When I began my professional working life in the 1990s, we were still very much in the old economy. There remained an acceptance of the idea of staying with companies for an extended period of time, and that companies adding employees to some extent represented business success; although this period aligned with the start of […]
There has been a lot of discussion of the negative impact of both Twitter and Facebook on the recent election. It’s easy to look at such artificial social spaces and say that they’re anonymous and negative; and hence, simply need to be vetted by good actors to minimize the impact of the bad. Inherently, this […]
This is one post in a thread of post-mortem for PGL, but today is timely, since recently Gameforge Philly, which did open a shared space for game development, has now closed its doors. There are several reasons that we never opened a space here, and I’ll try to cover them all. None would have likely convinced […]
It may be useful for me to describe why I started PGL. I had been working on a virtual currency startup, called superfluid, that I’d co-founded with a brilliant and funny Serbian physicist in Philadelphia, and the “futurist” Douglas Rushkoff in New York. It was built on concepts of community currency leveraging productive efforts toward […]
I haven’t posted here for a while, as I’ve been focused on other business, but thought I’d make a pass now at a comprehensive look at issues I see with bitcoin in light of Jason Calacanis’ recent, strongly positive, statements. I’m not an economist, but I do have a fair amount of experience in implementation […]
Jeremy Wagstaff recently posted a very positive analysis regarding Skype, with which, as a heavy user of Skype for IM, I quite empathize. However, his take on voice functionality is a tad euro-centric; not to say that he’s wrong, but I think that Skype’s journey back from years of neglect is a harder trek than he posits. […]
Since Gamestop is having a few issues with sales at this point, it seems like perhaps an appropriate time to look at issues in the game retailing business and the timeline for some upcoming changes. For a number of years, folks have predicted the death of games on physical media, and certainly it does make […]
There seems to be quite a bit of interest in the game developers cooperative, and I’ve been having a number of conversations about building such a thing. This being the case, it’s likely worthwhile to get into an overview both of what a cooperative is, and why it’s such a good solution for developer needs […]
I was asked the other day by an interviewer about the past and future of manifesto games, with which I have been glad to have been involved. As I was telling him, though, that a portal dedicated to indie games is redundant by definition in the current environment, where a thousand flowers are definitely blooming, […]
I like the idea of Apple acquiring EA, and contrary to what 1Up says, EA has suffered enough lately to make that a bit more viable. Apple could really use some high quality content for the iPhone/touch line of devices (which is now effectively competitive with game platforms like the DS), and perhaps upcoming tablets. […]