Eric David
Latest from Eric David
Twitter wants to be your go-to TV social media app with “TV Timelines”
If this year’s Super Bowl and Academy Awards ceremony have shown us anything, it is that people talk about television on social media…a lot. The Super Bowl alone had tens of millions of people talking about every moment of the game, but the so-called “second screen” TV experience extends beyond tweeting about game scores or sharing ...
Valiant Hearts director’s insights after leaving Ubisoft: “Something was missing”
Yoan Fanise has been working at Ubisoft since the early 2000s, contributing to modern classics like Beyond Good & Evil as well as more recent titles like the Assassin’s Creed franchise and Valiant Hearts. After 14 years with the studio, Fanise as decided to move on to smaller, not bigger, things. “Beyond Good & Evil was a 30+ ...
Upsilon Circuit gives players only one life…forever
Permadeath is not a new concept in video games. Several titles have a “hardcore” mode or something equivalent that gives players only one chance to beat a game, and if their character dies, they stay dead with no continues. But for games that have that option, such as Diablo III or certain Minecraft servers, players can always ...
Facebook lawsuit shows the dangers of selling virtual content to kids
Children are not the best money savers. If they see something they want, they pursue it with a relentless obsession that would be considered unhealthy in an adult. Fortunately, most children lack the means to act on their buying impulses, but there is one area where this is not necessarily the case: the internet. Facebook ...
Could Star Citizen’s 100gb filesize hurt its fans?
Despite its enormously successful Kickstarter campaign that earned over $2.1 million, upcoming space sim/MMO hybrid Star Citizen is not for everyone, and with a possible filesize of 100gb, it might not even be for some of the people who want to play it. “The game compression and asset removal is unlikely to yield such high gains ...
Australia is outsourcing its video game ratings to IARC—maybe good news?
Australia’s government-run video game ratings board is not very popular with gamers or game makers. Back in January, for example, the Australian Classification Board effectively banned Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number by refusing to rate the game, despite the board’s recent addition of an R18 (adult-only) rating. With the increasing volume of games being sold in Australia, ...
China’s mobile game “buying spree” may be drying up, says one publisher
Since gradually easing restrictions on the sale of video games within the country, China has become a huge emerging market for the video game industry. Analysts at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP valued the Chinese game market at $10 billion, and a 2014 report by Newzoo projected that the market could reach more than double that amount within the next few years. Mobile ...
Plans for second UK gaming stadium prove esports is big business
With the explosion in the popularity of video games in the last two decades, it is no surprise that the esports movement has transitioned from a novelty for a few dedicated fans to a multi-million dollar industry. Thanks to livestreaming services like Twitch.tv, the audience for esports has grown from thousands to hundreds of thousands in ...
Facebook’s new “Topic Data” tells marketers what you talk about
You may have heard the modern saying “if you’re not paying for it, you are the product.” The phrase has commonly been applied to social media, and Facebook Inc. seems dedicated to proving the saying right. Yesterday, Facebook announced a new feature for marketers called Topic Data, which will allow advertisers to see exactly what subjects ...
Is Minecraft too violent? Somehow Turkey thinks so
In a list of games that people might expect to be banned for being too violent, Minecraft falls somewhere between Angry Birds and Tetris. Blocky zombies and obnoxious spiders might not seem like enough cause to ban the ultra-popular manual labor simulator, but that is exactly what may happen soon in the country of Turkey. According to Turkey’s Family and Social ...
