Another new social game coming from Vienna – TeamVienna’s “Zombiees” started their private alpha today on Facebook.
At a glance it seems that a majority of Vienna’s finest game developers are all creating social or web games or frameworks – spielwerk, mipumi, platogo, Team Vienna, fatfoogoo …
Special gratulations to socialspiel for winning the Austrian Staatspreis for Push!
A project that I have been working on during my employment as a development team manager at VeriSign has been the base for an open source version:
EasyRec enables you to include item recommendations based on the behaviour of your website users.
From their website:
- User Actions are sent to the easyrec using the REST API. Possible actions are viewing, buying or rating an item.
- These user actions are stored in the database of the Recommendation Engine.
- The provided Analyzers periodically analyze all recorded data for identifying patterns to generate recommendations.
- These Recommendations can be accessed through calls to the easyrec webservice API and presented to a user.
I left VeriSign in 2008, so it will be quite interesting for me to see how it evolved.
I just came across Turiya Media, a startup concentrating on providing data mining for social and mobile games that sell virtual goods.
Founded in 2009, and they won the “Best Startup” prize at last year’s Game Developer Conference, but even now they still appear to be in stealth phase.
Interestingly, I have been thinking about data mining since I was working on Atlantis at plazz entertainment. Having talked with a lot of developers and publishers, it seems that most of them rely on basic data aggregations and averages as a basis for their decisions to optimize, while obviously it would be very rewarding to segment your customers into groups and and target them more specifically, predicting revenue curves and lifetime value, presenting them items to purchase that other, “similar” users have bought, etc.
If you are game developer (or publisher) using data mining techniques, or are interested in this topic, please contact me via Xing or LinkedIn.
I stumbled across this informative Overview of Lean Software Practices, a transcript of a talk given by Tim Wingfield.
If you have been asleep the last 10 years, it lists Lean Software Development best practices in a metholodgy-agnostic way, like
Then again, chances are if you have been asleep, you won’t be reading this blog anyway…
I’m almost off to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
This year again, the number of sessions about social, online, casual MMO etc. type of games increased – I should be attending most of the Social & Online Games Summit on Tuesday and Wednesday, and will roam around the following days.
The plan is to cover the most interesting stuff here in the blog – we’ll see how this goes.
If you are in SF and care for a coffee or beer (or have invitations to a hot exclusive party…), let me know.