Firefox Makes a Push for Gaming Excellence
This is an interesting development:
We’re committed to building the infrastructure needed to keep the Web the most robust platform on the planet. Although its roots have been around for some time, Mozilla’s focus on games is a relatively new initative. We are focused on making Firefox the best game development platform possible.
Check out BananaBread.
The latest Firefox release includes all of the JavaScript and WebGL updates needed to produce this demo.
BananaBread was developed by Mozilla to show our progress in action. We ported a complete C++ game engine to JavaScript using Emscripten. The original opensource engine is called Cube 2. It was designed to support first person shooters. Few believed porting a full, highly responsive game to JavaScript was an achievable goal. (We had our own doubts.) To our amazement, we found that we were able to build a demo that surpassed our highest expectations.
Neal and CLANG and Swords and the Cryptonomicon
I went to see Neal Stephenson speak on Wednesday- and it was great. He’s a really interesting guy doing loads of stuff. I came to his work via the book Cryptonomicon and I’m reading Reamde now. As well as writing novels he’s also trying to get a proper sword fighting game made and did amazingly well on Kickstarter. Click on the image to see the great video they made to introduce this project, called CLANG…
CLANG – Click to see more.
CLANG screenshot
PS Vita’s Sales – Not Bad, Until Apple Takes a Bite…
The sales figures are out for the PS Vita:
Sony’s PS vita has sold more than 2.2 million units worldwide since its launch in December.
The figure, confirmed to Playfront.de by Sony, means that since its launch in Japan, Vita has sold approximately 11,000 units a day.
2.2 million? 11k per day? Sound like good numbers – that is until you consider Apple’s sales:
Apple meanwhile recently revealed in its financial report for Q2 2012 that it had sold roughly 390,000 iPhones a day, whilst iPad sales had hit 130,000 a day.
That’s a total of 520,000 iOS devices per day. While over at Google back in 2011 they were activating 500,000 Android devices per day. (Google don’t make most of the hardware devices sold and so can see the total numbers via activations.) Between the two of Apple and Google that is over a million devices per day. Sony has a lot of work to do.
PS. I wrote this post and scheduled it to appear before the news about the closure of Sony Liverpool was announced. Having worked with the SCEE people there on Savage Moon and Eat Them, it is sad news. What was the old Psygnosis also make so many amazing games. Sad news indeed. (Video below is of Psygnosis’s ‘Shadow of the Beast‘)
ExPlay Game Jam Goes Live! Your Chance to Game Jam Science…
The Games Jam event, a joint event between ExPlay Festival, the Wellcome Trust, the Science Museum and the Pervasive Media Studio happened on the 5th/6th October – opened by professor Bruce Hood.
Are you ready to push yourself to the limit, flex your brain, drop your pants and reach for the sky? The Extended Play game jam is where raw creativity reacts with extreme digital skills to explode and shower the public in face-melting interactive sickness.
The Wellcome Trust, Science Museum and Pervasive Media Studios wil be hosting the 2012 ExPlay Games Jam with 120 gamess enthusuiasts all takingwill take part in a hour games development frenzy in two locations to win a showcase at this year’s ExPlay Festival in Bath.
This October, budding games developers and designers from across the UK are invited to take part in a 24 hour Games Jam at either the Science Museum in London, and The Pervasive Media Studios in Bristol. Open to teams and individuals, the Games Jam will be led by expert bio-medical scientists from the Wellcome Trust, who will reveal a theme at the start of the 24 hour period during which participants will work round the clock to create a brand new, playable game.
Completed games will be judged by experts, and winners from each location will be able to showcase their games to the public at the ExPlay Games Festival in Bath in November 2012.
The Games Jam will take place on 5 and 6 October, with the theme, curated by The Wellcome Trust, announced on the morning evening of Friday 5 October and two locations linked by a live audio-visual feed. The Games are organised by ExPlay Festival, hosted by The Science Museum in London and The Pervasive Media Studios in Bristol and curated and funded by The Wellcome Trust.
The last ExPlay jam I took part in was great fun and I really enjoyed it. If you are a games developer, it might sound like an odd idea to give up a weekend working more (and boy have I lost waaaaay tooooo many weekends and evening to crunch time over the years) but it was hugely liberating and fun. For students and others is a great chance to get a bit of experience making games. Yes I’m bias, but I totally recommend it.
Here’s what the team I was in made…
PS. Media coverage of the launch of the event is here…
Pre-Event
- huffingtonpost.co.uk
- wellcometrust.wordpress.com
- edge-online.com
- n4g.com
- pocketgamer.biz
- pmstudio.co.uk
- pcgamesn.com (Q&A with me on science & games)
- compohub.net
- gamasutra.com
- rockpapershotgun.com
- bristol.ac.uk
- sciencemuseum.org.uk
- creativeboom.co.uk
- mcvuk.com
- guardian.co.uk
Post Event:
- 7outof10.co.uk
- aurochdigital.com (shortlisted games announcement)
- blogs.culture.gov.uk
Lovecraft’s 122nd Birthday is Today, Tis a Panegyric Day
H.P.Lovecraft was born on this day in 1890, making today his 122nd birthday. His fiction has endured much longer than his body ever did and given it has now become part of our culture, will continue to be for some time. His fiction is famous for its bleak world-view, its horror prose writing style and its use of use of obscure words. But it is his creations – Cthulhu being the most famous, that have passed beyond fiction to become archetypes and memes of a monstrous, vast and blighted universe. So on this most Panegyric yet Eldrich of days, I present a few links you might be interested in…
H.P.Lovecraft, 1890-1937
Whether you know it or not, you’ve probably rubbed proverbial shoulders with Lovecraft. His work has been referenced in everything from Babylon 5 to Army Of Darkness. If you recently watched Prometheus, then I urge you to read ‘At The Mountains Of Madness’. The similarities are remarkable.
Games and Gaming Owe his Thanks
Call of Cthulhu was one of the first role-playing games to have a literary legacy. Because Chaosium publishes both the role-playing game and collections of Lovecraftian fiction, the game is treated on equal footing with the books that inspired it. … Dungeons & Dragons owes much to Call of Cthulhu. This is most evident in its monsters: Ghouls, Kuo-toa (Deep Ones), Mind Flayers (Star Spawn of Cthulhu), and Black Pudding (Shoggoth) all are directly or indirectly inspired by their Lovecraftian counterparts.
Within His Work We Face our Mortality
It’s a bit depressing to know that more than 99.9% of all species that have ever existed on earth have also died out. Extinction is not an exception but is the norm; the Dodo has plenty of company. … Lovecraft really understood this idea; a large slice of the monumental horror his works served up comes from the realisation that we are just another scrabbling species trying to scrape out a living in an uncaring universe.
The Size of the US/EU Mobile Games Market (Hint, It’s Big!)
We’ve all know for some time now that the mobile market was big and growing – but did you know how big?
Mobile gaming is on everyone’s agenda. There are many reasons why…This report shows that the total number of Americans that play games on their smartphone, tablet or iPod Touch has now surpassed the 100 million mark, a year-on-year increase of 35%. Europe shows a growth of 15%, totaling 70 million gamers for seven key territories. Men slightly outnumber women in the US (52%) as well as in key European countries (55%). Growth rate in terms of time and money spent is significantly higher. In addition to the growing installed base of smartphones and tablets, three key drivers are accelerating growth of this games market segment: uptake of in-game purchases in free games, tablets and smartphones each creating their own market and the popularity of “mid-core” games. In 2011, mobile gaming took 13% of all time spent on games worldwide, totaling more than 130 million hours a day, and 9% of total money spent on games, grossing $5.8bn.
Crysis 3 Is Lookin’ Good! @Crysis #Gamescom
As you may know from past posts on this blog, I’m a big fan of the Crysis games, so I’m very excited to see more of Crysis 3 being unveiled at Gamescom:
Crytek’s director of creative development, Rasmsus Hojengaard, was on hand at EA’s Gamescom press event to present a sneak peak of Hunter Mode multiplayer.
Hunter Mode was confirmed to support up to 16 players at a time. Comprising of two teams – a large group of CELL troopers, and smaller group of cloaked Hunters – it’s up to the Hunters to take out their prey. The twist being that as those playing as CELL troopers are taken down they will respawn as Hunters, so quickly tipping the balance of power.
And there is a video – and it’s lookin’ good!
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Instabuy, people!
The Size of the Chinese Gaming Market
It’s huge, I mean you already know it is going to be, because it is such a populous country, but the figures still stagger you…
Despite the fact that many video games consoles are built in mainland China, they have been officially banned for sale there since the year 2000. As a result developers have focused on selling titles for PCs or mobile devices.
The market is huge: analysts at Niko Partners recently told Forbes that the country was home to 150 million gamers who collectively generated half of the world’s PC online games revenue.
It estimated the market would be worth $6.1bn this year saying Tencent was the leader when it came to advanced casual titles.
Others are also closely monitoring developments.
I bet they are. Again: Half the worlds PC gaming revenue comes from China.
My Two Pence on #Zynga
So Zynga have been going through a bout of problems of late. This comes after their much hyped flotation. Yet the share price has fallen and there are lots of questions around about a number of company related issues. This after a time when Zynga, a new kid on the gaming block, were once valued at more than EA! There are a number of interesting commentaries doing the rounds. This one caught my eye:
Two and a half years ago I wrote an article for Gamasutra that kickstarted my career in consulting and caused a huge stir inside the walls of various social game companies. Its title was “Zynga and the End of the Beginning“.
I essentially said that the main problem in social games was that the product was almost identical across all providers, and that social game makers had trapped themselves into thinking that it had to be so. I said that this had led them to treat the market as akin to fast food, as a necessary commodity rather than a quality relationship, and that this meant they were heavily dependent on new users and their sense of novelty. New users would eventually decline and, if the products didn’t get start to become genuinely sexy, then they would eventually stall.
In fact my theory was that social games could slide into the same death spiral that Atari did in 1983. In this model, rather than rejecting one game in favour of another, the market declares a plague on all their houses and stops buying into the platform as a whole.
I agree and I see this as a major issue for social games. How many block-puzzle games are simply clones of Bejewelled? Answer is loads. Remember the classic PS1 title Bust-a-Move (aka Puzzle Bobble) – well the same gameplay can be seen cloned across multiple social gaming companies. Of course there are exceptions, some great games being made, however innovation needs to happen and the Zynga/Ea row at least seems to suggest this is not the case. (And if EA win – there may be trouble, and if EA loose there may be trouble.) However copyright law is very complex and it is unlikley that there will be a clear win either way:
EA has made broad claims, but when applying scènes à faire and merger doctrine many will probably fail.
For example, EA’s claim of uniquely creating an avatar game based on human interactions and functions probably won’t be any more convincing than Atari’s claim that PAC-MAN was protectable as an original maze game. It will prove difficult to defend the idea that TSS is a unique human simulation just as it might prove difficult to defend Petz as an original simulation of animals. In fact, at thirty thousand feet, all of these “simulations” are Tamagotchi-like.
Taking another step back, how different is TSS from an online fantasy role playing game or MMOG, where players are required to meet the needs of their characters, including food, love, companionship, quests, etc.? Isn’t the idea of improving your character key to Linden Labs’ Second Life and Blizzard’s World of Warcraft?
How about the idea of communicating via thought bubbles? Whether the need is sleep, a bathroom break, or love, it’s been repeated in comics and feature films for years. So no infringement there. Communicating via garbled language is something I enjoyed while watching Charlie Brown films as a child.[11] No infringement there either.
But it is not all bad for Zynga – they have advantages too!
Zynga may have a host of problems to worry about, but it’s also got an enviable set of advantages. Let’s start with $1.6 billion in cash; that’s a nice chunk of change that can fund many different initiatives. Even more important is a fact that seemed to have been passed over by many analysts: Zynga added $100 million to their cash hoard in the second quarter. So even when times were tough, and Zynga was not living up to expectations, they still tucked away $100 million in cash. They are not about to go away as long as they can keep doing that.
Ultimately the woes of Zynga will be reflected in the wider industry, just as its successes have. We are all too often an inward looking industry, which is why we tend to borrow ideas so freely from each other. However I do see that broadly as a good thing; we’re evolving the games we make based on real feedback loops from gamers. However as well as gradual evolution, we also need innovation to drive our own Cambrian Explosions.
A Great Becoming... 