In “The Total Cost of Gaming, Part 1” I discussed why game industry needs to do a better job understanding the Total Cost of Gaming (TCoG). You might want to read that post first.

Previously, all the costs of manufacturing a game were paid for by the publisher and passed along to the consumer in the final street price of a game. If a disk was only 50% full, the cost was the same as if it was 100% full. There wasn’t any pressure to eliminate art waste as the cost the same either way.

Today, “manufacturing” is downloading a game over the internet. This is largely paid…

While traveling in Europe I’ve learned (the hard way) that the cost of downloading a game can easily equal or exceed the cost of the game itself.

The price of the game matters to the consumer, but so does paying for the download. Game developers need to take care to only update the bits that need to be updated, and give the user control over when to download them.

Total Cost of Gaming

The enterprise software world talks about Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), which is the cost to buy software, plus the hardware, plus energy, plus the maintenance and support.

In the gaming world, we hear about the up-front…

When consumers around the globe purchase data plans for their devices, they usually only consider three factors: what kind of connection (wireless, dsl, fiber, etc…), bandwidth (Megabytes per Second) and data caps (Megabytes or Gigabytes per month). I’m writing this while traveling in Italy, so I’m painfully aware of bandwidth caps (Gigas, as they say).

These measurements make perfect sense for media streaming (music, TV, movies), email, and for many web browsing scenarios.

They are the wrong measurements, however, for video games, voice conversations, and video chat. Anything that involves interactive back-and-forth communication needs to take into account latency.

Latency has a profound affect on any games you play, voice/video…

When I read about the 10x programmer I think, “That’s nice, but it isn’t everything.” They are the big guns that cause a lot of damage, but they don’t aim themselves.

I’m interested in The Curious Programmer, who is less understood, but just as valuable.

The curious programmer is, well… curious about things.

The curious programmer

• is independent and self-motivated.
• is modest as they know they are never done growing.
• asks why are we building something. What is it for?
• does experiments to find the right way to build something.
• doesn’t accept the current assignment as what actually needs to be built.
• builds because building is fun.
• increases the value…