> Meanwhile Facebook had changed their policies making Zynga's viral growth more difficult to obtain for their next games
Don't forget that this viral growth was achieved through unethical methods. [1] In the fall of 2009 a number of articles appeared calling out the unethical behavior which changed the climate and forced Facebook to alter its policy:
Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell [2]
Scamville: Zynga Says 1/3 Of Revenue Comes From Lead Gen And Other Offers [3]
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus: "I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues" [4]
Who's making such a claim about VR? People who think Michael Abrash made this claim simply didn't read his white paper closely enough. Here's what he said:
> …VR may be best with slow movement and a lot of up-close interaction, in which case we’ll have to learn how to create fun games around that.
> Miraculously, they've succeeded in eliminating simulator sickness…
Not true. While Abrash seems to makes this claim several times early in the PDF [1], near the end there's this:
> In addition to the question of how games will interact with input, rules about how players can move around a virtual space without getting motion sick or losing presence have yet to be figured out. We’ve found that traditional FPS movement is far from optimal and tends to cause motion sickness, so VR may be best with slow movement and a lot of up-close interaction, in which case we’ll have to learn how to create fun games around that.
Abrash admits that "traditional FPS movement" still makes people sick despite all the technical improvements touted earlier in the paper. His solution doesn't work for FPSs but instead proposes new types of games instead of the ones that people want to play. Flying fighter jets, the type of simulation that gives simulation sickness its name [2], does not involve the "slow movement and a lot of up-close interaction" that Abrash says is needed to prevent sickness.
Like you I was excited that Valve had solved the simulation sickness problem, but on closer reading found that it's just not true. Many people have the desire to use VR tech in virtual worlds doing things that involve normal-speed head movements without getting sick, but Valve has not solved this problem.
Simulator sickness is different from motion sickness. That is, there may be low simulator sickness, but it turns out that pulling 9G turns or rocket jumping while running backwards at 40MPH, while not a problem on regular computer screens will get most people motion sick in real life, and hence in VR.
From personal experience and in watching a number of people in my office try out the DK1, I can definitely confirm that there are a number of things that are quite different when strapping on the Rift - relative scale of objects becomes much more important, world detail (books in bookshelves etc) takes on a much more interesting quality, and movement speed is definitely something that seems to scale down - feeling comfortable moving at walking/realistic speeds vs getting sick at traditional video game character speeds.
Yes, major changes—Jeb's Minecon 2013 slide showed 600,000 lines of code committed for version 1.7. [1]
Two years ago I was certain that Mojang's goal was to do a mod store, but at Minecon 2012 Jeb explicitly ruled that out in a slide titled "Making Money?" with a bullet point reading "Not via the repository or the game." [2]
A large proportion of Minecraft players are kids. I've written about this in The Minecraft Generation: A distinct demographic cohort. [1] This will be the first generation of children to grow up with a lot of experience in virtual worlds.
Not really, plenty of kids have grown up on WoW or EverQuest or LPMUD or whatever before this, not to mention so many other games. I don't see how Minecraft is revolutionary in this respect.
Minecraft isn't "plenty of kids." Minecraft is millions of kids, all playing the same game. Sales are over 26 million on all platforms, 10 million on PC. If 30 percent of PC sales are played by kids, which I think is low, that's 3 million. Plus a lot of kids are playing pirated copies or on other platforms.
WoW was popular with kids, but there were never 3 million children playing it. The majority of WoW and EverQuest players have been adults. MMOs, even kids MMOs, are unmodifiable theme parks which don't hold a child's attention for very long. Free Realms, the MMO made by Sony Online Entertainment targeted at kids, had to run TV ads to remind them to play[1]. Meanwhile Mojang has spent zero dollars marketing Minecraft (if you don't count Minecon expenses). Viral spread among children has helped make it the seventh highest selling PC game of all time[2].
MMOs have numerous specialized blogs covering them; the popular MMOs have dozens of blogs devoted specifically to each title. Minecraft has almost no blogs covering it because blogging is an activity done by adults.
In contrast, searching YouTube for "minecraft" currently yields "about 70,200,000 results." Instead of reading, most children would rather watch a video and quite a few have mastered making and uploading their own. One top YouTuber specializing in Minecraft makes enough to earn a living off it (he's young and single), and he's still gaining subscribers[3].
Minecraft is different. There's never been a game like it.
Wow, searching for "buy traffic" or "real human traffic" (sans quotes) is an eye-opener. They may be real humans and not bots (though I doubt it) but it's still fraud.
You're probably talking about Handmade Hero, by Casey Muratori. Unless there's more than one person doing this.
https://handmadehero.org/