Howard Tomlinson

No squatch sightings last weekend...but wow...what a week since. A massively productive one for The Glitch (on all fronts), and apparently some other things happened around the industry as well...huh. Alright...let's-a-go: OMY@C 🤘 ⛏ - Metallica will be in Fortnite soon. The event is called "Metallica: Fuel Fire Fury," and it will kick off on June 22nd. The San Francisco band got on the Fortnite Festival stage yesterday - so if you're curious...hop on in there. RIP Cliff. RIP Eddie. 🍎 - Apple's WWDC was this week...and their formal entry into Ai was the big takeaway. "Apple Intelligence," was the name they landed on. Essentially, it's Ai integrated through every aspect of their various OS's...adding personal context to everything. My first reaction was...do I want that though? On one hand, this feels like the first real indication of where consumer Ai is headed...on the other: privacy? A big part of Apple's presentation of their Ai is "setting a brand-new standard for privacy in Ai." So...they're well aware of the line that's being crossed. Apple's 5-minute video overview (on their site) shows you how "Ai for the rest of us" will work...and it's easy to be cynical about it. A squirrel DJ...cool. Custom emoji's...neat. Still...you should watch it. When app devs finally start building for this though...look out. PREDICTION: iPhone 16 will be the best selling iPhone yet. The 6 sold 222M units total...71.5MM units in it's first 3 months...so we'll know by year's end how this crazy statement is trending. 📺 🎮 - Mike Verdu will soon be leaving his role as VP of Netflix Games (and starting a new role with the company). Speculation is rampant about what this means for the games unit. It's possible that it means...nothing at all. I'm still massively bullish on the gaming opportunity for Netflix. My personal opinion is that transmedia is the biggest, most exciting play here...but I've also heard there are internal headwinds on that. 🤷‍♂️ 🍷 ⛵ - I'm not going to Cannes...again. Maybe some day. I'll drink rosé and look important at home...again. I'm not bitter. 📺 🎮 - Follow Friday: Two nerds with a webcam...that you absolutely should be following if you're in the games business: 1) Chris Melissinos (Principal Evangelist for Amazon Web Services (AWS) - Video interviews with games industry legends, deep retro dives, and discussions on the top news. 2) Alexander Seropian (Founder/CEO of Look North World) - Host of "The Fourth Curtain," is always a headliner event. 📺 - Palm Royale (Apple ). Kristen Wiig as a social climber in 1960's south Florida. So good. Save a grasshopper for me. 🎵 - Spotify's "Daylist" - pull the throttle back a bit with your list names though. "90's Indie Twee Friday Afternoon," might be accurate...but it's embarrassing. 🎮 - It's been 2 weeks since I picked up Hogwarts Legacy and Vampire Survivors...haven't started either yet. THAT's how busy it's been.

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I've worked with companies that have full test coverage and I've worked for clients that have no tests. Why is it usually these two extremes? We all categorise bugs into critical and lower, so why isn't it more common place to have tests for just critical functions? I'm working on a library for a side project and using TDD but don't plan on having unit tests for all of the front end although I will probably end up using snapshots.

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We're releasing all the data from the #workshops we held earlier this year to build Scotland's National Games Strategy. I'll be breaking it down, prioritising it and using that to create the recommendations for the final action plan. We have 11 topics from What are games and where do we fit (sounds simple, but it's SUPER important) to funding, finance, education (that's a biggie) and more. Follow along and make sure you're a part of this. #ScotlandsGamesStrategy #games #Scotland #videogames #ecosystem #data

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A colleague shared this video with me recently, a focus on the Business side of the games industry - A very useful and interesting interview with Mat Piscatella of Circana https://lnkd.in/eqzszimj I feel the recent challenges the industry has had to navigate means more focus on some of the points raised in the video need to be prioritised. The business landscape of games has changed, margins are tighter and competition is more fierce, let alone meeting the increasing expectation of players in terms of quality and value. Use of data and understanding the relationship between how players consume games and their purchase behaviour has never been more important. The games industry is relatively young, and perhaps the next few years will see some maturity in this area

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🚨 I'm looking for work in the second half of this year and want to talk to YOU about it 🚨 Yes, you have heard that right. Half-Space Consulting has done gangbusters since it launched in October 2023, working with 14 (!) businesses including major game developers, service providers, regulators, NGOs and trade associations to help them successfully tell their stories to the games industry. And while a good chunk of my time between now and the end of the year has been swallowed up, I do have some availability between July and September that I would love to fill to end my first financial year on a high. There are three main ways I can help your business: 👨‍🏫 Educating your business about the games industry landscape from a commercial, policy, media and cultural perspective through workshops, reports and ongoing consulting advice. 🤔 Developing, or reviewing, your strategies for engaging the games industry to ensure that you're telling a story that resonates with the audience you need to reach (and that you're choosing the smartest tactics to reach them). 🗣 Communicating to your audiences by creating reports and other written content, organising events and setting up one-to-one engagement opportunities such as calls, lunches and dinners. My clients have described my work as "the go-to for strategic communications insights" and "invaluable", while saying I'm "great to have around" and that I perfectly "understood their needs". Pretty good, right? So if you do have work that fits the bill OR you just fancy having a chat with me about ways we could work together, contact me either via LinkedIn DM or through my email address on my profile. In the meantime, here's a photo of me having a lovely old time with David Lilley and the Roucan Events and Content Ltd team at London Developer Conference. Just imagine how much fun we could have together if you hire me 🤔

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Tell me who should advise me on Business Development & Sales for games (B2B)! Every time Gamebreaking Studios grows, we have to evolve the way we work, and we’re at a point now where I’d love to start growing our advisory support network. The first area I think we could use some sage advice is in the realm of business development sales specifically for our unique industry in games. If you know somebody who has been playing that game for a decade or more, who gives sage advice, and who loves helping small/growing companies I’d love to meet them.

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Scottish games industry is shit. The government need to support businesses better. The attrition rate is so awful it needs to be addressed. Stable studios means stable job opportunities. We can’t tackle education before this otherwise there’s no jobs for graduates. Or worse, no support if they try start their own studios. Let’s stop putting the horse before the cart, it’s time to address the very real issues facing Scottish development studios. - lack of targeted financial support because we aren’t our own sector - lack of tax deductions and local council support. - acknowledgement of the business models employed by studios to survive.

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I'm not typically a "talker" on social media, even if it's (potentially) beneficial to my career - but I thought that this might be worth posting about. Email replies not written, tasks forgotten, deadlines missed - I was feeling a lot like a thoroughly inept person, both professionally and personally as I was looking around and going "how are these people able to do this? Why can't I?". I did way too much research and came to the realisation that I may, just possibly, be more neurodivergent than I had already thought. And so, after at least two years of dithering and indecision (which itself should have been a sign), I finally got around to arranging for an ADHD assessment. Now thanks to the current state of mental health support and particularly adult ND assessment, I ended up going private (because I'm fortunate enough to be in a position to afford to without going into debt) and so I found myself sat in a Teams meeting last week with an assessor who had looked at the various tests I'd already completed and then went through the core assessment questions before finally being able to say that I met the diagnostic criteria for combined type ADHD (though mostly inattentive). A wave of relief washed over me, maybe I'm not actually as terrible a person as I had thought I was; maybe this is actually the reason for the problems that I've faced (and my friends and wife have sometimes suffered through). Today I took my first dose of medication, which means I have to give up coffee for the forseeable (apologies to my colleagues if I'm grumpy over that for the next couple of weeks!) - my next steps are probably discussions with a GP and maybe even sending myself to see the disability and wellbeing team to talk to them as I recently enrolled on a PhD and that might be sensible. Fundamentally, I'm thankful that there are so many resources out there now; in particular I want to highlight the important work that the folk over at Adult ADHD UK (https://www.adhdadult.uk/) are doing to raise awareness and provide information, especially through their on-going (and now unrelated to the charity, for reasons) podcast (https://theadhdadults.uk/)

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