SL shuts down gambling
It was always a matter of time. Here’s the official word.
Year: 2007
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Paul Heydon on casual games
Investors look for the “Holy Grail” of casual gaming is an interesting article over at Ars Technica, about a talk at the Casual Games Association’s conference last week, given by a managing director at an investment bank. Basically, he outlines the key things that investors are looking for in the space:
- diverse portfolio, but not mere aggregators: “companies that offer game portals, in-game advertising, and casual MMOs”
- not hardcore: “lasting appeal and a strong casual base along with a strong monetization potential”
- ad-friendly: “in-game and on-site with banners”
- Web 2.0-ish: “user-created content, and a simplicity of design that allows making and inviting friends a painless process”
Why the interest? Because it looks like these are games that draw recurring revenue from mass audiences, as opposed to drawing recurring revenue from hardcore audiences or no revenue from mass audiences. And costs are low. He specifically says that the Holy Grail is not World of Warcraft, because it’s too small and based on subscriptions.
Heydon’s slides are available here (PDF). One slide claims that in 2007 there were over $135m raised for this sort of project, and he lists some of the ones that raised the most money. Even scarier, he projects almost a half a billion dollars in acquisitions happening in 2007. Yikes.
So what’s the Holy Grail in his opinion?
MySpace + YouTube + Maple Story + Skype + Habbo Hotel = 100 million users.
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Ramblings on Social Networking Services
Clickable Culture notes a new study about how young people use technology which has a number of interesting observations, but this one stood out to me:
Technology enhances, rather than replaces in-person interaction.
I have been thinking a lot lately about my experiences with various social networking services — lately, Facebook. There’s a ton of heat around Facebook right now, with lots of companies landing major funding to build applets to live on top of Facebook; it’s basically the darling of the Valley right now.
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Wow reaches 9 million
Gamasutra – World of Warcraft Hits 9 Million Subscribers
And yes, they mean actual players (a lot of people seem to think that WoW’s numbers are “registered user” figures, but they’re not).
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Cooking up Chemistry
I finally got around to reading Dan Cook’s The Chemistry Of Game Design on Gamasutra. At the rate other folks are going, I won’t have to write “A Grammar of Gameplay.”
The skill chains he describes are, of course, basically the same as the game atoms I’ve been messing with, and very similar to the diagrams that Andrew McLennan & co. have been working on, and to Ben Cousins’ stuff, and so on. I tend to think that the reason we’re all saying roughly the same thing is because, well, this is kinda how it is.