• 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.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »