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Now that 2008 is at an end, I usually look back at the year that was and what was the best. Both in terms of Music, games and movies. And here is the list over the best albums, games and movies that was released this year. (This list may be updated, as I’m still haven’t played all the games I have from 08).

Music Album:

• Equilibrium – The Sagas
• Heaven Shall Burn – Iconoclast
• Bullet for my Valentine – Scream Aim Fire
• In Flames – A Sense of Purpose
• Sonic Syndicate -Love and Other Disasters
• Cafe del Mar – Vol. 15

Games:

• Metal Gear Solid 4
• Battlefield – Bad Company
• Gears of War 2
• Mirrors Edge
• Fallout 3

Movies:

• Cloverfield
• Doomsday
• The Air I Breath
• Speedracer
• Death Race

2008 was quite a good year in many aspects. And I hope that 2009 will be even better. We have many new projects to do at GamersGate, and I hope to get some time and energy to continue bloging as in 2008.

Happy new year to you all!

The game market and industry have been growing every year, and this year continue this trend. Both in terms of revenue and media space. This fall, I have notice and enormous increase in TV commercials for PC and Video games. A list over the games and consoles I’ve seen recently:

• Fallout 3
• Resistance 2
• Playstation 3
• Xbox 360
• Gears of War 2
• Motorstorm 2
• Wii Fit
• Wii
• Animal Crossing DS + Wii
• Little Big Planet
• Guitar Hero World Tour
• Mirrors Edge
• World of Warcraft – wrath of the lich King
• Lips
• Raving Rabbit
• Prince of Persia

Maybe this is a changing point for game to take more place. The total amount of advertisment games seems to be more than movie and music combined this fall. Here in Sweden at least.

One thing I do when I’m bored is (like many other) to scan Youtube and the rest of the net for interesting video clips. Often its just short clips from series like Simpson, Family Guy and South Park. But it seems that the owners are fast to ban content that people have uploaded without permission. As people (especially Pirates) find new way to distribute copyrighted content, the companies and people that own the rights have to work harder to hunt the ones that upload it. I don’t think pirating and distribution of copyrighted content without permission ever will stop completely, as long as it isn’t free. And the ways to distribute content will be even more sophisticated, and the owners will have to adapt and stay even more informed of all the new places and technology to keep up.

All over the world, especially in the car industry, the economy have generally showed black numbers. Which might leads to people scrimp with their spending and look at “free” pirated content online. It struck me last night that this might open up for a whole new industry, Digital Content Copyrighting Polices. Basically, people how know the web, the latest trends and the hippies places were people get together and share illegal content. People who can be hired by the big content owners, like Universal, Electronic Arts, Sony BMG and 20 century Fox, and do their scanning of uploaded content for them. Specialist that the bigger companies can hire with one mission, to report illegal digital content. Like scanning Youtube for unapproved uploaded video clips. I don’t like this how ever (when it comes to video clips on Youtube), cause I think they miss a great opportunity to promote their TV shows even further for new audiences. Who view a clip, find it funny or interesting and want to see the whole episode. Thou I think this could be a great opportunity to create a new industry, not internet police, rather detective that investigate and report. For hire of cause.

Microtransactions and DLC (Downloadable Content) are two relatively new phenomenon in Games. In Asia, the big thing in online games are Free-2-Play the big model, were you play for free and have the option to buy small micro-items in game. Many small transactions, that combined add up to a bunch of money. In the west this type of thing in games haven’t really become successful, yet. But it seems that the whole industry are focusing their attention for this and develop games with this in mind. DLC have become big, were the developer can expand the life of a game buy developing new extra content for a game. This works for game, that is a consuming and interactive media. One example that comes to mind in books are when JK Rowling wrote a extra short story for her Harry Potter universe.

For big games, from big publishers this works very well. But til now big games that are already or on the way out on the market, DLC maybe doesn’t cost so much to develop. But it still a risk to incorporate it from scratch and depend the whole project on it.  Here, we at GamersGate have been developing a complete platform to ease for developers to incorporating microtransactions into their games. Microtransaction and DLC are indeed the future, or a part of the future, it have many advantages but still have some childhood things to fix. But this is probably just the beginning!