January 2008

Hi, thanks for dropping by. If you are interested in a lively community around mobile casual games why not register to play, score and make friends. Please go to http://www.playyoo.com/common/registration.html

The contest rankings which will determine prize winners in the Playyoo Game Contest are calculated on the basis of the popularity of a game. In order to minimize any chance of artificial results, we will use an algorithm which applies a weighting based on some of the other user activity variables, both public and private. These might include rating, preview count, number of unique member downloads, time spent playing the game, and other factors. For obvious reasons we’re not disclosing this algorithm!

At present there is a glitch in the interface which means we are not showing accurate data in the Contest leaderboard. However, it is not seriously wrong, and it will soon be corrected.Game owners can increase their chances of winning by getting as many people as possible to play, so for example inviting friends on other social networks to join Playyoo, by engaging in internal self-promotion, as several enterprising members have already done, and by creating more games. Obviously they can also create multiple user accounts and play their own games, but actually this is less effective than you may realize!

There is no rule that prevents any one member from winning more than one prize. It’s still wide open, and we anticipate a strong growth of the user base in the next few weeks. So, keep at it, and good luck to everybody. We value and appreciate every game that you create and upload, not just the winners.

Last month’s scandal at Gamespot undoubtedly rattled gamers and loyal readers who turned to the site for objective reviews. If you’re not familiar with the story, Jeff Gerstmann, Gamespot’s longtime editorial director, was shown the door- presumably after giving a negative review for Eidos’s Kane & Lynch, which had spent a significant amount advertising on the site. Kyle Orland provides a great summary of the story over at Joystiq.

But what does this really tell us? We already knew that the interests of corporate sales & marketing and editorial departments can often clash. And in the age of marketing spin masters and PR gurus, it’s wise to take any “objective” review, post, or article with a grain of salt.

With the emergence of Web 2.0 and the collaborative web, we all become published reviewers (sometimes objective ones, and other times….). Online communities share ratings and commercially-untainted recommendations. Of course, it’s naïve to think that community-created reviews cannot be manipulated, however there’s something wonderfully honest and open about letting anyone with computer access and an Internet connection offer their opinion.

And at Playyoo, we take community input seriously (after all, we’re looking to you to determine who wins it all in the Playyoo Games contest).

When you browse for games, you can sort by the community’s top-rated games. Or, take it to a deeper level, and limit your focus only to those games recommended by your friends (the ones you really trust). Or just take a peak at what your friends are playing for ideas. But remember- you can never know for sure if you’ll like a game until you take it for a spin yourself.

We are going to change our rss feed to http://feeds.playyoo.com/playyooblog in the next minutes. Please update your subscription.

This afternoon we installed a maintenance release to Playyoo, with the following principal changes:

New Features

• Playyoo staff members can now be identified by an orange “team” tag below their profile image.

Principal Bug Fixes

• Scores, ratings and comments from mobile now works also for non-Nokia phones

• What your friends are playing lists are now shown correctly

• Game stream configuration slider scale now corresponds to game ratings: for example, setting a slider to second position (after “none”) means “only games with rating 5″, setting to fourth position means “only games with rating 3 or higher”, etc

• Game default rating is set to 3

• Phone type detection greatly improved (although not 100%)

There will be a further update next week, then we’ll move on to the serious business of introducing some new stuff.

Right now, we are present on

- IRC #playyoo on freenode.net new!
- Facebook
- Flickr
- delicious
- we are not in Second Life yet
…. please suggest where else do you want us to have.