While the sales of new games in retail have struggled recently, Gamasutra recently reported that the digital download services continue to see strong growth: Valve’s Steam service revealed a 97% increase in download sales, year-over-year IGN’s own direct download service, Direct2Drive, has also surged year on year, according to the company, posting gains of 56% compared to twelve months previously. …
Casual games companies and the transition to Facebook
My last post commented on GamesBeat’s articles from Casual Connect, which touched on the challenges old casual game leaders are having with the new world of social games / social networks. Inside Social Games just posted about PopCap bringing Zuma to Facebook (as well as letting players use Facebook Connect on their own site). A quick look and you can …
Social Gaming Expands as Casual Gaming Gets Nervous
Casual Connect just took place in Seattle and Dean Takahashi over at GamesBeat has done a great job capturing some of the trends in this part of the games world: Part 1 and Part 2. Some of the most interesting quotes: Social games might hit a half billion in revenues this year. In 2007, before a price war began, casual …
Links & Attention
There have been a lot of posts around lately about whether blogging is dead, because short form is the new shiny. Of course, new media types never kill off old media types (or at least not quickly), but the topic is really moot because long form and short form are apples and oranges — two different value propositions. One thing …
U.S. Online Gaming Grows 22%
Conventional wisdom is that in down economies, entertainment is counter-cyclical. In the console space, the sales of new games has come under pressure in the poor economy, but the sales of used games is way up as well as subscriptions to mail-based video game rental programs (see Nielsen report). Now Comscore has tallied up US visitors to online gaming sites …
Socnet Advertising, where art thou?
A few months ago, I listened to a panel organized by Battery Ventures called “Monetizing Social Media”. Perhaps not surprisingly for a New York-based event, the panel spent 99% of the time talking about advertising. Still, I was surprised to see both the Facebook and MySpace representatives brush off microtransaction business models as niche and not worth discussing. The total …
MJ spikes Nielsen’s buzz chart
Nielsen’s Buzz tracking research just posted this chart, and went on to write: Nearly 15% of all online discussions about Jackson referenced either a broadcast or social network. CNN which teamed up with Facebook on streaming coverage was named in 5% of all online conversations. Also on the TV network side, BET came in 2nd with 1.9%, ABC with 1.7%, …
Music Marketing; Amanda Palmer w Twitter
Modern Music Marketing “The most important thing that an artist can do is to tour, absolutely. Touring provides the spark that all the other marketing segments need to work off of.” An interesting quote from Mike King, of the Berklee College of Music, in a video interview on modern music marketing. (via Hypebot) Amanda Palmer & Twitter There have also …
To Widget TV or Not to Widget TV
Chris Albrecht over at NewTeeVee, a blog I enjoy following, has a recent post up called “5 Apps I’d Like to See on My TV“. Apparently a research group did a study where 76% of respondents were in favor of widgets. You can color me a serious skeptic. First of all, once you look past the early adopters, TV watching …
Virtual world and social game ARPUs
Justin Smith had an interesting slide deck at the Social Games Summit where he shared his estimates for monthly ARPUs (average revenue per user): “good Facebook” – $0.30 – $0.40 “good MySpace” – $0.60 – $0.70 Some games can do much better. The Facebook game Battlestations shared some data in late 2008 where they appeared to have around a $1.00 …
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