Buying video games in packs

The Humble Bundle changed everything. Sure, back in the day, you would see companies sell a "gold" pack of all of the previous versions of a game at a low price, but the idea of selling massive bundles of downloadable games was seen as a good way for a company to turn its product into a cheap commodity and slit its own throat...

Then along came this little idea: gather a bunch of indie games together and "sell" them for whatever people wanted to pay while giving incentive for those who were willing to pay a bit more. It didn't just take off. It made a large enough pile of cash that the big boys noticed. Today, every game company on the planet is scrambling to figure out how to be seen as a "bundle". In the end, it's probably a bit of a fad, but that doesn't mean you can't take advantage of it.

World of Warcraft's next expansion: Exsanguination

No, Exsanguination is not the title of the next WoW expansion (that I know), but it is the trend. WoW players have been abandoning the game, and interestingly, they're not leaving for the WoW-killer MMO that we've all been predicting and waiting for. Instead, they seem to be going back to single- and multi-player games on services like Steam (which is mostly where I've ended up after a roughly year-long detour into Rift, which was great and all, but I lost my taste for the MMO grind) or its console equivalents.

But to look back at WoW, what could they do that would bring their players back and make the MMO interesting again? Well, sadly, I think it would take a roughly 180 degree turn from what the Mists of Pandaria expansion was. They would have to address the "grindy" nature of the expansion, but at the same time expand what's already interesting and fun.

Replayability is a word

I just read the (2010) blog from ben abraham (lowercase from his blog name "ben abraham dot net"), "`Replayability` is NOT a word, so stop using it idiot!" I feel the need to reply to this, because it's a concept that I've come across before, and I'm kind of tired of dictionary thumpers. I don't want you to get the wrong idea, however. I'm glad that he wrote this article. It shows that he's at least thinking about what the video gaming community is. That's a good thing. I just think he's wrong about his conclusions.

How might Google monetize Ingress?

The first question I had when I heard about the Ingress beta was: why is Google doing this?

Face it: there's a real dollar cost to anything Google does, so it has to do one of the following:

1. Generate more revenue than it costs
2. Enable other Google products and services to make more revenue than it costs
3. Improve Google's positioning relative to its competitors, in order to generally benefit their other products more than it costs
4. Meet one of Google's non-monetary goals in a way that they feel is "worth" the cost and is offset by other income

Ingress: Google's augmented reality MMO

Ingress logo

+Ingress is Google's new augmented reality game that's currently in beta. It brings together a few things: first off, it's Android-only at the moment and has a strong preference for players and developers communicating via Google+. This is an obvious play for increased adoption of both platforms.

That aside, however, Ingress is the first MMO that I've played where the first step is, "go outside," and as you play the game you get a definite sense that Google isn't kidding about that. The game won't allow you to set your phone in location debugging mode (I suppose if I loaded a custom Android image, I could defeat that, but realistically it would be self-defeating) and they choose locations that are artistic or historical for elements of the game.