ENTRIES TAGGED "games"
Becoming a community-centric content publisher
The video game world offers some valuable lessons
Following on from my last post, which began a conversation about similarities between the book publishing and gaming industries, I see the second key pivot as actually the most important one. The formats I talk about in that first post are deliverables. They’re “Content Containers”, according to current publishing buzzword statutes. The crucial pivot for digital content industries isn’t converting to digital product – though how you handle that is undoubtedly important – it’s the power that it gives you to talk directly to consumers that will truly revolutionise the retail landscape.
Lightning strikes twice: The first digital pivot
Or, why the games industry doesn’t always get it right
We’re often told in publishing to look to other media for inspiration for the digital transition. Indeed, I have been an often vocal and staunch supporter of bringing in skills from other industries to help us build the skillsets we need to survive the changeover and there is certainly still a talent gap.
However, other media industries don’t always get it right. Music certainly didn’t, whilst film is struggling to balance the cinema/boxed goods model against the increasing on-demand requirements of its core userbase, TV is having to deal with dramatically falling ad revenues and time-shift boxes which cut out the advertising.
Games, though – those guys are digital natives, right? If there was ever an industry built to withstand a shift to digital distribution, the game industry is it, surely?
Outthink Inc. believes learning should be fun
Join their campaign to revolutionize learning
Most of us who pursued careers in publishing did so because reading, in some way, impacted us as kids. But kids today live in a vastly changed world, and tablets have now taken over. One in four adults owns a tablet. On Christmas Day this year, 51% of mobile activations were for tablets, not phones. As publishing migrates from print to pixels, and reading more directly competes with games, phones, and tablets for attention, we need to ask how those pixels might impact the futures of today’s kids the way print did for us.
News Roundup: B&N Won't Buy Borders, Kindle Roadblocks and Sightings, Pirates Convince Game Developer to Drop DRM
Report: No Borders Bid for Barnes & Noble It looks like Barnes & Noble won't acquire Borders after all. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) says B&N is changing course from earlier this year and will not submit a bid for Borders. Kindle Projections, Roadblocks and Sightings Theresa Poletti from MarketWatch comments on the relative absence of Kindle sightings, particularly…
Pirates Convince Game Developer to Drop DRM
"Why do people pirate my games?" Game developer Cliff Harris recently posed this question on his blog and the onslaught of responses caught him (and his blog host) by surprise. Harris offers some interesting conclusions, but most notable is this passage on digital rights management (DRM): People don't like DRM, we knew that, but the extent to which DRM is…
Game Re-creates Lost Oakland Neighborhood
My hat's off to the release of a superb project out of the UC Berkeley Journalism School that re-creates a "lost" and once vibrant neighborhood of Oakland, 7th Street: There's much more to be done — developing a curriculum so grade school students can use the game to learn about 7th Street and the blues and jazz scene (we got…