Feature Article Archives - Page 10 of 10

9 online games/MMO trends for 2009 – part 2

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 of volatility in population (eg launch spike, then dwindling population). You also have to decide about how to break down the hardware’s geographical location yourself to give users better pings, have to take the game down to operate scheduled maintenance, renew the machines after a few years , etc. Read more

January 28, 2009/0 Comments/by Diane

9 online games/MMO trends for 2009 – part 1

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 from the industry. We might be right or wrong, but what is sure is that this industry is moving very fast, and is fascinating to watch. Anyway, it will be fun to check at the end of the year to see where we guessed right and where we missed – most of the points seem to us to be quite logically tied together at the moment.
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January 26, 2009/0 Comments/by Diane

Feature Article, Market Research

Netbooks are leading PC market growth (especially in Europe)

According to the Financial Times quoting IDC, most of the growth on the laptop market comes from netbooks (small, lightweight PCs on Windows or Linux, destined first and foremost to browse the web – the most famous one is the adorable little Asus Eee PC, of which I am a proud owner). IDC expects them to represent as much as 11-12% of the laptop market in 2009.