Video Games

Is Ohai the next big thing in social games?

With Electronic Arts' recent $400 million purchase of Playfish, social games are all the rage in today's tech industry. That's no surprise: lightweight games on social networks (which people usually play while they're goofing off at work) and social games have attracted huge player numbers with the biggest titles boasting 20 million to 60 million regular players.

But here's the worst kept secret about the genre: most social games aren't very, well, fun. They offer limited interactivity, game play challenge, and graphics. Consequently, players aren't invested enough to spend much money on them, especially … Read more

Turning Twitter into an application server

As much as Twitter is a powerful communication and social application, it's a relatively simple Web app. As part of a new contest sponsored by Engine Yard, Ruby on Rails developers are going to turn Twitter into their own application server.

The contest asks developers to program the "Worst App Server Technology Ever" (Waste) using Twitter as the message bus. While much of the contest is being done tongue-in-cheek, it's actually an interesting use case to see if a service like Twitter can take the place of a more traditional message bus like IBM MQ series … Read more

Virtual goods: Duping the masses?

I attended the Virtual Goods Summit on Friday and walked away struggling to figure what topics might be interesting to write about. My net takeaway is that not much has changed in the year that I've been writing about social gaming and virtual goods, with the exception of two facts:

1. Virtual good providers are being lauded as the next big thing to replace advertising 2. There's something weird going on with the ads and offers that have taken over the more traditional banner advertising role

There is no question that virtual goods have become an integral part of social network revenue streams. And the mainstream media has finally started to catch on.

But, I didn't realize the oddities of the way users are being monetized until I attended the event and saw the heavy emphasis not just on monetizing users but on doing so in a way that was transparent and non-intrusive. Theoretically, it's a good idea, but in practice, many of the "offer" providers are purposely or inadvertently running Ponzi schemes.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington arrived at my second point above and took the theory much further with data that shows many social gaming offers and advertising practices amount to little more than a complicated scam that gets people in the door for free only to take advantage of their lack of understanding of what they've technically agreed to in the various offers.

In short, these games try to get people to pay cash for in game currency so they can level up faster and have a better overall experience. Which is fine. But for users who won't pay cash, a wide variety of "offers" are available where they can get in-game currency in exchange for lead gen-type offers. Most of these offers are bad for consumers because it confusingly gets them to pay far more for in-game currency than if they just paid cash (there are notable exceptions, but the scammy stuff tends to crowd out the legitimate offers). And it's also bad for legitimate advertisers.

… Read more

Virtual-goods resellers on the rise

Gamers are not just making purchases to enhance their gaming experience but also selling virtual assets to other players, according to new research from video game market research firm VGMarket.

Sales of virtual goods are expected to reach $1 billion this year and already generate near $4 billion annually in China. But there are some challenges, primarily the fact that once you convert your real money to virtual cash you can't readily get the dough back out.

The research revealed that in-game currency is the most frequently sold digital good from player to player and that two out of three sellers sold in-game currency in the last 12 months, earning a median of $22. PlaySpan, a provider of monetization and payment solutions for games and virtual worlds and sponsor of the research, considers that to be good news as its platform enables game developers to provide player to player marketplaces for their players. In addition, the PlaySpan Marketplace currently provides a secondary market for IMVU players to buy and sell goods as well.

One out of two sellers made a sale in a social network game over the last 12 months and earned a median of $50, while one out of four sellers made a sale in a free-to-play game over the last 12 months, with their median earning being $98, or nearly double that on social networks.

Eric Hartness, chief marketing officer at PlaySpan, told me that the secondary market is a boon for games, adding value, real and perceived, to all players by associating a real world dollar value on their playing time, game accounts, and digital items. … Read more

China's online game revenue surpasses $900 million

China's online game market grew 39.5 percent in the second quarter of 2009 to $906 million (6.18 billion yuan), according to newly released data from Analysys International.

Online gaming, like many other markets tends to have a few big winners, in the case of China's major game sites, three companies enjoy up more than 50 percent of the market share.

Tencent Holdings--20.2 percent of the market and 1.24 billion yuan ($181 million) in revenue Shanda Games--20 percent of the market and 1.23 billion yuan ($180 million) in revenue NetEase.com--12.7 percent of … Read more

Resurgence of U.S. game sales predicted

As market research firm NPD Group prepares to release sales data data for the U.S. game market next Thursday, other analysts have predicted a return to double-digit growth after six months of decline.

According to Edge Online, Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter and Electronic Entertainment Design and Research's Jesse Divnich expect monthly software sales of $750 million (up 21 percent year over year) and $715 million (up 16 percent), respectively. And while these are still just estimates, it shows that consumers are still willing to spend on high-quality new games.

EEDAR's top 10 forecast: Halo 3: … Read more

A rethinking of gaming addiction

While recent research suggests that video game addiction is reaching pandemic levels, the prevalence of such addictions is being disputed widely.

Video games are indeed an easy target for many societal ills, not just addiction. Driving home that point, Neils Clark, co-author of "Game Addiction: The Experience and the Effects," on Saturday described in a blog post what he deems 10 game addiction fallacies.

The list of fallacies includes the fact that games aren't drugs, which means that treatment will vary greatly. In addition, because definitions and methodologies used in studies are varied, criteria by which addiction … Read more

How age impacts social-gaming monetization

New data released by Gambit, a micro-transaction platform provider, illustrates the complexity of both customer targeting and analyzing micro-transaction buying patterns. The major takeaway: older players seem like a good target market until you dig in to find out that they don't spend a whole lot.

But, it takes a minute to understand the data, as Gambit's Susan Su points out in a blog post on how age impacts social-gaming monetization. While it would appear that older users are a good target market thanks to their high revenue-per-user statistic, they are actually pretty meaningless in terms of revenue. … Read more

Buddhist leader calls video games 'emotional therapy'

Ogyen Trinley Dorje--the only senior Buddhist leader recognized by China, Tibet, and India--was recently interviewed during a visit to Delhi, India, where he gave his views on politics, hip-hop, and video games.

While certainly not your average 24-year-old, he's clearly in touch with how video games can make us all feel better. He's also apparently a Mac fan.

Well, I view video games as something of an emotional therapy, a mundane level of emotional therapy for me. We all have emotions whether we're Buddhist practitioners or not, all of us have emotions, happy emotions, sad emotions, … Read more