[SGVLUG] OT - D&D online game now free to play

[Miguel Hernandez]

Thanks for the heads-up, Matti!

This reminds me a LOT about Chris Anderson's (Editor, Wired magazine) recent
book- FREE: The Future of a Radical Price. I caught his interviews on
Charlie Rose (PBS) & he was even on C-SPAN. His basic premise is that it's a
great business model, one that's been adopted by several industries but
seems most-embraced by the gaming industry. In that example, he talks about
how game demos are usually easy to get your hands on & that if you like it,
you'll pay for the full game (experience). It makes sense, if you demo the
game & like it, chances are that you'll buy it and that once you do, you did
it because of that & not because you got duped into buying something while
receiving something else.

In both interviews, he talks about a robotics company he co-founded (w/a 18
year-old h.s. student from Tijuana who he said had a "Google PHD") & how
they fully open-sourced their code which helped their dev team fix a
perplexing problem- once they made it available to the public, the error was
fixed in 7 hours!

He put the book up for free to read on scribd.com for 5 weeks & I think the
Kindle & Google Reader versions are still available (for free, of course!).
You can read more details about all this on his blog @
http://www.thelongtail.com/ (the name of his previous book). For all you
interested in free/libre/open source, I think it's a great read.

Tom- To your issue about LUA scripting in games, World of Warcraft uses LUA
scripting & community-contributed add-ons are plentiful so I'm sure there's
TONS of documentation about that around which might be helpful to you. But I
haven't played that in a couple years (Warhammer Online is wayy better hehe)
so dunno the state of it.

Sorry for the long post, just thought folks on this list might find this
info useful.
--miguel
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.sgvlug.net/pipermail/sgvlug/attachments/20091015/dd6fe85b/attachment.html