Via Arve, the Opera Web Applications blog talks of how the Opera 9 Browser has made extensions to the canvas element specifically for authoring games for the browser. Read the rest of this entry ...
We attended the third and final Web-Based Games Round Table session hosted by Brian Robbins at the GDC this morning. It was focused on the production/design aspects as opposed to the commerce and community issues of the previous two sessions. Read the rest of this entry ...
We attended the Web-Based Games RoundTables on Wednesday and Thursday and they were very informative. This was the first time Rob and I attended any roundtables and being able to participate as "equals" was very exciting.
The first session on Wednesday dealt with business models of web-based casual games. Revenue models ranged from subscriber-based, to banner-ad, to in-game advertising, with advertising taking up the biggest chunk of the session time. Interesting concepts in branding items within the game (such as table-tops in card-based games) were discussed with an effective "Click Per Minute" in some cases as "three-to-five seconds with a clear view of the ad". It sounds like no one has struck on a surefire in-game advertising model nor standardized how monetization of ads would work in this context. People are still working these ideas out.
One aspect discussed was that some companies are struggling to deal with arranging advertising contracts with clients directly, while others are considering going through ad brokers or simply use Google's AdSense program. Everyone agreed that it would be great to have a "clearing house" that deals with clients directly and saves development houses who are not otherwise trained in this regard.
Apart from advertising strategies, another interesting item discussed was how to leverage the community facilities within games and game services to improve revenue streams. One of the key people from Pogo was there and other panel members lauded Pogo's "badging" and ranking systems which basically sounds like a way to give players valued status (i.e. "I've played Game X over 100 times") with very little investment from Pogo's side.
Unfortunately, the entry must be cut short yet again, but suffice to say that I really got some value out of the round-table discussions and look forward to them in the future.
Renesis finally released their pre-alpha technical preview SVG player. My biggest complaint is that it's a standalone player that can't access the web, but I'll keep my complaints to a minimum because they've finally made good on their promises to release something. The sample SVG files that come with the player are nice, though!
On another front, Firefox's SVG Blog mentions that support for the SVG <textPath> element will likely be included in Firefox 2, which is good news. The alpha for Firefox 2 is due out next week. The earlier the better, I always say. Get it into more hands for testing. Hopefully they can also squeak in the DOM support for text that tor mentions.
Looks like the latest Opera 9 weekly build will be slightly delayed. Borg says they've made a lot of progress, hopefully this includes fixes to their proxy server issues which is preventing me from using the browser behind a firewall. We can always hope for improved SVG support too...
I reported about a month ago that Windows Live Mail (what will be the next Hotmail) didn't support the Mozilla Firefox web browser very well. It looks like they've done an update since then because now I'm able to reply, forward and move my mail messages around using Firefox. Too bad the latest Opera 9 nightly build is still horribly broken (can't get through a proxy), so I can't check that...