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Private Party at the Cafe.com

Cafe.com is soon to be reopened to everyone with plenty of great new features and new games, single or multi players.

We are giving away invitation codes for selected people to discover the new site before everyone.

Go to cafe.com to get your invitation code!

See you there :-)

casual/crossover games growing

Source: GigaOm

Want to see how drastically the game industry’s market is changing in the U.S.? Take a look at the top 10 best-selling video games in 2007, recently released by retail sales tracker NPD Group, then compare that list to previous years. While several established franchises were represented (Halo, Call of Duty, etc.), there’s also strong showing by games with proven popularity beyond the action/sports-oriented “hardcore gamer” segment of males aged 18-to-35. In fact, most of the top ten sellers were arguably non-hardcore:

Halo 3 (360) — 4.82 million (HARDCORE)
Wii Play w/ remote (Wii) — 4.12 million
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (360) — 3.04 million (HARDCORE)
Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (PS2) — 2.72 million
Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) — 2.52 million
Pokemon Diamond (DS) — 2.48 million
Madden NFL 08 (PS2) — 1.90 million (HARDCORE)
Guitar Hero 2 (PS2) — 1.89 million
Assassin’s Creed (360) — 1.87 million (HARDCORE)
Mario Party 8 (Wii) — 1.82 million
Granted, many hardcore gamers like Mario, Pokemon and Guitar Hero — but then, notably, so do families, kids, women, and/or older, casual social gamers. Six of 2007’s top ten games found this broader audience. Now compare how much smaller that crossover was in recent years. Here’s NPD’s 2006 list:

Madden NFL 07, PS2, EA — 2.8 million (HARDCORE)
New Super Mario Bros., DS, Nintendo — 2 million
Gears of War, Xbox 360, Microsoft — 1.8 million (HARDCORE)
Kingdom Hearts II, PS2, Square Enix — 1.7 million
Guitar Hero II, PS2, Activision — 1.3 million
Final Fantasy XII, PS2, Square Enix — 1.3 million (HARDCORE)
Brain Age: Train Your Brain, DS, Nintendo — 1.1 million
Madden NFL 07, Xbox 360, EA — 1.1 million (HARDCORE)
Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Xbox 360, Ubisoft — 1 million (HARDCORE)
NCAA Football 07, PS2, EA — 1 million (HARDCORE)
Just four of the top 10 games in 2006 were non-hardcore. Go back to NPD’s 2005 list, and that number looks even smaller: two or three of the 10, depending on how you classify Star Wars franchise games. Look at 2004’s NPD top 10, and you find just one or two crossover titles, depending on where you place Spider-Man.

So why is the trend of casual/crossover games growing?

Continue reading the article

Exploration trip in a casual games store in Paris

Interesting exploration trip in a game store in Paris today with some members of my French team (Valerie, Thibault and Olivier).
A though (yes, it happen to me sometimes ;-): boxed products like we see in the picture are closer to our audience than the video games like Xbox, or PlayStation...

59m online gamers in China by 2008

News by GamesIndustry.biz

A survey by the Data Center of the China Internet and Internet Society of China expects the number of online gamers in that country to surpass 59 million in 2008, GamesIndustry.biz reports.

The projection is a 20 percent increase from the estimated 48 million online gamers last year, according to a China View news story.

The survey began in January 2007 and polled more than 300 websites, 270 enterprises, and 50,786 persons around the country.

Free-to-play online games services are expected to continue to dominate the market with an estimated 80 per cent market share. The Chinese online gaming market value in 2007 increased 57 per cent from its value of 9.36 billion yuan (USD 1.2 billion) in 2006.

Shanda and Netease, both listed on Nasdaq, were the lead online gaming companies in terms of revenue and the number of subscribers. Giant Interactive, a Shanghai-based company, controls 14 percent of the market.

Kingsoft and Perfect World are two game developers that recently went public, which the director of the research department conducting the survey refers to as a trend for 2008.

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Robert Scobble to talk live on Mogulus

Robert Scoble, famous blogger who has been kicked out from Facebook (and who is now back on Facebook...) is hosting a video Live with Mogulus. Watch it now, it's live and it works great!

http://www.mogulus.com/robertscoble

Full disclosure: I'm a board member of Mogulus

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Go NYC! Silicon Alley Insider is great

I'm happy to see that NewYork is coming back on the tech scene..

Silicon Alley Insider (in beta) has even come back and after reading it for quite some time now, I really can say I love it! Read it too...

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How Will Activision Blizzard Change Games Sector?

A very good analysis form Om Malik

It’s not entirely clear yet how Vivendi’s plan to take a controlling stake in Activision, unveiled Sunday, will shake up the games industry. But the $18.9 billion deal will not only merge the maker of World of Warcraft with the owner of Guitar Hero, but will create a video game company, Activision Blizzard, that surpasses Electronic Arts in terms of revenue.

It certainly gives EA (ERTS) something to think about, and some analysts are wondering if EA will look for a buyout from a large media company. What’s more likely is that EA will look for other acquisitions. Raph Koster, who started a company that bridges the web with virtual worlds, notes that EA seems to be moving towards global media concerns while Activision (ATVI) has been “doubling down on traditional gaming.” It will be interesting to see if EA starts eyeing music, TV, film, and other entertainment options.

Also affected is The9 (NCTY), which operates World of Warcraft for Blizzard in China. Shares of the Chinese gaming operator, in which EA holds a 15 percent stake, slumped in Monday trading as analysts worried that the deal may delay contract renewal negotiations next year.

Activision CEO Kotick said in one interview that he’s counting on Blizzard’s strength overseas to help carry other Activision brands — such as Guitar Hero — to Asia. Blizzard is also working on Starcraft II, a brand that remains very popular in South Korea.

Continue reading the article

10 rules to launch a startup today

From Loic Lemeur

1- do not wait for a revolutionary idea, the idea of your life will never happen, just focus on a simple exciting empty space you see and execute as fast as possible

2- share your idea as much as possible, the more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
3- build a community around you through blogging and social software
4- listen to your community, answer questions and build your product with their feedback, involve bloggers as early as possible and get their feedback, if negative, adapt your product permanently
5- gather a great team with a very different skill set than yours, look for people who are better than you without being afraid of it
6- be the first to recognize a problem or a mistake you have made. Never hide it behind the carpet. Address the issue in public, learn and correct it.
7- do not spend time on market research, but launch as early as possible in alpha or beta versions. Keep improving the product in the open.
8- do not focus on a large spreadsheet business plan, you are so sure it is not going to happen anyway
9- do not plan huge marketing, growing with your community loving the product is much more powerful
10- do not focus on getting rich or selling your company, focus on your users, money is a consequence of success, can't be a goal

Harm of excess weight becoming overhyped???

From Slate

A big study suggests the harm of excess weight is overhyped. Downside of obesity: higher risk of death from heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, and some kinds of cancer. Downside of overweight: higher death risk from diabetes and kidney disease, but no higher risk from cancer or heart disease. Upside of overweight (compared with "normal" weight): much lower death risk from Alzheimer's, emphysema, lung cancer, Parkinson's, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. Net result: 100,000 lives saved per year by being overweight instead of "normal." Theory: Extra weight includes "reserves" that help you resist or recover from disease. Supportive reactions: 1) Fat isn't bad for you. 2) "Overweight" is normal, and "normal" is underweight. Critiques: 1) The study only measured deaths, so it missed the fact that fat causes disease, impairment, and lower "quality of life," even if it doesn't kill. 2) The reason fat kills fewer people is that we're medicating them. 3) Overweight may not harm you directly, but it leads to obesity, which does harm you. 4) Other studies say fat is harmful. 5) If we tell people fat is harmless, they'll eat crap and stop exercising, which is bad for them regardless of weight. (Related: Is fat a cultural problem? Is it a bigger world problem than hunger? Is it OK to eat like a pig if you don't get fat?)

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Quote of the week

I really like the quote from Edgar Bronfman, seen on Kim Pallister's blog. A good lesson to learn from this is to listen to your customers, give them what they want because they always win and they make you win too!

Edgar Bronfman, music mogul, speaking at a mobile conference in Macau:

"We used to fool ourselves,' he said. "We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won."