ICO Partners

As the European online games market is becoming increasingly competitive, we are starting to see some casualties, games and companies not meeting the success they planned and closing operations or shutting some games down. In the recent weeks, the following closures have been announced, all in the Free to Play category:

• Italy-based Gametribe portal, operated by Game Media Networks, subsidiary of Digital Bros, a retail videogame distribution company, will be closing down on December 31st. The portal had already lost or not renewed the license for Dekaron from developer GameHi since September. It also operated action online game Infinity, cel-shading MMO Dreams of Mirror Online (DOMO) and football session game Kicks Online.

• UK and Spain-based company Rourke Online has seen its portal Key2Play and game servers disconnected after failing to pay for the hosting at the end of November. They were operating F2P MMOs Priston Tale 2 and Ys Online. Ys Online’s service termination had already been announced.

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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. (more…)

The past week in Korea has been very busy for us. We attended the KGC event for the first time this year, and it has been a very nice experience.

Thomas spoke at KGC, presenting not one lecture, but two! Both went very well, with a very attentive audience that was thirsty for knowledge on the European market and the European players.

The presentations are on SlideShare now:.

This presentation is similar to others we’ve done during the year. Some of the numbers have been updated, and as always we have provided additional information from previous iterations. The section on how to enter the European market, and related advice, has been fleshed out more thoroughly.

This is quite a new angle for us. We prepared this lecture at the request of the KGC organizers, and we can honestly say it was a lot of fun to prepare. We’d like to develop it even further, but we hope that in its current form it has enough material to be useful to its intended audience (non-European developers).

As ever, feedback on both presentations is very welcome!

[You may have noticed that those presentations feature a different logo than our previous materials. We'll talk more about that soon, but for now let's just say that we felt the need to move on to an image that's more representative of ICO's spirit.]

The lecture went really well, even if Thomas didn’t have time to insert a few Bastille Day jokes ! The slides can be downloaded here and seen below:

To renew the disclaimer in the presentation, a lot of the numbers are estimates based on various sources. If you have official numbers for any of those games, please contact us and we’ll update it!

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. (more…)

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.

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.

According to the Financial Times quoting IDC, most of the growth on the laptop market comes from netbooks (small, lightweight PCs on Windows or Linux, destined first and foremost to browse the web - the most famous one is the adorable little Asus Eee PC, of which I am a proud owner). IDC expects them to represent as much as 11-12% of the laptop market in 2009.

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