[casual_games] Digital Shelf Space

[Eric Lamendola]

Good Morning All,

 

If production budgets keep climbing and the churn rate is becoming
increasingly faster, does the Casual Games space look like it will suffer
the same fate as the console market (or movies for that matter) where price
points go up and the quality goes down?  It also appears that based on this
trend, there is less and less room for a "sleeper hit".  Word of mouth is
what has kept a part of this industry alive for a long time and some
publishers seem to be moving towards more and more models that cycle a game
out in a week or two not allowing a title to pick up enough steam to get a
W-O-M campaign behind it.

 

In this online world, the "Digi-Browsing" retail concept is clearly not the
same as brick and mortar.  Sure, you can list 200 games on a site or provide
links and graphics to the top 10 games, but browsing through 200 titles
online is incredibly daunting and not nearly as effective as walking down an
aisle in a store where you can look at box covers and browse 40 titles at a
time.  Online, it appears on a given screen that you can either give no
information about 40 games, just enough information about 6 games, or too
much information about 1 game.

 

So, what is truly the cause of this issue and what is the most effective
solution?  Especially since some publishers put up hundreds of titles in a
year, is the onus on the publisher to be more selective of content and be
more conscious of driving sales to ALL of their products and not just
"What's New"?  Is the onus on developers to start making fewer titles in a
year to allow their previous titles a chance to excel on their own?  Is
there a new way to display product information that allows people to see new
product without completely shifting the focus away from other popular and
potentially more successful products?  In looking at several retail models,
there seems to be a lack of "retail-related" standards in the sales of
online games.  Only recently have a few companies introduced the concept of
sales, rebates, coupons, clearance, specials, etc. which seems to be the
next logical choice for driving sales to different "departments". 

 

The Mobile space has even less "shelf space" and there are several hundred
titles in the queues at the wireless companies clamoring to be on the deck.
There you get 10 lines of text in which a product will appear with 9 others
with: no option to sample the product, see screen shots, or get any
information about a game before purchasing it.  This is going to be even a
MORE difficult nut to crack.

 

Just wondering.

 

--------- www.slingo.com - "First in Fun" -----------

Eric Lamendola

Director of Operations, Slingo Inc.

Business Development / Game Design

 

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