While Android’s user base is expected to surpass the iPhone’s, many passionate gamers would tell you that the gaming experience on the iPhone is far better than on Android – primarily because of the buttonless form factor of iPhone, but also because of the superior iPhone graphics. But a panel on mobile gaming at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2010 conference today said that’s not the case.

The panel participants all vehemently supported Android over iPhone, although largely… (more…)

(This is part 4 of 6 of “Microsoft: Can Elephants Really Dance?” series. For earlier parts, please follow the links below the post)

It’s been a while since Microsoft’s heyday as the monopolistic king of technology.  Called “too big to innovate”, “inefficient”, and “crippled [by redundancy]”, the bearish outlook on Microsoft’s once glorious future seems pervasive.  But with the highly anticipated Project Natal arriving this year, a healthy 32.5 million Xbox 360 consoles sold, and a blossoming Xbox LIVE community of over 20 million users, Microsoft’s console gaming division has shown everyone that Microsoft can still come up with some cool new tricks. Let’s take a look at how the Xbox 360 is faring against its two fiercest competitors (*cue battle music*). (more…)

Earlier we talked about several platforms on which to showcase your talent (the iPhone, Facebook, Android, Palm Pre, BlackBerry, and MySpace, to name a few). Having so many choices might cause developers to overlook the most obvious platform of all: the World Wide Web, plain HTML, and Flash. Read the full article »

While the “real” economy has been tumbling for the past two years or so, social applications, online gaming, and the virtual economy have proven to be fairly resilient in the face of the economic slump. Some reasons for this resilience could be that people have more free time, and that they generally don’t mind making small payments on virtual goods. The worldwide virtual goods market (which is a subset of the virtual economy) is estimated to be around $5 billion, with 80% coming from Asia (China, South Korea, and Japan) and only $200 million to 400 million from the US. Several players have emerged to take advantage of this opportunity. Third-party developers on Facebook are projected to make $500 million this year, and while most end users think of social applications (and games) as the only players in the space, there are several others. In this article, I will touch on only one missing piece of the puzzle: the virtual economy. Next week, I will cover some other players which together with social apps and online gaming make up the social media and online gaming ecosystem. Read the full article »

After reviewing social gaming companies, I move on to RockYou and LivingSocial — two very successful companies in the social applications space — to find out more about the similarities and differences between social games and apps.

You can see from the top Facebook apps list here that although they are fundamentally different, apps and games that are popular on Facebook and other social media are generally entertainment-based rather than utility-based. What’s more, on the iPhone, one out of three apps is an entertainment app or a game. Let’s look at some specific similarities and differences. Read the full article »

Social gaming is changing the way games are marketed and distributed. Rather than relying on big publishers and distributors such as Electronic Arts, studios are leveraging the power of social media to virally spread their games. In order to better understand how they have built sustaining businesses, I talked to the CEOs of some of the top social gaming companies. You will see that all of them have different yet successful strategies. Read the full article »