GDC: Casual Games all-dayer pt II

Casual Games business models snippets:

• under 5% of consumers see the value in purchasing casual games, especially when there are so many free options; but, a bright spot is item sales, digital avatars, more business opportunities in new territories and on new platforms.

• Three Rings (puzzlepirates) income = $100K per month from subs. $250K from microtransactions.

• Club Pogo: subscription service is their primary income. No advertising, exclusive content and enhanced community features. It's a runaway success: 1.4m paid subs, and the growth trajectory is healthy. Loyal userbase. Predisposed to purchase downloads, addon, premium items, etc. Low churn, high conversion.

• Shockwave.com: advertising has been the growth driver for us. Advertising is a business of scale, advertisers like to buy in large numbers, so you need a large enough audience to get on their radar screen. We are now owned by MTV/Viacom, so advertisers take us seriously.

• Real Arcade: we're selling ads in our games. Real Arcade is sold as part of Real Networks, which is part of a large media company. We're still considered small by advertiser buyers, even though we're across hundreds of thousands of people every [day/week].

Comments

[Duncan Gough]

I'm still interested to see whether subscriptions and microtransactions can be more than an either/or situation.

From what I know of Puzzle Pirates they built a created ocean/instance to support pay-as-you-go style play, but I'd be pretty confident that they could conjure something up.

[Elizabeth Fong (lizthegrey)]

Duncan - the idea of a hybrid doubloon/subscription ocean has been previously brought up and discussed by our players, who think of everything imaginable:
http://forums.puzzlepirates.com/community/mvnforum/viewthread?thread=30196
http://forums.puzzlepirates.com/community/mvnforum/viewthread?thread=39013
http://forums.puzzlepirates.com/community/mvnforum/viewthread?thread=43969

There were a number of sticking points brought up in those threads including the fact that you'd have to find some way of handling item trades between doubloon-users and subscription-users.

Currently, we operate two subscription oceans, three doubloon oceans, and one international (German) doubloon ocean.