Much of that success can be attributed to the game’s open structure and limitless potential. Players can build anything they imagine, provided its outward-facing geometry is made up of simple, colorful blocks. The focus on creativity is why so many players, young and old, have been drawn to the game and continue to play years after its release.
Source: ‘Minecraft’ tops 100 million sales
Apart from Tetris, few games have come anywhere close to hitting the 100 million mark.
Faisall had upgraded the dinosaurs using the game currency Dino Bucks without realising it was charging him in real money.
Source: Boy, 7, racks up £4,000 on dad’s iPad playing Jurassic World game | Metro News
What the PC game industry figured out is that in a world of abundant media, users have endless choices; instead of fighting for scarcity, fight for attention. Maximize user engagement and money will — with enough experiments — inevitably follow.
Professional gaming – e-sport – is a huge deal in South Korea. There’s a government department dedicated to its development.
Source: The real scars of Korean gaming – BBC News
At the top-end of gaming, the players are undeniably well looked after, healthy and happy – even if the gruelling routine means they clearly don’t enjoy playing anymore. It’s work.
Still, the era of plastic instruments has passed. You can’t find the controllers in stores anymore, but your local Salvation Army or Goodwill probably has a giant pile of them. Even those who love Rock Band have trouble justifying all of the primo living room real estate the full suite of controllers consumes.
via Rock Band and Guitar Hero May Be Returning in 2015 | WIRED.
By contrast, the current ranking system leads to the popular becoming more popular — once you’re on the top charts, you have increased visibility, which leads to more reviews, which further cements your chart position (as long as you stay inside your semantic rating bucket).
Those of us who want to discover hidden gems really need the search functionality to work with us, not against us. We want a system where the top charts are self-correcting, rather than self-reinforcing. Otherwise we get a situation like Apple’s with frozen charts, shady tactics, and skyrocketing user acquisition costs.
Often synonymous with “random generation”, procedural generation is the usage of calculations and algorithms to create content, rather than referring to preset data. The typical reason is to generate content mid-gameplay, which makes for a more unpredictable and unique experience in multiple playthroughs. Common elements that are subject to procedural generation in games include item attributes, enemy abilities, and level layouts.
Procedural generation specifically refers to the usage of algorithms to generate content, it is not necessary to be random. Pseudo-random generators with fixed seeds can be considered procedural generation despite producing identical results.
via Newest ‘procedural-generation’ Questions – Game Development Stack Exchange.
“Of course, least positively of all, another angle for many publishers is in-app purchasing – why provide a feature as a hidden cheat when you can get people to pay money to unlock it?” Seavor has also noticed this trend. “Bigger publishers have now realised you can actually sell these things to players as DLC. Want that special gun? Think you can unlock it with a cheat code? Nope! You’ve got to give us some money first!”
Recent data shows 20 percent of mobile games get opened once and never again. 66 percent have never played beyond the first 24 hours and indeed most purchases happen in the first week of play. Amazingly only around two to three percent of gamers pay anything at all for games, and even more hair-raising is the fact that 50 percent of all revenue comes from just 0.2 percent of players.
This is a statistically insignificant amount of happy gamers and nothing that gives you a basis to make claims about “what people want”. I think it just as likely that mobile’s orgy of casual titles is due to simple bandwagon-ism or, in other words, not knowing what people want.
via Mobile is burning, and free-to-play binds the hands of devs who want to help | Polygon.
Daily active users (DAUs) in the first quarter of 2014 were 28 million, compared to 52 million in the first quarter of 2013. On a consecutive quarter basis, DAUs were up 7% from 27 million in the fourth quarter of 2013. Web DAUs and Mobile DAUs were 12 million and 16 million in the first quarter of 2014, respectively.
via EX-99.1.