I’ll be speaking at Future Play 2005 about the Future of Games and the impact the casual market will have on the industry.
Looking at the rest of the speakers this should be a pretty good event. It’s a lot more academic focused than many of the other conferences I’ve been to. It should be interesting [...]

One thing which I’ve found interesting over the years is the large dichotomy between “shareware” game developers, and the shareware industry, vs. the typical “casual” game developer, and their counterpart, “the portal.”
My first experience of this was when I went to the Shareware Industry Conference back in 2000 (or was it 2001?). That was where [...]

There’s a great article up from the escapist on Casual Fortunes, which talks about the “fortunes” people are making developing casual games.
Overall it is an excellent article and definitely worth the read, although there’s a few points that I have to take issue with.
Perhaps the biggest thing is that Mr. Varney seems to imply that [...]

Joe Jaffe, along with AdRants and some other sites, have been talking about whether agencies should have blogs. We don’t really call ourselves an agency, but we’ve been known to roll wit’ da agency homies, so here’s our thinking on this topic.
1) Our employees are smart enough to say intelligent things that people might [...]

It looks like there’s one thing that the game development industry has in common with the ad industry: Burnout. Apparently 44% of the people in marketing, advertising, sales and PR sectors have experienced symptoms of burnout.
This matches up with the currently horrendous Quality of Life issues that face the game industry.
I’m beginning to wonder which [...]

It looks like congress is getting into the GTA Hot Coffee scandal in a big way, with the passage of a resolution to have the FTC investigate Rockstar Games.
While many people seem to think this is a bad thing, and essentially nothing more than a witch hunt, I am very glad to see it happen. [...]

Big news today on the web3D front as Dassault Systemes has acquired Virtools. This move demonstrates the growing impact and overall interest in 3D on the web.
The press release announcing this focuses on the web-player and it seems obvious that it is one of the big reasons Dessault is interested in Virtools. This is something [...]

Day 2 of the Casual Games Conference started off a bit slow with everyone trickling in a bit late in the morning. Once things got going the conference content again proved to be very solid.
Casual Game Audio: This session from Guy Whitmore of Microsoft was tragically underattended. Guy obviously knows a tremendous amount about game [...]

It’s that time of year again. CMP Media has just opened the call for abstracts for the 2006 Game Developers Conference.
It looks like there’s several changes to the overall submission process this year, and I expect that will result in some always welcome fresh new content.

The press release is now starting to hit the wires, so we can finally announce the formation of the IGDA’s Casual Games SIG. This SIG is going to focus on casual game development, including web/downloadable titles, advergames, etc. We created it to address the growing needs of this rapidly expanding marketplace.
Currently there is no single [...]