Bing is the name of Microsoft’s new search engine. It looks like this:

And yes, I did save that as a PNG so it could be bing.png.

Just read this. Even when you are one of the hotshots in the industry, helping to create some of the most lucrative and well-known franchises in industry history, don’t bluff about quitting your job for attention.

BR: To try to force that issue, to get them to talk with us, the four of us put in our resignation, with basically the trigger for us not to be resigning was to email us or phone call us, so like talk to us.

BF: So like, just care.

BR: Yeah, just talk to us. A day and a half later, we heard back from that chain. Mike called me and said, “I’m supposed to come up Monday and get you guys cleared out.” So, it wasn’t like we really wanted to leave.

Dan Baum’s tweet-story of working for the New Yorker and then being fired is fascinating not only because of its juicy inside-baseball-ness but because how it shadows the beats of my own personal story:

1. Get hired somewhere prestigious for less than you would make elsewhere.
2. Produce good work.
3. Piss off the wrong people by being overly-candid.
4. Get your ass fired.
5. Become disillusioned with the lie of meritocracy.
6. Cry about it online.

At least I didn’t name names. I’d be worried if I were him after all that’s happened to look petty to other potential editors.

This is pretty much why I’m trying to be my own boss.

I spent three hours yesterday while sorta-watching the NBA playoffs playing Baseball Superstars 2009 for the iPhone after briefly mucking around with the free version.

To save you a review, this isn’t only a somewhat-casual yet complete baseball game for your phone, it also includes:

• A 36-game season mode.
• An RPG mode with accelerated games where you only play when you are at bat (other baseball games on the console do this but I can’t remember which. I know Madden’s superstar mode does something similar in football.
• Super Batters and Pitchers with special abilities
• Mission Mode
• Homerun Derby
• Trading
• Training
• Special Equipment
• &c.,

You can play it in short bursts or long sessions. It is dead simple to learn, but provides tons of options as you get better. In short, it’s the kind of game I kept pressing to create at my last job.

Now there are problems with it. It is obviously an up-port of an older cell phone franchise as it somewhat anachronistically puts buttons on the screen rather than giving you full touch control. It’s legacy probably largely defrays the cost. But I paid $2.99 for the game.

$2.99.

A spicy chicken sandwich at Wendy’s costs more.

The description said it was on sale from $4.99. They needed to have a 40% sale because $4.99 wasn’t selling with a fully featured free demo.

Unsubstantiated rumor pegs Apple’s cut of sales at around 30%. So Gamevil got $2 from my sale.

I’ve bought DS games for $35 that provide much less content. Let’s say that I am running a studio or publisher and I have to choose whether to produce my new project for the DS or the iPhone. Let’s say that average retail price per unit is $24 since later sales will be discounted. Let’s also say that it costs me $9 to buy & print a cartridge and support all the infrastructure that gets that cart to your store. (I’m just waving my hands in the air here, but I’m in the sorta-ballpark) My publishing concern gets $15/sale. I have to sell seven and a half times as many copies on the iPhone to yield the same amount. Now, I understand that the iPhone and App Store have a broad reach, but the difference between 50k DS sales and 375k iPhone App Store sales is stark.

Where Apple excels is that they set themselves up as the sole publishing gatekeeper. If I wanted to make a DS game myself, I couldn’t. Nintendo needs to license me dev kits which they won’t do unless I am already a developer. Even once I pay the premium to get the kits, I have to find a publisher who gets a cut both financially and creatively and then the game again needs Nintendo’s approval before it can make it to market. So Apple provides a lot less overhead on the front-end, meaning the market can be populated by titles from major corporations and one man teams of guys living in cottages.

But if quality titles by professional organizations can’t get even close to the money generated on consoles from the iPhone, they will either stop making quality titles or scale them down so far that it is cheap enough to not lose a lot of money. They’ll go with the DS because they can easily step over the hurdles that Nintendo et al set up so that every schmuck can’t make a DS cart.

And even the single-guy-doing-his-thing model can’t survive long unless it is with very small and unambitious projects. Let’s say it takes that guy six months to do his project and he can make $70,000 coding at a “real” job. He needs to make $35,000 per project. At $3 ARP and Apple’s 30% cut, he needs to reliably get 17,000 sales on word of mouth.

While Baseball Superstars 2009 and other titles I’ve picked up recently have been pretty great, we don’t and won’t see anything like Hatsworth, The World Ends With You, Hotel Dusk or any of the other top-tier DS games. If we do, it will be an aberration. And that’s sad because the iPhone can do almost everything the DS can do and it has the bonus features of carrying all my games simultaneously and converging with the phone/GPS device that I take absolutely everywhere.

Keep buying App Store games, even if they are a shocking $4.99. I’d be interested in seeing how the companies that are putting out software for $19.99 and higher (very specialized stuff I see in the app store all the time) are doing.

Postscript: The upcoming microtransactions capability that will come with version 3.0 might change everything. Or it might be a big waste of resources.

Update: I tried to do some searching for the most expensive games on the App Store, but you can’t search by price. I did find this game called Jet Setter which attempted to release at a $1,000.00 price point. Apple let it linger in approval limbo until they dropped the price, giving it the old pocket veto. Does anyone know of any games that are priced about $9.99 (and have stayed there?)

As you can see from the timestamp below, I stopped updating this in June 09. From my server logs, I see that many people are still coming to this page. You should know that since Zynga is constantly changing the game, many (most) of this information is out of date. Take that as you will - z.

Last updated on 13 June 2009.

Looking for a similar post on Mafia Wars: Cuba? Look here.

Hi all, I decided to throw together this quick chart for the players of the Facebook/Myspace/Phone/Toaster game Mafia Wars after getting sick of trying to divide by prime numbers in my head and not finding sufficiently updated lists on other sites. Below you will see the loot drops and the experience points per energy point for all the jobs of the first seven tiers. I’ll update as I progress in the game.

If you are simply trying to maximize experience points, do the “Manufacture Tokens”, “Get Cheating Deck” & “Run Illegal Poker Game” jobs. This trio requires 36 energy and yields 63 experience, the best ratio I’ve seen so far in the game for lower levels. If you have less than 36 energy, the “Bank Heist” job yields a similar, but slightly smaller ratio. Once you reach Level 80, you will be able to “Muscle In On a Triad Operation”, which has a juicy 72/42 yield.

But the best use of this table is for choosing between jobs when trying to fill up mastery meters. If all your good jobs are filled (Bank Heist, Run Illegal Poker Game, Protect Your City”, etc.) and you are trying to figure out which lesser job will yield more experience, then just look it up on the table below.

The orange bars are jobs which yield loot drops which are consumable by other jobs. You will find yourself doing these jobs not for experience or mastery, but to fulfill requirements for other jobs that require these consumables. I’ve highlighted them so that they can be easily found and remembered.

The one time that you shouldn’t care about EXP/ENG is when you are about to level up. Get as close to the leveling up total as you can (if you level up at 7000 EXP, then try to get to 6999) Then simply find the job which you have the energy to perform that yields the highest experience points. Since experience points carry over to the next level, but your energy refills instantly, you can get some “free” experience points this way. If you are good at fighting, the boss fights grow in experience as you level up and can be a great way to get an edge on your next level up.

UPDATE: A commenter has clued me in that the values I stated may be after the Wheelman and Mastermind bonuses. In that case, you would need to add 6% more energy and subtract 6% experience. I could go through the table and update everything to be sans bonus, but everything would still be wrong for anyone with either bonus. Since these bonuses apply equally to each job, it wouldn’t change the rank order of preference for each. The only useful thing the bonuses would change is the XP/EN value. Use this table as a guide and then verify with your own situation.