Som(a)niloquy

Computex: The Buzz, The Bombs, and the Booth Babes

“I just flew in from Taipei and boy are my arms tired…”

I wrote that line a month ago when it was hoped to be at least slightly true…So the “just” has now become a distant memory and I’m only now getting to this blog, but better late than never right?

The whole point of this article is to give a report on what I saw at Computex which was in Taipei (as always) June 1-5. Now in the spirit of full disclosure I should say right off the bat that I was only in Taipei because I was invited to go by a large semi-conductor outfit you’ve no doubt heard of. And since I really never read those NDAs I sign I really don’t even know if I can mention then by name here…but you’ll read between the lines no doubt (where Google will not). Anyway, it’s worth saying that these folks were very generous to lil’ol’ Soma Games, took great care of me and didn’t EVER stop feeding me! I swear I ate 13 times a day over there…which was a good thing.  I stood atop the 2nd highest building in the world, the Taipei 101 and was shocked to see that a Starbucks in Proto-China looks exactly like a Starbucks in Seattle – I just couldn’t really read the menu. But who cares right? ’cause I just know where “Americano Maximus Quad Shot” is on the menu anyway and everybody understands a pointing finger. Continue Reading…

The Lament of a Flex Developer

or “Why Apple broke my heart and Adobe is holding the pieces”

by our very own Ryan Green

April 8, 2010 was the day the first salvo was fired, all out war declared, and the following day an Adobe employee named Lee Brimelow had his emotions get the better of him. His blog post told Apple collectively to… well… ahem. Apply screws to themselves.

See, the following Monday, was a day that I, as a Flex / Flash developer, loyal Apple fan-boy and AppStore developer had eagerly anticipated with bated breath. Monday, the 12th, was the day when the world would open up. When those, like me, whose livelihood depends largely on the Adobe Flash Platform would finally be allowed into the mobile space; unencumbered; invigorated; and empowered.

Continue Reading…

Where the Intel App Store Fits In

Soma Games was in Las Vegas this last week to attend CES whereIntel announced the beta launch of their new app store aimed at netbooks. (Check it out here)

For Soma Games, this was a singular opportunity but I’m seeing a lot of ink out there this week by folks who don’t get it. The refrain I’ve heard from the party poopers is the laconic ‘another app store?’ whine as if the paradigm shift represented by app stores is somehow old news. These folks totally miss what the app store model represents and they will be eating their words as their myopia is exposed in the coming months, particularly in what the Intel store represents.

In the broad sense, the app store model is a huge opportunity for everybody in the software chain. Developers like Soma Games can get our product out to our tribe for minimal cost, fans benefit from the long tail and…blah, blah, blah. You’ve already heard all that about Apple’s raging success. But don’t think of the iTunes store as a product where it’s critical to be first and unique. Instead it’s a new way of doing business, and that’s a much bigger thing. In fact, the Apple store is getting pretty fat and bloated these days, some genuine competition will be good for it. Another app store is a good thing in the same way a competitive shoe store is  a good thing.

As for the specific punch of Intel’s store, you need to remember the three rules of retail?

1. Location
2. Location
3. Location

The App Up store is likely to get off to a fairly slow start because it isn’t really a new idea, people have seen these things before, and so the gee whiz factor is gone. But Intel is working with OEMs like Dell and Acer to get this thing pre-installed on netbooks that ship out all over the world. Pretty soon there will be a gigantic installed base that grows more of less by osmosis. The netbook users who are all about minimal fuss will be drown to its ease of use and one-stop-shop featueres and before you know it the app store will be the first (and often only) place they will look any time they think they need a new utility of time sink.

In other words, before long, being in that store will be like placing your business at the corner of 1st and Main where everybody goes to browse…because it’s right on their way to everywhere else.

Manifold Publishing

There is no way that any video game or series of video games can possibly tell the stories we want to tell at Soma Games.
Neither could a graphic novel,
…or a book,
…or a movie.

If ‘the medium is the message’ then we will only have told our stories properly when they are told across multiple media, each used in its proper place to express the proper part of a manifold expression of creativity that ought to transcend any single medium. Continue Reading…

Keep Raising The Bar

Christian game developers have toiled in obscurity for all these years largely because we’re broke and making a video game is an expensive proposition. With little access to capital games have struggled with older technology that doesn’t compete with current expectations and anemic (…or totally absent…) marketing budgets. The two factors make the whole enterprise of building a Christian game a daunting task. The Catch-22 of course is that investors want to see some proven indication that a title has a reasonable chance of making a profit but it’s been next to impossible to prove the point when nobody can make a realistically funded effort. (Left Behind notwithstanding…ahem)

But two recent releases have me smiling about things to come. The first is Heaven The Game (which we reviewed here) and the other is Adam’s Venture. Neither game is what you would really call a AAA title and neither plays on a console which is where most of the gaming market is right now, but neither title could have been cheap to make, and that means somebody is starting invest some serious dollars into this niche I’ve been talking about for years. Continue Reading…

Serialized Gaming Requires Rapid Distribution

When Soma was first looking at the video game business about four years ago the biggest barrier to entry was cost and distribution. That may look like a subject-verb-mismatch but the two things are so intricately related that they might as well be seen as a single issue. Indie games cost less to make but had no realistic way to get to the public; to get out there you needed a big distribution channel, to get distributed you needed a publisher and to interest a publisher you needed to spend $500k or more.

But as I was coming to grips with this problem something new was just appearing on the scene – digital distribution. Continue Reading…