22nd June 2010 by Thomas
Innovating on business models
It is obvious to all that business models have evolved over the past few years. Some small changes and some bigger ones and I am glad to see that it is still going on with companies exploring and experimenting both new and variations of old ones.
I have often said that the business models are now part of the game design process – and we are currently seeing new games using this to the best. But to see historical actors of the industry making their own experiments with their costly projects is actually equally interesting – or even more considering they have to manage their existing games and adapt them accordingly. There have been three announcements lately of that nature that I think are worth closely looking at. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: APB, Blizzard, Business Model, DDO, LOTRO, Monetisation, Real Time Words, Remote Auction house, Turbine, WOW
Posted in Events, ICO Partners
(2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)8th May 2009 by Diane
Cease and desist (being a platform)
Blizzard has recently sent cease and desist letters to the developers of iPhone apps using data from the Armory (of which the text can be found here), not so long after the announcement of the new add-on policy, which forbids add-on developers from monetizing their add-ons, and from obfuscating their code (preventing any sustainable competitive advantage for any of them. Except established companies with leverage to negotiate.) Together, these moves seem to sum up to a clear policy : preventing anyone from doing money by providing services around World of Warcraft. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Events, ICO Partners
(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)27th April 2009 by Thomas
Your MMO on Mobile
The week-end saw the video from a World of Warcraft client on iPhone get featured on a series of website. Whether or not the video is a fake and the whole story a hoax is actually irrelevant as this is more the concept that we actually want to discuss (it should be noted that they still have an accessible website but, with a quick Linkedin research, most of the management team seems to have moved on other projects).
You can go see the demo video at Kotaku as the Youtube versions are getting removed as they pop up.
But the basic principle is an app acting like a 3D client for WOW that would run on your iPhone. And the question that actually gets asked is who on earth would like anything like that? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Events, ICO Partners
(4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)12th March 2009 by Thomas
GDC09 lecture teaser
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Conference, ICO Partners, Latin, Map, Superman, WOW
Posted in Events, ICO Partners
(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)29th January 2009 by Diane
News roundup 29/01/08
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.
Tags: Consoles, Flying Labs, PopCap, social networking, SOE, WOW
Posted in Events, ICO Partners
(2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)