Popcap have released a market research survey they recently commissioned, revealing that apparently between the US and UK, the average user of social games is a 43 year old woman. I’m wary of these figures since they don’t include typical platforms such as consoles, and the study doesn’t state a great deal about where the [...]

The inimitable James Wallis has bravely salvaged his blog and started posting again, pointing this week to Roger Caillois’ book Man, Play and Games, and summarising some of its main tenets. In particular, agôn, alea, mimicry and ilinx were terms I’d heard unreferenced in a GDC presentation last year, and I’m pleased to stumble across [...]

I still meet people who ask me, perplexed look on their fizzogs: “Channel 4 are publishing games? Why?”. Here’s why, in a Gamasutra piece examining Adult Swim and Channel 4’s forays into games so far. It’s worked excellently for them, and excellently for games too, with them taking on smaller projects and different topics.
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Clint Hocking nails it as far as morality in games is concerned:
When canned, discrete moral choices are rendered in games with such simplicity and lack of humanity, the message we are sending is not the message specific to the content in question (the message in the canned content might be quite beautiful – but it’s [...]

Lewie Proctor pulls in a variety of opinions on piracy over at Savy Gamer, including CEO of TIGA Richard Wilson, indie developer Cliff Harris, and Dmitry Guseff from DRM provider StarForce.
All kinds of new platforms are habituating people to buying downloadable titles, but it’s new territory and there have been a lot of screw ups. [...]

I’ve heard from one XBLIG developer that any game making three hundred sales there is doing very well relative to most. Brandon Boyer goes into quite some detail on Boing Boing about what Microsoft promised at launch and what they’ve actually done, finding a somewhat depressing result. There’s clearly some commitment from Microsoft when they’re [...]