It was recently reported that Zynga’s market value was less than the value of its cash holdings and the property it owns in San Francisco. If you were suddenly asked to replace Mark Pincus, what would you...

I will shortly be writing a piece for MCV, the UK games industry magazine that is heavily read by retailers, about free-to-play. I was told that the journalists at MCV are often told that the UK just...

In the GAMESbrief rules, I propose that developers should make sure that customers can spend at least $100 in a game, mainly because to designers who are new to free-to-play, this seems like a staggeringly high amount....

Much attention is being paid in the press to traditional game companies (such as Valve) who are starting to integrate F2P ideas into their products - the (slightly offensive?) implication often being that "real" game companies are...

While other companies in the console games business are struggling to adapt, Nintendo has so far defied expectations - most notably by managing to sell tens of millions of 3DS consoles, despite the ubiquity of smartphones and...

Electronic Arts and Zynga are locked in a court battle in the USA, with EA accusing Zynga of "persistent plagiarism" while Zynga counters that EA's actions are "anticompetitive". In the broader picture, we can probably all agree...

If free-to-play becomes the dominant business model for platforms that encourage longer play times and less 'snacking' (such as consoles or PC), how can rich, 8+ hour single-player narrative games (such as Half-Life 2, Tomb Raider or...