Why Zynga Is Unstoppable, and Why It Doesn’t Matter
Everyone making games right now knows about Zynga. In a couple of years they’ve grown to hundreds of millions in annual revenue, hundreds of millions of monthly active users and a billion dollar valuation. They’ve followed a consistent pattern of taking an idea, quickly developing a prototype of it, testing lots of new features and [...]
How Will Kids Pay For GeekStack?
I got an insightful comment from Eva on my previous post:
just wondering what your revenue stream would look like. If you are focussing on online, how are you going to get your target audience to pay?
I think the reason traditional cards are so successful is because they are cash purchases – those kids don’t [...]
Thanks to Jason and Welcome TWiSt Fans
Today I was on This Week In Startups with a question for Ask Jason and he gave me some good advice about how to proceed with GeekStack as a business.
For those new to GeekStack, my background is that I’m a part-time solo founder with a wife, kids, a mortgage and a job. Basically the opposite [...]
Quick Update 8/14/2009
I’ve been working on the game engine for the last month or so. It started out slowly because everything I tried to do required 4 or 5 or 6 supporting pieces. The nice thing is that I’ve been picking up speed lately because I’ve been able to use the utilities I wrote for [...]
Why I’m Not Grouping By Scientific Field
One thing I specifically wanted to avoid for the card grouping was to group them by scientific field. There are couple of reasons why I didn’t want to have Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Genomics, etc.
First, let me share an experience from the Rebooting Computing conference I attended a couple weeks ago. Many of the attendees were [...]
Player Roles
Yesterday I discussed a two tiered card grouping idea, with a broad division into Science and Context, and then subcategories underneath each. I mentioned that it would mesh well with today’s ideas about player roles, so without further ado:
An important part of the theme and balance is the role each player takes.
Here’s the obligatory comparison [...]
Network Effects With Lock-In? Yikes!
I was listening to a talk on my iPod the other day, and the speaker was talking about how some of the biggest Tech businesses (Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, eBay, Amazon) were either founded or hit their stride during bad ecomonic times. That’s a fine fact, but he was saying it to a bunch of [...]
Alternate Subscription Feed Without Daily Links
A friend at the Cameesa T-Shirt shop asked for an alternate feed that doesn’t include the daily links, and so I made one. If you’re interested in following GeekStack as a company but don’t want a daily dose of Geeky news, subscribe to this feed instead of the usual one:
GeekStack Blog (No Links)
Enjoy!
More Thoughts on Making GeekStack a Game
I’ll take it as both a good sign and a bad sign that a reader pointed out to me that I haven’t updated the blog here much. Here are two excuses, one bad (but with good advice attached) and one good.
First, I read the Twilight series of books. They’re fun, fast reads that have a [...]
GeekStack as Trading Card Game?
From the beginning, I liked the idea of making GeekStack not just trading cards but a collectible trading card game like Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon. After all, those games are fun (addictive?) and using a rare card to help you win is more motivation than just getting the rare card to complete your set. [...]
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