Personal archive
Written on April 1, 2008 – 2:10 am
Reinout te Brake, online gaming expert
Paramount Pictures said it will be expanding its interactive department to publish online video games, focusing in particular on casual, handheld and mobile games, according to Variety. It makes sense because the mothership Viacom is a true believer of online games in general.
Big companies are tuning into the online games industry and that should lead to one thing in the end; game companies have to bulk up to compete with the others. And if that is not enough, these game companies have to be innovative when it comes to new technology. The more you offer for less, the more broader the games will become for the mass audience.
Dollars are floating
Of course we have already seen this start in 2007, but it already shows that 2008 is an interesting year. Electronic Arts is still in the race to get TakeTwo Interactive (publisher of GrandTheft Auto), ActiVision announced a merger with Vivendi-Universal (Vivendi owns World of Warcraft) and Chinese online games operator 9You has received equity investment. I didn’t put any figures here, but here we go, 9you received $100 million, EA made a bid of $2,1 billion and the merger of Activision/Vivendi is around $18,9 billion.
Nice. In the first quarter of 2008 we are already talking about 20 billion dollars that are floating around in the games industry! Companies like Paramount will easily spend tens of millions of dollars and Viacom already announced spending 500 million dollars on games. 2008 is the year of online games! (more…)
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Written on March 24, 2008 – 12:15 pm
Reinout te Brake, online gaming expert
The last few days I had some time and look around over the Internet. As you know, there is a lot of news about companies like Facebook.com and Google. Their success is the motor of a whole industry, they are the fuel for lots of new business ventures. In loads of business-plans you will see entrepreneurs compare their ideas against that of these companies. It is very difficult to create and come up with something unique, I grant you that, but what is it that these companies mentioned above have in common? The answer is; simplicity! Already I hear loads of people wonder if I lost it, but let me assure you, I didn’t.
During the last years I have come in contact with many VC-companies and they all are looking for companies that look like Bebo.com, Facebook, Google and MySpace. The “why” is simple too, these companies re-present high valuations today and therefore the investors who backed these companies made a great “return of investment”. These VC companies contact me if I know entrepreneurs with similar good ideas. In most cases I do send them info about young companies that look for funding. And then it starts; benchmarking! The business plans are going to be compared to the successful companies of today. After a while I have come to believe that VC-companies want something they can understand and compare, they want it too; simplicity! (more…)
Written on March 13, 2008 – 11:54 am
Reinout te Brake, online gaming expert
Hey you, yes, you! You are responsible for that huge buzz about online casual games! Since you are playing online games everywhere, whenever and so many times, you were helping in the past years to get a whole industry started. Do you actually know the term “casual games”, “ingame advertising”, “return on investment” and “venture capital”? We do. We, as in the online casual gaming industry. We are building games to please you as a player and make money of it. We try to understand your behavior in every way so we can develop specific games for men, women, boys and girls. Strategy games, role playing games, multiplayer games, arcade games and many more. You just have to choose or did we already know what you would choose?!
The online casual gaming industry has grown the last years significantly because more and more sites are offering games to the public at large. Not only you will find these games on specific games portals like Miniclip, GamesGames, and Pogo, but you will find more of these games in social communities like for example Facebook.com. Every day millions of games are being played online and therefore lots of companies did start to develop (often flash-based) games. These companies are located all over the globe, from China to USA, from Holland to India.
So I ask you just take a moment to think about it. What kind of games do you like? Where do you normally go to online to find these games? Do you (want to) pay for games or do you accept advertising around these games? All of these questions went already through the heads of those smart game developers and their marketing teams. They figured that these games are interesting marketing tools. You probably consider them just as nice playable games, but this industry is building on knowledge and experience on your behavior when it comes down to playing games online. (more…)
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