This is a somewhat lazy blog post for a monday morning, but I read this piece by Wendy Fonarow and thought it was very interesting. Even though it’s about music, many similar things from it go for games too. I’m going to quote that section wholesale:
This may be a dumb question, but what criteria are [...]

Robert Fearon was going to be one of the speakers at World of Love, but unfortunately couldn’t make it. He did, however, write up his talk. He makes an excellent point: Giving away source code is seen as the most generous thing a game developer can do, but in fact that’s only useful to the [...]

Jeffrey Sheen is the founder of Stargazy Studios, and posted this piece on Indievision about a tool he uses for game design: The Quad. I’m quite partial to these kind of dimensional models, having looked into them before in relation to human emotion, and I think Jeffrey’s pins down a few important elements of game [...]

The argument goes that piracy is killing games/music/film, and the counterargument goes that pirates wouldn’t pay full price, so it’s not as big a dent in profits as entertainment industries like to make out. However, that’s not exactly an easy thing to measure.
Wolfire has some back-of-fag-packet workings, but with an interesting point: estimates are that [...]

A couple of years ago you couldn’t turn a corner at GDC without hearing about casual games. This year, the term was “social games”, and they seem to have set off some major jitters.
Firstly, we have a panel, in which VCs talked about developers being “in denial” and the future of the games industry being [...]

A bit of good news in the face of so many studio closures and redundancies this year: Ex-Codies Nick Wheelright and Trevor Williams are opening a new studio in the Midlands, called Playground Games. My bet is that Birmingham will snaffle them, as it seems to be doing with a lot of creative businesses at [...]

There’s a very interesting post-mortem of Time Fcuk by co-creator Edmund McMillen over on Gamasutra. The comments on the piece are also worth reading; Gamasutra is managing to build quite a community of known game designers in the comment sections on some features.
Time Fcuk is one of the games I sought for the Indie Games [...]

Valve are setting an excellent example of how to update games at the moment, by making the updates into entertainment themselves rather than mere patches.
Last week they unveiled an update to the sniper class in Team Fortress 2, which seemed to completely negate spies, the counter to snipers. Knowing full well that such an update [...]

Steve Gaynor from 2K Boston coins a new term: Single-A Games; projects that have a higher risk and lower budget than typical triple-A titles (In the words of Tom Armitage, nice coinage).
Triple-A is, of course, yet another coincidental, convenient and rather subjective piece of games industry terminology, and I’m pleased to see the lexicon expanding. [...]

Greg Costikyan offered a great opinion piece on Gamasutra the other day, about a lack of culture in games leaving the only options in extremely forgettable licensed IP. What makes it a particularly strong piece is the examples he gives of the incredibly homogenised boardgame mass market of the US, and the strongly cultural market [...]