Archive for October, 2008

Reflexive Arcade is acquired by Amazon.com

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

Yeah this is pretty big news for the casual game world, so here are my random thoughts on it:

Well Reflexive have already changed their affiliate scheme to remove a feature that allowed affiliate sites could offer discounts. This has worried lots of affiliates who wonder what will happen next and also developers are worried about possibly having a reduced royalty rate in order to increase Amazon profits. This could just be paranoia though because I don’t think Amazon would want to loose clients right after purchasing the company (unless they have bought it to shut it down because they have their own game company in the pipeline). I wonder if Amazon will be adding to Reflexive by making an online games/community games site too? I imagine that their business development team are pretty clued up and if they’ve cottoned onto the growth of downloadable casual games they must have figured out that online games are getting pretty big too.

With their finances and marketing clout behind Reflexive they could really push Reflexive to be a very big player in the casual arena – perhaps the biggest. It depends how quickly they work and how BFG and Real (two of the biggest casual portals) can sense what is happening and adapt. However, if Amazon make more and more people aware of casual games this could work out well for all casual game portals due to increased customer awareness, so it may not be a bad thing at all.

Also Amazon aren’t the only big players climbing into the casual arena as many mainstream game companies are doing this too but the hope from the casual world has generally been that these big guys will need to spend a while “catching up” to learn how to do things properly – this could be a false hope though. One more thing, Amazon may acquire MORE casual game companies too…

How to succeed – brief summary

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

Last night I saw a forum post by someone with a less than positive attitude and it prompted me to post some basic advice about positivity. Of course I’m sure that most of you have heard this sort of advice before in many forms including huge long books. But the core of it is actually very simple and it works. Sometimes though we just need a reminder to kick us up the arse (that’s ass for the Americans) – so hopefully this post will tip the balance for some of you and get you going.

The Summary

Cultivating a positive attitude is essential for success – everyone who’s made a ton of money and/or had great success in their field knows that…Basically make a goal, think positive, then take action. If any one of those are missing then you are on a road to nowhere.

And that’s it! Here’s a bit more detail:

Visualising a Goal

We know that visualising a goal and then making a plan are essential otherwise you have nothing to aim for and no clue about how to get there. However, sometimes you can have a goal and only a vague plan, and it’s possible to work out what to do along the way. This is called the Ready Fire Aim approach and the advantage of it is that you get started whilst you are still excited about the idea without getting bogged down with a massive plan. It is still important to have a first step though, so that you can get started with something!

Positive thinking

You’ve also got to believe you can do it and quash any negative thoughts about your abilities as soon as they occur – train yourself to only think positively. We have good days and bad days. Sometimes we have setbacks that may make us think negative thoughts about ourselves or our project. This massively affects our performance and interaction with other people who may be crucial to the success of the project. So it’s important to kill those negative thoughts as soon as they occur before they grow into monsters. Sometimes you just need to put on some motivational music, or go for a walk, or see your family, or play a game (this really helps me because when I play a good game it makes me want to get on with my own game and make it better!). When you are having a good day ride the positivity – big yourself up and really push your project forward.

Taking Action

After coming up with a goal and making a plan you need to do something straight away that takes you a step towards the goal. Some days you may not feel like taking the next step, but you must force yourself to – once you get started you always feel better and often feel more motivated to continue and complete more tasks. An idea without action is totally worthless, it’s just a dream. Action turns dreams into reality. So if you’ve got to take some action today, go and do it now, don’t put it off!

Failure

So what if you do those three things and you still fail? Well that’s OK because you’ll have practiced making a goal, thinking positive and taking action. You’ll also have learned something from your failure. Then you can make a new goal and try again. Also I’ve heard some people say that it’s good to find out that you’ve failed soon so that you can try another approach quickly. If you take hardly any action or have a wishy washy goal then you might not fail for a long time and this means that you’ll have missed lots of chances to try other possibly more successful approaches.