What explains the massive worldwide success of video games such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and Pokémon Go? Game companies and their popularity are poorly understood and often ignored from the standpoint of traditional business strategy. Yet this industry generates billions in revenue by thinking creatively about digital distribution, free-to-play content, and phenomena like e-sports and live streaming. What lessons can we draw from its major successes and failures about the future of entertainment? One Up offers a pioneering empirical analysis of innovation and strategy in the video game industry to explain how it has evolved from a fringe activity to become a mainstream form of entertainment. Joost van Dreunen, a widely recognized industry expert with over twenty years of experience, analyzes how game makers, publishers, and platform holders have tackled strategic challenges to make the video game industry what it is today. Using more than three decades of rigorously compiled industry data, he demonstrates that video game companies flourish when they bring the same level of creativity to business strategy that they bring to game design. Filled with case studies of companies such as Activision Blizzard, Apple, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Microsoft, Nexon, Sony, Take-Two Interactive, Tencent, and Valve, this book forces us to rethink common misconceptions around the emergence of digital and mobile gaming. One Up is required reading for investors, creatives, managers, and anyone looking to learn about the major drivers of change and growth in contemporary entertainment.

Do you want to build mobile games, but lack game development experience? No problem. This practical guide shows you how to create beautiful, interactive content for iOS and Android devices with the Unity game engine. Authors Jon Manning and Paris Buttfield-Addison (iOS Swift Game Development Cookbook) provide a top-to-bottom overview of Unity’s features with specific, project-oriented guidance on how to use them in real game situations. Over the course of this book, you’ll learn hands-on how to build 2D and 3D games from scratch that will hook and delight players. If you have basic programming skills, you’re ready to get started. Explore the basics of Unity, and learn how to structure games, graphics, scripting, sounds, physics, and particle systems Use 2D graphics and physics features to build a side-scrolling action game Create a 3D space combat simulator with projectile shooting and respawning objects, and learn how to manage the appearance of 3D models Dive into Unity’s advanced features, such as precomputed lighting, shading, customizing the editor, and deployment

A group biography of seven enduring and beloved games, and the story of why—and how—we play them. Checkers, backgammon, chess, and Go. Poker, Scrabble, and bridge. These seven games, ancient and modern, fascinate millions of people worldwide. In Seven Games, Oliver Roeder charts their origins and historical importance, the delightful arcana of their rules, and the ways their design makes them pleasurable. Roeder introduces thrilling competitors, such as evangelical minister Marion Tinsley, who across forty years lost only three games of checkers; Shusai, the Master, the last Go champion of imperial Japan, defending tradition against “modern rationalism”; and an IBM engineer who created a backgammon program so capable at self-learning that NASA used it on the space shuttle. He delves into the history and lore of each game: backgammon boards in ancient Egypt, the Indian origins of chess, how certain shells from a particular beach in Japan make the finest white Go stones. Beyond the cultural and personal stories, Roeder explores why games, seemingly trivial pastimes, speak so deeply to the human soul. He introduces an early philosopher of games, the aptly named Bernard Suits, and visits an Oxford cosmologist who has perfected a computer that can effectively play bridge, a game as complicated as human language itself. Throughout, Roeder tells the compelling story of how humans, pursuing scientific glory and competitive advantage, have invented AI programs better than any human player, and what that means for the games—and for us. Funny, fascinating, and profound, Seven Games is a story of obsession, psychology, history, and how play makes us human.

From the New York Times bestselling author of the “twisty-mystery” (Vulture) novel In a Dark, Dark Wood, The Woman in Cabin 10, and The Turn of the Key comes Ruth Ware’s The Lying Game. Isa Wilde knows something terrible has happened when she receives a text from an old friend. Why would Kate summon her and their two friends to the seaside town where they briefly attended the Salten House boarding school together seventeen years ago? The four friends had quickly bonded over the Lying Game—a risky contest that involved tricking fellow boarders and faculty with their lies. Now reunited, Isa, Kate, Thea, and Fatima discover that their past lies had far-reaching effects and criminal implications that threaten them all. In order to protect their reputations, and their friendship, they must uncover the truth about what really happened all those years ago. Atmospheric and twisty, with just the right amount of chill, The Lying Game will have readers at the edge of their seats, not knowing who can be trusted in this tangled web of lies.

"The stories of forty ballplayers, men who made it to the big leagues for just one game."--Jacket.