As micro-payments rapidly become the mainstream model for most new online games, there is a massive rise of business models offering collectible items. From games where the collectible elements are at the very center of the gameplay, like Magic The Gathering Online, PoxNora, Urban Rivals, Bella Sara, all the games from ChallengeGames, the recent UpperDeckU […]
Gamasutra relays a report by Seattle Post that shows Microsoft numbers for Xbox Live Gold subscribers. The more recent figures are from February 2008, showing that 56% of all Live members were Gold (60% in the US). The percentage was actually down 4 points yoy. At that time there were 10M announced Live members , […]
According to a new Comscore study (users aged 15+, Dec 08 vs Dec 07). Good news for social games ! UK, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and Italy were the countries with the biggest penetration of social networking. Also in the study : Facebook grew 443% in one year in France thanks to localization, and has now […]
As reported by Virtual World News. The linking of accounts is always something tricky, it looks like users have 2 weeks to transfer their virtual currency and can’t claim what they already spent in the client-based version, and they have to start over with a new avatar and crib in the new world. This should […]
The first part of this post can be found here. 5.Rise of cloud computing This is the corollary of trend 4, and of the difficulty of scaling hardware investments. As launches of Age of Conan and Warhammer Online have shown recently, it is a risky position to invest in hardware when you have a lot […]
Like every new year, it’s time for looking back at the past one and trying predictions for the next one. We are quite late in the exercise as we post this, so we’ll concentrate on the predictions part for the future. These are based on our observations and deductions and various chats with clever people […]