This year at Casual Connect, we had a roving reporter getting the scoops on games coming out this year. We’ll post the previews (a lot of them) over the upcoming weeks.
In the meantime, here is a news round up on what you may have missed last week at the show!
This year at Casual Connect, we had a roving reporter getting the scoops on games coming out this year. We’ll post the previews (a lot of them) over the upcoming weeks.
In the meantime, here is a news round up on what you may have missed last week at the show!
10 Things PopCap Hates about Casual Games
PopCap CEO Dave Roberts gave an amusing presentation on the 10 things he hates about casual games, including gamification, the idea that simple games are easy to make, and the get rich attitude that permeates the industry.
The most industry rant was about portals, where he said “I’m sick to death of portals” and questioned how they can ask for 60 – 70% when Apple only takes 30%.
Of course, it’s hard to take a rant about what sucks in casual games seriously from someone who just sold his casual game company for over $1 billion to Electronic Arts last week. It’s sort of like listening to Nirvana’s second album, In Utero, and wondering, why all the anger, Kurt?
One billion Angry Birds
Speaking of angry, Rovio CEO Peter Vesterback proclaimed their goal is to reach 1 billion fans worldwide for Angry Birds. How?
Expand to China. There are a billion people in China, many of which like games. But, there are also many people in China that don’t like to pay for games as well.
Rovio acknowledges that it’s hard to create hit games multiple times so their strategy is to put all their eggs in the Angry Birds. The issue is, it’s just as hard to keep a successful game from not growing bored year over year.
And now a word from a venture capitalist…
Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat has a long article about Tim Chang’s talk about the venture world and gaming. Tim Chang just struck big this year on gaming with investments in ngmoco and Playdom, so he knows what he’s talking about.
So, what’s in Tim Chang’s crystal ball?
He is a big believer in BadgeVille’s gamification-as-a-service as evidenced by the fact he is part of the latest $12 million investment. He believes in the mid-core social market such as Kiseye and Kabam, which is about taking hard-core games and adapting them to casual platforms such as Facebook and mobile.
He likes mobile because it’s a wide open market, as opposed to Facebook where Zynga is the big leader. He thinks cloud-based gaming, mosolo (mobile, social, local), and HTML 5 show promise but still are early.
And he does think games will continue to be hot for the next 6 – 12 months but that after that time, the bubble will burst.
So, if you are in the games space, better get moving fast.
