30. July 2008 by admin.

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: Industry Facts as provided by the ESA

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

• GameRankings.com
• Video Game Charts (VgCharts.com)
• And round out number 3 with GamesIndustry.biz (charts)

You can also review data from the consumer end resources (e.g. IGN, gamespot, etc) and 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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/)

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30. July 2008 by admin.

Week 2: Top 10 - Important Wins and Loses

As we finish our history of games, and begin to discuss the design and development of your game, it’s important to understand what succeeds and what fails. When reviewing the success and failures of game history it is important to remember that winning and losing isn’t jut about having the best design or technology. Success is at the intersection of multiple factors including marketing, timing, audience, and others. Many great games never succeed commercially, and occasionally a very mediocre game triumphs.

Winning:

Winning isn’t everything, but it is pretty important. A win in the industry could be viewed multiple ways. The easiest is commercial successes, but even that can be evaluated multiple ways (pure number, market share, specific demographic, etc). You can also consider a game a win if it pushes your company from just another developer, to noteworthy-ness.

• Forbes (via NPD) American’s All Time Top Videogames, or you can read a very similar list from Newsweek as the Best Selling Games

Losing:

Industry critics, whether fan boy, 30-year veteran, or academic pull no punches when it comes to weak games. Do a search for worst-game-ever. While it’s fun to read or watch the sometimes over the top reviews bashing a game, I found the following to be fair reviews and lists.

• PBS just asked a range of Game industry people for their Best and Worst: PBS.org
• Gamepro’s 10 Worst-Selling consoles: Little note, develop exclusively on these consoles if you want a challenge
• There’s a list maintained on Wikipedia about games with “Negative Reception“

Tie, Draw, and No Show:

There’s also the hotly contested, underrated and under appreciated game category. In a game dev class, this is not a very solid place from which to examine games. Simply, there’s too much opinion and not much quantitative data to evaluate. However, Gamespy did embark on a fair analysis in 2003.

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30. July 2008 by admin.

Week 1 Top 10’s: Classic Video Games and History

We begin class by learning about the history of video and computer games. Most students know something about Atari 2600 or Pong, but there are many holes we need to fill. Week one’s top 10 provides you with a set of resources to further develop your understanding of video game history. These lists aren’t necessarily academic, nor are they complete, but they are somewhere between entertaining and educational.

• The 10 Most Important Games of all time: As presented at the Game Developer’s Conference (something you should know about). This list will be particularly useful when you are studying for your first quiz. If you don’t know half of these, you don’t know games. Don’t worry, we’ll play some of them in class. You should also note that Game Informer, IGN, and others do similar lists annually.

• Top 10 Cheesiest Classic Game Commercials (Yahoo!Games): Sit back, open a can of Tab and enjoy. We will watch some of these in class. Once you get beyond the laugh, we can start to analyze what sold games then, and what sells games now. Remember, this curse focuses on marketing as well as development.
• Top 10 Remakes of Classic Games (Daily Top 10): Download a few games you might not be able to play otherwise. We can’t play every game in class, so it’s a good idea that you each play some outside of class.

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

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