Veteran game designer Sid Meier delivered the keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference today and during his hour-long session on the “Psychology of Game Design: Everything you Know is Wrong,” the creator of the Civilization franchise produced a series of key points, mantras, and worthwhile quotes captured here. Meier is the creative director at Firaxis and director of this fall’s Civilization V. (You can catch the full news story here .) “Gameplay is a psychological experience: I base my games on things like railroads, pirates, and history, and I try to make the games I design true and real. The more historical, the more realistic, and the more factual, the better. The more railroady and piratey, the better. But what I thought I knew was wrong. During the early days of my career, I hadn’t taken into account what was in the player’s head
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Quotes from Sid Meier’s keynote GDC speech
When John Schappert returned to Electronic Arts in the middle of 2009 to become the video game giant’s chief operating officer, he walked into one of the toughest transitions the company had ever had. Losing money, EA was cutting lots of jobs, shelving game projects, and closing offices even as other companies were growing fast in new parts of the game business. These days, if you don’t have a game in the top 20 titles — which in the U.S. account for 50 percent of console game revenue — you are not making money. And EA had too few titles in the top 20 in the past year. The rest of the core video game industry had a tough year in 2009, with 11,488 layoffs among 95 companies during the year, according to M2 Research . But EA created a “WTF moment” in the industry when it announced last fall in the same day that it was cutting 1,500 jobs and had purchased social game company Playfish for $300 million plus earnouts
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EA’s No. 2 exec shares five tips to avoid the game industry’s mess
Gomez is a division of Compuware that does website performance measurement for businesses. Like me, they like to hammer the point that a slow site loses a lot of business. In fact, 78 percent of consumers surveyed told Gomez they have switched to a competitor’s site because the site they wanted was too slow. With that in mind, this past Sunday Gomez studied the websites of every company with a Super Bowl ad as their commercials ran. The company’s resulting rankings are a composite of four stats: USA Today’s Admeter popular ranking, TIME magazine’s expert ranking, plus two Gomez website rankings, response time and availability. Snickers and HomeAway aced the test, helped by high USA Today scores and fast website response times. The Hyundai Sonata ad that compared the car to sonatas by Mozart and Schubert finished last, due to low scores from USA Today and Time for its creativity, plus mediocre site performance
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A giant table of Super Bowl ads ranked by online results
Fresh off the success of Mass Effect 2 , Electronic Arts is launching one of its big bets on a brand new video game as it debuts Dante’s Inferno . The game goes on sale today. EA spent an estimated $3 million or so on a Super Bowl commercial touting the game. EA chief executive John Ricciteillo said the ad helped drive more than 3 million downloads of content related to the game as well as strong preorders. It will be interesting to see if EA can score back-to-back hits. In its first week, Mass Effect 2 saw 2 million units sold
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Electronic Arts makes a huge bet with Dante’s Inferno
Electronic Arts is launching a number of big titles in the coming fiscal year that should get gamers excited, according to the company’s conference call with analysts today. EA typically announces titles during its quarterly calls to get gamers frothing and to give analysts guidance about its expected financial performance. Those titles could always be delayed, but EA has been shipping more games on time than it used to. During EA’s conference call with analysts, EA chief operating officer John Schappert ticked off a number of titles that should set tongues wagging, including some mysterious titles in the fourth fiscal quarter that ends March 31, 2011. One of them is a first-person shooter game coming from Epic Games, the maker of the Gears of War and Unreal shooting games. There will also be new titles in that quarter based on EA’s existing franchises: DeadSpace, EA sports fighting, the Sims, Spore, Hasbro, Need for Speed simulation, and Dragon Age: Origins
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Electronic Arts tips its hand on big (and mysterious) titles in coming year
By Roland Hutchinson on Monday 8th February 2010 2:03 pm in Mobile Phones , Technology News Motorola announced their latest Google Android handset last week, and now they have released a new advert featuring the Transformers star Megan Fox. The advert was shown during the 2010 Super Bowl, you can check out the video of it below. The Motorola Devour is powered by Google Android 1.6, and it features a 3.1 inch capacitive touch screen, plus a touch sensitive navigation pad, and a microSD card slot, with an 8GB card pre-installed, and it also comes with Motorolaâ??s MOTOBLUR. Other specifications include a 3 megapixel camera, built in 802.11b/g WiFi, a full Qwerty keyboard, a 3.5mm audio jack and GPS.The Motorola Devour will be available on Verizon from March, there are no details on pricing as yet.
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Megan Fox Shows Off The New Motorola Devour
FROM GAMERTELL – The New Orleans Saints have just taken the superbowl – as predicted by EA Sports. MORE ? Full Story ? | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell . | Comment on this Article ?
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Saints win Super Bowl XLIV, Madden NFL prediction was correct
Google CEO Eric Schmidt wants you to believe that Google’s 52-second “ Parisian Love ” ad that ran in the third quarter of yesterday’s Super Bowl was a spontaneous decision to take a popular YouTube video and “share it with a wider audience.” Aw, a present. You shouldn’t have! They didn’t. We got an email this morning from Martin McNulty, director of online ad agency Forward3D
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Ad expert: Google’s Super Bowl spot was a live traffic test
Mobile advertising is one of the hottest fields we report on at VentureBeat. Gartner analysts expect it to be a $7.4 billion market by the end of 2014. Not as big as Google’s $20 billion-ish ad economy, but a viable space for which media planners will design and place ads. For ad buyers, it’s a big deal that Mobclix will soon be hooked up to Nielsen’s ad targeting data
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Mobile ad exchange Mobclix teams with Nielsen to sharpen ad targeting for 890,000 households
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said tonight in a blog post that Google’s first-ever Super Bowl commercial was an accident of sorts. The ad, dubbed “ Parisian Love “, has been up on Y0uTube for three months already. The idea wasn’t to create a big splashy ad. Rather, Schmidt wrote, “Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it’s had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience.” Here’s a link to the other Search Stories ads that are up on YouTube
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Eric Schmidt explains Google’s accidental first-ever Super Bowl ad