This workblog has now been replaced with a much more professional looking personal home page and will therefore no longer be update. For current updates about me, my work, and my life, please visit:

http://www.kyleorland.com 

Yet while independently owned specialty shops dominate the brick-and-mortar comic book business, the videogame retail space has increasingly become synonymous with one name: GameStop. The slow conglomeration of mini-chains like Babbage’s, Software Etc. and FuncoLand came to its monolithic conclusion in 2005 when GameStop’s merger with EBGames gave them a full 25 percent of the videogame market (a share that’s surely increased with the chain’s nonstop expansion in the years since). The remainder is almost entirely taken up by big box retailers that sell videogames alongside unrelated products like electronics and home supplies. For most consumers, the small, mom-and-pop game shop is a thing of the past, if it was ever a thing at all.

(full article) 

(full article) 

(full article) 

“Attention spans are just getting so small that readers don’t know what they want,” Mr. Orland said.

(full article)

(full article)

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.

(full article)

(full article) 

(Download MP3)

(full article)