This Spring's Epochal Upheaval in the Global Gaming Industry - TechHui2024-03-29T15:42:57Zhttp://www.techhui.com/forum/topics/this-springs-epochal-upheaval?groupUrl=gamedevelopers&feed=yes&xn_auth=noIts interesting that the deve…tag:www.techhui.com,2011-05-09:1702911:Comment:824422011-05-09T19:37:30.605ZKevin Luttrellhttp://www.techhui.com/profile/KevinLuttrell
<p>Its interesting that the development community has known about this phenomena for a while-- creating an increasing number of social networking games in the background-- but the business media is only now coming up to speed as more of these games go live. </p>
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<p>I started playing World of Warcraft when it was first introduced and saw how the paradigm of gaming shifted. All of a sudden people were spending real money to buy virtual "gold" on Ebay. People who would have never met…</p>
<p>Its interesting that the development community has known about this phenomena for a while-- creating an increasing number of social networking games in the background-- but the business media is only now coming up to speed as more of these games go live. </p>
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<p>I started playing World of Warcraft when it was first introduced and saw how the paradigm of gaming shifted. All of a sudden people were spending real money to buy virtual "gold" on Ebay. People who would have never met became friends in real life. I even knew a police officer who would bring his laptop with him on patrol and link into the game from his car. But a dark underside also emerged. Gold Farmers would hack people's accounts, transfer all items and "gold" to a dummy account then resell everything on Ebay or other places for real money. Oh yes, people made a living turning 000101100 (binary bytes) into cash.</p>
<p>And of course, as the game gained traction and became wildly popular, people playing WOW lost interest in traditional console gaming. It was a perfect storm. I stopped playing that game two years ago but things were shifting. Clearly, some Angry Birds, Farmville denizens, Evony castle builders and Mob Warriors saw this shift as well.</p>
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<p>Now, we have several tools to build social games. The Unity 3D gaming engine is an exciting platform for developing online games for Facebook, mobile devices and whatnot without using Flash.</p>
<p>If anyone is interested, there is also a tutorial series taking shape at developphp.com called "World of Webcraft" on how to build a social networking game from scratch for Facebook using L.A.M.P. and Flash. It's free and an interesting series. Let's flood Facebook and the App Store with games with the "Made in Hawaii" label!</p>
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