My previous articles were about system design at a conceptual level, focusing on goals and best practices for system designers. This article gives an example of how to put those principles into practice. To demonstrate, I’ll walk through the character stat systems for one of the games I did system design for: Dungeon Siege 2. I’ll describe how its systems work, why we set things up the way we did, and how we did the math to translate our goals into content.

Ticketmaster estimates that every time one of their customers posts on Facebook that they’ve bought a ticket, their friends spend an additional $5.30 with the site.

Every month Opera conducts the definitive analysis of the key trends affecting the mobile Web worldwide. We publish these findings as the State of the Mobile Web. Each report provides the most frequently visited sites, key data metrics from Opera Mini and a snapshot of a specific trend chosen by the analysis team that month.

Geradezu euphorisch erzählt Springer-Boss Mathias Döpfner derzeit immer wieder, dass Paid-Content-Modelle dank iPhone und iPad endlich funktionieren würden. Die ePaper der verlagseigenen Print-Objekte kann er damit nicht meinen. Denn: Aktuelle Zahlen der IVW zeigen, wie schwach sich Bild, Welt, BamS & Co. auf elektronischem Wege derzeit verkaufen. Alle Springer-Zeitungen und -Zeitschriften verfügen als ePaper demnach nur über dreistellige Abonnentenzahlen.

According to a new report from Women’s Wear Daily, digital magazine sales are on the decline. A closer look at the data, however, reveals that sales are not nearly as bad as they appear.

The report, which cites numbers released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, points out that magazine sales on the iPhone and iPad are down across the board.

Microsoft has now released downloads and sales data for Windows Phone 7 Apps. The marketplace now counts 4868 apps. Among the most downloaded apps in the marketplace my 4 apps is ranked like this

Sigurd has 4 applications in Marketplace, with various levels of success, and it is his most recent app which has seen the most attention, garnering more than 50,000 downloads in 23 days, and reaching a Marketplace rank of 8, with an average of 2274 downloads per day.
The other apps have not fared as well, but what is interesting is the rapid drop-off when going from position 8 with 2300 downloads per day, to position 49 with only 330 downloads per day.

Der digitale Wandel von Print zu Online nimmt immer mehr Fahrt auf. Wie eine aktuelle Umfrage von Qmags unter 170.000 Lesern zeigt, erfreuen sich digital aufbereitete Inhalte zunehmender Beliebtheit. Klarer Verlierer sind in diesem Fall die klassischen Print-Medien. Die Gründe für die Verschiebung dürften auf der Hand liegen. So sind digitale Inhalte früher verfügbar, können leichter archiviert werden, schonen die Umwelt und können zudem besser durchsucht werden. Interessant ist auch, was die Leser über diese Publikationsform denken. Demnach ist die überwiegend Mehrheit der Leser entweder zufrieden oder sehr zufrieden mit der Art, wie die Inhalte präsentiert werden. In Anbetracht dessen, dass viele Magazine und Zeitungen auf dem iPad eine 1:1-Umsetzung der Print-Inhalte darstellen und häufig ganz auf interaktive Darstellungsmöglichkeiten verzichten, ist dieses Ergebnis meiner Meinung nach doch etwas verwunderlich.

Three million iPads have been sold in 80 days, Apple has announced. The tablet device launched in the US on April 3 and internationally on May 28. Apple said that developers have created over 11,000 new apps for iPad, which is also capable of running “almost all” of the 225,000 apps on the App Store. “People are loving iPad as it becomes a part of their daily lives,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “We’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more people around the world.”

This Escapist’s publisher, Alexander Macris, strikes a note that is all too familiar to many veteran gamers. He’s feeling left behind as a gamer, and explains the simple economics of why this is the case. Why they aren’t makin’ ‘em like they used to anymore. While I’m not sure his numbers are entirely accurate, they do paint a pretty sobering picture of why games have adapted the way they have…

Dies ist die leicht überarbeitete schriftliche Fassung eines Vortrags, den ich am 5. Juni zum Abschluss der 3. Berliner Mediensucht-Konferenz gehalten habe. Der vollständige Titel meines Vortrags hieß: “Immer und überall online – ein verheißungsvolles Leben mit Facebook, Foursquare und Co?” Ich werde den Vortrag wegen seiner Länge in drei Teilen auf diesem Blog veröffentlichen. Hier geht’s los mit Teil 1: Warum das Internet kein Zukunfts- sondern ein Gegenwartsthema ist – und für manche Nutzer das Thema Nummer 1 überhaupt.

In all the current excitement and hype about Android and the Apple iPhone and iPad people have seemed to lose sight of Nokia, this is a very silly thing to do. Nokia make about 40% (actually 39% last quarter) of all the mobile phones in the world, compared with Apple’s 2%. Nokia has 123,000 employees to Apple’s 35,000. Of the 52 million smartphones sold in the world in the last quarter 21 million came from Nokia, a 40% market share.

I have rapidly established a reputation for ‘iPhone bashing’, which is nothing to do with not owning a suite of Apple Products or disliking Steve Job’s hair. Oh no. For those of you that are not aware, my main ‘beef’ is with brands who do not consider other platforms simply because its a) too hard, b) too expensive/not as cheap as iPhone or c) just want to tick a box that says ‘We have an iPhone app’.
There is a wealth and breadth of great (and some not so great) operating systems out there that can offer brilliant, rich and engaging experiences for their users, that despite having a substantially larger market share than Apple, continue to be overlooked. For a long time I have wanted to put together a presentation to demonstrate this very point, but Ewan MacLeod of Mobile Industry Review has pulled it out of the bag.