Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/26447
By JENNIFER TAYLOR Games You’ve Designed a Game– Now What Do You Do? Accessing new avenues for game promotion, distribution, and monetization gamers is growing at an aggressive pace. As a result, so, too, is the gam- ing industry. In fact, online gaming is now the number-one activity on the In- ternet across all age groups, generating more money in recent years than another big entertainment sector: the movie industry. According to online gaming market research company DFC Intelligence, online gaming revenue for 2009 was expected to reach $8.8 billion world- wide, while marketing firm Strategy Analytics projects annual revenue to reach almost $12 billion by 2011. For game developers of all sizes, there’s a definite push to jump into the action. But doing so successfully requires following a few rules. First, your game has to be playable by the widest possible audience. Second, keep barriers to playing low so people can enter your game fric- tion-free. Tird, have the ability to rapidly iterate, update, and enhance your game. And, finally, make sure your game works across multiple platforms and is available through several application stores. For independent game developers working with finite budgets, this is not always easy to accomplish. But with several new services from Adobe and its partners, winning in the game development market just got easier. T More Opportunities, Fewer Limits As you likely know, the Flash Platform supports some of the best casual games on the Web today. Tis is due, in part, to streamlined develop- ment workflows among Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Flash Profession- al, and the Flex framework—all aimed at driving smooth integration and iteration of art, sound, and code. Jennifer Taylor is the senior director of product management at Adobe, working closely with developers and publishers to help them create, distribute, and monetize games based on Adobe Flash technology. 8 January/February 2011 raditional notions about gamers and gaming are changing. With the rise and popularity of social networks as well as the uptake of broadband services worldwide, the number of casual and social An active community of Flash developers contributes to the strength of this development environment, as well. Millions of talented develop- ers not only create great content, but also share massive amounts of information through online forums, tutorials, user groups, and confer- ences. And, last but not least, because the Adobe Flash Player is installed on virtually every Internet-enabled computer worldwide, you can develop an Adobe SWF-based game with confidence, knowing that just about anyone can play it in a browser. More recently, the introduction of Adobe AIR (a cross-platform run- time environment) has moved online gaming to off-line environments, enabling people to play games on their desktop computers, with or without an Internet connection. And with AIR for Android coming up in the AIR 2.5 release, the reach will go even further. But even the most impressive Flash games won’t see action if nobody knows they’re out there. Tat’s where several new services from Adobe and its partners come into play. Created to provide developers with more opportunities and fewer limits, these services offer a vehicle to enhance, distribute, and cash in on your SWF-based games. Using the services, you can easily add social and collaborative capabilities to your games, accelerate development, reach larger audiences, and find new ways to monetize your efforts. Easily Integrate and Stay Up to Date To reach the broadest range of potential casual gamers players, the titles need to have a presence across multiple social networks. After all, not everyone’s playing on Facebook. But who has the bandwidth or the budget to write separate integration code for each and every network? Or to write and deploy updates every time an API changes? Te Social- ize service from Gigya can help overcome these hurdles. With the Socialize service, developers can easily integrate leading so- cial networks with their games. Implemented through a single Action- Script3 API in Flash or Flex, the service provides an abstraction layer that connects with multiple networks—including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and a growing number of others. Tis easy-to-use service removes the complexity and repetitive work of having to implement multiple APIs. It also insulates game developers against ongoing chang- es. Every time a social network changes an underlying API, the Socialize service automatically adapts to those changes. Tat means you don’t have to rewrite and recompile your code every time a social network updates an API. Your game doesn’t break, it stays up-to-date, and you