Last week, our SF Game Monetization meetup group hosted its second speaker event, Maximize Your Virtual Goods Revenue. We had over 150 people attend to socialize and watch three awesome speakers share what they’ve learned about game monetization. Check out each speaker’s presentation below:
This was also posted on Kontagent‘s kScope blog.
It’s becoming clear that casino games are the next big social game genre.
Take a look at the image above, provided by Kontagent. Casino games are surpassing farm games as the darlings of social networks: The growth of monthly active users (MAUs) for farm games is slowing, while that of social casino games is generating higher revenues – seven times, according to Kontagent – than the casual games category.
Image from TechCrunch
TechCrunch just posted an article titled “How’s the Gold Rush Panning Out? 70% of Mobile App Users Pay Little Or Nothing, Study Says”. This implies that with only 30% of users ever paying for apps at all, a game developer’s potential success for the ever-popular freemium mobile game is much more limited than many think. Backing this up is an Ars Technica article from 10 days prior, which reported that “iOS app success is a ‘lottery’: 60% (or more) of developers don’t break even”. So not only are most players not paying, but most developers aren’t making enough off of the ones that do to break even.
Whoa. Just a couple months ago, Zynga was cautiously musing that social games and gambling could join forces to make more money. Now Dean Takahashi is saying that real online gambling and social games are on a collision course. What a difference a few months makes.
Virtual Goods are on fire! The US Virtual Goods Market is expected to hit $2.9 Billion in 2012, and virtual good sales dominate freemium game revenue. Maximizing your revenue from virtual goods has never been more important to today’s mobile and social game developers. That’s why we put together a lineup of virtual goods experts to share their knowledge with you in our upcoming meetup: Maximize Your Virtual Goods Revenue.
Food and beer will be served in our gorgeous new Mission event location at 6:00pm, followed by three expert speaker presentations at 7pm. Each speaker will present for 20-25 minutes, allowing 5 minutes for Q&A. After the event, drinks and more networking will be on tap until 9pm.
If you’re involved in the startup community or even just follow Hacker News, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve heard about “lean startups” or the “lean startup method.” In his bestselling book, The Lean Startup, Eric Ries outlines a framework for small, innovative teams to more efficiently find product/market fit for new products. At its core is a focus on evaluating product design decisions based on user data gathered from scientific experiments. Eric argues that by making “validated learning” your key goal, you shortcut your time to building a wildly successful mass market product.
These same methodologies and principles can be applied to game development, drastically shortening the time it takes for you to learn if players actually enjoy your game. In an in-depth look published on Gamasutra, I show how game development can benefit from the Lean Startup approach.
When I walked into SuperCuts last week, I was hardly expecting to find a gold mine of data on online sports betting in the US. But that’s exactly what I found when I picked up ESPN, The Magazine and stumbled upon an article about the subject. ESPN collected bet data from BetUs.com, 5Dimes.com, and CaribSports.com to see what US sports people bet on.
Quick post for today, I just wanted to share this awesome Mobile Game Marketing Whitepaper by ayzenberg. It includes case studies of Plants vs. Zombies, Doodle Jump, and Dead Space. What impressed me most about this report was how much creative offline marketing PopCap did for Plants vs. Zombies. That, and Dead Space’s “Your Mom Hates This” campaign is brilliant. Check it out!
“Vegas, baby!”
Those are the words of Ben and Merrick, the pair that won Betable’s contest at the iOSDevCamp hackathon last fall. Ben and Merrick host the Port Forward Podcast blog and documented their journey in their latest audio. You can listen in here:
Port Forward Podcast – Betable.com Trip to Vegas
This month’s Kontagent analytics webinar was packed yesterday, with hundreds of developers from around the world tuning in to make it their most successful webinar ever. The topic? How to build ‘irresistible’ social casino games. Clearly, the social casino games space is heating up, and game developers and casino companies alike want to learn more. Teaching them was Dave Bezahler, the CEO of Blitzoo, a 20-person social game company that experienced great success with its SlotSpot Facebook slots game. He shared his knowledge of the market and went through SlotSpot as a case study for social casino games.
