MMOClash reports a financial analyst downgraded Activision Blizzard stock from "buy" to "neutral" based on an online survey with 381 gamer participants. Now personally I wouldn't buy Activision Blizzard shares; their main cash cow is aging, and the games business is extremely volatile. But I do have doubts whether accurate financial forecasts can be achieved by asking a few hundred gamers.

We (PopCap Games), in partnership with Information Solutions Group, published a report on social game users earlier this year.

The research covered 5,000 social game players in the US and UK, and found that the average social gamer is a 43-year old woman. But the reality is much more multi-faceted... here are the key findings:

Among the nearly 5,000 consumers who responded to the survey, more than 1,200 play games on social networking sites and platforms at least once a week, qualifying them as "social gamers" for the purposes of the survey. Two-thirds of all qualified survey respondents are U.S.-based. 55% of all social gamers are female and 45% are male — with the disparity being even larger among UK consumers (58% vs. 42%). The average age of social gamers is 43, with U.S.-based social gamers averaging 48 years of age compared to 38 for those based in the UK. Further, 46% of American social gamers are 50 or older, compared to just 23% in the UK. Only 6% of all social gamers are age 21 or younger.

How much is a shared link on Facebook worth? For online ticketing service Eventbrite, each time someone shares a link to an event with their Facebook friends it results in $2.52 worth of ticket sales. In contrast, a Twitter share is only worth $0.43, and a LinkedIn share is worth $0.90. Sharing an event through Eventbrite’s email sharing tool is worth $2.34, almost as much as Facebook. On average, across all social channels, each share is worth an average of $1.78 for Eventbrite.

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.

Our Mission - To explore the rich cultural genre of games; to give scholars a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories; to provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussions on games and gaming.

Game Studies is a crossdisciplinary journal dedicated to games research, web-published several times a year at www.gamestudies.org.

Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games, but any previously unpublished article focused on games and gaming is welcome. Proposed articles should be jargon-free, and should attempt to shed new light on games, rather than simply use games as metaphor or illustration of some other theory or phenomenon.

Rapid Application Development (RAD) processes such as Agile, Scrum, and the like, simultaneously pose an opportunity and a threat to achieving a quality user experience. It all depends on how it's handled. The standard methodologies as described in books don't work in practice, if you care about the usability of your products. But small modifications work wonders, as we found when studying how Agile works on real projects.

MMOGCHART.COM is dedicated to my research in tracking the growth of subscription-based Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). The menu on the left is updated each version with new figures, charts, graphs, and my analysis. My work is wholly independent and free; if you find it useful please consider making a donation via PayPal. If you have any questions, desire an interview, wish to provide numbers, or would like to hire me to consult on a MMOG project, please feel free to contact me.

I surveyed MMORPG players for the first time in the Fall of 99. Since then, I've surveyed over 35,000 MMORPG players from most of the popular US MMORPGs. Over the past 5 years, I've presented these findings in a variety of formats. I settled on The Daedalus Project as a way to easily present findings, but the problem that emerged was that it became hard to illustrate themes and show the big picture using a blog format. The Daedalus Gateway is an attempt to provide a coherent gateway to all those findings.

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