26th February 2009 by Diane
The Xbox Live subscription
Gamasutra relays a report by Seattle Post that shows Microsoft numbers for Xbox Live Gold subscribers. The more recent figures are from February 2008, showing that 56% of all Live members were Gold (60% in the US). The percentage was actually down 4 points yoy.
At that time there were 10M announced Live members , so that was about 5.5M Gold subscribers – if the proportion was still the same today (it might have increased since thanks to the NXE, which has brought them 3M members since November 08) that would be 9.5M Gold subscribers (there are 17M Xbox Live members). According to the latest numbers on VGChartz there are 28.5 millions of Xbox 360 distributed worldwide -the total Live members accounts are about 60% of that. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: microsoft, Playstation 3, PSN, Sony, subscription, xbox live, xbox360
Posted in Events, ICO Partners
(4 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)23rd February 2009 by Diane
2M registered players on Combat Arms US
Reported on Gamesindustry.biz , that’s 3 months after the first million registered users (and 7 months after going live). The European version, live since January, seems not doing bad either, with servers regularly full or almost .
Core, PC players-targeted genres are doing well when it comes to client-based F2P games (much better than more casual genres, increasingly impossible to do outside a browser, or those whose audience usually plays on console). A core genre with a casual enough product (in the sense of being inclusive with players of all skill levels, meaning the vast majority of (losing) players can have a good time, and requiring little coordination/planning/advanced group tactics at the first level of gameplay, and that the business model makes it enjoyable for free players to play) is a good formula. Combat Arms seems to have found a good balance there, with a simple product accessible to a large number, focused on small team close combat and with largely unintrusive micro-payments. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Combat Arms, FPS, nexon
Posted in Events, ICO Partners
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)19th February 2009 by Diane
Three Quarters of European Internet users visit social networks
According to a new Comscore study (users aged 15+, Dec 08 vs Dec 07). Good news for social games !
UK, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and Italy were the countries with the biggest penetration of social networking.
Also in the study : Facebook grew 443% in one year in France thanks to localization, and has now overtaken Skyrock.
The social networking landscape still remains pretty diverse in Europe – that isn’t shown in the study- but the overall usage is very high. For comparison, Emarketer recently published a similar study showing that the penetration rate was 41% in the US. That encompasses all year 2008 though, not just December as the Comscore figures.
Tags: europe, social networking
Posted in Events, ICO Partners
(2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)19th February 2009 by Diane
SOE data and local communities
SOE has released 60TB of data free for research(via ArsTechnica). This is a brilliant move from SOE, it is really likely to benefit the whole industry (and probably social science academic fields as well), but themselves are likely to benefit from it the most (since the data is about their game and customers.)
There are a few interesting snippets in the article from the preliminary examination of the data, which we found particularly worth mentioning:
- Players in the same time zone are 1.25 times more likely to play together
- Players in the same 10km area are 5 times more likely to interact
The data is only about US players, but this is something we have already observed with European MMO services (and it gets even more prominent once you throw different languages into the mix). Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: EverQuest 2, metrics, SOE
Posted in Events, ICO Partners
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)11th February 2009 by Diane
Virtual MTV moves to browser based
As reported by Virtual World News.
The linking of accounts is always something tricky, it looks like users have 2 weeks to transfer their virtual currency and can’t claim what they already spent in the client-based version, and they have to start over with a new avatar and crib in the new world. This should make difficult to convince all of the users to take the leap (maybe preventing to buy any more new currencies in the client based world and offering a better exchange rate would have been a better incentive), but it should give them much more opportunities for growth thanks to the improved accessibility.
The new VMTV can be found here.
Tags: browser-based, MTV
Posted in Events, ICO Partners
(3 votes, average: 1.67 out of 5)