business
DRM hurts publishers as well as users.
Having won a minor battle with the Kindle, publishers are now free to request that digital reading can be disabled on any individual book that is downloaded.
That may be bad news fhe book industry.
So far the transition to digital media has been filled with different industries practicing radical nose removal, absolutely convinced that the face [...]
Why MicroPayments Won’t Save the Newspapers
Clay Shirky gives a short lesson in the dos and don’ts of MicroPayments:
Such systems solve no problem the user has, and offer no service we want. As a result, conversations about small payments take place entirely among content providers, never involving us, the people who will ostensibly be funding these transactions. The conversation about small [...]
In Social Games the Audience Monetizes You
It’s easy to get caught up in the mind set of thinking how you’re going to pry as much money as you can out of the pockets of your audience. But in the end you want to find a way to get them to pay you without having to use extortion. That’s true even if [...]
Are Single Player Games Like Newspapers?
There’s a lot of chatter going on about the death of print these days, and with it there’s been the usual death throes as those who once made a living by writing for it are putting their pens to paper (keyboards to screen?) to try and save it by writing long screeds that hope to [...]
MediaShifting at Inside Social Games
I’ve joined forces with Inside Social Games, and you’ll be seeing my more in-depth pieces over there for the near future, although I’ll make sure they’re linked back here as well.
The first on is up now. You can check it out here
Here’s a taste:
While there’s lots to love about the iTunes experience as a customer, [...]
Game Retail is becoming a Social Platform
Hardcore PC gaming may be dead at retail, but the potential of the market is opening up online as more and more of hardcore PC games become available as direct digital downloads. And while they may be a specialized group the players who show up on to buy a hardcore PC game have some distinct [...]
Ten Reasons that Social Games may eat the Casual market
With relatively low production costs and a business model of “Free to try and cheap to buy”, there seemed to be no way that Casual Games couldn’t succeed.
But Casual Games haven’t become the all-encompassing juggernaut that some people were predicted they would be a few years ago. Meanwhile, Social Games are quickly expanding into exactly the same market.
How Social Games Saved the PC Gaming Market
Although there have been good times and bad times, the PC gaming market has always been a bit of a lurching monster. Since the early eighties, when some of the best games came in Ziploc bags with photocopied cover sheets, up through today where some of the most popular titles are fee social games that [...]
Social Platform Games Enter Into the "Frog Kissing Contest" Phase
While there’s currently a lot of excitement based on the massive amounts of investment that poured into the Social Platform Games market in the last half of 2008, it’s fairly clear that the bloom is off the rose in terms of the rocketing growth that initially spurred the industry.
Unfortunately for any young industry, the really [...]