Video Games

'Free-mium,' self-funded models set to gain traction

Sooner or later, I will put all my 2009 predictions together, but in the meantime, I've come up with two business trends that I think we'll see next year:

Web start-ups will move to premium services and subscriptions Self-funding will rule for "ecosystem" plays

Ad-supported sites will move to a "free-mium" approach or die by the end of the year. Free-mium and paid services will become the norm next year, as advertising wanes and companies realize that ad-supported business models were not that great to begin with. Even Digg, with all its traffic, has little to show for the advertising model. … Read more

Top 20 gaming trends of 2008

Gamasutra put together their list of Top 20 gaming trends for 2008.

As someone who got back into games heavily this year (to the point of where I had to cut myself off) I would say that the biggest gaming "issue" was DRM and the Spore debacle. As far as big changes to the whole landscape, I would say the Wii Fit is a monumental genre-changer.

My favorites from the list (20 is a lot): 3. You Don't Want DRM - You Want Services 2. Casual MMOs? For Kids! 5. The Inevitable User-Created Content Entry 9. Free … Read more

More games moving to the cloud

The Shack reports that Electronic Arts might be moving Spore to the Steam cloud-based gaming platform. An EA end-user license agreement showed up on Steam demonstrating that if nothing else, the company is testing out the idea.

Spore was the most pirated game of 2008, and if you are EA, you have to look at other ways to deliver games to the masses. With Steam, EA not only increases its distribution possibilities, but it also gets a better platform with a more user-friendly DRM function. … Read more

What's powering gaming PCs?

Valve just released November's hardware report, surveying users of the Steam on-demand gaming platform.

Steam is a very interesting cloud-based service that allows users to play games on any PC and that maintains the state of not only your gaming, but your community as well. This model encourages more game play and a higher likelihood that users purchase additional services as time goes on. It also puts some control back in the hands of the users, who aren't burdened by DRM.

Some interesting statistics: 70 percent of users are running Windows XP 65 percent of users have Nvidia … Read more

PlayStation 'Home' gets hacked multiple times

It didn't take very long for Sony's new PlayStation Home to fall prey to hackers, with multiple developers already exploiting different areas of the service.

One hack uses Apache and DNS redirection to let you display your own version of PS Home to display movies, text and music of your choosing.

Another hack allows for the downloading of any file you want, like someone's user profile or avatar, and the final near-term vulnerabilities include uploading any file to the Home server or deleting any file from the Home server.

It's not clear to me that there … Read more

'Myst Online' to be released fully open-source

Cyan Worlds has decided to release all of the Myst Online: Uru Live assets to the public as open source, including the client and server architecture.

Cyan will also hold one Myst Online server shard open for players to have a centralized world, while others can now freely put up their own Myst Online servers.

This will be an interesting experiment to see whether a development community forms around this massively multiplayer online game. Unlike many open-source projects that solve developer problems (and therefore have a direct audience), a game casts a broader net to a nondeveloper community.

I also … Read more

FCC blames World of Warcraft for college dropouts

If you're in the market for more hyperbole and absurd government news, take a gander at this long-winded transcription of a speech by Federal Communications Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate at the Telecom Policy and Regulation Institute

The speech offers a glimpse into the viewpoints of our governmental policies of helping and fighting technological advancement at the same time.

With the explosion of educational resources available online, one might think parents would be 100% pleased with the internet's role in their children's lives. But surveys show just the opposite: a late 2006 survey that showed 59% of parents … Read more

Virtual goods bubble looming?

The buying and selling of virtual goods is an extremely nascent market that seems to be heating up dramatically. Almost daily there are announcements pronouncing large virtual good revenues on the horizon and new forms of payments and rewards for the intrepid user.

Just today social network Hi5 introduced multicultural holiday gifts along with a new payment system. Virtual world Habbo also introduced a new type of currency and reward program for loyal users.

With all of this interest and efforts toward monetization, is this a bubble waiting to burst?

So far, my answer is no.

Virtual goods are part … Read more

'Spore' leads 2008's most pirated PC games

EA's Spore topped the list of most pirated video games for 2008, according to TorrentFreak.

Spore suffered from a serious PR problem when Electronic Arts introduced an archaic DRM technology that infuriated thousands of users and led to a piracy tsunami. EA, however, said the downloads didn't hurt Spore sales.

Most people agree that EA's heavy-handed DRM helped to push Spore to the top of the list. The initial outrage (500k downloads in the first 10 days) was obviously curtailed over the next several months, but these download numbers are still quite astounding.

1. Spore (1,700,… Read more

Korea to invest $200 million in game industry

The South Korean government announced that it will invest 350 billion won ($236 million) in the computer game industry through 2012.

Culture, Sports and Tourism Minster Yu In-chon said the emerging game industry had proved to be a future growth engine by accomplishing its initial billion-dollar export goal for the year 2010 two years early.

Sixty projects are slated to help grow the industry, including a $200 million game fund with an end goal of becoming one of the top three countries in gaming, along with the United States and Japan.