The console era is over — or so a growing number of game-industry executives would have us believe. While social and mobile gaming have taken a sizable share of the video games market, there is room for growth for hardware, particularly in streaming technology and the emergence of open-source platforms. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Draw Something has gotten a big boost from China, an unlikely market for a game that asks people to draw English words and phrases. But the game is a top 10 hit and it looks like users are finding creative ways to play the game. Read more »
Gaming on desktop PCs and consoles is a big business, but one that generally requires participants to be locked down to a location. In today’s growing mobile world, that’s less than ideal. That’s partly why mobile device chips are gaining capabilities for immersive, multi-player 3-D gaming. Read more »
The Game Developers Conference said more than half of its attendees last year were from mobile game development companies and the trend is likely to continue this year as Google, Qualcomm and RIM pour more money into mobile-focused developer days and booths at the show. Read more »
Mobile social network MocoSpace surveyed 15,000 of its users in December and found that 26.7 percent of women respondents age 30 and over played mobile games more than three hours a day, compared to 18.5 percent of men in the same age group. Read more »
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play smartphone, aimed at mobile gamers, has a new twist that could add more appeal: OnLive’s cloud gaming service now supports the slide-out gaming controls on the Android smartphone. Touchscreens certainly work for games, but button-mashing is best done on…. buttons. Read more »
