Over the course of a loooong time, me and Nicholas Lovell from gamesbrief, argued about whether or not free to play games are the bright new future of gaming. I am traditionally against the current implementation of F2P gaming (although I’ve softened on this a bit). Nicholas is traditionally very pro. See who you found most persuasive in our little debate…

Let us speak today of MMO websites.  I visit loads of official MMO websites, both for work and my personal interest, and it is absolutely appalling how many of them appear to be slapped together by Geocities monkeys from 1998 with no greater understanding of what such a website should do or offer.  I often find myself very frustrated when I’m trying to find some basic information, the latest news, or God forbid, an RSS feed.  You’d be surprised how many official websites do not have an RSS feed.  It’s like they’re in denial about modern technology even while running a highly sophisticated game.

After writing my recent article on Growth Hackers, I’ve been asked by quite a few folks on how to learn the discipline. The best answer is, learn from someone who’s already good at it – if you’re technical and creative, it’s well worth the time.

I would encourage everyone to also read Andy Johns’s Quora answers on What is Facebook’s User Growth team responsible for and what have they launched? and
What are some decisions taken by the “Growth team” at Facebook that helped Facebook reach 500 million users?- it lays out a lot of the key activities used in a well-run growth team.

There is no shortage of stories about lone developers who made an app for the iPhone or iPad and had runaway success. But in the real world, the majority of app makers struggle to break even, according to a recent survey by marketing firm App Promo. Though the survey's methodology is a bit on the light side, numerous developers that we spoke to agree that the results—59 percent of apps don't break even, and 80 percent of developers can't sustain a business on their apps alone—are close to accurate.

Today Nissan North America changed the way consumers interact with cars in dealership showrooms. IdentityMine and digital agency Critical Mass celebrate the launch of the fully immersive Nissan Pathfinder Experience, utilizing Kinect for Windows. Originally, Kinect was used to enhance the Xbox 360 gaming system; now Kinect can be applied to a variety of consumer interactions. The debut is center stage at the Chicago Auto Show, the largest auto show in North America, and includes a massive interactive display. Participants can virtually navigate through the interior of the Nissan Pathfinder by interacting with the Kinect for Windows console, using hand motions to direct the experience.

I wish Lena Dunham were a stuffed animal, or a Polly Pocket, or something else that is small and easy to carry around. Not because she is precious, or adorable, but because she, with her creator-of-the-new-show-Girls-ness, has become my security blanket. She is, thankfully, neither precious nor adorable, and Girls, which airs on HBO on Sunday nights (and the first ep of which is on YouTube), does not have a quirky, indie tone. It is simply HILARIOUS, and the characters are sometimes clever, but they are also sometimes embarrassing, sometimes stupid, sometimes assholes, etc. It’s funny for the familiarity of its seemingly unnecessary filler words and recognizable mannerisms. It’s poignant because it doesn’t moralize, but brings comfort just by presenting prototypical characters and making them feel less cliché, and less lonely. It’s important because it is a TV show on a big cable network that is run by a 25-year-old woman pulling from her own experiences and telling her own stories.

We live in a bold, new era in game monetization. A full-production desktop game that is free-to-play makes on the order of $37.5 million every year. Games companies that see less than 5% of their users ever spend a cent make almost $1 Billion a year in revenue. Entirely new ways of selling games are being devised every day. How should a game developer pick a monetization method in these crazy times? To help us understand what really drives consumers to open up their wallets for their favorite games, I suggest we look back to one of the progenitors of micro-transactions, Magic: The Gathering(MTG from here on out).At first glance, it would seem to be easy to answer the question “What is the monetization method of MTG?”  ”Simple,” you might say, “They sell packs of cards,” which is true of course, but there is a lot of nuance rolled up in those packs of cards.

I was on stage with Facebook advertising Product Manager Paul Adams this morning. Don’t know who he is? He came up with the research that led to Google Circles before moving to Facebook. Interesting guy, but he told me that Facebook isn’t working on ways to push advertising back out through the verbs to client apps.

Gamification is bullshit.

I'm not being flip or glib or provocative. I'm speaking philosophically.

More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.

Macht plötzlich alles keinen Sinn mehr? Hat sich die Geschäftsführung die Reportings der Marketeers mal genauer angesehen und ist explodiert? Frustration aller Orten. Völlig zu Recht. Denn, da hat Mirko etwas Kluges geschrieben:

“Erfolg hängt im Social Web heute ganz stark am Engagement Einzelner. Das skaliert aber nicht. Und wer es versucht, es zu skalieren, verbrennt sich…”

Da ist es wieder, das Bild vom Social Ikarus, der sich zu nah an die Sonne wagt. Der Absturz lässt sich jedoch vermeiden, wenn die richtige Flugroute gewählt wird.

Our indie team, Kindling Games, is currently developing a game for Windows Phone 7. We’re in the final throes of getting this thing out the door and the other day we had this simple, well proven idea for generating a little more revenue and adding a different dimension to our game. For a small fee, you would be able to customize your rainbow duder (we need a better name) with a few skins and also be able to customize your levels. For example, you’d pick up a Zeus skin and a tiny Zeus sits on top of your rainbow cloud and extra lighting particle effects rain down terror on the townspeople. Essentially, the purchase would include a small bit of additional functionality along with the cosmetic change. We’re well beneath the maximum package size so we thought this would be a great way to add extra content and some extra fun! After having this idea, I had a flash of sudden realization that the Windows Phone 7 does not support micro-transactions. Arrrrrggggh!!!

iMirror - AR case for sunglasses manufacturer via iPad

The finalists for this year's Games Media Awards have been revealed ahead of October's ceremony in London.

Organisers have whittled down the list of finalists from thousands of nominations, with 17 magazines, 20 websites, podcasts and blogs, and 26 writers up for an award, with the winners to be chosen by a panel of industry figures.

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.

Here’s an excellent idea: use Kinect to display clothes on people in real-time, inside a fashion retail shop.

But hey – wait a minute – look closely at the person who’s posing in each case. Why does the on-screen person look like they weigh twice as much as the person who’s in front of the camera?

Is it hard to build, market and maintain a web app that makes at least $1000 a month?
For a single, skilled web developer.

Startups in stealth mode need one piece of advice.
Just Stop.
As in stop being in stealth mode. Stop asking for advice. Stop doing your start-up. You're not ready.
You're a naive-bullshiter.

Last night I returned home to see a post by Jeremiah Owyang about online community best practices. Included in the post was the following image of the life cycle of a successful online community:

If you take a look at this graph you may think, wow this is definitely how I’d like my community to end up. My immediate response was “is this possible?” Thanks to “continual improvements” these online communities appear to have continued growth even past the standard maturation phase of the business. If you’ve read “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore you will immediately realize that this chart makes no logical sense.

We have previously discussed how online communities are often characterized by vast participation inequality. The so-called 1% Rule states that 90% of a community’s membership will not participate; 9% will contribute only occasionally; and the eponymous 1% will participate frequently, contributing the vast majority of material.

This model of participation inequality holds true for many online communities, and especially for bulletin-board modes of interaction (such as forums, blogs, etc). What it doesn’t provide, however, is a more detailed look at just how these participants become involved in communities or how they transition between groups. Rationally it must hold true that the 1% shifts as the online community grows, its members age, and so on.

It’s almost everyday that I come across an awesome Facebook fan page. Then I go to their site, and wow – it’s in full flash and I can hardly navigate it without throwing up. I search for their topic and the brand is nowhere to be found.
The allure of social media has made brands throw out any semblance of a strategy and have just jumped in. Instead, brands should take a moment to consider your long term digital strategy.
If you’re not sure what a possible workflow should look like – I’ve outlined three steps to digital maturity below. Each step explains what should be happening across each individual media type.

Facebook’s communication channels are central to social game distribution, retention, and engagement, but there’s rarely an opportunity to see what happens to a game when all of its communication channel access is cut off.

It has now been about a week since Facebook suspended all viral communication channels for most LOLapps games. Although changes will take a while to cycle into a monthly active user graph, an AppData graph of LOLapps’s Critter Island game’s daily active users shows why a communication channel suspension is almost as bad as an outright removal of an app

“It looks like around 92% of the people playing the full version of [the pictured] Ricochet Infinity pirated it.” It’s moments like those that make people in the industry stop dead in their tracks. 92% is a huge number and though we were only measuring people who had gotten the game from Reflexive and gone online with it, it seemed improbable that those who acquired the game elsewhere or didn’t go online were any more likely to have purchased it. As we sat and pondered the financial implications of such piracy, it was hard to get past the magnitude of the number itself: 92%.

Over the past 2 years, the relatively close knit blog universe has exploded in a massive confluence of social expression and corporate reaction. A cottage industry of owner-operators, trawling social media on behalf of themselves and others, has cropped up in lofts, dorms, agencies and iPhones.

These are the new social media Community Managers and corporate is clearly looking. This post offers a granular look at crucial skills, essential duties and a job description for the CM role.

In the realm of marketing, Gatorade is probably best known for splashy commercials featuring some of the world’s most famous athletes. However, a new effort behind the scenes of the PepsiCo-owned sports drink maker is putting social media quite literally at the center of the way Gatorade approaches marketing.

When you spend as much time as I do examining the workings of the online ad industry, it's easy to forget that, to many people, it really is pretty opaque. Not only is it characterized by some of the most complex and scalable technology in the world, but it also has its own, pretty unique, economic model to boot.

The above presentation helps to visualize how social technologies change business, ecommerce, and corporate websites. When I heard Mark Zuckerberg tell us how Facebook connect would be linked with different websites, I had a feeling of how dramatic this would change the web –and wrote this piece What ‘Facebook Connect’ Means for Corporate Websites.

Illegal Advertising is an independent blog that brings you the best in underground online advertising. Illegal, banned and rejected commercials, spoofs, very virals, director cuts, underground campaigns and exclusive previews. New content is added on daily basis, so check back often.

Studie zu Werbung und viralem Marketing in Social Communities von Tomorrow Focus

My name’s Scott Jennings. I work as a designer in the computer gaming industry, and comment a lot here on my blog-type thing on massively multiplayer games. Currently I’m at a small startup called John Galt Games, working on getting Webwars: Eve out the door.

Marketing mittels Mundpropaganda ("Word of Mouth Marketing"), Buzz Marketing, Viral Marketing oder Virus Marketing sind Ansätze, die immer weiter Verbreitung finden und zunehmend von großen Marken (P&G, Bacardi, Coca-Cola, Toyota oder Ford) angewendet werden. Hinzu kommt, dass durch die anwachsenden Inhalte im Web 2.0 auf Blogs etc. die digitale Mundpropaganda im Internet an Bedeutung gewinnt. Dieses Blog diskutiert diese Themen und gibt Anregungen dazu. Der Begriff Connected Marketing basiert auf einem Buchtitel, an dem Martin Oetting mit einem Kapitel beteiligt ist: Connected Marketing. Martin Oetting arbeitet bei trnd, der ersten deutschen Agentur für Mundpropaganda Marketing.