Game Design Secrets

Summary

Here are the key points we covered in this chapter:

• Advertising-based payments, in which players take a real-world company offer in exchange for virtual goods in a game, will probably emerge as a strong revenue source for web games, as will secondary markets in which players can exchange game goods with each other.
• HTML5 and WebGL may supplant Flash as the leading development platform for the web in three to five years, but thanks to new features in Flash, such as accelerated graphics rendering, it will probably enjoy its prominence for quite a while. Whichever platform succeeds, it’s important for developers to be as platform-agnostic as possible.
• The growing quality of high-end graphics in web games will probably lead to growing interest from hard-core gamers, but they will probably need to see products different from what they are accustomed to on Steam or on their consoles.
• Twitter is still a “blue ocean” opportunity for web game developers that’s yet to be exploited, but has excellent potential as a gameplay mechanic and channel for viral promotion.
• Users of the social networks Google+ and Chrome are an important market worth developing for, especially in South America, but overall Google+ will probably remain secondary to Facebook and the broader web.
• Draw Something’s success is probably just the beginning of a trend in user-generated content-driven games, in which content can be shared asynchronously on Facebook walls, Twitter, and the web.
• The success of Apple’s ...