Notes from Virtual Items Summit Day Two (from a man who is playing hooky)

It’s still sunny in the Bay Area, so I am missing the second day of the Virtual Items Summit. Never fear, Social Times, part of Media Bistro, who coincidentally, is running the show, is blogging there.

So now, I blog, citing their blog:

• In a session with the big players of social games in the hot seat, representatives from Zynga, CrowdStar, and Disney’s Playdom all agreed that the social gaming market…will get bigger (surprise!). The key is global expansion. If gamers in Japan and China spend more per user on virtual items than they do in the US and those markets combined are larger and growing faster than the US, then obviously there is a huge growing market overseas. Of course, the challenge for these countries is that there are strong companies already in China and Japan. DENA is a Japanese company expanding into the US, as evidenced by their purchase of ngmoco just yesterday.
• In a session with small independent game companies on the panel, all panel members agreed a small indie company can still make it on Facebook (again, surprise). All agreed that Facebook Credits are more beneficial than detrimental, in that the increase in people willing to trust and spend money on Facebook is greater than the 30% cut Facebook takes.

If you are at the Virtual Items Summit and hear of anything newsworthy, tip us or post in the comments (no spam of course, it has to be newsworthy.

Joel Brodie