Social Music Gaming

While it's going to be a long while before anyone gets within striking distance of Zynga's dominance when it comes to social games on Facebook, the fight for the number two position on that site is a fierce one, when it comes to daily active users.

Three companies are battling for the silver medal -- Wooga, Electronic Arts and King.com. EA's held the lead for a while, but earlier this month King.com broke away from the pack, largely on the strength of its Bubble Witch Saga game.

As it looks to extend that lead, the company is also focusing on what's next. And for now, the field is fairly wide open. The Saga series is likely to continue growing -- and there are other games the company can move over from its Web-based game series. Acquisitions aren't out of the question. And there's even some chatter about a possible IPO.

That 'going public' talk started around the top of the month, when the company's CEO and co-founder Riccardo Zacconi told Reuters he was "preparing the company" for a possible offering, even though it would be at least next year before it made that step.

Alex Dale, King.com's chief marketing officer, seemed to take a step back from that in a recent conversation with Gamasutra, however.

"We have done some internal reorganization to take that [IPO] option if we want to or need to, but there are no specific plans and that is not a focus for the company."

Right now, the focus for King.com is on growth, both in terms of daily and monthly average users, as well as financially. King.com bought its first external studio a little over a month ago -- Fabrication Games in Stockholm. And as consolidation becomes more common in the mobile and social space, prices are sure to rise.

EA's $750 million buyout of PopCap Games nine months ago (with incentives that could drive the price to $1.3 billion) and Zynga's recent $180 million purchase of OMGPOP have inflate the market -- and if it wants to keep its lead, King.com has to be able to compete with those sorts of bids.

Dale didn't discuss the size of the company's war chest, but said King.com is happy with its growth.

"The profitability is good," he says. "The business models are good. We are growing revenues fast -- and by that, I mean high double digits -- and we're investing in developing new games."

Profitable since 2005, King.com has diverse lines of income -- social games on Facebook and mobile (both of which draw from player microtransactions) and web-based skill tournaments, where player can make small wagers of 10-15 cents (which supplements the advertising income).

"We're coming from business model 'A' and we're adding both 'B' and 'C'," says Dale. "If you play Bubble Witch Saga on Facebook, that's a very relaxing experience. It's competitive, but in a gentle way."

But he adds, "The same game mechanic on the tournament side is different. If you play Bubble Witch on King.com and you're playing for a cash stake, it adds a competitive edge."

While King.com has been around the games world for nine years, it was the move to Facebook a little over a year ago that has caused it to see a major surge in popularity. Bubble Witch Saga's DAUs now top Zynga's Farmville by 1.4 million -- but that popularity hasn't come without criticism.

Some players have noted Bubble Witch Saga seems very reminiscent of Puzzle Bobble and taken the company to task for that. Dale dismisses those comparisons, however.

"We are 100 percent using our own IP," he says. "We've been taking the IP we like that has performed well [on the website] and launched that on Facebook."

While the company is regularly looking for new ways to expand its reach, don't expect it to broaden its focus to include resource management games like FarmVille. While they've been successful for other social gaming companies, King.com thinks they're too difficult for lapsed players to return to. Instead, casual titles (like it focuses on) always leave a door open for players to walk away -- and don't penalize them for leaving.

"It's a lot easier to reactivate in a causal game, whereas if you go to a resource management game after you haven't played for a couple months, your castle has been destroyed," says Dale.

Social games companies - or, indeed, any Facebook application developer - using the social network's Facebook Credits virtual currency have to give up 30% of revenues to Facebook. That's a business model that works for games like FarmVille, but presents more problems for, say, selling music. However, it seems Facebook may be flexible going forward, as it tries to get different kinds of companies to use Facebook Credits. "We receive a fee of up to 30% when users make such purchases from our Platform developers using our Payments infrastructure. In the future, if we extend Payments outside of games, the percentage fee we receive from developers may vary," explains a quietly-amended section of its S-1 IPO filing. How it might vary remains unexplained, but if the terms are good, we could see more bands starting to sell songs for Facebook Credits.
Source: TechCrunch - http://tinyurl.com/c89z67u

Here’s a crazy turn of events: Zynga no longer has the biggest game on Facebook by daily active users.

OMGPOP, the New York-based casual gaming company that has had a huge comeback in the last month, now has the top spot for daily usage with its Pictionary-like game Draw Something.

In the last couple of days, Draw Something just edged past Zynga’s Words With Friends to take the top spot for a game in terms of users on the AppData leaderboard, which is a tracking service for apps on the Facebook platform. Draw Something now has 10.8 million daily users who are logged in through Facebook, compared to Words With Friends, which has 8.6 million daily active users. (If you look at monthly usage, the picture is different with Zynga’s CityVille and Texas Holdem Poker on top. But game developers tend to focus on daily usage since it often correlates better with monetization.) The company told us a few days ago that it had just passed 25 million registered users and popped above 10 million daily active users a week ago.

Chris DeWolfe is not resting on his laurels after his big-name success as a co-founder of Myspace.

For a lot of people, Chris DeWolfe is still best known as the co-founder of pioneering social network Myspace — but even with that big name success under his belt, it’s fair to say he is not resting on his laurels just yet. For the past two years he has been heads down building an increasingly powerful social gaming company SGN, which was recently previously known as MindJolt, that is aiming to give Zynga a run for its money by making games that bridge Facebook, mobile and the web.

We talked to DeWolfe this weekend at the South By Southwest Interactive conference. You can watch the interview in the video above to see him discuss the lessons he learned after selling Myspace to NewsCorp, why Zynga and Facebook could start to lose an edge post-IPO, SGN’s huge female following, and more.

The Zynga Platform Delivers More Ways to Play and More People to Play with on Zynga.com

Zynga Welcomes Game Developers Mob Science, Row Sham Bow and Sava Transmedia as Inaugural Platform Partners

SAN FRANCISCO – March 1, 2012 – Zynga (NASDAQ: ZNGA), the world’s leading provider of social game services, today announced the Zynga Platform, a new platform designed to bring players what they’ve asked for: new ways to play and more people to play with. As part of the initial roll out, Zynga will debut the beta release of Zynga.com, the company’s new destination for social games. In addition to serving up popular Zynga games, Zynga.com will let players discover and play social games created by third party game developers. These Platform partners will be able to reach new audiences and make their games even more social.

“We built Zynga.com to give our players more ways to connect with each other and play great social games whether built by Zynga or other talented developers,” said Mark Pincus, founder and CEO, Zynga. “Together with our platform partners, we look forward to bringing more play to the world on our platform.”

Zynga.com – a playground for social games
Zynga.com is built with the goal of bringing players more ways to connect with more people on a new destination dedicated to social games. Zynga.com will enable players to meet and connect with other players who share a love for social games, ultimately giving them more friends to play with. Players will progress faster in their games by tapping the entire community to instantly get what they need to complete quests, obtain virtual items and advance to the next level. Zynga.com is one of the first sites to be totally integrated with Facebook as an extension of the companies’ strong and collaborative partnership. It will allow players to log in with their Facebook ID and easily play games with their existing Facebook friends, as well as other people who love to play the same games.

“Zynga.com was created based on listening to players and understanding what they want and need to make their play time more fun and meaningful,” said Manuel Bronstein, general manager of Zynga.com. “We are excited to give players a way to connect with other people who love to play the same games in a destination that is all and only about games. We will continue to listen to player feedback and provide even better ways for them to connect and play together.”

MXP4’s Pump It! application has been dominating Facebook’s gaming apps for some time now as part of their Bopler Games musical suite. Android and iPhone addicts will be pleased to know that MXP4 is teaming with Mobile Roadie to ‘bring the noise’ to mobile platforms this month.

The success has been fuelled by an addictive mix of core gaming traits (reaction times and hand-eye coordination) coupled with the ability of the user to apply the game to their own personal choice of music (their audio avatar, in effect).

For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, Pump It! will play your selected track over a virtual speaker whose four ‘quadrants’ light up and flash against various BPM changes and riffs within the musical track. The player simply hovers over the quadrant that is flirting for their pointer, thus building up a musical momentum gauge and charging the central Pump It! button of the app’s title.

All the while grooving to one’s favourite tunes, users then click like crazy to build up points during the ‘bonus’ section, before the quadrants effectively reset themselves and the rhythmic mouse-baiting begins again in earnest until the track has played out.

Japanese gaming giant GREE just acquired mid-core, mobile game developer Funzio for $210 million in an all-cash deal that should boost its ability to build games for Western audiences.

Funzio is behind Crime City, Modern War and Kingdom Age, which are graphical RPGs that have had more than 20 million downloads on Apple’s iOS, Android or Facebook platforms.
I had heard a few weeks back that Funzio was in a fundraising process at a $350 million post-money valuation and had also been loosely talking to various buyers in an auction-style process. Apparently, the fundraising efforts helped tip Funzio into a sale, but maybe not at the valuation I had originally heard about. Still, $210 million is not bad at all, considering that the company had raised about $20 million to date from IDG Ventures and Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson. For comparison, Draw Something-maker OMGPOP went to Zynga for $180 million in cash plus an undisclosed earnout.
Why did GREE buy Funzio? GREE is a multi-billion dollar mobile gaming company from Japan that is trying to break into Western markets. Its profit margins put Zynga to shame, but the company is running out of room to grow as its home country becomes saturated. GREE bought a gaming network OpenFeint for $104 million last year as part of that effort.
But the thing about GREE is that it is a dual platform provider and game developer, so OpenFeint only really addressed one side of its needs. OpenFeint was the platform and GREE needs in-house development capabilities, for which it has been hiring very aggressively in the Bay Area. Funzio should help with this after GREE scouted many targets over the past few months. Early-stage talks with at least two other game developers and platforms didn’t work out for various reasons. They had also looked at OMGPOP, but didn’t move fast enough because Zynga’s chief

Zynga takes the first step in promoting games published through its partner programs today by adding Row Sham Bow’s Woodland Heroes to the Facebook cross-promotion bar that appears above Zynga games.

Adding a game to the zBar, as Zynga called the tool, seems like a small thing compared to what Zynga wants to accomplish in publishing third party games on Zynga.com. Cross-promotion bars have been thoroughly explored by 6waves, Applifier and Tapjoy (which acquired AppStrip) on both social and mobile — and 6waves has a sizable head start on Facebook games publishing. But Zynga has two features that other cross-promotion networks lack: brand recognition and size (65 million daily active users and 292 million monthly active users on both social and mobile as of Q1 2012). Both of those are key factors driving interest from smaller developers in the Zynga publishing platform.

As detailed on Zynga’s blog today, publishing partner head Rob Dyer says that Zynga intends to drive traffic and test promotions during this early beta phase to see what impact it has on Zynga’s network as a whole — and what impact Zynga’s network will have on an individual game.

Good news: European companies are in second and third places in social gaming on Facebook. Bad news: Zynga is first.

Both Wooga, based in Berlin, and King.com, based in London, are now slugging it out for second and third places, according to AppData, a service that measures the popularity of mobile apps and developers.

Riccardo Zacconi, CEO of King.com, says that while Wooga had already pushed EA into second place, King has stolen a lead on them both this week in the measure of daily active users (DAU) playing social games on Facebook.

Nor is this a case of the newcomers on the block beating some old-timer that doesn’t get it. While EA may be traditionally associated with games consoles—a totally different kind of gaming that appeals to a completely different kind of player (young adult males rather than older adult females)—remember that it bought its way into social gaming with the purchase of the London-based Playfish for $400 million in 2009, and of PopCap Games, the maker of Bejeweled and Plants Vs. Zombies, of Seattle for $1.3 billion last summer.

But—and it is a very big but —before popping the champagne corks, let’s not get too self-congratulatory. Anyone remember War Admiral? Or perhaps more recently, Richard Thompson? No? War Admiral was runner-up to Seabiscuit in the 1938 “match race of the century” at the Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, and Mr. Thompson was the unfortunate silver medal to Usain Bolt’s iconic 2008 Beijing 100-meter gold run. No one remembers runners up.

So while these two European companies slug it out for second place, the behemoth that is the U.S.-based, publicly quoted Zynga Inc. utterly dwarfs them. According to AppData, King.com has 10.26 million daily active users; Wooga 10.17 million DAUs; and EA 9.07 million DAUs. But Zynga (65.14 million DAUs) is twice as big as the next three games makers combined.

But hang on, says Mr. Zacconi, we are comparing apples and oranges. “If you look at the actual social games that Zynga has —not, for example, poker games—then its lead is cut.”

He is right, but that still leaves Zynga way out in front, and still bigger than the next three combined. Both Mr. Zacconi and Jens Begemann, CEO of Wooga, point to one reason for Zynga’s dominance. “Zynga was there when social gaming really started to take off and were able to get that essential first foot in the door,” said Mr. Begemann. “That early start has been the key for them.”

Neither CEO said passing Zynga was a target for them. “I am not focused on passing Zynga,” said Mr. Zacconi. “My target is to build a company that is leading in casual and social games, making sure that every game we launch is the best game we can have in it is genre, and focus on revenue and profits.”

But according to Nicholas Lovell, CEO of the acclaimed Gamesbrief, a respected newsletter that covers the games industry, to focus on who is winning on Facebook is to look in the wrong place. “The Facebook battle has been won by Zynga,” he said. “Mobile is the battleground of the future.”

“No one is saying, ‘Guys if we don’t have a Facebook strategy we are dead.’ They are saying ‘if we don’t have a mobile strategy we are dead.’”

But he is keen to stress he is not writing off Facebook and its 845 million users; simply that the world’s largest social network has matured and as such it will attract different, and perhaps less exciting, companies.

“It is not to say that Facebook is not a viable platform for making real revenues and profits. But it is that the race to build a must-have, 10-times return, gaming business on a new and exciting platform, well if you were writing the business plan for that game business, Facebook might not even appear in it.”

And for companies looking to build a long-term future, the Zynga model—get big, quick and then look to exit on the public markets—may be a game plan to emulate.

It is a strategy not lost on Mr. Zacconi. King.com has certainly made no secret of that an IPO is a consideration and while Mr. Zacconi is keen to stress that nothing has been decided, he has put in place the changes needed should he decide to go that way. By way of an aside, he did say that his preferred market was not in Europe—it’s NASDAQ.

None of the players in this battle are blind to the changes. Zynga acquired OMGPOP, makers of the viral (and mobile) game Draw Something; Wooga launched Diamond Dash last year for iOS last year, and King.com is to launch its first mobile game, Bubble Saga, next week, first on Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, and then on both iOS and Android two weeks later.

With the growth of mobile, and at the moment the lack of any clear champion, the gaming space has been thrown open once again. If European companies can repeat their belated success in social gaming in this new arena, then the race is on.

Mobile Social Sports App Revolutionizes How Fans Watch Sports, Provides Live Social Games While Watching Televised Sporting Events 

As the first live mobile and social gaming experience for sports fans, FanCake is a free iOS app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, which enables fans and viewers to participate in televised sports by competing with and against one another, showcasing their sports knowledge, and socializing with Facebook friends and fellow fans – all based on the action on TV.

With the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament kicking off Thursday, FanCake will include all 67 games of the annual March Madness event and host a live, in-app tournament. Fans can play along while watching each game and compete for medals, trophies and win social challenges.

LONDON, Feb. 29, 2012 is a social fan platform, developed by inensu. SuperFan has redefined music apps by combining social, game mechanics, location and fan clubs to create a platform for fans to feel closer to their idols. Universal Music has partnered with inensu to launch an official SuperFan App for the break-out US R&B/pop group Mindless Behavior.

Combining engagement mechanics from social games, location apps and fan clubs, SuperFan is an innovative platform built for the social and constantly connected fans of today. Fans can virtually travel around the world with Mindless Behavior and be part of everything they do in the real world every day, wherever they are.

SuperFans play trivia & games to prove that they truly are a Mindless SuperFan and compete to get on the country and friend leaderboards. SuperFan also mixes the real and virtual worlds, by awarding in-game points to those who attend real shows and check-in to the SuperFan Reporter (www.superfanreporter.com) via their mobile phones.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/02/29/4300406/polydor-teams-up-with-inensu-to.html#storylink=cpy

More than 13 million copies sold for Just Dance 3 and other dancing games last quarter (ending December) helped Ubisoft meet its third quarter guidance and grow its revenue to €652 million ($852 million).

Social and free-to-play games are the future of the video games industry. Long gone are the days where you have to pay £50 upfront in the hope that the product won't suck. Today you can start playing a game, for free, and only if you like it can you decide to spend a bit of money on it – you can improve gameplay, buy some clothes for your avatar, furniture for your digital house or acquire extra weapons for your digital hero.

Free-to-play is the dominant business model for most games on social networks, and increasingly so for mobile games and online games in general. Research firm Flurry found that over 65% of the top grossing game apps in Apple's AppStore are free to play. Only 6 months earlier, in January 2011, this figure stood at 39%.