[casual_games] Casual games on MacOS

Donald dbahlman at xblitz.com
Thu Feb 8 18:24:22 EST 2007


Oops! My bad




Apparently, I don’t have as much time as I think, at least to double check
my own math
(hehe)



Thanks DaveR. And a very good follow-up question as well.



Donald



_____

From: Dave Rohrl [mailto:daver at popcap.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2007 5:11 PM
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [casual_games] Casual games on MacOS



Your math is a bit off. If Mac sales were 3% of the market (and I suspect
the 10% number may be more accurate given Mac users’ greater predilection to
purchase), then that $10MM number would represent 500K units sold, not 500K
trials. This suggests something like 30M trials.



That said, I do think it’s hard for a new company to build much of a
business in a $10-30MM market with strong established market leaders. I
can’t advocate doing a casual game exclusively for the Mac; the revenue just
isn’t there. The question that developers should be asking themselves is
how the incremental development costs of doing a Mac port (or using a
multiplatform framework) compare to 10% of expected revenues from their
current projects (or forecasted sales from the other games they could be
working on).



- DaveR



_____

From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Donald
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2007 2:31 PM
To: 'IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List'
Subject: Re: [casual_games] Casual games on MacOS



Well, I don’t know of any official studies. But in my experience, I’ve
worked for two different MAC game companies. And in both cases the
companies had to convert to PC because the MAC market was just too small to
support them. I don’t think it’s changed that much recently.



So here’s my “unofficial” guess. On my portal, about 3% of our visitors use
a MAC. If you take the number of total US revenue for casual games from
2005 it’s about 350ml. Using my 3%, I would guess the potential revenues
for a MAC user base at about 10.5ml, or at 20 bucks ahead you could figure
about 525,000 users. The average US conversion is 1.5% so that would leave
about 8,000 potential MAC gamers. (That’s if all half million MAC users
demo’ed your game.)



Ok, maybe I have entirely too much time on my hands.



However, my two cents is that if it won’t work on an iPod, it probably won’t
make enough money
long term. Anyways, it’s still too much of a risk for us
right now.



Cheers!



Donald

xBlitz Entertainment



HYPERLINK "http://www.xblitz.com/"www.xblitz.com



_____

From: E. D. Bass [mailto:edb at CONCRETEALCHEMY.COM]
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2007 2:06 PM
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [casual_games] Casual games on MacOS



Thats a great question..... I'd be interested in that too

Jose Marin wrote:

Hi.

Is there some study/report on how big is the market for casual games (or
games in general) on MacOS?

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