GAMES | Roman Nouzareth | Boonty | CAFE.COM

QQ PCU evolution for mini casual games

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MTV NETWORKS’ NICKELODEON KIDS AND FAMILY GROUP COMMITS $100 MILLION TO ITS ONLINE CASUAL GAMES BUSINESS

Great great news form Nickelodeon... With a top notch team and IP (and partners... ;-) I wish them all the success they deserve.

Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group Announces Plans for New Premium Subscription Services, Multiplayer Games, First Teen Girl Gaming Site, Casual MMOGs/Virtual Worlds, More Self-Published Titles, and Broader Integrated Advertising Opportunities

Investment Plans Part of MTV Networks’ Overall Commitment to Become Leaders in the Casual Gaming Arena

NEW YORK and SEATTLE – July 18, 2007– MTV Networks’ Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group today announced its commitment to invest $100 million over the next two years in development, distribution and creation of casual gaming titles, sites and platforms. The announcement was made by Cyma Zarghami, President, Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group and was highlighted at the Casual Connect gaming conference in Seattle, WA, in a keynote address delivered by Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group’s Executive Vice President of Digital Media, Steve Youngwood.

This announcement from the Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group is part of MTV Networks’ overall commitment to leading in the gaming space, including casual games, games media, console-based and handheld games.

“Across all of MTVN’s online sites, gaming is an important original genre and we are committed to delivering fresh content to our audiences in all of our demos,” said Ms. Zarghami. “Particularly in the kids’ space, with more than 86% of kids 8 to 14 gaming online, we see great momentum for online casual gaming. This investment will not only benefit our audiences, but also our marketing and distribution partners.”

Technorati Tags: free games, fun, games, items, Microtransactions, MTX, Romain Nouzareth

Rayman Raving Rabbids

I spent my night the other day, before flying to Mumbai, playing on a friend's Wii at Rayman Raving Rabbids from UbiSoft. This is a great great game (congratulation to the Montpellier Studio's team BTW), 200% casual... I was playing with girls and guys, aged around 30's and we all had great fun playing together (and not competing).

cafe.com is doing the same than the Wii but for the PC... the new version is gonna be released soon...

Time spent playing VS human projects...

Nice figures...

in 2003, 9 billion hours were spent playing solitaire. By comparison, it took only 7 million human hours (6.8 hours of solitaire) to build the Empire State Building, and only 20 million human hours (less than a day of solitaire) to build the Panama Canal."

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Virtual Goods: the next big business model

This guest post is written by Susan Wu, a Principal with Charles River Ventures,where she focuses on digital media, software, and infrastructure. Susan is coproducing the Virtual Goods Summit this Friday at Stanford University - most of the companies mentioned below will be presenting.

img_susan2.jpgPeople spend over $1.5 billion on virtual items every year. Pets, coins, avatars, and bling: these virtual objects are nothing more than a series of digital 1s and 0s stored on a remote database somewhere in the ether. What could possibly possess people to spend real, hard earned cash on ‘objects’ that have no tangible substance?

The virtual worlds space has received tremendous press attention in the last year, fueled in no small part by Wild West stories of fortune and anarchy in worlds like Second Life and the plight of the Chinese gold farmer in World of Warcraft. But people aren’t paying attention to the bigger story. While people preoccupy themselves with mocking the absurdities of some of these virtual worlds, the reality is that there are many businesses out there making meaningful amounts of money in virtual goods:

* Tencent is one of the largest Internet portals in China with over 250 million active user accounts. They generated $100 million+ in Q1 of 2007 and over 65% of their revenue comes from virtual goods.
* Habbo Hotel has over 75 million registered avatars in 29 countries and 90% of their $60 million+ yearly revenue comes from virtual goods.
* Gaia Online does over 50,000 person to person auctions and 1 million message board posts a day- making them the 3rd largest auction site and the 2nd largest message board on the Internet. Their average user consumes 1200 page views a month. They employ 3 people whose sole job it is to open snail mail envelopes full of cash that people send in for virtual goods.
* There’s a commonly held misperception that virtual goods are only for online gamers. Both Dogster and HotorNot are succeeding with a hybrid ad/virtual goods business model. Currently, over 40% of HotorNot’s revenue comes from virtual goods.
* Major mainstream brands are now buying advertising in the form of virtual goods in social networks. Gaians can now purchase and pimp their virtual Scion xBs. Coca Cola and Tencent partnered to allow Tencent’s users to trade codes taken from real Coke cans for virtual objects in the Tencent network. Wangyou, a Chinese based social network, has also been extremely aggressive in experimenting with branded virtual goods.

Continue reading the article on Techcrunch

Technorati Tags: boonty, cafe.com, Items, Romain Nouzareth

EA Restructures into Four Labels

After UbiSoft, it's EA's turn to put more emphasis on casual games. Great news !

In a move to streamline its operations and improve its overall global focus, juggernaut publisher Electronic Arts has reorganized into four distinct units: EA Sports, EA Games, EA Casual Entertainment and The Sims. More within...

Leading publisher Electronic Arts has announced today that the company will be organizing itself into four distinct business units/labels: EA Sports, EA Games, EA Casual Entertainment and The Sims. EA said that each label "will operate with dedicated studio and publishing teams focused on consumer-driven priorities."

The company also noted that "the new structure is designed to streamline decision-making, improve global focus, and speed new ideas to the market."

You may recall that earlier this month EA announced its new casual division, headed by former Activision executive Kathy Vrabeck.

More on Game Daily

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Outcome Vs Activity

A good text about management and focus in a fast pace (and always stressed) environment. From the Founder of Military.com (a client of ours BTW... http://military.boonty.com/)

I am embarrassed to say that it took me 10 years to learn one of the most fundamental pillars of leadership: It is all about outcomes — and not activities. This business truth is simple and obvious, yet, extraordinarily powerful. Unfortunately, it remains strangely elusive for many founders, and most people.

I can hear you now, “Of course I knew that,” or “Not me … I’m all about the mission.”

Well, in my experience, I have found that most people tend to confuse activity with outcomes — and it is a breathtakingly expensive mistake. In a world of infinite choices, choosing which activities will occupy your day is likely to be your single greatest driver of effectiveness. Beyond picking the right objectives to pursue, you need to focus on the results, not just the means to that end.

Technorati Tags: boonty, free games, Romain Nouzareth

Game Business & its crisis of Attention

Again, a good article from Om Malik

Someone recently asked me how the game industry lost the attention war. Paradoxically, interactive entertainment has never been more popular or lucrative, but the game industry— narrowly defined here as the major consoles and game publishers— is now, with one notable exception, but a sliver in a much larger interactive entertainment pie. Why? There’s a simple explanation, but first consider this recent litany failure.

Milestones of an Industry On the Road to Irrelevance
Inside an Insular Industry
A Future Business of Games Without a Single Industry
Milestones of an Industry On the Road to Irrelevance

EA in Crisis: The industry’s largest publisher defenestrates their chief executive, citing sequel-itis, then drastically scales back its profit estimates, citing a failure to develop enough titles for the Wii.

Nichification of the Next Gen Console: Xbox 360 eclipses Playstation 3, sending Sony into a tumult. But that conflict belies a more crucial truth: this generation, the console war is actually a duel between midgets. Selling in the low millions, each has little chance of reaching anything near the PS2’s truly massive installed base.

Wii Victorious: At its E3 2006 debut, fanboys praise the Wii for its innovation, but because it lacks HDTV and hardcore gamer titles, dismiss it as a sideshow to PS3-versus-360. Instead, the Wii vastly outsells both and becomes a disruptive technology, forecast to eventually reside in nearly 1 of 3 homes.

Rise of Non-Game Virtual Worlds: World of Warcraft premieres in 2004 and three years later, retains an uncontested monopoly on the fantasy MMO. The industry keeps churning out fantasy MMOs—all of which fail in comparison. Meanwhile, a slew of non-fantasy online worlds— Gaia Online, Club Penguin, Second Life, and more— attract millions of users, extensive media coverage, and investment dollars. None of them are produced by the game industry—which, after developing virtual worlds for some 20 years, represents a spectacular missed opportunity.

Casual, Web-Based Games Rising: Dozens of free game sites like New Grounds and MiniClip rank in Alexa’s top 1000, attracting millions of casual players, especially women. Few have any relation to the game industry. Among the only fantasy MMOs to succeed post-WoW is the Web-based RuneScape—once again, not from a major publisher.

Inside an Insular Industry

Why is all this happening? The unifying explanation can’t be conveyed by strict business analysis, for it goes to a deeply rooted corporate culture: The game industry is Hollywood for Lost Boys.

It’s a business comprised almost entirely of young gamer dudes, serving an audience of young gamer dudes, covered by a gaming press of young gamer dudes, all of whom are only interested in creating, playing, and covering games that interest young gamer dudes—which they believe to be the pinnacle of entertainment. (For a cruelly accurate, street-level sketch of its oblivious insularity, read this excerpt from Smart Bomb, or immodestly, my own report from E3 2001.)

So of course EA would under-develop for the Wii: its low res graphics aren’t appealing to Lost Boys. Of course the industry would be slow to grasp the Wii’s disruptive power and fixate on the 360-versus-PS3 sideshow, since both can run the Hollywood-worthy epics like Halo 3 and Gears of War they’re interested in.

Of course they’d fail to capitalize on the rise of Flash-driven casual games, which appeal to women and older gamers. Of course they’d keep churning out fantasy MMOs they like, and ignore the rise of non-game virtual worlds, which they don’t. (As Will Wright once told me, developers are hobbled by a “moviemaker wannabe” streak: “You know: ‘Well, George Lucas made his world — here’s my world!’”)

And of course they’d be indifferent to user-created worlds like Second Life: the idea that amateur-produced content might provide a new and in many ways superior experience to traditional MMOs is entirely alien to them. Their peevishly incurious reaction is pretty much what you’d have got from a movie producer in the 90s, if you told him that film and TV would soon start losing their audience to a video clip site featuring stupid dog tricks and a dancing bald guy.

A Future Business of Games Without a Single Industry

Can the industry regain the attention? Not as it exists now, not without brutal changes to its gamer-centric culture. A few publishers, notably Ubisoft, are trying to steer their corporate ship out of Lost Boy territory, developing more Wii titles, more games for families and casual players. So the PS3 and the 360 will continue underselling, and as more publishers shift their dollars to the Wii, become even more niche.

As traditional MMOs besides WoW go extinct, user-created online worlds will thrive, and budget-conscious game studios will turn to Multiverse, Areae, Second Life, and other open platforms. Individual developers willing to make do with a little less geek glamor in exchange for more independence will leave the industry, and follow after the Flash-enabled success of games like Desktop Tower Defense.

After speaking at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference, venture capitalist and tech visionary Joi Ito described an industry steadfastly ignorant of the changing world outside, “making the same mistakes that the content guys have been making since the beginning of networked computers. They ALWAYS over-estimate the importance of the content and vastly underestimate the desire of users/people to communicate with each other and share.”

So in the short term, nothing will change for most of them; occasional tent pole hits like Halo 3 will soothe their cloistered delusions. They’ll keep ignoring non-traditional gamers, Web 2.0, and the user-created revolution, assuming like Hollywood that their core product has enough global appeal to get them through the latest media revolution.

And that will be their final disastrous turn. Because unlike the real Hollywood, there are only so many Lost Boys in the world willing to pay attention to them for so long.

Technorati Tags: games, Romain Nouzareth

China market: Online gaming services valued at $330 million in 1Q07

Online gaming services in China during the first quarter of 2007 were worth 2.56 billion yuan (US$330 million), rising by 26% on quarter, according to China-based consulting company Analysys International.

Shanda was the largest provider accounting for 18.96% of total sales revenues followed by NetEase with 18.60% and ZhengTu with 14.85%.

Analysys also surveyed types of main places for playing online games, finding that home, net café, school and workplace accounted for 64.0%, 26.8%, 5.6% and 2.7%, respectively, of players in 2006 and the proportion for home will rise to an estimated 73.6% in 2007 while that for net café will drop to 15.2%, the company pointed out

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Survey Reveals Playing Games at Work May Boost Productivity

MASSACHUSETTS -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 05/21/07 -- WorldWinner, a subsidiary of FUN Technologies Inc. (TSX: FUN)(AIM: FUN) and the leading provider of online game competitions for cash and prizes, today unveiled the results of a survey examining whether playing casual online games at work enhances employee creativity, energy and overall productivity. The survey, which involved more than 500 players who compete at WorldWinner.com, reveals surprising new reasons workers take time out of their day to play casual games. Among them, more than 80 percent of respondents who play online games during the workday feel better-focused on work as a result of periodic mental breaks associated with game play, 76 percent report improved productivity, and 72 percent rely on game breaks to reduce job-related stress.

Continue reading the article

Again, a good reason to go to cafe.com to have fun, everytime of the day

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