PS3 : News, Tests, Jeux PS3, Actu PlayStation 3 - Play3-Live.com.
Web. Social Gaming Pwns The Industry. This guest post is written by Jeremy Liew, a Managing Director at Lightspeed Venture Partners where he focuses on investments in gaming, internet and consumer enabling technology companies. Jeremy is co-producing the Social Gaming Summit next Friday, June 13th, at UCSF Mission Bay. Most of the companies mentioned below will be presenting. This post comes a year after venture capitalist Susan Wu wrote a guest post on virtual goods. The last few years have seen a transformation in the consumer internet world as online media has evolved into social media. Many new social media companies have shot to tens of millions of users very quickly, including Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Yelp, YouTube, Slide, RockYou* and Flixster*.
As the game industry embraces web games, multiplayer games, and social games, we are seeing these same trends emerge. Social games are not just multiplayer games. Dramatically reduced development costs Lazard estimates that Halo 3 cost $30m to build. Easier monetization. Half-Life Portal | Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Dragon Age Origins - Home. The Official Spore™ and Spore™ Creature Creator Site. Spore And The Great DRM Backlash.
If we can learn anything from the troubled launch of Spore, a videogame many people have been looking forward to for years, it is that binding products with digital rights management (DRM) restrictions hurts more than it helps. Spore, designed by Sims creator Will Wright, went on sale a week ago. It is expected to sell 2 million copies in September alone, and is currently the No. 3 best-selling game on Amazon. But it also has one of the worst ratings on Amazon (2,016 out of the 2,216 ratings are one star) because of a concerted campaign by fans protesting its DRM.
It has also been downloaded an estimated 500,000 times on BitTorrent, and is well on its way to becoming the most illegally downloaded game ever. The DRM that comes with the official game only allows customers to use it on three machines (after that you have to call EA for permission to activate the game on additional machines). This is nothing more than an inconvenience. There is a lesson here for all media companies.
Blood Bowl.