For Work

Week three starts with a top 10 of top 10’s: game rankings and sales. Before you decide to develop your game, you should do the research to see if anyones been down your path, and find out what they learned. You’ll never get all the asnwers, but you can get some improtant questions resolved. Here’s a few sites for your video game research:

We’ll start with the basics: [1] Industry Facts as provided by the ESA

Then we should review a few of my favorite sales stat resource for video games:

• [2] GameRankings.com
• Video Game Charts ([3] VgCharts.com)
• And round out number 3 with [4] GamesIndustry.biz ([5] charts)

You can also review data from the consumer end resources (e.g. [6] IGN, [7] gamespot, etc) and [8] NPD group.

For Fun

As you start to work through your game ideas and attempt to evalaute what shoulds stay and what should go, you should view a few lists of things that never happened. Typically such games are called vaporware, and the stories by these games are sometimes more interesting than the game that almost was.

• [9] How Stuff Works: Best Games That Never Were

After trying to sell a game you know didn’t succeed, I thought you might appreciate reading this little post of the top 10 games that will never be made. It’s in no way academic, but number one did have me laughing.

• [10] The Top Ten Game You’ll Never See

There’s also a photoshop contest about where people create box art for some games that didn’t quite make it to the shelves.

• [11] Worth100: Video Games that Were Not Made

FYI, you will be doing some of your own box art in Photoshop, so this really is related directly to class

(this is a repost of content I provided my students at http://ai.lgracegames.com/)