Uli Kilian once set a world record by solving 100 Rubik's Cubes while running a marathon at the same time. So he's smart. And fit. But the smartest thing he's done might have been building a robot to tap his iPad screen in the middle of the night so that he wakes up to a ton of money in a mediocre free-to-play game.…
"I hate my job," George Yao told The New York Times. After moving across the country to a tiny apartment, to a city where he had no friends, he found an outlet in Clash of Clans. Then Yao found himself standing in the shower with five iPads—individually bagged—struggling to preserve his No. 1 ranking in the game.
Cartoonish graphics, simple and intuitive game play, free-to-play, Oh My Gods: Tower Defence has it all, and yet even though it's a grand game that's 100 percent free, it's not exactly a perfect ten.
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By now, most adults are used to the idea that the software and services they use—including video games—record what they do to send feedback to the companies that make them. But when some third-graders found out that games they love have some kind of data-mining, it was a heartbreaking combination of funny and sad.
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If a certain system can be used to trick children into spending thousands of dollars, then it's probably not a very ethical system.
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In 2009, Australian developer Firemint released Real Racing for the iPhone, stunning mobile gamers with amazing visuals and setting the standard for realistic mobile racing games. In 2010 the studio released Real Racing 2, adding licensed cars from major manufacturers and online play for up to 16 players. In May of…
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Firemonkeys' eagerly-anticipated Real Racing 3 is the first free-to-play entry in the popular mobile racing franchise. How far you can get without paying real money depends entirely on how much patience you possess—do you mind waiting 10 minutes for tire repair?
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Available today on iTunes, Beeline Interactive's Ghostbusters is a freemium game about busting ghosts, which I've heard makes people feel good.
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Gamers who are old enough to remember the PC experience before AOL brought dial-up internet access into everyone's homes will probably also remember shareware. My family had dozens of these discs and, later, CD-ROMS over the years. Each one promised HUNDREDS! OF! GAMES! and while most were simply trashy clones of some …
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Crytek is building Warface, the studio's first freemium shooter, shown recently at E3. It's also going to deliver Crysis 3, a more traditional FPS, sometime in 2013. Whenever the studio finishes off its current committments, CEO Cevat Yerli told VideoGamer.com, it will be developing free-to-play games only.
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Zynga's next big Facebook game is an improved version of FarmVille currently beta testing under the name Big Harvest, reports TechCrunch. Their source says the game is being tested out in the Phillippines.
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"In a freemium game it's not a rational decision to pay; it's an emotional one." Wednesday at the East Coast Games Conference in North Carolina, former BioWare design manager Ethan Levy explained how free-to-play games can harness to emotions of their players in order to profit.
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Free-to-play games are all the rage here in 2012. With MMOs, social games, and mobile games leading the way, some analysts see the model as the inevitable wave of the future across genres. And given how very well freemium games seem to be doing, they might just be right.
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When EVE Online began selling premium vanity items this summer, everyone lost their minds and rioted. Granted, these were $68 virtual monocles and such, but they didn't offer any kind of performance advantage. Another space-based MMO, Dark Orbit decided to offer a rare spacecraft with a value of €1.000 (roughly $1,300) …
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Nearly two-thirds of all revenue generated from the top 100 games in the Apple App store in June came from people spending cash inside "free" games, according to a recent study.
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D.C. Universe Online has launched something called the "DCUO Marketplace," and while its shelves are pretty bare, what it could portend down the line is worth paying attention, if not cash.
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It's not the return of MVP Baseball, the long lost and lamented Major League Baseball title that went into exile after 2005, but EA Sports has gotten back on the field with MLB in World Series Superstars, a Facebook game rumored to be in development that launched by surprise today.
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Company of Heroes Online isn't just a straight remake of the original, addictive real-time strategy game, it takes that experience and fixes almost everything wrong with it.
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Electronic Arts tells Kotaku that while they're exploring different downloadable game strategies, they do not plan to charge gamers for "traditionally free game demos."
