Well Jagex (the company I used to work for) have released their online mini games portal Funorb. It is a collection of single and multi-player online Java games, with community offerings such as forums and in game chat. They have done a good job with the design of the website and I also like the game start up graphics. They just seem to have polished off things nicely which is what you expect for a product that you hope to charge for.

The pricing is key as it is a very competitive market with some sites offering some very good games for free (Kongregate springs to mind). I honestly do not know how this part of the company will fare. I personally would say that they will have a hard time, but you never know. If they build up the community well, offer their own inspired games (rather than knock offs of past games) they might have a good chance. Their advantage though is advertising it through Runescape.com and offering joint price packages (which they are doing). They have millions of customers already through Runescape and is an amazing opportunity to cross sell Funorb.

You have to wonder though how this will affect their partnerships. They have some huge partnerships (affiliations) with existing mini game sites for marketing Runescape. I can guess that some of these partners have directed a large number of paying subscribers to Runescape and probably probably still do. So how will they feel about Jagex entering their own market. Will they really want to send traffic to a competitor? I really do not have any experience in the mini games market so can comment really whether the games in Funorb.com do compete with what their partners are doing. But using a little common sense you can tell that there is going to be some disagreements somewhere.

But good luck Jagex. I am interested to see how it all goes.

Well, its been a while since I have written anything (again ). I have been literally rushed off my feet. I have almost got Smell Beautiful off the ground and have to spend this weekend entering the products etc and then finishing off the worldpay account stuff. I have been spending this week so far tucked away in Hanley library working on Digaset trying to finish the prototype. It is definitely coming along but it will take until the end of the week to finish it and get something working to show people. It wont have anywhere near the functionality that it will have, but it will hopefully show people what we are trying to achieve.The amount of work that I have managed to do this week proves that I need an office. I have managed to get so much more work done at the library than I do at home its unbelievable. No screaming kids, no distractions, just a quite work place. I am looking forward to getting somewhere that I can call work. So, much more work to do. Hopefully Smell Beautiful will be released in about a week, so there will be many more long days to come. I look forward to start earning some money though, rather than it always going out of my account. I don’t care if it doesn’t cover all my costs as long as it reduces them as I will last that little longer than I could without the extra money