After years of campaigning about it from the industry, the UK Government has finally announced tax breaks for the games industry. Congratulations to TIGA, ELSPA and all the developers that worked with them on making the case for them.
There are very few details as yet, but Develop have been carving a few out including that [...]

One of my favorite bits of games industry dialogue from the past few years has been Frank Lantz’ assertion that games are not media. Anna Anthropy expanded on it last week with glorious clarity in her GDC indie game developer rant:
first of all, the videogame isn’t a medium, it’s a form.
Terms are taking root with [...]

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 [...]

This DICE talk is doing the rounds (to me via Kim Pallister’s notes and Nicholas Lovell’s embed).
I’ve often thought about designing game rules into everything: what if a mundane job could be made compelling by game rules? That simple rule systems can become compelling is something I talk about a lot. From The Game and [...]