Money Talks: Improve your game’s CLV by listening

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Our first meetup event, “Money Talks”, was a great success. With over 75 attendees, we had a packed house full of game developers itching to learn. Our three great speakers gave our audience great insight into game monetization:

  • Roxanne Gibert, CEO of Spyra, formerly game monetization & product strategy at Zynga, Playdom, and Playfirst.
  • Roger Dickey, former GM of Zynga and creator of Mafia Wars, the most successful social game of all time.
  • Chris Griffin, CEO of Betable, the only platform that lets game developers legally integrate real-money gambling into their games.

Roxanne Gibert, of Spyra Games, spoke at our talk about CLV and ARPPU

The first speaker was Roxanne Gibert, whose game monetization and product strategy background comes from years at premier social game companies including Zynga, Playdom, and Playfirst. Now running her own company, Spyra, Roxanne presented a great overview of game monetization and the framework that you need to implement to make impactful decisions to move the needle on your CLV and ARPPU.

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Game Monetization Lessons from Magic: The Gathering

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Adam Summerville is a Co-founder of CircleCat Games. Adam’s hobby is analyzing the non-intuitive design decisions behind his favorite games. If you need to, grab a glass of water and get comfortable: this post is a long one but it’s a good one, and well worth the read.
magic_the_gathering_planeswalkers
We live in a bold, new era in game monetization. A full-production desktop game that is free-to-play makes on the order of $37.5 million every year. Games companies that see less than 5% of their users ever spend a cent make almost $1 Billion a year in revenue. Entirely new ways of selling games are being devised every day. How should a game developer pick a monetization method in these crazy times? To help us understand what really drives consumers to open up their wallets for their favorite games, I suggest we look back to one of the progenitors of micro-transactions, Magic: The Gathering (MTG from here on out).
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Exposing Social Gaming’s Hidden Lever

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In our last post, Gambling Makes Billions Without Innovation, we showed how each gambling game has spent decades or longer without a single gamplay innovation. We are following this up with a series where we outline each major type of gambling game and how their mechanics can be applied to the modern gaming world. One of the most striking things that we found in our research was that social gaming, a burgeoning $2 billion industry that’s beloved by over 900 million players worldwide, is merely a modern adaptation of an invention created in 1887: the slot machine.
slot machine gambling mechanics exist in modern social games such as FarmVille
See if this sounds familiar to you:

To play the game, you put currency into the machine. You then pull the knob and wait for the result. When the result is presented, you are rewarded with a cacophony of exciting sounds, attention-grabbing images, and some form of currency. Often times, this winning helps you progress towards a larger goal. You also have the opportunity with each play to win a rare prize of significantly higher value than the value of the currency you contributed to play the game.

That’s a slot machine, right? Wrong. It’s the basic action loop of FarmVille. Continue reading →

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 →

Money Talks – and you can listen

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San Francisco Banner

For those in the San Francisco Bay Area, Betable is going to be hosting its second Game Monetization meetup, Money Talks. The event will be from 6pm to 9pm on November 10th, 2011 and hosted at K&L Gates’ beautiful SF Office on the 12th floor of 4 Embarcadero Center. Best of all, this talk is completely free.

Game Monetization is a hot topic and many developers are willing to learn. We’ve put together a great set of speakers to teach you how to make more money with your game. These speakers bring a wealth of game monetization experience from some of the most prestigious companies in the industry. Continue reading →

The Game Innovator’s Dilemma

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The Innovator’s Dilemma
The Innovator’s Dilemma is a oft-referenced book by Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School that describes a theory about how large, successful firms can fail “by doing everything right”. Christensen describes how a company’s successes and capabilities can actually hamper its ability to adapt to new market conditions and technologies. This can affect companies in any space, from game development to creating automobiles. To explain its theories, the book outlines two major types of technologies: sustaining technologies and disruptive technologies.
The Innovator's Dilemma applies to game development as well Continue reading →

Game Design Insights from John Romero & Brenda Brathwaithe

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Last night, the legendary duo of John Romero and Brenda Brathwaite shared their experiences in game design to an intimate crowd of aspiring game designers at the Cogswell Polytechnical College at an SVIGDA-hosted event. We learned a lot from the event and wanted to share some key takeaways with you.

John Romero and Brenda Brathwaithe talk game design

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Stand Out: Brand Your Game with Audio

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Guest Post by Peter Inouye, a freelance game composer from the SF Bay Area. Peter is a musician, audiophile, and closet social gamer. You can find him on Twitter at @AznBanjoPlaya.


Think back to the games you remember most from your childhood. Doesn’t the music start to come back to you as well? And like it or not, start to loop incessantly in your head? Whenever I think of the original Legend of Zelda, Koji Kondo’s renowned title/overworld theme come directly to mind and won’t leave (which is OK, because it’s so good I walk around town like I’m on an epic mission).  Even the sounds come to mind—I loved the sound of the sword beamso much that I would wander around trying to find half a heart just to get the sound back.This, developers, is why audio is so important to your game—it is part of your game’s essence. 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 →