Online casual games; a worldwide gameplay of dollars!
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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