I took fewer notes on the sessions I attended the last two days of Casuality. There were more panels and fewer individual speakers, and the panelists in general were giving out less chunky data nuggets (and more soft opinions) than the individual speakers. Here’s some stuff I did note down: (From various speakers and various sessions – I don’t remember in all cases who said what)
Mobile:
$5.99 is the average game sales price
65% of revenue from women
Try Before You Buy is starting to hit mobile (10 minute trials versus 60 minute for PC), but it’s not THAT successful, because the games are often poor and users thus don’t want to buy.
1/3 of mobile sales are puzzles
75% are, more broadly, ‘casual games’
Other:
Lots of talk of bringing in more ad revenue, in part to make more money from the 98-99% of gamers who don’t buy (i.e. only doing the first part of ‘try and buy’).
AOL rep. said that AOL does not share (and apparently doesn’t plan to share) ad revenue from browser-versions of downloadable games, but DOES share ad revenue from games built exclusively for web. His excuse is that the former are designed mainly to sell the downloadable versions of the game and don’t generate many ad impressions, anyways. The crowd at this session was not terribly happy with his statements/position.
The AOL rep. also said that downloadable games with browser versions sell much more than those without (I think he said 3-5 times more but I may be mistaken). My take: First, probably only the higher quality/bigger budget casual games HAVE a corresponding downloadable version, and second, his statement also seemed to be part of his justification for not paying ad-revenue sharing on these games (i.e. – see, you’ll sell more downloadable games, so you don’t need ad-share). So I take his figures with several grains of salt.
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July 3rd, 2006 at 12:49 pm
I agree that the second to last point is a cop out.
On the last point, three reasons:
- yes, better games tend to get the free web version built, so there’s a chicken-egg thing here.
- games with a free web version have that additional “step” in the path from see the game listed –> try web version –> try download –> purchase progression that consumers make. Think of it as coaxing a shy little squirrel along toward the cash register
- games with a free web version get better merchandising/location – i.e. if it’s a download only, and not moving a lot of units, it gets pushed down/off the site.
July 3rd, 2006 at 6:20 pm
[...] I’m not sure how this all stacks up for Vista either, which is meant to focus more on games, along with DirectX 10. It’s as if Live Arcade has caught Microsoft by surpise, leading to exploratory moves like this, to see how and where they can sell these Casual Games. I think I’m just a bit let down by all this – Microsoft have found themselves a strong leader on the console simply through lack of coherent competition, and now they’re reversing into the Casual Games market at a time with a retail plan that could conceivably force a huge shift in its structure, when the same industry is trying to figure out how to maximise try-before-you-buy games and increase ad-revenue. [...]
July 7th, 2006 at 6:04 am
I left a response to your notes on my blog here : http://jonasantonsson.com/archive/2006/07/07/116.aspx