the sounds of it the resolution is specific to preventing civilian casualties, but we'll see if and how that translates into actual reality. |
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Furthermore I would assume this could lead to more rebelling in other countries, fueled by the expectation that the UN will intervene if it goes tits up. are we committed to helping everyone? Plenty millions of people have been killed in the past couple decades by their own governments without any intervention because, well, that's just how the world works. There is no right way to go into another country and assert your rules. But here are civilians and rebels alike completely fucking stuck, by all accounts just hours and days away from being firebombed and wiped out by military forces. It's a delicate situation to be sure. |
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Yep, I have been mulling this over and have not really come up with a good answer. Starting another war is not a great idea. Leaving the rebels to their certain doom is pretty callous too. I do not really have an answer per say... but I guess erring on the side of the people over Qaddafi has to be better... "programmers talk from a very deep gnome cavern, full of gold mechanics" - wisdom from the ancients
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