Can gamers be treated like shoppers—get sliced, segmented, and targeted? A year-old startup with offices in New York City and San Francisco called Turiya Media is building a business around applying data mining techniques to social, massive-multiplayer, and mobile games to help game developers figure out which players are the most valuable. As more free-to-play games become the norm and selling virtual goods becomes the way to make money, game companies are relying more and more on a small fraction of players (typically 1 to 3 percent) paying to level up or for that shiny new virtual sword. Finding that 1 to 3 percent of players or getting more to pay for virtual goods can have a big impact on game revenues.
Nothing released yet, but it looks like they're doing some interesting modeling.
Maybe you could start off by explaining to our readers, some of whom could use the clarification, how are LCGs like CCGs and how are they different?
LCGs or Living Card Games (what we call them) offer the same kind of play experience that you would have from a CCG. You have your customizable deck of cards that you make beforehand, before you play. It has the same type of strategy elements that you would find, the depth of play, in that every game plays out differently, the same strategy.
They differ in the fact that it’s not collectible. You know what you’re going to buy in the packages that you buy. You don’t have to chase cards to build decks. You can play with the cards that you want to play with. We’ve a sharp decline in the CCG category over the past several years but still believe people want that same play experience, they want the same community, the same tournaments that a CCG offers but the blind-buy purchase model has really burned a lot of people out and chased them away.
Super Rewards' Bailey: 'Quit Your Job And Make Facebook Games'
There are 200 million unique users playing games per month on Facebook, and they’re playing 4 games on average -- stats fast becoming familiar to anyone with an ear to the social gaming sphere. Does that mean it's time for a career change for traditional developers?Super Rewards CEO Jason Bailey thinks so, and at GDC Canada, he laid out his mandate: "What I’m going to do today is convince you all to quit your jobs, and go make social games,” he said. “Because you really, really should.”
Based on the checks Bailey is paying out to his customers, these are the ARPUs he found broken down by genre:
- - Farming genre: 10-20 cents per month per user
- - X Wars RPGs (such as Mafia Wars): .25-$1
- - City building: sub 10 cents
- - Gambling (poker, lottery, slots): .25-1$
Now, the guy quoted runs a games payment processor so the headline quote should be read as "Quit Your Job And Be My Customer", but there's some nice notes and the stats quoted are news to me.
If the web fragments into closed systems, if companies put content and applications behind walls, some indeed may thrive — but their success will come at the expense of the very creativity and innovation that has made the Internet a revolutionary force.
We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs. No company — no matter how big or how creative — should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web.
Adobe cofounders write a passionate editorial against Flash.
In the traditional space these days, when it's a $30 million project with a hundred people, I would go for weeks without needing to do any game design or any game mechanics stuff. I could even imagine these days going an entire year on a project and no new game mechanics get designed or no new substantial play -- because you're all busy working on the technology and the art, just making content now that you've designed the thing; that kind of stuff.
In social games, where it's just every week's some new stuff and keeping it going and keeping it exciting and "How can we make it even better?" and "We need a new feature over here!", it's just really exciting for someone in my space because there's not the friction of having to make a lot of art and having to make a lot of production value and having writers making story. It's just game mechanics; straight game mechanics. That's cool! It keeps me really, really busy.
Nice interview about moving from mainstream games to social games, the biggest theme is iterating faster.
As the discussions are going on the social gaming’s future, we’d like to analyze the current situation of top Facebook applications in terms of player base. What we want to do is to show the latest changes in those applications. In our analysis we’ll use Product Life-Cycle (PLC) approach, developed by Theodore Levitt published in Harvard Business Review entitled “Exploit the Product Life Cycle” on 1 November 1965, which is directly related with the developers, marketers past decisions. We read player base graphics as dynamic responses of players to changes and investments that game development team has done.
We concentrated our efforts on top Facebook “Game” applications which are dominated by Zynga with 6 out of 10 applications as you can see from the table (leaderboard as of 19.09.10) above. Below you will find more info about the analysis done with respect to player base graphics.
At such times, and at such speeds, the task of educating ourselves becomes all the more urgent. We are citizens of a democracy, and democratic citizenship has always been a difficult skill to master. This is why Aristotle tells us that, in an ideal state, citizens would possess ample leisure time: the education of a citizen depends upon contemplation, deliberation, and training. Citizenship requires cultivation and, as any farmer would tell us, cultivation takes time.
Thoughtful comments on the intersection of democracy, play as work, social obligation, and plutocratic democracy.
Recently, I spoke to Jesse Schell, he’s a game designer and a professor at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. I wanted to talk to Jesse about the current state of gaming, and the possible future of games. He gave a very engaging, provocative talk recently, suggesting that we’re starting to see the “game-ification” of everyday life, and that gaming will likely become the norm as a mode of advertising, or even to push forward public policy.
Indie Game Developers and the Facebook of Doom
The story of Facebook so far * Three big episodes: * 2007-2008: The pioneering debut * 2008-2009: The difficult sequel * 2009-2010: Increased quality & maturity * And what next? * 4. 2010-2011: The lame cash-in?
