ICO Partners

As promised during the lecture last week, we are sharing the presentation used as a support. For those who couldn’t attend, it should help you get the main items covered then (even though there is nothing like the real thing). At the end of the presentation, the main question was on the demographics and the numbers that we mentioned : the general numbers on Europe came from official census, most of the time done by some EU entity; numbers from the games that don’t have a source cited are estimates, based on publicly available data.

Note the presentation format make some slides difficult to read in Slideshare. You can always download the full presentation from the site though.

As micro-payments rapidly become the mainstream model for most new online games,  there is a massive rise of business models offering collectible items. From games where the collectible elements are at the very center of the gameplay, like Magic The Gathering Online, PoxNora, Urban Rivals, Bella Sara, all the games from ChallengeGames,   the recent UpperDeckU and the upcoming BattleForge, to games having a “Gachapon” , lottery ticket or “Lucky box” feature offering collectibles added as an afterthought (MapleStory, ShotOnline, etc…), collections of items acquired through a random factor are flourishing and are on the way to becoming a must-have in any micro-payment system. SOE has invested in the model even before having micro-payment games, by acquiring Worlds Apart TCG studio in 2006, before launching an EverQuest 1 & 2 in-game CCG, Legends of Norrath. More recently, they acquired PoxNora developer Octopi, and seem to be introducing collectible elements in all their new games. It’s still a mystery why Nintendo has not released a truly online Pokemon game yet. (more…)

GDC is now only a few weeks away, and we are busy planning meetings and giving some final touches to the lecture.

As a reminder, we will be speaking at GDC, during the Worlds in Motion Summit. The session is on the 23rd of March, at 4.15pm, in the North Hall (room 132).

We actually wanted to share here a teaser of the many topics that the session is going delve into. A lot of the focus is on explaining Europe and the market of online games in Europe and how it is different from the North American market. (more…)

New NPD study shows that online gaming on consoles and handhelds in the US grew from 19% in 2008 to 25% in 2009, while PC remains largely majoritary, at 87% versus 90% last year (this last figure via ArsTechnica).

That would give a graph like that if we understand it right :

Amongst consoles, 50% of console online gamers played on Xbox360, while Wii was growing from 18% to 29%, and PS3 came third.

There is an interesting interview about InstantAction in Gamasutra recently.  The site beta is over and the service is now officially commercial. Instantaction has 1.4M registered players, and announced seven games in development in addition to the nine already available.

We are personnally very convinced by the “hardcore browser games” proposition, and the multiple declinations happening at the moment. As more and more online services are turning to the browser (according to our estimates, around 70% of PC online projects developed in Europe, live or in development, are browser-based), the 3D high-end sub-segment is particularly interesting. (more…)