ICO Partners

• Flying Labs opens a casual MMO division (”family-oriented”)
• Games Convention Leipzig is cancelled, but Games Convention Online will take place there from 31/07 to 2/08, dedicated to online games and especially browser games.
• Internet in 2008 in numbers.
• Study from Pew Research shows 35% of all US internet adults have a social network profile. For 18/24 years old it’s 75%. 50% of the US adult socnet users have a profile on MySpace, 22% on Facebook.
• SOE partners with PopCap for casual games on the PSN.
• WOW to have accounted for 50% of Activision Blizzard’s earnings last fiscal year according to analyst.
• Console manufacturers impacted by recession.

A few links of news for today :

• Nexon closes HumaNature studio (based in Canada, developers of Sugar Rush). As there were no news of the game since the end of Closed beta in December, we would be suprised if the title wasn’t cancelled.

ERRATUM :  HumaNature was producing the game, not developing it, the developer is Klei Entertainment, which is not closing. HumaNature was working on unannouced new IP games. Thanks Daniel for the corrections!

• Online gaming gets 27% traffic growth yoy according to a new Comscore report. The online gaming display ad market grows with it, and gets upmarket as the ad clutter for the category diminishes. Most impressive growth is Spil’s network with +269% growth.
• Rumour : AOL selling Bebo? (were apparently disappointed by monetization vs projections)
• Paypal joins OpenID (that can give OpenID more credibility)
• GOA adds another True Games title to their portfolio by taking care of European operations for Possibility Space’s WarriorEpic .
• Gamigo brings Hanbitsoft’s steampunk MMO NeoSteam to Europe
• New study by DFC compares  offline and online games publishers’ business models, online makes better profits , less risky.
• Gmail will have an offline option. (Convenient for anyone with a laptop, and helps overcome barriers to cloud-based service usage.)

The first part of this post can be found here.

5.Rise of cloud computing

This is the corollary of trend 4, and of the difficulty of scaling hardware investments. As launches of Age of Conan and Warhammer Online have shown recently, it is a risky position to invest in hardware when you have a lot of volatility in population (eg launch spike, then dwindling population). You also have to decide about how to break down the hardware’s geographical location yourself to give users better pings, have to take the game down to operate scheduled maintenance, renew the machines after a few years , etc. (more…)

Virtual Worlds Management has posted its update on Youth Virtual World  sector.  If it seems to you that the sector is crowded, it’s probably because it is : they numbered 200+ of them. (more…)

According to this Comscore new study, there was 1 billion Internet users aged 15+ in December 2008.

Looking at the regional breakdown, Asia/Pacific comes first with 41% of the audience, but Europe comes second with 28% audience share. North America is third with 18%.

In terms of country share, if China and the US  are far ahead (China being apparently overtaking US for the first time), Germany, the UK and France come respectively #4,5 and 6, Russia is #8, while  Italy and Spain are #12 and 13 and Netherlands #15 (with 11M unique visitors, which is amazing for a 16M populated country). If you add all of them together, their share is bigger than China’s, but the fragmentation of this audience shows on the top properties breakdown where all websites are originated from US or China.

It’ll be interesting to see where Europe and US will be in the future when China, Russia, India, Brazil and Mexico continue to grow fast.

Like every new year, it’s time for looking back at the past one and trying predictions for the next one. We are quite late in the exercise as we post this, so we’ll concentrate on the predictions part for the future. These are based on our observations and deductions and various chats with clever people from the industry. We might be right or wrong, but what is sure is that this industry is moving very fast, and is fascinating to watch. Anyway, it will be fun to check at the end of the year to see where we guessed right and where we missed – most of the points seem to us  to be quite logically tied together at the moment.
(more…)

This is not a very much discussed topic in the world of Online gaming where game design, technology or business models make for sexier discussions. Maybe there is a consensus and everything below is so obvious that it isn’t worth time spent on it.

In our experience though, it is an aspect that is just not considered, whether for economical reasons (the studio will licence the game anyway and need to separate the different services) or for a lack of interest (operators just do it the way their main competitors do it). When everyone is pushing for the “It’s a service, not a product” motto, it is a very important aspect to be considered. (more…)

Nowadays, with many studios and publishers currently laying off quite a scary number of people, we ran into an initiative that we find laudable, even if related to unfortunate news for many.

Vivendi Games Europe is currently in the process of reorganising its activities following the merger with Activision and a number of people were made redundant. A part of the team went to the direction and asked to actually create a dedicated website listing the persons currently looking for a job. (more…)

We are very pleased to announce today that our submission for this year Worlds in Motion Summit that will take place in San Francisco the same week as the GDC has been accepted. (more…)

This is the second part of a 2 part article - you can find part 1 here. (more…)