Bart, I am not trying to defend them but I do believe Z had an early app store Scramble game that they rebuilt as Scramble with Friends presumably with the Words WF engine . I'm not sure which was out first but it could have been either. Also, both games ...
I hope these guys create some great new gaming experiences but I am also skeptical of their dev model. They need to know now their distribution/pricing model and need to build a game to that. They can't just decide at the last moment to tack on a F2P economy and ...
Galen, NPD is indeed struggling to stay relevant as digital and specifically social and mobile continues to eat into the user base and sales of Retail game distribution.
That is a safe assumption of the rarity of action games on FB. The limitation is in the Flash tech. It is hard to do heavy, real time action with lots of interactive objects/characters and fast frame rate. I personally believe that over the next few years social game players ...
Smart move. Games only appeal to a small fraction of customers and would not benefit from the same economies of scale. Plus, Retail games are continually declining and no sense investing in infrastructure to rent games when in a matter of years everything will be digitally distributed.
The cynical side of me thinks NPD downplays the trends with digital distribution including social/mobile out of self-preservation reasons. They have very accurate reporting numbers for retail but vague forecasts for digital and as retail continues to shrink they increasingly become less relevant.
Split Second was hardly in the same class as GT, NFS, Forza and GTR. I would say general competition led to their demise, where as a contraction in racing could have contributed to Bizarre's disbanding but still a massive fail by Activision in my book for closing down a profitable ...
I would agree with the author and not just about MMOs but about all games with the opportunity for digital distribution. The reason the bulk of iOS Top Grossing apps are Freemium Games is they remove all the barriers to download i.e. not forcing the consumer to pay money before ...
