Charles Hudson's Weblog

In all of the announcements about Apple’s iOS5, the one that caught my attention was the continued progress that Apple has been making with GameCenter. They now claim over 67 million registered players for the Game Center service and it continues to expand to include a wider range of game types. I’ve been thinking about [...]

There is a strong case to be made for why Amazon will become a force in the wold of freemium games. Amazon has the three key ingredients – a database of customers who have credit cards, a hardware strategy that will promote customer adoption, and skills as a merchandiser.

I’ve been tracking the progress of Google’s In-App Purchases for awhile. It’s not just academic to me – we’re building Android games over at Bionic Panda Games and the development of that product is pretty important to us. Previously, I worked on the Facebook Platform, which went through its own process in launching Facebook Credits. [...]

Just a quick thought that’s been on my mind of late. I’m trying to figure out how two major changes I see in social and mobile games will be reconciled: 1. Many social games developers are gradually beginning to embrace deeper integrations of Facebook Credits into their on-Facebook social games. In a number of cases, [...]

Every day I seem to love my iPad more and more. I read a few reviews of people declaring that they could easily go iPad-only during their workday and not a miss a beat. I was a bit skeptical of that claim, so I decided that I would try to go iPad-only during my workday [...]

I’m now on my second Android phone and I have to say that Android has come a long way. When I first got my Nexus One, it wasn’t an iPhone killer by any means (some of my early thoughts on the Nexus One can be found here). In reading a few posts, this one by [...]

This has been a really interesting week in the world of platforms. Between Fred Wilson’s blog post on filling holes and the subsequent Tweetie acquisition announcement and Apple’s announcements about some of the social gaming features that will be part of the next iPhone OS release, it reminded me of some things I’ve thought about [...]

I saw so many posts about the new Google Nexus phone (I liked the one on TC, so I’m linking to that one) that I wanted to post my quick thoughts. In the interest of fair disclosure, I used to work at Google back in the day and know and respect a lot of the [...]

When I read Walt Mossberg’s revised review of MobileMe, I was really excited – it sounded like they had fixed many of the issues that had prevented me from using the product in the past. Alas, after two weeks of playing with MobileMe, I’m throwing in the towel. It’s not a bad product, it’s just [...]

I’ve had my iPod touch for about a week now and I absolutely love it, aside from the learning process associated with the touchscreen keyboard. I have to admit that I was very perplexed when I first saw the iPod touch – why would Apple need a phone-less, touchscreen iPod when most of the other [...]