Category Archives: News & Trends

What happened to innovative games?

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NimbleBit feels that Zynga shamelessly ripped them off with their new Dream Heights game
Indie developer Nimblebit dropped a PR bomb on Zynga yesterday with it’s letter addressing the similarities between their hit iPhone game Tiny Tower and Zynga’s upcoming release, Dream Heights. This galvanized the gaming community, with thousands of people, from prominent bloggers to gamers on Reddit criticizing the company.

However, just after the new year, Atari ordered the removal of Black Powder Media’s Vector Tanks, a game strongly inspired by Atari’s Battlezone. This galvanized the community in a similar way, except this time, gamers were furious that Atari shut down an indie game company that made an extremely similar game.

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DoubleDown acquisition lends credence to Facebook gambling rumors

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Facebook gamblingThere have been rumors for some time that Facebook will soon allow real-money gambling in the UK. Some would say that it’s a natural move for the social network, which makes a substantial portion of its revenue from facilitating purchases of in-game virtual goods. Considering that real-money has a significantly higher revenue potential than virtual currency, allowing online gambling could help Facebook boost its revenue growth before it’s rumored May IPO.

To lend credence to these rumors, there were two massive acquisitions of Facebook casino game companies within the last two weeks. On December 30th, Caesars Casino elected to purchase the 49% it did not own of Playtika, one of Facebook’s larger casino game makers with over 5 million monthly active users. But the announcement that turned heads was gambling heavyweight IGT’s $500 million acquisition of DoubleDown Interactive.

If you look at the numbers as they are now, there’s no reason for IGT to pay $500 million for DoubleDown. DoubleDown was rumored by AllThingsD to be making $140,000 per day, which equates to about $51 million in revenue per year. This puts the purchase price for DoubleDown at almost 10X their revenue, which is high even for the frothy social gaming market. Furthermore, DoubleDown Casino, their only game, has approximately 4.7 million monthly active users, which means that IGT paid over $100 per monthly active user. [Click to Tweet]


This purchase would only make sense if real-money gambling is coming to Facebook. Whether you view it as a land grab (DoubleDown Casino was the #4 game on Facebook by daily active users in 2011), or as a smart buy for the future (online casino players are worth roughly $1,800 over their lifetime), this acquisition is a sign of things to come. With social game giants EA and Zynga rumored to be looking into the real-money gambling opportunity,  social game developers would be wise to stake their claim in the market as soon as possible.

[Image credit: TechCrunch, TeePeeGames]

The Real “New Frontier” of Gaming

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the new frontier of gaming is real-money play

Last week’s Wall Street Journal article, “Gaming’s New Frontier After Zynga”, talks about how the future of games is new, high-quality massively multiplayer online role-playing games (commonly known as MMORPGs). The author alleges that innovative new MMORPGs created by companies like Trion and Tiny Speck will lead to a revolution akin to social games’ emergence over the last 5 years. While this article captures part of the trend, it misses the bigger picture.

The future of gaming is not immersive massively multiplayer games. People have been saying that MMORPGs were the “future of gaming” since back in the days of the original Everquest. To quote David Radd from his IndustryGamers post last week, “things didn’t quite pan out as planned”.

Today, the resurgence of MMOs is just one piece of the larger trend:

The intersection between virtual worlds and the real world is the future of gaming. [Click to Tweet]

 

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Gambling Makes Billions Without Innovation

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Last week, we outlined The Game Innovator’s Dilemma, which shows how large, successful firms become reliant on sustaining technologies that only improve their existing products. Often times, these firms’ successes can hamper their ability to adapt to new market conditions and adopt disruptive new technologies.Nowhere is this Dilemma more apparent than in the gambling industry. Just think about the four major gambling games that you see in modern casinos: poker, blackjack, roulette, and slots. By implementing sustaining technologies, gambling companies have barely kept them current. Yet the gambling industry makes money hand over fist in amounts that would make any game company jealous: over $458 billion all told. Just to rub it in, let’s take a quick look at these four popular games and the innovations that they’ve undergone in since they were created. Continue reading →

Earn More With Free-to-Play

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Steam Free-to-play advertisement
Steam recently implemented a slew of new free-to-play games.

Why your game needs to be free-to-play
You work your tail off to build a great game. You put in hundreds of hours. From storyboarding to coding to calls with the designer to guerrilla marketing to gameplay testing to bug fixing, you pour sweat and tears into your baby. And now you want your customers to PAY for it? What are you, crazy?

But why shouldn’t I, you say. Building a game is significantly harder than a one-off web app that engineers can churn out themselves in a weekend, and those engineers charge for them. Building a game takes all of the challenges of coding and throws art, writing, and marketing on top of it. Why am I being punished for building the tougher product? Continue reading →

Why Zynga’s Profits Plummeted

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Zynga's Profits Plummeted Gamasutra dropped a bombshell reporton Monday that Zynga, just ahead of their planned IPO, had reported a 95% drop in their year-over-year profits from $27.2 million to $1.3 million. The social gaming juggernaut continued to lose momentum in all major categories: its total revenues grew only 15% last quarter versus 24% in the previous quarter. Its virtual goods sales and ad revenues were down 4% from the prior quarter, and their total daily active user count across all games also dropped 4% from 62 million to 59 million. Has Zynga lost the interest of its users, or are market trends eroding Zynga’s core revenue streams? Continue reading →

Asian app purchases surge as China becomes #2 iOS app market

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If there was any doubt that the international market for smartphone apps will soon eclipse the United States, it has been blown away by the latest Distimo Report. The report shows huge growth in the Asian smartphone market, with China now claiming the title as the #2 market for iOS apps in the world. We have distilled the report down to 3 key points for your viewing pleasure below:
Key Point #1: Revenue in Asian markets lags because users there are not nearly as comfortable with in-app purchases or paid downloads

Betable HTML5 Hackathon Contest: Win a trip to Vegas and up to $10,000!

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HTML5 Hackathon logo
Betable is proud to announce its sponsorship of the Hackathon at the HTML5 Developers Conference hosted by the Silicon Valley Independent Game Developers Association. The Hackathon is this weekend, and open to all developers interested in building apps on this budding platform. If you haven’t already, you can sign up here. Continue reading →

Why Real-Money Play Will Revolutionize Game Monetization

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Real-money play will change how games monetize

In the fast-growing social, free-to-play game markets, developers do not have many options when it comes to game monetization, and those that are available to them produce low average revenue per user (ARPU) and customer lifetime value (CLV). At Betable, we want to change that by giving social, mobile, and open-web game developers new ways to monetize their user base through engaging, real-money play. We offer a real-money platform that gives game developers the ability to add real-money play into your game. Subscribe to this blog to find out more about us and game monetization. Whether you get paid via virtual currency, ads, paid content, or lead generation, we will show you how you could easily bolster your existing sources of revenue with real-money play. Continue reading →