In 2009, a total of around $600.5 million was raised by game startups — that’s down 36% from the year previous, but is still a Lot Of Money. And venture capitalists remain bullish on the future of game funding.

How do you get a piece of that action? What’s it like to work with a venture capital firm? What do VCs look for in an investment?

The MIT Enterprise Forum’s New England Games SiG and the New England Venture Capital Association co-hosted an event last night titled “A Meeting Of The Minds: Game Companies And The VCs That Fund Them” to help answer those questions. Here’s my summary…

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Last year I made some predictions about casual gaming in 2009. Let’s grade my precog skills, then gaze once again into the crystal ball to conjure predictions for casual gaming in 2010.

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A couple weeks ago, I attended a business conference on casual games. There have been many good reports on key findings. Here’s my summary of interesting trends, plus a VC’s perspective on where things are heading.

I’m particularly interested in the idea of meta gaming, and how that could be applied to businesses outside of gaming to drive engagement and reap benefits…

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Yesterday, we shamelessly self-promoted my company’s first-ever iPhone game: Ninja Rally.

Today, we’re pulling the curtain back a bit to look at lessons learned from the development and release of the game.

Ninja daggers can’t solve every business problem. Many, yes. But not all.

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Yesterday, we looked at trends in casual gaming for 2008. Today, I’m offering my predictions for casual gaming in 2009.

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When we’re not talking product management at Product Management Meets Pop Culture, we’re talking casual games. (Not a surprise, given my gig @Gamesville.)

Today, we’re looking at the top five trends in casual gaming in 2008…

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In the Casual Gamer’s Bill of Rights I put forward last week, it was #6 — “The right to games that help me understand the world and my place in it” — that proved most controversial among my circle of friends and developers, so I wanted to spend a little time discussing it and getting to the core of the argument.

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The company behind Galactic Civilizations, Stardock, recently posted a PC-specific Gamer’s Bill Of Rights. In their words, this document is “a series of guidelines we’re trying to introduce in an effort to get our industry to be a little more standardized in how we deal with our games.”

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All year long, journalists, bloggers and various analysts have wondered, “Are video games recession-proof?” The consensus seems to be: Yes! No! Maybe! 

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Over the weekend, dozens of reviewers bombarded Amazon.com with one-star reviews of EA’s Spore because of the game’s draconian DRM scheme, which limits consumers to three installations. And that was just the beginning of the bad press for Will Wright’s latest brain child.

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