Εμφάνιση αναρτήσεων με ετικέτα game. Εμφάνιση όλων των αναρτήσεων
Εμφάνιση αναρτήσεων με ετικέτα game. Εμφάνιση όλων των αναρτήσεων
Κυριακή 31 Μαρτίου 2013
Σάββατο 30 Μαρτίου 2013
Kickstarted Video Game Console Gets Ready for Debut
about to hit the stores, and it’s not produced by Sony, Microsoft
or Nintendo, the current gorillas dominating the market.
Ouya, a much more modest $99
console, running off Android’s operating system, will be hitting
the market in June and will be available in stores like Target and
Best Buy.
The launch of Ouya will mark the culmination of an interesting
experiment. The completion of the console’s development and release
was paid for via a Kickstarter campaign that drew in $8.5 million
in donations. Kickstarter campaigns have been successful in helping
fund products and artistic ventures. But as gamers know, the days
of a console being just a product are long over. Game consoles also
now provide persistent services. Games can be purchased and
downloaded via console these days, as can rentals of movies and
television shows.
Ouya’s challenge will be not just getting the console into
gamers’ hands, but in being able to continue to operate an online
market given its economically modest origins. I
wrote about Ouya back in August and the skepticism over whether
such a business model could possibly succeed.
Chris Kohler at Wired got his
hands on the console in San Francisco just recently. It
obviously is not going to be competing with the Xbox or the
Playstation for the high-end games, but that’s absolutely not the
point of the system. Rather, it intends to be an avenue for
smaller-game developers to more easily find an audience. Because of
the huge boom of indie game development, the success of the system
will depend on the ability for creators to use their marketplace
and the ease of consumers in connecting to the types of games
they’d like. Kohler notes the system Ouya will be using for its
marketplace incorporates both an algorithm and human curation:
It’s common knowledge in the world of iOS apps that you get
noticed in one of two ways: Get featured in the store via Apple’s
secretive process of internal curation, or (by hook or by crook)
get onto the top-grossing or most-downloaded charts.“We don’t think downloads or revenue are good indicators of what
a good game is,” [Ouya CEO Julie] Uhrman says. To that end, Ouya is
crafting its own automatic algorithm that will determine whether or
not a game is any good, based on other players’ behaviors. How many
times have they played it? For how long are they playing it? When a
player turns on their Ouya, is it the first game they immediately
boot up? All of these factors will influence how prominently games
are positioned in the Ouya marketplace when a player clicks on
“Discover.”There will also be an element of hand-picked curation on Ouya.
That process, Uhrman says, will be led by Kellee Santiago,
co-founder Journey creator thatgamecompany and now Ouya’s
head of developer relations. All new games will go into an area
called the “Sandbox,” and will be pulled up into the “Recommended”
feed after they hit the jackpot on the automated fun algorithm, or
are selected by Santiago’s team.
There’s still plenty of skepticism among gamers that Ouya’s
business model can actually work (just read the comments under
Kohler’s story). Portability and simplicity has contributed to the
success of mobile phone gaming apps. Do people really want to play
such games on their televisions? We will find out beginning in
June. For the curious, PC Magazine has a
slide show of some games that will be available at launch via
Ouya.
Even if Ouya fails, console developers will likely learn a lot
about building economic systems that accommodate the ever-changing
nature of the gaming marketplace.
Παρασκευή 29 Μαρτίου 2013
If 'Girls,' 'Full House' And More Had 'Game Of Thrones' Sigils
HBO has released a delightful sigil-maker before the start of the third season of Game of Thrones. This got me thinking, what would some of the most famous characters from fiction adopt as their sigils and mottos if they were in the world of Westeros? Let's have a look.
Read More...
More on Game of Thrones
LEADING BASKETBALL HISTORIAN: Heat-Bulls Was The Greatest NBA Regular Season Game Ever Played
Grantland's Bill Simmons, who literally wrote The Book Of Basketball, says Wednesday's Heat-Bulls game was the greatest regular season game of all time.
The Bulls won and snapped the Heat's 27-game winning streak.
You had the underdog Bulls playing without their two best players against the most famous NBA team since Jordan's Bulls. You had the best player in 20 years at the peak of his powers. You had a national TV audience and unparalleled stakes: Miami approaching an unapproachable record, the smell of history looming over everything, real greatness in the air. You had an intensely proud Bulls team hoping to turn that game into a street fight (1980s basketball, reincarnated), as well as a genius defensive coach who understood exactly how to beat Miami (or at the very least, make them sweat out no. 28). And you had Chicago's spectacular crowd, one of the few old-school NBA fan bases left that (a) understood the stakes, (b) would never sell their tickets on StubHub to Miami fans, and (c) knew from experience exactly how to affect such a game.
I can't remember watching an NBA regular-season game that felt like a Game 7 before.
Interesting.
Read the whole thing here >
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Join the conversation about this story »
Τετάρτη 27 Μαρτίου 2013
Gilligan's Island Game Theory and Gay Marriage
oral arguments today in a case about the Clinton-era Defense of
Marriage Act (DOMA), which was a pro-active attempt to squelch
same-sex marriage, Iowahawk offers up three reasons to support
marriage equality:
First, I'm against restrictions on adults entering into
voluntary contracts. Second, I see no reason why broadening the
definition of marriage to same-sex couples devalues or diminishes
mine. Finally, there's the purely utilitarian Gilligan's Island
effect: if Skipper and Professor decide to wed in a tasteful
lagoon-side ceremony, I've got Ginger and Mary Ann to myself at the
wedding luau. And if it's Mary Ann and Ginger hooking up, well...
I'll be in my bunk.
Read the whole thing
over at Breitbart.
And for god's sake, follow Iowahawk (Dave Buerge) on Twitter; his
feed is one of the best.
Τρίτη 26 Μαρτίου 2013
Could the Red River Valley soon run blue?
(CNN) - The year was 1976. Apple was new on the computing scene. The supersonic Concorde plane had just taken to the skies for the first time. And the Seattle Seahawks suited up for their first football game. It was also the last time Texans voted to put a Democrat in the White House.
Game Developers Are Migrating To Mobile
Game developers are increasingly turning to smartphones and tablets for their next project. A survey of 2,500 developers from the organizers&of the recent&Game Developers Conference&found that 58 percent were planning their next project for mobile devices. Approximately 38 percent of those surveyed said their last project was on mobile. Over 50 percent of those surveyed said they were independent developers, indicating that their could be some bias towards mobile in the survey, since mobile games are cheaper to develop than budget-busting console games.& Mobile gaming isn't going to knock out more immersive and graphics-driven desktop and console gaming any time soon. Hand-held consoles, however, are directly threatened by the increasingly sophisticated crop of iOS and Android games and will see less and less developer interest. Mobile games have been the primary beneficiary of the app store era. No wonder, given they are the largest time bucket on both smartphones and tablets.&A BII analysis found that 70 percent of the top 200 grossing apps on the iOS App Store were games (the proportion was 75 percent on Google Play). Among developers working on mobile, 90 percent planned working on iOS, 75 percent on Android, and only 15 percent on Windows Phone. Click here to view a larger version of this chart. 
Please follow BI Intelligence on Twitter.Join the conversation about this story »
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