Quo Vadis was in April, so this presentation update is coming to you with some delay, but better late than never (as they say)!
I have decided to change the format of the presentation though. Rather than uploading the one that supported my lecture at Quo Vadis, I’ve made a “generic” presentation based on it (which in turn was based on one for GFG that I gave this past January in Hannover). The new presentation is essentially the same as the Quo Vadis version, but rather than adding another Slideshare presentation, I replaced the GFG presentation and changed the title to make it less specific. The idea is to simplify the information and point people at the most up-to-date version of the material. You can still find a few similar presentations in our profile, which I’ve left alone as they contain uniquely useful info.
Here is the new presentation:
In other news, you may have noticed that we’ve recently redesigned our website, which now includes a Korean version. It’s a work in progress, so if there’s anything you would like to on the site, please let us know.
This week the Game Forum Germany in Hannover takes place and I have been invited there to speak about the Free to Play games market in Europe. That’s a topic I have spoken about a lot in the past year and anyone familiar with this blog has seen an iteration of that presentation. I will still put it here, as each iteration as its own flavour and set of data.
If you want to meet over there, please feel free to drop me a line through the contact page: https://www.icopartners.com/contact.php
If you’re doing community work or marketing on behalf of an MMO or other type of online game, you’ve probably already discovered twitter as a tool for reaching your players. Whether you’re just starting out or already managing an account, we’ve come up with a short list of things to think about when planning a twitter strategy for your game. Off we go… Read more
It’s well known that online games have been shortening the value chain, threatening the roles of middlemen such as publishers, distributors and retailers, and enabling developers to get in direct contact with players. However, as some very interesting discussions pointed out a few months ago, acquiring users (call it marketing, or traffic acquisition) is hard and expensive, which lends considerable power to other actors in the chain, such as:
- Digital distribution sites, like Steam
- Platform managers
- Aggregators, like Miniclip
- Community and media websites
- Ad networks
- SEO-savvy “gateway” portals (MMO lists, etc)
Channels like these have grown greatly in influence, and the conditions of working with the most prominent ones are becoming increasingly expensive (some of the biggest aggregators now ask for either lots of cash, or equity). Read more
As micro-payments rapidly become the mainstream model for most new online games, there is a massive rise of business models offering collectible items. From games where the collectible elements are at the very center of the gameplay, like Magic The Gathering Online, PoxNora, Urban Rivals, Bella Sara, all the games from ChallengeGames, the recent UpperDeckU and the upcoming BattleForge, to games having a “Gachapon” , lottery ticket or “Lucky box” feature offering collectibles added as an afterthought (MapleStory, ShotOnline, etc…), collections of items acquired through a random factor are flourishing and are on the way to becoming a must-have in any micro-payment system. SOE has invested in the model even before having micro-payment games, by acquiring Worlds Apart TCG studio in 2006, before launching an EverQuest 1 & 2 in-game CCG, Legends of Norrath. More recently, they acquired PoxNora developer Octopi, and seem to be introducing collectible elements in all their new games. It’s still a mystery why Nintendo has not released a truly online Pokemon game yet. Read more
Gamasutra relays a report by Seattle Post that shows Microsoft numbers for Xbox Live Gold subscribers. The more recent figures are from February 2008, showing that 56% of all Live members were Gold (60% in the US). The percentage was actually down 4 points yoy.
At that time there were 10M announced Live members , so that was about 5.5M Gold subscribers – if the proportion was still the same today (it might have increased since thanks to the NXE, which has brought them 3M members since November 08) that would be 9.5M Gold subscribers (there are 17M Xbox Live members). According to the latest numbers on VGChartz there are 28.5 millions of Xbox 360 distributed worldwide -the total Live members accounts are about 60% of that. Read more