A couple of weeks ago at GDC 2011 in San Francisco Cinco Barnes from Spacetime Studios talked about their experience with Pocket Legends on iOS and Android devices (the complete summary of the session is here) . As you might know, it is working out quite well for them, not just on iOS, especially expanding into Android territory gave revenues a huge boost. Surely a key factor of this success is delivering a quality product in a niche (it won’t be a niche much longer but while competition is getting tough on iOS, there is still a bit more room on Android) and getting the gameplay right for the audience.

In the Spacetime Studios case, some assumptions about how MMO’s should work on mobile platforms were spot on, some others were surprisingly wrong. I thought I would share the most notable.

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Towards the end of 2010 and at the beginning of 2011 I noticed a sudden influx of new followers on my Quora account. What happpened? Many sites put Quora on their watch list of hot websites for 2011 raising a lot of interest from people who haven’t heard about it before (e.g. The Telegraph). In fact, the platform is so hot right now that Silicon Valley’s latest gossip is that Quora’s founders have rejected a $1 billion offer. Now that a more casual audience is joining the service, it raises the question if games companies and their Community Managers need to get involved.

Before you say “no”, consider that it also took its time for Facebook and Twitter to become almost an essential part of nowadays Community Management and there were sceptics in the beginning. Searching for big names in the video games business on Quora shows that there aren’t many followers for most of them. Outstanding examples are companies like Zynga (2500+ followers for both Zynga and Farmville) and Rockstar Games (900+ following the company but only 60+ following Grand Theft Auto). Looking at the questions it is obvious that the focus lies on business and industry related topics rather than tips and tricks for the games themselves.

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For the past years, our very own Thomas has been going around the world, preaching about Games as a Service, the whole idea that focusing on all aspects of a game that are not core gameplay not only can drastically increase all key performance indicator in an online game, but also prove very profitable. Now,  Ubisoft Toronto’s head Jade Raymond recently showed a pretty good understanding of this concept by using a interesting analogy. She said, while talking about a new project : “Games aren’t just what you talk about around the water cooler, they’re becoming the water cooler itself …“

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In the small world of MMO developers, publishers and players, the legal battle opposing Interplay and Bethesda Softworks for the rights of the Fallout MMORPG has created a lot of stories press, a lot of gossip, and a lot of discussions among online communities. More than a legal question, this lawsuit is also a battle of two brands : Interplay, the publisher coming straight from the golden days of Black Isle, and Bethesda, the new publisher who brought the Fallout IP back to life and made it more successful than ever despite provoking the anger of old-school fans. No matter what will be the result of this conflict, the image of these two companies will be strongly impacted, and the Fallout Online name will bear the the burden of these month of legal insecurity.

This short analysis aims at analysing how the lawsuit is affecting the brand image of Interplay, Bethesda and Fallout Online, but also what could be its impact on “innocent casualties” such as Obsidian Entertainement, Masthead Studios or Icarus Studios.

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When I started working here at ICO Partners, I noticed a challenge I’ve seen before in large global companies with multiple offices in different locations: there’s no water cooler or kitchen shared by everyone in the company. No place where information is passed on naturally from one person to the other, gradually making its way to each staff member until everyone ‘magically’ knows.

Even though we’re small enough to all fit into one cozy room, our people are located in three different cities, and often above the clouds on their way to clients or conventions on other continents. We really started to think about the information gaps when I, as a fresh starter, wanted to know more about what each person is doing (the typical “what are you working on right now?” question).

When you’re in a company with multiple offices, it’s dangerous to believe that just because everyone in your office knows about what’s going on, that means everyone at all the other locations knows it, too. Some information might have been shared with a few people via email and selectively passed along, which can create an impression that the info is common knowledge when it really isn’t.

Meanwhile…in another time zone…. remote colleagues wake up several hours later, open their inboxes and find this:

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