http://www.philsteinmeyer.com Phil Steinmeyer's rumblings on the game biz, programming, and life Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:09:10 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A while back, I posted here about the sharp decline in US PC retail game sales (using data that had mostly been helpfully collected and posted by Rob Merritt). That was two years ago, so the topic deserved a revisit. The good news is, sales aren't falling as fast. The bad ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/153/retail-pc-game-sales-still-on-life-support/ Catching up on other blogs a bit. Some of these links are a bit old, but still interesting (to me, anyways): Greg Costikyan has a great post on his experiences presenting at a venture capital conference. I haven't attended a VC conference, but parts of his post accurately echo ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/152/links-and-such/ In theory, I should probably create a separate post for each game that I want to comment on. Feh... Here's some game comments from the last year or two. Casual Games: Build-a-Lot - Excellent game. Clever idea, well implemented. Build-a-Lot 2 - Disappointing sequel. Didn't add enough new stuff. ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/150/games-games-games/ I admit I'm a bit of a sucker for online conversations. For a while, I posted my own thoughts with some regularity here. I still post regularly on a couple of forums, and I occasionally will comment on other people's blogs. That said, some time ago I disabled comments ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/149/no-comment/ If you've been reading amateur blogs for a while, you may be familiar with a certain cycle. Blogger creates blog. A huge flurry of initial posts ensues. Blogger describes such mundane topics as taking his family to McDonald's. Blogger realizes that perhaps the rest of the world isn't so interested ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/148/a-brief-return/ Perhaps this is an ominous sign for the industry - someone has recently released a book entitled Creating Casual Games for Profit & Fun. (Amazon link). This is the first I've heard of any books specifically aimed at our little corner of the games industry. I haven't read the ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/147/casual-games-book/ Very simple game here. See if you can beat 27.314 seconds... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/145/fun-physics-game/ I took some time the week before last to play around with Flash some more. Specifically, I ported one of the mini-games from Banana Bay to Flash, to be played in a browser. You can try the result here: Banana Bay - Mini Game While it's ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/143/a-flash-mini-game/ A pretty lengthy, and solid, article on the casual games biz, here. Some interesting excerpts: The sequel to one of PopCap's popular word puzzles, "Bookworm Adventures," is expected to be the most expensive title produced for the casual game genre. PopCap, which has offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Ireland, spent $700,000 ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/142/casual-games-biz-article/ There's been a lot of industry speculation that Sony is losing a lot of money with each PS/3 sold. This article claims the the total cost of the main unit alone, EXCLUDING controllers, cables, packaging and any profit margin for the retailers (i.e. Wal-Mart's gotta make money to sell these things), ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/141/is-sony-losing-their-shirt-on-each-ps3/