Kevin Ohannessian
Jan 25, 2012
Risk has come to Facebook. Scrabble is one of the top iPhone apps. And several board games are enjoying a long life on game consoles. In the digital age, you better be ready to Hasbro-down. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away families had a game night--once a week they'd pull out a stack of boxes from a closet and everyone would flex their knowledge of trivia (Trivial Pursuit), vocabulary (Scrabble), or even their real-estate management skills (Monopoly, natch).
Jul 29, 2010
Mazda is taking to social media to launch the 2011 Mazda 2. A branded game on Facebook, "DriverVille," is a virtual, multiplayer game where players get customizable "Your Inner Driver" avatars and use them to drive virtual cars to win Driver Bucks for virtual products and real weekly sweepstakes prizes.
Jul 23, 2010
"Farmville now outpaces Twitter." "One in four people plays social games online." "More than $1.8 billion worth of virtual goods has been sold in virtual worlds." These are just some of the headlines we see today about the popularity of online gaming, but what does this all mean for Gen Y and for brands?
Reuben Steiger
Jun 30, 2010
In 2002 a startling announcement was made: sales of video games had finally surpassed the movie box office in the U.S. Over the past two years, games have catapulted to an even more impressive level. Farmville, a game that allows players to tend to a virtual farm with their friends in Facebook, is currently played by 70 million people per month. That's one in four Americans. Kleiner Perkins, the legendary venture capital firm, announced that Zynga is the fastest-growing investment they've ever made. To give this some context, consider that Kleiner was the first investor in Google.
I believe this trend represents something much bigger than just explosive growth in the gaming industry. For years, many of the world's smartest people, from psychologists to behavioral economist to marketers, have been studying what motivates people to perform specific actions. In marketing terms, the most important of these is the purchase impulse. Today, the research on buying behavior is beginning to be reframed in terms of gaming mechanics.
Justin Smith
Jun 23, 2010
There’s no shortage of big initiatives going on at Facebook these days. We sat down with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week to talk about the state and future of Facebook and its surrounding ecosystem.
Zuckerberg shared his thoughts on recent changes to the Facebook Platform, competitive dynamics he desires amongst developers, the surprising growth of the social games business on Facebook overall, his vision for Facebook Credits, market perceptions of Facebook’s revenue streams and overall revenue numbers, what the company learned from its period of serious interest in Twitter, and Facebook’s company culture around money.
Eliane Alhadeff & Jennifer Levitz
Apr 16, 2010
With the aid of a US$1.8 million grant from the Department of Labor, they studied the way young people learn in a world of video games and smart phones. In collaboration with MIT; Virginia Tech; and the Institute of the Future, they build a high-tech, next-generation training facility called UPS Integrad.
This facility offers 3-D simulations and webcasts along with traditional classroom instruction. Trainees are recorded to show them how they look in action. UPS teach them to drive in a replica outdoor city called Clarkville that has real streets, street signs, sidewalks, and simulated commercial and residential delivery and pickup sites.
Jesse Schell
Apr 3, 2010
Games are invading the real world -- and the runaway popularity of Farmville and Guitar Hero is just the beginning, says Jesse Schell. At the DICE Summit, he makes a startling prediction: a future where 1-ups and experience points break "out of the box" and into every part of our daily lives.
Sep 14, 2009
The Facebook-led technology shift that allows the "social graph" -- or the data matrix -- of each person's friends network to be connected to external mobile webware is big news for game makers. In this ten-minute interview, Kevin Slavin of New York's Area/Code shop, explains the implications of the development on the social game market where he is already a major player. His four-year-old company has created games for A&E, Discovery and MTV.
Sep 8, 2009
The first Tiger Woods video game, released in 1999, was available as an off-the-shelf disc for the Sony PlayStation console or the PC.
Today Tiger Woods games, including the just-released "PGA Tour 10," are available for PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PSP, Wii, Nintendo DS, Xbox, PCs and mobile phones. Gamers can download new golf courses and equipment, buy expansion packs, play in live online tournaments, stream play to a PC or Mac and order up a specially created iPhone app. Marketing has followed a similar course.
Aug 22, 2009
Tom Byron's restaurant, Pink Castle, is shaped like a giant nouveau castle, painted cotton candy pink and topped with blue fairy-tale turrets. The inside resembles an old-fashioned diner with comfy booths, checkered floors, balloons, video games and festive salsa music on the jukebox. Its most famous dish is a Pink Burger. Pink Castle has been such a success for Byron that he says he'd like to franchise it. On Facebook.
Aug 5, 2009
Not many branded iPhone games have broken through, but a new one from U.K.-based Barclaycard has quickly become the most popular free, branded game in the history of the iTunes App Store.
Aug 4, 2009
Emotion is one of the most powerful elements of an experience, and also the most difficult to design. Yet games regularly inspire intense emotions, drawing players into the experience they offer, and making these experiences enjoyable and memorable.
Jun 19, 2009
Some of the biggest, well-know brands in the video game world announced new titles at last week's E3 trade show in Los Angeles. Maybe you've heard of Halo, Mario Bros., or BioShock but, unless you're a gamer, you probably know little else about them. Countless hours are spend enraptured by this varied, multi-billion-dollar industry, yet it still operates like a niche community. An acquired taste.
I think that video games need their Oscars.
Jun 1, 2009
All the world's a game. Well, at least it could be. Game evangelists paint a picture of a world where planning your retirement, studying for exams, donating to worthy causes and even clipping coupons can be made into a game that will engage consumers and make even the most mundane of tasks fun. It's a lofty goal, but it's the kind of thinking that could change the way marketers engage consumers -- making anything from perusing ads to comparing products to studying user manuals more, well, fun.
The Financial Times Limited 2009
May 26, 2009
Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has a second job. On top of managing growth of the popular social networking site, she is also a chef in Restaurant City, one of the thousands of games that run on Facebook.
Facebook’s platform, which allows third-party developers to build services and games that run inside the social network, celebrated its second birthday over the weekend. In that time, it has spawned a new industry of profitable application developers, and a host of imitators. It has also allowed Facebook users, such as Ms Sandberg, to interact with friends through the new category of social gaming.
May 26, 2009
Everyone complains about "e-mail overload" — getting so much stupid corporate e-mail that you miss out on important messages. But Byron Reeves has figured out a way to solve the problem.
How? By turning corporate e-mail into a game.
Reeves, a communications professor at Stanford, had studied the spectacularly popular online game World of Warcraft, and he knew that people inside the game place enormous value on the game's artificial currency of gold pieces. They'll go on quests and spend hours doing boring tasks just to earn it. That gave him an idea: Why not create a system where users earn virtual currency by intelligently using e-mail?
May 14, 2009
In its biggest campaign yet for its biggest franchise, Electronic Arts is making The Sims video game a little more sociable.
Apr 9, 2009
The third of the laptop hunter ads shows a mom and a kid, shopping for a computer under $1500. And yes, the clip takes yet another dump on Macs.
Apr 8, 2009
Few traditional media companies have scored major success in the Apple App Store, the increasingly popular outlet where outside programmers and developers can launch programs or tools -- i.e., applications -- specially designed for iPhone users. In fact, games dominate, based on comScore’s ranking of the top 25 downloaded applications.
Mar 25, 2009
Electronic Arts' iPhone version of Scrabble now supports Facebook Connect, offering players the chance to compete against friends whether they're sitting at a desk or standing on the bus.
Mar 16, 2009
It seemed like magic back when barcodes could simply identify a grocery store item. And when QR codes hit the scene, pictures pointed us to URLs. Now "barcodes" have reached the next level of complexity.
Feb 25, 2009
Several announcements today further cemented the fact that the Web browser is the new game console.
Feb 19, 2009
Palm has confirmed that games will be among the applications
available for the Palm Pre, although exactly what type of games will
run on the handset remains unclear. In an interview with Engadget,
Palm said games will be part of the Pre experience, along with various
other applications that will be offered through a Palm-style version of
Apple's App Store. Mobile gaming is extremely popular on the iPhone and
iPod Touch, and is a big part of Apple's pitch for those devices.
Davis Thinking
