Google has the best search. That lead to its awesome email service. Which lead to assembling some fairly nice cloud based applications such as Calendar and Documents. And acquiring YouTube, of course, which seemed a stretch to their services, but I’m glad they did it, so YT would have enough backend to keep going. Maps, Earth, and SketchUp are a nice trio that make sense. Most of their other “Beta” products seem to fit the strategy pretty well. I always look forward to new Google products, and have loved their strategy and honesty, but Lively feels wrong to me.
The last thing the world needs is another virtual world. Jeez, with the number of Virtual World/ 3D chat programs released just this year, you would think Second Life was the most successful product the game world has ever seen. Check this chart on TechCrunch that shows the number of virtual world products released just this year. There are 14 titles with an aggregate VC funding of $345MM.
To me, this move by Google seems a little reminiscent of Microsoft chasing every software opportunity that shows up. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong. I have to admit, I have not even tried it since my household is filled with Macs, and it is not available on Macs yet. I will try it out of obligation, but I don’t want to. I’ll take my chat in text, thank you, so I can get it on my phone and on any browser that I happen to be using.
Today is Bill Gates‘ last day on the job at Microsoft, and I find it a little sad and nostalgic. Believe it or not, there are very few people in the world that have been more influential on the game industry than Bill. Probably Miamoto, but I can’t readily think of any body else. Of course, Bill has never designed a game or even played very many, but he has always supported them and felt they were important, so his platforms have been supportive and open to them, thus allowing thousands upon thousands of game developers and publishers to grow and prosper.
From the earliest days, Microsoft has supported games. Initially by publishing them. Probably the first computer game I ever played was Olympic Decathlon published by Microsoft. Colleen and I practically wore out the keyboard on my spanking new Apple II with that game. And, of course, no story of Microsoft and games is complete without mentioning Flight Simulator, which was always at the top of the best seller charts back in the day.
To show the importance of the PC for game developers, it is necessary to start somewhere else. [Read more →]
If you want to get into the games business working for yourself or a big publisher or you want to move from working for a publisher to being independent or vice versa, this is the most important question you can ask yourself. What are you doing right now to make it happen? The easiest thing to do is nothing, to make excuses, to wait for your big break to be handed to you, but if you don’t move forward, there are other people that are, and they will get what you want.
There are all kinds of excuses for not moving forward. Here are some hypothetical examples: [Read more →]
Any of the three people that read one of my personal blogs knows that I am not having a good time with Yahoo right now. A couple of years ago I signed up with them as my ISP for Make It Big In Games because I am not a web guy and they had a decent plan with one click install of Wordpress. I have regretted it ever since. The service is incredibly SLOOOOW, they wrap in a bunch of Yahoo crap selling their services on a site that I am paying for, they spam my email accounts, and a bunch of other grievances that I don’t want to bore you with.
Since Jerry Yang took over a year ago, Yahoo seems rudderless. What do they stand for? [Read more →]
I’m not writing anything insightful in this blog post, but I finally got to use the Spore creature editor yesterday (I use OS-X, so it just came out), and had to write about it. All I can say is AWESOME! Will Wright deserves all of the accolades everybody showers on him. His team deserves a lot of credit as well.
Normally, I don’t pay much attention to what the mainstream publishers are doing, but I love the kind of “sandbox” games Will creates, and I have been waiting anxiously for Spore for four years now. While a lot of people, including myself, criticize the game industry for creating a lot of crap, and it does create it’s share of crap, the release of this game makes me feel good and gives me hope.
Coolness! Make It Big In Games has been picked up by Alltop. Guy Kawasaki’s latest small web service business, Alltop is a much expanded version of popurls, i.e. a single place to go to read the five latest stories from hundreds of sites. All of the sites are arranged by categories, such as Games, Gizmos, Web, Green, etc. I kind of think of it as an automated RSS reader where I don’t have to do much work, and I like it… a lot.
I’m sure all of you have heard of Guy Kawasaki, but if you haven’t he was the original Apple “Evangelist”, i.e. a business development guy that would recruit software companies to build great products for the Apple Platform. Since leaving Apple, Guy has written a bunch of books, started Garage.com (a web form venture capitalist), and writes an incredibly insightful blog.
I once met Guy along time ago and I have a pretty amusing story about that meeting. We had dinner together at a SPA (Software Publisher’s Association) meeting in Washington, D.C. At the time, I was running Dynamix, a company that I co-founded with Damon Slye. We were an incredibly small, struggling game developer, and I was out looking for opportunities to increase our business from one large original IP project with Electronic Arts and a conversion project with Activision (they had just changed their name to Mediagenic..nice move, huh?). So, I was out to dinner with, I won’t use his name, but it rhymes with Ben Holeman (I decided I probably should not use his name, but I still burn about this 22 years later), a slick executive from Mediagenic, and Guy was there to get support for Apple games from us. [Read more →]
Two years ago I wrote this article about what it is like to work for big publishers after the original “EA Spouse” article hit the news. With the recent follow up on Gamasutra, I thought I would pull it out of the dust bin and publish it. As a little disclaimer, I really don’t care, politically, one way or another how this turns out. I wrote this article to contrast working at a “secure” big company as opposed to going it Indie. I know I won’t work for large companies since I have the means not to, and because even if I didn’t, I would rather dig ditches than put up with this kind of work environment.
Publishers such as Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubisoft, and Microsoft are the largest sources of money and employment in the Games industry. They create billions of dollars of revenue, then reinvest it in development, marketing, distribution, overhead, and what is left over is their profit. In some cases this profit is huge (Electronic Arts, well usually), and in some cases pathetic (Atari). If you are considering working either directly or peripherally (see DEVELOPER post coming up soon) for these publishers, it is important to note these profit numbers. Here’s why: [Read more →]
I have been up since 5:00 A.M. I should have gone back to sleep, but my brain just took off, and there is no way I can go back to sleep. It is my first day as a non-GarageGames employee, and the possibilities are simply overwhelming my senses. Should I blog? Write a business plan? Continue my research or work on the massive To Do list that any start-up company has?
Well, first up is to blog. Why should I do that? For a bunch of reasons, and I think they apply to anybody that is in business for themselves or even happily employed working for the Man. You need to be a part of the social fabric of your industry. As I have written about in the past, you need to stay in circulation and work on your personal brand. To be honest, I have let this part of my career languish for the past two years. Two years ago this blog was getting incredible traffic, but I neglected it. Getting GarageGames sold (we worked on one acquisition offer for six months before we turned it down prior to working on the IAC deal) then starting up on Instant Action and game acquisition took the rest of the time. In many ways, right now I feel like a guy that was married for a long time, suddenly gets a divorce, and is now on the singles scene again. I should not have done that, and neither should you. [Read more →]
Recently Warren Spector blogged about his favorite games and then reblogged the article to add in the overlooked M.U.L.E. His article was just type, so I thought it would be an interesting experiment to put the list into a Great Games Experiment Flash widget. Here are the results:
Being a serial entrepreneurial is almost an addiction. It is the thrill of starting new things that are nothing but promise, have no baggage, and cannot yet be fully quantified. Once the vision is mostly realized, however, the itch comes back, and the cycle starts all over again. For me, the time has come to start the cycle over again. I will be leaving GarageGames on 6/2/2008 to start a new company with another vision and a new set of promises.
GarageGames via Instant Action has become the publisher that I always wanted to work with, so that is one of the thing that I will be doing. [Read more →]
