Here are the slides from my presentation today at Browser Games Forum:

As the recent game announcements have been multiplying, Mobile is the new frontier for online games and MMOs. The technical constraints have been mostly overcome, and the apparition of a hardcore audience playing mostly from home has made the main problem (good enough ping) less painful. The possibility of free apps with in-app purchases have finally make the business part of it sensible. It’s thus no surprise that many games are announced. However, as games like Pocket Legends find success, the room for growth is increasingly moving, like for social games, to outside of the US/English-speaking territories. What’s the market looking like in Europe? Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Diane was at an Online Games summit in Ankara, keynoting the event and meeting actors of the Turkish online games industry. It was a honour to be invited there, and she was very happy to learn more about the Turkish market, which is one of the big ones in Europe already, and is still in a phase of rapid growth.

As more Asian and American eyes are turning to the European market (since market is less mature and the Chinese market is increasingly closed), Turkey is emerging as a rising star of the European region for online games. The country has the second biggest population of the region, and a majority of them are young (60% are under 35) and educated. According to a recent Comscore report, Turkey is the 3rd most engaged Internet audience in the world. The games websites category there has a 68% penetration, higher than in the UK. According to government statistics, 24% of Turks aged 16+ played network games with other people in 2008.

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The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released a draft of standard guidelines for in-game advertising. This is a very good move for the medium, as keeping network-specific standards made the medium inapproachable for the vast majority of marketers and media buyers, used to be able to compare and optimize campaigns across different media and networks. The guidelines are dedicated to measuring impressions on dynamic billboard ads, and the draft shows a lot of challenges in defining what counts as a valid standard impression (eg how to rule out impressions from bots,  player or developer-induced impression manipulations, etc), but still it should be encouraged as a step in a good direction, and every developer or publisher planning to offer in-game advertising should have a look.

The guidelines are accessible here and the IAB is collecting feedback from  industry actors until the 17th of July.

The legal frameworks of the different countries around Europe contribute to the complexity of the territory. It is quite a challenge to establish a service and its rules and have them actually comply to all the different requirements of those various countries. When they don’t contradict each other, even in the same country, as it sometimes happens.

The other real pain, is, like for any proper persistent world, the fact the legal system is always evolving and it is important to keep an eye it. What was fine and perfectly legal yesterday might be forbidden tomorrow. Read the rest of this entry »