Google YouTube PM Hunter Walk asked on Twitter Monday:
There are some serious competitive advantages that Zynga would bring to the table if they decided to pursue this idea and provide legal online poker to its Zynga Poker players. For one, Zynga’s poker game currently holds over 28 million active players, which makes it the world’s largest poker site of any kind.
Clearly, Zynga has the potential to be a real-money poker powerhouse
But what would that mean for them?
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:
Earlier this month, Roger Dickey spoke at our Game Monetization meetup event. Roger is the creator of Mafia Wars, one of the most successful social games of all time, and also served as the GM of Fishville once his company was acquired by Zynga. You can watch the full video below, but we wanted to pull out one topic today that we found really interesting: mining the theme space.
Roger Dickey is the creator of Mafia Wars, one of the most successful social games of all time, and learned game monetization strategy during his time as a GM of multiple games and international product advisor at Zynga. At our Money Talks event in San Francisco, Roger dropped some serious knowledge that showed how the leading social game companies maximize their game monetization. You can watch the video below, or read our cliff notes to get a quick overview of the best social game monetization strategies he shared.
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:
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.
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
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