Kyle Orland

The game development website used my notes for its coverage ofthe Games for Health Conference:

• Games For Health Conference Kicks Off In Baltimore
• Neils Clark On Moving Beyond ‘Game Addiction’
• Noah Falstein On Exergaming History
• PopCap Games’ Effects on Mood and Stress
• Why You Should Care About Virtual Worlds
• XRtainment’s Medina Says Gaming Gyms Can’t Be Glorified Arcades
• Developers, Researchers On Weighing Science Versus Fun
• The Real Life Lessons Of WoW’s Corrupted Blood
• The ‘Overheated’ State Of DS Learning Games In Japan 
• Healthcare Giants Talk Games For Health Initiatives
• What Rex Ronan Teaches Us About Health Education
  
• Analysis: Making DDR For Seniors With Touchtown’s Dancetown
  

Since licensed gaming seems bigger than ever these days, Gamasutra’s editors felt - somewhat flippantly - that publishers might need some help picking through the pop culture landscape for un-optioned properties that have the potential to become great games (as well as a few existing game franchises in desperate need of a comeback).

Our criteria for putting together this article - with input from all Gamasutra staffers - was a mixture of gut feeling and impassioned argument; unscientific, to be sure, but rather than functioning as a guide to the 20 and only 20 licenses that could or should be explored, it’s much more of a thought experiment into avenues many might not have considered.

Sure, judging by the history of licensed games, many of these ideas would probably be awful if they were actually made. On the other hand, there’s nothing that suggests that given the right amount of time and budget that these games couldn’t sing: just think about it.

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Making money in the video game business is usually a pretty simple proposition: you make a game; other people pay to play it. There may be some middlemen like producers and retailers in there, and the actual payment could be a purchase, subscription or rental, but when you boil it down, the pay-to-play model has defined the business of video games since the days of the arcade.

But the world of free-to-play browser-based Flash and Java games has largely thrown this business arrangement on its head. This is partly because it had to. People have been trained by sites like Hotmail and Google to expect web services — even good ones — to be free to use. The New York Times recently abandoned its Times Select online subscription service, possibly after realizing that people weren’t willing to pay good money for the kinds of opinions that were available for free on hundreds of blogs. Similarly, any online game site that starts charging money for content risks losing players to the myriad free alternatives.

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If a patent is filed in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and no one is around to enforce it, does it make any money?

This somewhat zen query actually hides a serious business question about the best way to extract value from a patent. Sure, there’s some prestige associated with publicly staking your claim to an idea before anyone else, but prestige doesn’t pay the bills. It takes a significant investment of time and money to get a patent — between 18 to 30 months and thousands of dollars in filing fees on average, according to PatentInfo.com. In the business world, the point of such investments is usually to make money.

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Charles Bellfield is the Vice President of Marketing at Capcom, USA. In this Gamasutra interview, freelance journalist Kyle Orland sits down with Bellfield to discuss Capcom’s stance on the Academy of Interactive Arts and Science’s ‘pay to play’ model, the success of downloadable console demos and the feedback loop it creates between developers and consumers, Eastern influences on Western games, Okami, Phoenix Wright, and more.

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