According to an article by The Daily Beast’s Richard Abowitz, online games like World of Warcraft are one of the top five reasons porn-for-profit is dying, and it all comes down to staying power. More »
Atlus has completed phase one in the deployment of their internet community and online gaming portal Atlus Online, with mascot Jack Frost running rampant all over the page. More »
Atlus fans around the world will soon have a lovely new place to play online games and chat with other like-minded individuals, as Atlus readies their new community portal, Atlus Online.
Perhaps some of the strife in the Middle East can be attributed to the fact that they don’t have any massively-multiplayer online role-playing games localised in Arabic and Farsi. New publisher Game Power 7 is looking to rectify that unfortunate oversight. They’ve just launched themselves as the first online game publisher in the Middle East and North Africa, established to help game developers publish localised versions of their online games in the region. Think of them as the Arabic version of China’s The9. Game Power 7 plans on revealing the first Arabic MMO title in the fourth quarter of this year.
Game Power 7 [Official Website]
Founder and former CEO of Jamdat Mobile Mitch Lasky, now a partner at Benchmark Capital, is putting a $US 7 million vote of confidence behind a new game company, Riot Games, headed up by CEO Brandon Beck and president Mark Merrill. Making me feel like a total slouch, by the way, because at age 26 and 27 respectively, my age peers Beck and Merrill are heading up a multimillion-dollar company.
Lasky, Beck and Merrill unveiled the venture this morning, and announced they’ve accumulated some industry vets for their studio talent, with “core members” of Ultima Online, Dungeon Siege, Jak & Daxter, Heroes of Might & Magic, Neverwinter Nights 2, Sly Cooper and Total Annihilation‘s teams, among others.
You may, by now, be a little jaded at yet another announcement of a venture capital-funded online games startup, but when Kotaku talked to Lasky, Beck and Merrill yesterday, they had some things to tell us about how they plan to shake things up.
Veteran UK game journalist Jim Rossignol, currently one of the Big Four at the Rock Paper Shotgun blog, has just published a book called ‘This Gaming Life,’ documenting his experiences in three different cities pursuing and documenting the culture of online games.
He covers the widespread competitive game scene in Korea, looks into Quake‘s evolving role in the London game scene, and visits Iceland to see the birthplace of EVE Online, to develop what he says is a story of “how games change the lives of gamers”.
I thought the idea of a “travelogue” of game culture was interesting, so I asked Jim a few questions about the book, and his experiences.
While Ethan Allen makes mosquito nets look romantic, living in a country where mosquito nets are purely utilitarian and totally necessary (mine was a hideous blue colour with an ugly flower pattern in the netting, and was rigged up to the ceiling with fishing line – no four poster beds to be found) will dash any romantic ideas post-haste. April 25th is World Malaria Day, and as part of the ‘Nothing But Net’ campaign to get mosquito nets to parts of Africa where malaria is a very real and very deadly problem, the UN has commissioned an easy little came called ‘Deliver the Net’: The challenge: race the sun and hand out as many insecticide-treated bed nets as you can to African families. The more nets you deliver – before the mosquitoes come out – the more lives you save. Once you’re done playing the game, sign up, confirm your email, and a life-saving bed net will be sent on your behalf!
The AIDS epidemic in China is huge and of serious concern to a lot of people (the best work I’ve seen to date is the wonderful and heartbreaking To Live Is Better Than To Die, an underground documentary by Chen Weijun on a hushed-up tragedy in Henan), but the Ministry of Education is using computers and ‘games’ of the quiz variety to fine effect: Launched by the Ministry of Education and sponsored by the China AIDS Roadmap Tactical Support Project, the contest ran for three months last year, yet its effect continue – the site remains up and nearly 19 million people have logged on.
Americans lurve online gaming. But what about Japanese? Nope! An online questionnaire poled 15,000 members of Japanese internet community MyVoice about their feelings towards online games. The sample was 54 percent female, 2 percent teen, 16 percent twenty-something, 37 percent thirty-something, 28 percent forty-something and 17 percent fifty-something. Over half of them were not interested in online games! That’s not including the 12 percent who are totally indifferent. And when asked what their image of online games was, the most common response was “Geekish.” And get this, only 1 percent of those poled use Macs to play online games. At least we have that in common!
Hit the jump for the full breakdown:
