InsideMobile Conference

I just got accepted to speak at the InsideMobile Conference! The show will be going down August 26 to 27, 2009. It's looking like it's gonna be a great show, especially with yours truly speaking. That and the fact that the 360|Conference team and O'Reilly are putting it on. Tickets are cheaper on a first come, first served basis! So buy your tickets asap at http://insidemobile.eventbrite.com to get the best possible price. See you there and you better go to my session!

PV3D - The Next Generation of Games

I saw Papervision 3d (PV3d) a few years ago and instantly saw it's potential. Flash a platform that is installed in 98% of all machines with the capability of rendering 3d objects is solidifying its current position in the gaming space.

I'm really excited about the new “gravityOffset” capability in PV3d. Check out this Rolling Sphere in action

Cost of Now

I really enjoyed Seth Godin's blog post about the cost of now.

It's so true one minute to late and the value of your business can change, this is why our team is always developing with a sense of urgency. Thanks Seth!

"The closer you get to the source and moment of information, the more it costs.

If you wanted to be the first person to see Nokia's new phone, you could have flown to Berlin, as Robert Scoble did. Or you could have been the second person by obsessively hitting refresh on his posts. Or you could have been the tenth person by having it show up in your feed later in the day. Or you could wait a week and see it everywhere. Or in a year, get one on eBay for $5...

If you want to know how the stock market did in 2006, you can spend ten seconds and find it in Wikipedia. If you want to know about today, you'll need to invest a few clicks and you'll get the delayed results. Or you could pay a lot of money for a stock market terminal and get the current prices. Or you could even risk prison and get some inside information about what's going to happen before it happens.

More than ever, there's a clear relationship between how new something is and how much it costs to discover that news.

You can check your email twice a day pretty easily. Once every fifteen minutes has a disruption cost. Pinging it with your pocketphone every sixty seconds is an extremely expensive lifestyle/productivity choice.

Sure, go ahead, stay hyper-current, but realize it's not free."

Game Server Upgrade

We upgraded our web and game servers to quad core this weekend.

The site and game services are running much faster now. We had some issues with the Nameserver DNS pointing to the right IP. We figured it out.

Some History of In-Game Advertising

In 1933 the world’s first pinball machine with electricity was released. One year later a scoring-mechanism was embedded into the machines that could track the number of balls and points the user achieved. Now people were competing and had a measure of skill, it wasn’t long before companies began exploiting the game, in the 60s and 70s, companies such as Playboy started branding these games. And so the first iteration of in-game advertising was born.

The next stage of in-game advertising would be the biggest advancement in this ad medium since computer graphics provided more real estate and more engaging environments for advertisers. The first computer graphics powered game was an early version of pong made with military devices. In 1978, the game Adventureland by Scott Adams carried in-game advertising for one of his upcoming games called Pirate Adventure. It’s interesting to unravel Adventureland, as it was a text based game. I conjecture that Adams wanted to create a franchise of games and that the strategy was to gain more face-time to promote his upcoming titles. From herein, companies began working out in-game advertising deals with game publishers prior to the game’s release date. In 1992, the ninja game Zool carried some levels that were branded with Chupa Chups. Zool is the story of a ninja that arrives in earth and must cross through six different lands in order to complete the game. Chupa Chups must have seen a good match with the in-game demographics in order to be one of the first companies to market in-game.

The Zool/Chupa Chups static in-game advertisements were in the form of product placement, with clearly visible lollipops scattered on the side-scrolling game. One year later, in 1993, Electronic Arts (EA) had secured sponsorship from Adidas in-game on the outskirts of the field. It wasn’t long before EA had a roster of clients and partners showing up in most of their sport games.

By examining the history of in-game advertising it is evident that Adventureland realized the value in being able to reach out to its own community and increase their brand loyalty. The other note is that for those multiplayer games where Chupa Chups can be scattered its worthwhile of considering the option of tournament software to create new revenue streams by way of sponsors.

Tournaments - MG Online

Amongst the flurry of E3 2008 news, the one that was the most interesting (but not surprising) was that Metal Gear Solid 4 would be expanding its community and competition features via it's online store.

It makes perfect sense, instead of loosing their community to third parties organizing these events, they can own their community and offer a better experience to the gamer because of more advanced integration.

The update to MGS4 will now include reward points that are gained via site activity or by winning tournaments. These points can then be used to upgrade characters, unlock new features, etc. This point-based economy is an excellent way to revitalize a community and it's a topic we frequently consult on.

The clan rooms will also be added but I do not think they will offer chat and voice as our clan tools do.

I look forward to seeing this update and also in seeing publishers paying more attention to the power of social media and their game.

Tournament & Community Framework

Check out the new pages on our Community and Tournament Platform