grokludo

Rand Fishkin is an icon in the SEO space who recently started a game studio and is making a new indie game, Snack Bar at the End of the World. Rand’s open-sourced method for indie developers seeking investment is mainly about leveraging your network, whether large or small, to get the funds needed to make a game. It doesn’t matter if you have millionaire circles or just normal friends, school alum...

Maarten Denoo has been active in the Belgian gaming scene as an academic and journalist for years, releasing papers that cover loot boxes and the progress of policy around gambling in games. This episode covers the recent research around loot boxes, and gets a frontline view of Belgium's loot box ban, as well as uncovering a possible new avenue of attack: Consumer law. You can find out more a...

Kotaku AU has closed. To me and many others, it held a special place in Australia's gaming history. So this is part memorial, part group therapy session, part insider discussion for everyone else's understanding, in which I've gathered former editors of the site to talk about its beginning, middle, and end. Mark Serrels and Alex Walker had the longest tenures as editor of Kotaku AU,...

Margaret Anderson became Director of the Australian Classification Board in 2013, a time when it still made opaque decisions and wasn’t prepared for the tidal wave of gaming content that would come in the following years. She talks to grokludo about declassifying the classifications as it were, and dealing with the multiple challenges that games created as a fast-moving technology that vastly outp...

Paul Tozour is saying exactly what the industry needs to hear right now. Backed with data from his 2015 study titled The Game Outcomes Project, he's fictionalised the data in his new book The Four Swords: A Parable of Leadership, Video Games, and Dead Dragons. Tozour goes through his lessons for studios, publishers, managers, and creatives, able to definitively describe what leads to a succes...

Malcolm Ryan from Macquarie University speaks about his study that shows how suggestible we can be if a game's morality meter tries to nudge us in a certain direction... provided certain conditions are met beforehand. Even when players think they're ignoring the morality meter, the results say different! Read the study here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15554120211017040...