Mary Jane Irwin Archives

Investors Say There's Still Money to Be Made in Games

By Mary Jane Irwin Mar. 24, 2009, 5:15pm PT 6 Comments

Traditional game publishing is no different than newspaper publishing, Gus Tai of Trinity Ventures said at a panel discussion held at the GamesBeat conference today in San Francisco. They are broken from a content standpoint, and they are broken from a distribution standpoint. It is… Read More »

Twofish Elements Helps Developers Price Virtual Goods for Fun and Profit

By Mary Jane Irwin Mar. 10, 2009, 5:00am PT 2 Comments

Happening upon virtual items for sale in the games you play is now as common as a dentist handing you a new toothbrush after each visit. It is expected that online games will hawk some form of virtual wares to players. But most social and casual game… Read More »

Quake Live May Spark Gaming Industry Shake-up

By Mary Jane Irwin Feb. 25, 2009, 4:15pm PT 6 Comments

Earlier today, I found myself sitting at the tail end of a 55,452-person queue for Quake Live, the latest entry in a long line of first-person shooters from id Software, the Mesquite, Texas-based developer best known for PC game franchises Doom and Wolfenstein. Quake… Read More »

Stop Looking for a WoW Killer

By Mary Jane Irwin Feb. 15, 2009, 9:00am PT 13 Comments

Ever since World of Warcraft started showing signs of cancer-like growth — ravenously consuming massively multiplayer online game subscribers — video game industry entrepreneurs and investors have hunted for a WoW killer, the next big game capable of toppling the 11.5 million subscribers developer Blizzard has… Read More »

The Brave New World of Open-source Game Design

By Mary Jane Irwin Feb. 7, 2009, 9:00am PT 8 Comments

When Acclaim Games publicly unveiled its Rockfree project, a free-to-play, web-based riff on the rhythm genre, last November, it did something unusual. It invited gamers to play an early version of the game so they could weigh in on the project as it was being… Read More »