26th April 2011 by Thomas
Game as a Service in action: Rift and League of Legends
As a follow-up from my previous blog post, intentionally quite theoretical, I thought I would give two very specific examples of what I consider good development to push the service side of a game.
While a lot can be done to improve the quality of the service of a game, I really believe that it is when a company is dedicating its most precious resource (developers) on pushing the level of the service quality that you know it has a genuine will to develop a service strategy. More than, say, opening a dedicated Customer Support department with hundreds of dedicated staff and limit the developers to only build new content and gameplay features.
It may be biased by my own personal experience, but I have seen a bit too often CS departments used as a stop gap for development shortcomings. It is too common to see a bug left unfixed by the development team, that would require a couple of days of an engineer’s time at worst, to have hundreds of hours of CS staff spent hotfixing the issue. But I digress.
Tags: coin lock, Customer Support, dota, Games as a service, gold farming, griefing, League of Legends, MMO, Rift, Riot Games, tribunal, Trion
26th January 2009 by Diane
9 online games/MMO trends for 2009 – part 1

Like every new year, it’s time for looking back at the past one and trying predictions for the next one. We are quite late in the exercise as we post this, so we’ll concentrate on the predictions part for the future. These are based on our observations and deductions and various chats with clever people from the industry. We might be right or wrong, but what is sure is that this industry is moving very fast, and is fascinating to watch. Anyway, it will be fun to check at the end of the year to see where we guessed right and where we missed – most of the points seem to us to be quite logically tied together at the moment.
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Tags: Acclaim, Age of Conan, AQWorlds, Bigpoint, browser-based, digital distribution, Fallen Empire, Fiesta, Flyff, free to play, Fusionfall, Gameforge, Habbo, HoMM Kingdoms, InstantAction, MApleStory, Neopets, Ohai, Pixie Hollow, Power RAcing, QuakeLive, Runescape, Stardoll, Trion, Webcarzz, Webkinz, zOMG











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