Social vs Hardcore, Can we drag them into our domain!

I found this article on Gamasutra very interesting as it speaks about the growth potential in Social and online games, in this case they highlight the fact that the hardcore developers are having a really hard time to penetrate the Social game space.  I find that even for us here at Antic we are having a very hard time to "dumb" down our designs to the point that it seems most social game players want the games to be.  My gut and where we are hedging our bets is that we can bring enough of them over to our side, but delivering a more engaging game experience then the simple me to mafia, farm, aquarium "games" they tend to play now, where its really mostly about clicks and management, with very little if any strategy or difficulty curve built in. That is why we are moving our collect, build and real-time battle game Junk: battles to Facebook soon, with the hope that the deeper more engaging game play will find an audience on Facebook as well..

Whats the fuzz about the IPad

So Apple finally came out with the Jumbo IPod touch, and everyone thinks its either the best thing since sliced bread (really its just a bigger screen!), or Apple totally dropped the ball by not making it your laptop replacement.  My Take, it is for sure not as revolutionary as the IPhone, who took the clunky mobile space into the the new century by showing the handset manufacturers the power of a great GUI (Which is oddly weird that they ALL failed to see the power in one before the IPhone).  The IPad on the other hand does not replace anything we have today, its trying to be a NEW thing that we have to decide if we really need or not, a much harder task than asking someone to replace their exciting phone for something MUCH better. For me the only and i think the reason most people will get one is simply as a surf board, aka, a web access pad.  The other features are nice, but not ground breaking.   So the question then begs how many people need a surf pad?   Well time will tell.  I am for sure getting one, in about 11 months for myself for Xmas.