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.

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.

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.

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!!!

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.

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