Posts Tagged ‘industry’

Gaming Industry Pays Tribute To Japan

We all know how devastating the recent earthquake was to the country of Japan. As you may all know, Japan produces some of the top video games in the world. Games such as Mario, Metal Gear, and Final Fantasy were all brought to us by the Japanese.

That’s why some of the superstars of the gaming industry collaborated on a project to help Japan by producing a 1 hour video and you can help Japan by donating through their website. Top names of the gaming industry in this project include Tim Schafer, Will Wright and Sid Meier.

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Game Industry Salaries

 

Being a member of the gaming industry, I always try to keep up with industry news. My latest find was a survey conducted in 2007 by Jill DuffyThe Game Industry Salary Review. Note that the figures above are NOT the Philippine standards (I could only wish. sigh).

They sent email invitations to Game Developer magazine subscribers, Game Developers Conference 2006 attendees, and Gamasutra.com members in January 2007, inviting them to participate in our annual salary survey. There were 5,600 respondents. Of course, the figures were in USD (US Dollars). I wondered how much the monthly compensation of gaming professionals were in PHP, hence the graph above. The standard in the US and other countries is “annual compensation”. We Pinoys measure it in “monthly”.

More after the break…

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MMORPG Industry: Lessons Learned from 2007

Almost every MMO company would like to fend off the 800 pound gorilla that is World of Warcraft. What’s astounding is that it’s a subscription based game in a renaissance world of free or item-based business models. It can’t be denied, WoW has gone from being big to being a part of pop culture. We’ve seen the brilliance of their TV commercials and how they seamlessly even integrated a Toyota truck into an advergaming coup. Genius!

Michael Zenke of Gamasutra said that 2007 was “not a great year for the industry, but it still wasn’t bad.”

What follows are my “Lessons Learned” notes for the MMORPG industry in general in 2007.

  • It’s not all about graphics – Maple Story, not your average AAA title, has managed to amass 3 million subscribers. It has nothing to do with the graphics. It’s gameplay and fun factor are what contributed to its success. In Vietnam, a “low spec” game called Swordsman Online has hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, surpassing even Ragnarok in that country.
  • Free is still the best price – of course, World of Warcraft is an exemption. It’s known that North American players are used to paying monthly subscriptions and that the Asian market plays for free. Call it a cultural or socio-economic divide, North American MMO companies are slowly seeing the wisdom of acquiring games using the F2p model. So did we, when we opened up Ragnarok here in the Philippines as an F2P service.

More notes after the jump.

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