Online Gaming Update Report!

by on 25 August, 2008 - 07:43

by: Reinout te Brake

As you could read it the emails I send over the past months, there is a lot of interest being expressed in online gaming - particularly casual online gaming. Credits to World of Warcraft, who got everyone started to think about online gaming on a bigger scale or lets thank the Wii Games, which took us to another level of gaming experience.

What’s for certain, is that social gaming - and more and more often with Internet-based components - has been reborn, and is now bigger than ever. Behold the multiplayers within social networks, anyone good examples? Gaming worldwide is growing, but China is rocking. Please read the mail and as always, keep me posted, in the loop and feedback is so very much welcome!Online Social GamingFor all I know there are three companies that everyone knows when you talk about “online social gaming”. First, there is of course hip and trendy Facebook.com, which has essentially pioneered the integration of Web apps (a segment of which are designees of the gaming label) with social networking. And then there are two incredibly fast growing competitors: SGN (Social Gaming Network) and Zynga Game Network. The goal of both SGN and Zynga is simple!! In short, it is to aggregate large portfolios of gaming titles for distribution to destination sites where people (sure lets call them the good old online targetted profiles) meet and greet. Still are there any other companies like these two that have similar focus/businessmodel, please let me know. Any recent acquisitions in this space that I am not aware of, same thing, please let me know too!By the way, have you seen this; http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/07/fubar-grows-over-3-million-percent-in-a-year and in that reference, keep on reading overthere; http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/06/instantaction-and-cafecom-browser-based-games-growing-up-becoming-more-social/.Social gaming start-up Pikum closes £2.6 million financing led by Virgin USAPikum, an online social gaming start-up launching in the UK, has secured investment of £2.6 million from Virgin USA. Pikum – a new kind of game created and played between friends - is the brainchild of 28-year old entrepreneur, Sean Glass, who previously co-founded higher education-focused online financial services company, Higher One (Higher One was ranked number 85 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing U.S. private companies in 2007). Pikum's founding management team also includes Johannes Larcher, Pikum's CEO, who was a member of Overture's executive team until its sale to Yahoo! in 2003, and most recently was CEO of online education firm Academy123 (acquired by Discovery Communications in 2006). The funding round included participation from leading early stage U.S. based venture fund, First Round Capital, who also led Pikum's seed financing in March 2007.Online Massive ScrabulousSo RealNetworks is to be “the” gamingbrand in creating one big companymaking and being a massive casual gaming brand of this “new age”! Through a possible acquisition of the (right now) massively popular Internet game “Scrabulous”. This is a title of an Indian flavor which has drawn quite some attention of “the profiles” at facebook.Then someone wrote this and I would like to share this with you!Acquiring Scrabulous is likely to be a good move for RealNetworks for the following reasons:Firstly, it would enable RealNetwork to easily expand its casual gaming portfolio and user base whilst minimising its competition. According to Adonomics, the Facebook app analytics company, Scrabulous ranks fifth in terms of total number of active users at 0.65m and represents 22% of registered users, which is a significantly higher proportion of users than any other app.Secondly, RealNetworks could further diversify its business model by adding ad-supported services. Ad-supported casual gaming is likely to have more success on online and mobile social media platforms than subscriptions judging by the nature of many of the games. Moreover, a recent survey by RealNetworks indicates that 90% of casual gamers will watch in-game streaming video ads in returns for free game play, with a reported clickthough rate at 34%.Finally, it represents an opportunity for RealNetworks to move into widget-based distribution on social networks. This would enable the company to scale distribution across social networks and other social media sites and encourage viral promotion.Of course would like to hear more from the people behind/with REALGAMES, so feel free guys!Videogame Ad Spend To Hit $1 Billion By 2012: eMarketerNo slowdown for videogame advertising, as companies spent $502 million on all videogame-related ad efforts, according to eMarketer, which expects the category to rise to $1 billion within five years. The researcher projects that U.S. in-game ad spend will increase from $295 million in 2007, a year that saw the success of games like Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game Halo 3 and Viacom’s Guitar Hero and Rock Band, to $650 million in 2012, a 120.3 percent increase. For this year, eMarketer is anticipating a rise of 36.6 percent to $403 million. Not bad at all guys! Always wonder how accurate these kind of research is and who is giving input. Care to elaborate anyone?Secondly, eMarketer expects even higher growth for web-based games, including sponsored sessions and display ads in or around the online game space, with expenditures soaring 133 percent between 2007 and 2012. In particular, eMarketer finds that while console games will rise 91 percent by 2012, the real driver of videogame ad spend will come from casual and online games. The report points to lower costs and the ability to easily insert and update a variety of different kinds of ads. For another, the numbers of players who use an internet connection with consoles like Xbox Live are likely to remain fairly limited. Lastly, the absence of a definitive standard ad model will continue to hold back spending, at least for the next year or two. And talking about the “definitive” standard in this space, what should be the standard? Did someone already reveal it, who is leading? The advertiser, the agencies or the industry?!Midway and its new portalMidway CEO David Zucker has revealed his company plans to open a new casual games portal. Zucker said that the sucesses of internally-developed massmarket DS and Wii games Touch Master and Game Party had inspired the company by "returning to its roots" - the Midway brand first rose to prominence in the arcade era. To build on its successes, Zucker added that the web portal for casual games would open "in the near future", although no specifics were given. The company has a stable of classic retro IPs it could refit for the web space or it may choose to build new properties for the casual sector. But then I read Midway Posts $29.7 Million Q4 Loss, http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3166836, so I wonder how fast they can find their “roots”!CDC and ChinaCDC Games, the gaming unit of CDC Corp. keeps on reporting exciting key metrics for its online games in China. The last report was of the month of February. According to the announcement, the first-person online shooter title SF Online achieved 72% month-over-month growth in average daily revenues while adding 2.7 million, or 19% registered users. As a result, SF Online is now the company’s largest revenue generator. MIR III also gained 35% in average daily revenues compared to January 2008 and 44% compared to Q4 2007.Other interesting China News;China's online game market surged 66.7 percent year-on-year to hit 12.8 billion yuan ($1.8 billion) in 2007, according to a report released by i Research Inc, a well-known consulting firm. The jump is largely driven by China's massive player-pool and operators' marketing efforts, said the firm. Shanda ranked the first with a market share of 19.3 percent while the runner-up Netease took 15.1 percent, followed by Giant Interactive Group who took 11.9 percent, according to i Research.China's online game market is expected to hit 19.1 billion yuan in 2008 and 40.1 billion yuan in 2011, predicts the firm! (One U.S. dollar equals 7.11 yuan)At the same time, Internet game industry in China has speed up in the entering into the international market. In 2007, a total of 28 Internet games developed by 12 Internet game enterprises made their way into the international market with the sales revenue of $5.5 million, which was an increase of 175 percent above the previous year.Lists!!! The first list is in;The top 20 ranking game development studios for the first-ever countdown, alongside some of the notable games they released in 2007, are as follows: 1. Nintendo Kyoto (Brain Age, Wii Play) 2. Infinity Ward (Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare) 3. Blizzard Entertainment (World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade) 4. Electronic Arts Canada (FIFA Soccer 08, NBA Street: Homecourt) 5. Valve (Portal, Team Fortress 2) 6. Konami Japan Studio (Winning Eleven: Pro Evolution Soccer, Dance Revolution Universe) 7. Insomniac Games (Ratchet & Clank Future) 8. Capcom Osaka Studio (Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, Monster, Hunter Freedom) 9. Electronic Arts Tiburon (Madden NFL 08, NASCAR 08) 10. BioWare Edmonton (Mass Effect, Jade Empire: Special Edition) 11. Bungie Studios (Halo 3) 12. Ubisoft Montreal (Assassin's Creed, Naruto: Rise Of A Ninja) 13. 2K Boston [& Australia] (BioShock) 14. Harmonix (Rock Band) 15. Bandai Namco Tokyo (Ace Combat 6: Fires Of Liberation, Beautiful Katamari) 16. Square Enix Tokyo (Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, Front Mission DS) 17. Game Freak (Pokemon Diamond/Pearl) 18. Epic Games (Unreal Tournament 3, Gears Of War PC) 19. Hudson Soft (Mario Party 8, Mario Party DS) 20. Neversoft (Guitar Hero III, Tony Hawk's Proving Ground)The methodology for the first-ever Game Developer Top 50 Developers countdown was as follows. Each game developer was firstly assessed by combining the top ranking games using all weekly Top 10 charts of U.S., U.K., and Japanese sales in 2007, as well as number of games released and average Metacritic review scores -- specifically making eligible those developers whose games were released in calendar 2007.LinkedIn Group that interest you?!BTW; I started two groups on LinkedIn; one is “meet the investors” and the other one you already know (more then 400 gaming pro’s joined already) “online casual games”.Not a member, I’ll forgive you, so here you go;meet the investors-invite; http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/66174/441B81296BE2online casual games-invite; http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/48049/75DE89084217Links to nice articles;Of course I will go out with some links that you should click on and read more, enjoy and have a nice weekend!http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23483209/http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/06/BU24VEBTK.DTL http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117982006.html?categoryid=18&cs=1Have a good one!

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Original Post: http://reinouttebrake.blogspot.com/2008/03/online-gaming-update-report.html