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 [...]

I can’t sum it up better than Raph does with this quote:
For those of us who dream of a place we can’t possibly be, doing things we couldn’t do, as someone else, with friends… well, we’re a little bit out of luck. We’ll always have our Avalons and our Lost Worlds. They’re just not the [...]

In an astounding piece of news, due to a loophole of China’s legal system, World of Warcraft just lost nearly half of its playerbase. The servers in China have been shut down for a month now, due to legal issues with former partner organisation The9. There’s no obvious end to the legal battle, and Chinese [...]

Via Kim, I paid some attention to Offworld’s retelling of some truly epic events happening in EVE Online. The MMO, often called “capitalism in space”, allows players to build and own immensely complex and large corporations made of other players. Large alliances often struggle for power. There is little narrative in comparison to the sheer [...]

James Governor has written a fascinating account of his visit to Microsoft’s Virtualisation team, who are attempting to simulate as much as the possibly can. It has potential to improve both the efficiency and the greenness of businesses, as James puts it:
Moving Atoms has a cost. I have recently started talking about Bit Miles as [...]

It’s just over a month since speculation surfaced on cuts at NCsoft Brighton, with the situation ultimately culminating in the closure of their dev studio with almost 70 redundancies as a result. Wired Sussex pointed out that the industry in the region is still quite strong, with many companies hiring in the region.
Some of the [...]

East Midlnads based Monumental Games have won £300,000 of funding from the Technology Strategy Board, they announced yesterday.
It makes a lot of sense, as networked technology is looking like one of the safest bets in games at the moment.
I do wonder if Rocco wrote this or it was written for him, as press release quotes [...]

Bruce Sterling gave a keynote at the Austin Game Developer’s Conference, and Rudy Rucker quickly posted a transcript of the talk. He manages to use a set of nonsense words to illustrate how the present regards the past, presenting his talk as someone from the future talking about our present. The entire thing is entertaining [...]

KZero have an excellent visualisation of different types of MMO and what age groups play them. There are many there I hadn’t heard of, all neatly categorised. Follow this link for a full size version, and this one for a post by them breaking it down.
(via the infringalicious Wonderland :) Note to KZero – people [...]

Google have finally launched a virtual world. People have been talking about this since the first google maps mashups, Sketchup and again with Google Earth.
What’s there so far seems pretty high quality, there must be some fairly powerful content creation tools to allow users to generate many of the rooms on show (there’s already a [...]