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Next week one lucky Apple fan will download the 25 billionth app from the App Store. Numbers on that scale are usually reserved to GDP figures rather than Angry Birds. With well over half a million apps available it can be hard to filter out the noise and find people building the good stuff. The stuff you wish you had thought of first. Where are the apps that solve problems, disrupt conventions or are just too addicting to put down?

Here are three that have us excited:

 

Facebook has 845 million active users monthly and 483 million active users daily.  Is this a worldwide boredom epidemic?  Or is there something inherently rewarding about using Facebook?  It turns out that the latter is true (oh good…it’s not just me), and using social media has a whole host of psychological effects.  in Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking proposed something called the Hyperpersonal Model that explains why looking at your Facebook profile actually raises your self-esteem.  This is a surprising result considering that other practices that draw self-awareness (looking in a mirror, being videoed, etc.) can be quite a blow to your self-esteem.  According to the study, the internet is the only place where you can selectively display chosen aspects of your life—flashback to the MySpace selfies that only show a quarter of your face at just the right angle—good pictures, flattering comments, and witty remarks.  So when you look at your profiles jam-packed with “skinny days” and only the wall posts that got ten-plus comments, of course your self-esteem rises, and it’s no surprise you keep signing in for more.

In this month’s issue we’ll explore deeper into DLC with what developers and publishes are doing to keep their fans enticed between disc releases, evolving the fading CPG model. We will also take a look at the good, bad, and ugly of Zynga’s latest newsmaking, and take a trip down portable gaming memory lane with our latest featured infographic. How many of these handheld classics were you gaming on back in the day? We also dive into the discrepancy of the Android Market Place: they have nearly the same amount of apps as the iOS App Store, yet a majority of mobile developers continue to prefer iOS to the Android…why?

Download PLAYED now!

While most of us were asleep last night, and his Double Fine crew were making hundreds of thousands of dollars, fifteen and thirty dollars at a time. Instead of pitching their next game to publisher after publisher in hopes of getting funded, Double Fine used Kickstarter to pitch their classic adventure title to those masses who would eventually want to play the release. Less than eight hours after launching their page they had already met their $400,000 goal, and had broken Kickstarter records for most funds raised in the first twenty-four hours and most backers of all time. Just under a day later and they’ve crossed the $1,000,000 mark with more than a month to go in the campaign. Needless to say, the experiment into collaborative development has been a success for Double Fine and their latest passion project.

** Have you been reading your issues of PLAYED from cover to cover? Just in case you’ve been slacking, we’ll be featuring a few choice articles here on Denuology.com every month. If you like what you read here, be sure to download the entire issue for industry insights from our gaming experts.**

In honor of the New Year, we’ve compiled a list of our best guesstimations on what’s to come for the gaming industry over the next twelve months. Hopefully you’ll hold on to this copy of PLAYED throughout the year so you can track how close we were to predicting the future.