Thursday 14 July 2011

Investors on where the smart money will go in social games

This article, written by AJ Glasser was first published on Inside Network on July 13, 2011.

Late yesterday at GamesBeat in San Francisco, game company accelerator YetiZen led a panel with top social and mobile game investors on the evolving dynamic of funding in the space. Norwest Venture Partners’ Tim Chang, Digi-Capital Managing Director Tim Merel and TinyCo CEO Suli Ali characterize an industry that’s both converging and expanding on a global scale.
“[Developers] need to think globally from day one,” says Merel. As an investor, he looks for developers that either offer a portfolio of existing games or that already have access to various channels in different countries. These companies have proven traction and very likely also have plans for multiple revenue streams beyond in-game virtual goods sales. He describes the potential behind Rovio’s Angry Birds, which now has a line of t-shirts and stuffed animals generating revenues in addition to actual paid downloads of the game. He also describes the nature of game concepts that can succeed in international markets versus those that have limited appeal due to cultural association; like the various Chinese multiplayer games based on the Three Kingdoms historical period that fail to find traction with Western audiences.
“There is a danger of false positives,” warns Chang. He talks about how many developers create a “red herring” for investors by basing annual revenue expectations on peak traffic months when there are no guarantees that the developer can retain those users, let alone monetize them. This is especially true of copycat games or developers that reskin their original game without investing resources into distribution channels.

The road ahead in mobile games

This article, written by Dean Takahashi, was first published in VentureBeat on July 13, 2011.

Mobile gaming is the wide-open battleground of the entertainment industry. While Zynga dominates social games and big publishers rule console games, the global smartphone game market is still up for grabs.
Since there are potentially billions of users in this market, mobile gaming could become the largest game market of them all. Who will win it?
Smartphone games have been growing as a market since 2007, when Apple’s iPhone debuted. Tablet games have been growing since the spring of 2010, when Apple launched the iPad. Now the fastest-growing mobile market is based on devices running the Android operating system. With triggering events such as the success of Angry Birds, the hit Rovio game that has been downloaded more than 200 million times, mobile game companies are raising tens of millions of dollars. Mobile game companies have garnered significant valuations, particularly overseas.

Tim Merel, managing director at Digi-Capital, says, “The time to act is now.”

The potential of mobile games

 

Mobile games could be a $13 billion market in 2014, according to Merel. Mobile and online games together could be a $44 billion market, or 50 percent of the global $87 billion market in 2014. Today, mobile games are around $8 billion, a small slice of the overall game market, which is still dominated by console games, web games, and Facebook games. (IDC estimates mobile games will grow to $5 billion in a few years; Gartner says that mobile gaming was $6.7 billion, or 10 percent of the $67.4 billion game market in 2010; the estimates vary, but few doubt mobile games will have a great growth rate).
How will a huge mobile game market come about? That’s one of the questions we’ll explore at GamesBeat 2011 on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. We’ve got 80 of the game industry’s finest minds focused on the evolution of mobile gaming. We all want to figure out how to connect the dots in mobile games.

Thursday 7 July 2011

The great games market split: the Big V

We are entering a world where the games market is fundamentally splitting in two, like the media market of a decade ago. Back then what we now call "old media" scoffed at "new media" upstarts for giving away content, bizarre business practices, and products and services which made no sense to the wise old birds. "They'll destroy more value than they'll create," was the mantra.

Well welcome back to the future.

Today's games market is fundamentally splitting into "Value" and "Volume" markets, both by sector and geography. The two-speed market this is creating may have more rapid and profound effects on the games market than it did on the media market, with meteoric rises for some and slow going for others.