[casual_games] Other business models (was can't bite my tongue ...)

[Brian Robbins]

What Jim is talking about is something that I think many of us have
known for quite a while now.

The current casual game market is very good at reaching and monetizing
the "casual mom" demographic. However we do a relatively poor job at
reaching other demographics, especially younger and more male
audiences. The conventional thinking has always been that those people
are playing consoles and we just can't compete with them. The problem
for is really that we weren't able to monetize our games in a way that
they would pay for them. We've made it even worse for ourselves by
continuing to create games that are more and more suited to that mom
demographic.

When was the last time we saw a great casual racing game? There's been
a few but none of them have done very well. In fact, according to our
Casual Games White Paper, racing games have performed the worst:
<http://www.igda.org/wiki/index.php/Casual_Games_SIG/Whitepaper/Publishing#Sales_Performance_by_Game_Category>

What you don't see in the above statistic is how many downloads those
racing games would get. When I was working with a site that had a much
younger demographic, anytime we put up a racing game it easily
garnered 2-3 times the downloads of any other title we had. The
problem was nobody would pay because that younger demographic won't
pay $20 for a download. Not for a racing game, or for almost any other
game either. Yet that same demographic is spending a fortune on
entertainment through music, movies, etc. What we need to do is start
providing them a way to pay for the content we create suited to them,
not trying to trick them into paying for a model which they won't
subscribe to.

People keep saying that the download model is flawed, broken and
dying. I don't think it is, I just believe that we're going to find
other, better ways, to monetize a much larger portion of the market
than we are right now. We'll still sell $20 downloads, that just won't
be the main portion of the casual game industry revenue anymore.

-- 
Brian Robbins
Casual Game Visionary for Hire


On 10/11/06, Jim Greer <jimgreer at gmail.com> wrote:
> James -
>
> Thanks for the numbers - it sounds like you've established that for the
> Popcap.com audience the current model maximizes your profit. What we're
> betting is there are other audiences and other models out there - and it
> sounds like you agree with that, too.
>
> > We see the same low conversion rates that everyone else does on the PC (2%
> conversion rates are typical, which means 98% are not playing)
> >
>
> Yup. Since you're being so generous with the numbers, here's one I'd love to
> hear. What percentage of people playing a web game on your site initiate the
> download? 10%? To be clear - if you get 1000 people playing the web version
> of Bookworm, is it 100 of them who start the download, and 2 of those 100
> that go on to purchase it? If so, then I really think charging for premium
> content in the web version, at a lower price, might make sense. If not for
> your audience, then for the younger one we're targeting.
>
> > Here in the states, young people primarily play consoles and handhelds.
> >
>
> There's a site called MySpace you ought to check out... I think they have
> some young people there. Seriously, young people spend plenty of time on the
> web, socializing, playing online games, etc. If they don't respond to the
> current downloadable market, then it's time for some experimentation.
>
> Jim Greer
> jim at kongregate.com
> Company: http://kongregate.com
> Blog: http://jimonwebgames.com