By Nadia Oxford on Apr 27, 2011 in Business, Facebook, Free Games
0
Free-to-play online games are capable of attracting a huge audience. No surprise there; after all, they’re free games. How can you mess up a pitch like that?
Alas, it’s not hard. The success of free-to-play games makes for a pretty crowded marketplace. So how can a developer give their project a needed boost?
The team behind Battlestar Galactica Online (BSGO), Bigpoint, has a few ideas. After all, Bigpoint recently pointed out that BSGO recently passed...
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By Nadia Oxford on Apr 27, 2011 in Online Games, PC, Retail
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If you’re the parent of a child who enjoys gaming, the online world can appear as a mire of predators and destructive websites waiting to catch and swallow your kid whole. But the Internet is also a grand educational and entertainment resource. Here are some websites, apps and high-tech resources that will help you help your child enjoy gaming and surfing online.
WEBSITES
1UP.com
This long-lived gaming website features news, reviews, previews, and a busy...
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By Nadia Oxford on Apr 26, 2011 in Culture
13
It’s never easy to whip up a list of video game recommendations for women and girls. That’s because identifying games as titles of interest “for men” or “for women” does more harm than good. Male gamers are often stereotyped as lovers of war games featuring rattling machine guns, whereas women are expected to to stick to puzzle games. Girls are offered games about babies and horses.
And yet, there’s nothing wrong with men...
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By Nadia Oxford on Apr 26, 2011 in Kinect, Microsoft, Motion Controls
3
As mature gamers, Christmas Day doesn’t really hold the thrill of surprise for us anymore. So we have to make do with trade show E3, the ultimate spring showcase for the video game industry. At E3, we learn what companies have been constructing through the barren winter months. Anything can happen, and it often does.
With the rumor that Nintendo might be showing off the Wii 2 at E3 2011, this year’s upcoming E3 is suddenly worth anticipating. But one...
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By Nadia Oxford on Apr 25, 2011 in Nintendo 3DS, Wii
1
Rumor has it that a very special guest will be making an appearance at E3 2011, namely, the Wii’s successor. Call it the Wii 2; call it the Wii HD; call it “Fred” for all it matters: We won’t know anything about Nintendo’s new video game system until the company is good and ready to tell us all about it. But that just makes it extra-fun to put together a wish list. Here’s what we’d like to see in terms of features from the...
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By Nadia Oxford on Apr 25, 2011 in Nintendo 3DS, PC, PlayStation 3
2
The summer months can be downright chilly as far as video game sales are concerned. Much of the game-playing population goes away on holidays, and publishers use June, July and August to polish up their big Christmas releases.
But that doesn’t mean that summer is a wholly barren time for gaming. In fact, some interesting stuff is coming our way in the hot months of 2011. Here’s what you can expect.
Torchlight II (Mac/PC, July 2011) — An action...
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By Nadia Oxford on Apr 21, 2011 in Business, Facebook, Online Games
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Social games are really popular (“How popular are they?”). They’re so popular that a report recently released by Parks Associates predicts that revenues from social games will quintuple by 2015.
“Gaming on social networks has quickly become the most visible category of online games,” said Pietro Macchiarella, a Research Analyst with Parks Associates. “Right now more than 250 million people play games like Zynga’s CityVille...
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By Nadia Oxford on Apr 20, 2011 in Music Games
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Attaching the name of a famous musician or band to a music game is a good way to draw people into buying the title. In fairness, it’s also a good way to repel people from the game if they’re not fans of the lady or gentleman on the box. Either way, an endorsement from a celebrity artist gets people talking about the game in question, and that’s pretty important if you want your titles to catch an eyeball or three in a busy market. Here are ten of...
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By Nadia Oxford on Apr 20, 2011 in Game Design, Game Development, Licensing
1
Let’s talk about video games based on TV shows and movies.
(The audience groans. Somewhere far to the back, there is the echo of retching.)
There, there. It’s not a pleasant topic; most video games based on television properties and movies are just awful. But that’s not always the case, and what’s more, that doesn’t have to be the case. If publishers followed a few rules, the quality of games based on licensed intellectual properties...
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By Nadia Oxford on Apr 19, 2011 in Music Games
3
We go through long stretches of pop culture history wherein music tends to sound manufactured, but occasionally something different catches our ears. The same can be said for video games based on music: We have the likes of Guitar Hero, which is a fun game to be sure, but as bizarre as damp moss. If you peer under the carpet of the music game genre, however, you’ll find some interesting alternatives brooding in the darkness. Here are seven of the weirdest...
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Scott Steinberg is the CEO of 