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This week in social games was an exciting one. EA selected Live Gamer to power microtransactions, we had a chance to interview Alex St. John of Hi5, Chief Revenue Officer of Offerpal and Robert Winkler of the MMO Dawn of the Dragons, a brain IQ game called InGenius saw tremendous growth, Disney acquired Playdom for over 700M, Habbo saw growth on Facebook, action-adventure MMO Warrior Epic expanded to South East Asia, Depict 1.6 was selected as an OpenFeint Gold game, Mazda launched DriverVille to promote its new Mazda2 in North America, Zynga confirmed its joint venture with Softbank as well as its $150M in funding, Playdom signed a 5 yr deal with Facebook.
Electronic Arts Selects Live Gamer For Online Microtransactions
Today game publishing giant Electronic Arts is announcing that they’ve selected microtransaction/virtual economy service provider Live Gamer to help monetize its online gaming products. This is major news for the game industry, as America’s largest game publisher continues moving away from the old school retail model and towards social network-driven, free-to-play gaming, with revenue driven more by virtual item sales than sales of cardboard boxes on shelves. Last year, EA made a huge move into social gaming with the purchase of Playfish; this partnership with Live Gamer strongly hints that the company will put more of its existing “core gamer” franchises online, with Live Gamer handling sales.
Interview: hi5 President Alex St. John Discusses Sumo, Avatars and Facebook [Video]
At last week’s Casual Connect the first day had people atwitter about the Facebook vs. hi5 sumo match up later that evening. This was part of some ingenious marketing from the hi5 team, and they were looking to publicize the fact that their new development platform is ready to take on Facebook and establish hi5 as a truly great place to develop games. I got to sit down with Alex St. John, the former founder of WildTangent and now CTO and President of hi5, about his plans for the site.
Brain IQ Game InGenius Helping Over 350,000 Users Increase Mental Powers
We recently covered an IQ development game called InGenius by Zed Group that raised the bar on competitive gaming focused on intelligence from the genre’s prior ruler “Who Has The Biggest Brain” by Playfish. The game has surpassed 350,000 monthly active users in its 4th week on Facebook. The game comes from Spanish developer Zed Worldwide and is also available on Windows mobile, Android and Blackberry.
Casual Connect: OfferPal CRO Mihir Shah Discusses K-Factors and SocialKast [Video]
At last week’s Casual Connect, OfferPal CRO Mihir Shah held a conference to introduce SocialKast, OfferPal’s new service focused on allowing gamers to “write once, share anywhere”. The SocialKast service consists of a wall, which as seen in the video, allows users to share their gaming activity with people through the Yahoo! APIs, the Google APIs and more, to increase that viral spread that has recently been ebbing on Facebook.
The Rumors Were True: Disney Is Acquiring Playdom for Up To $763.2 Million
As we suspected a few days ago in our 3 Reasons That Disney Would Buy Playdom article, Disney has announced plans to acquire Playdom. The financials have been disclosed and at $563.2 million plus a $200 million earnout, the deal is larger than the approximately $400 million dollar deal that EA made to buy Playfish. As we reported, the match is good, based on Playdom’s existing properties and Disney’s IP. Once again, social gaming explodes to a whole new level… When will the growth stop?
How Did Habbo Beat Zynga At the Virtual World Game?
If you think Facebook is the sole model of social games and virtual worlds, think again: With 15 million monthly users, a web-based world for teens with the odd name of Habbo is larger than most of Facebook’s top games, including Zynga’s virtual world YoVille, which counted nearly 20 million monthlies last year, but has since shrunk to nearly 9 million. Habbo, by contrast, has been growing fairly steadily since its launch in 2000. Created by the Helsinki-based Sulake Corporation, Habbo added a Facebook application only very recently, so this growth has come without leveraging the social network. How did they do it, and what can social games learn from Sulake’s success?
UTV True Games’ Warrior Epic Expands to SouthEast Asia
International online game publisher UTV True Games is partnering with South East Asian based AsiaSoft to bring the game Warrior Epic to Asia. The fantasy action-adventure MMORPG will be distributed across Asian territories under AsiaSoft’s supervision. The game’s innovative mechanics should blend well with Asian cultures as it is exposed to millions of games in AsiaSoft’s reach.
Pictionary Style “Depict” Game Partners With OpenFeint
Aurora Feint’s Gold partnership is a select program that invites the cream of the crop applications with exceptional utilization of OpenFeint’s social features and are in turn rewarded for their characteristics. The latest game to be selected is Depict 1.6 by Makeshift games, a universal app for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Depict 1.6 is a great example of a social mobile application and is perfect for OpenFeint.
Can Mazda’s DriverVille Facebook Game Improve Sales of the Mazda2?
Automobile makers are finding it increasingly fruitful to make announcements using Facebook. Through Facebook, companies have segmented their audience by car, and one well known company, Ford, announced the launch of the new Ford Explorer through their Facebook Fanpage and received a great response. Another car maker attempting this is Mazda, with the announcement of Mazda2 for North America utilizing a branded social game on Facebook called DriverVille.
Zynga and Softbank Confirm Joint Venture in Asia and $150M in Funding
Zynga and Softbank have been secretly meeting in an effort to figure out how to tackle the Japenese market with high-quality, mass-appeal games. In June, news broke out that Zynga had ‘raised’ $150 million from Softbank Capital but we had no way of knowing how true that was. Zynga’s expansion into the Asian market, accelerated by acquisition of Chinese game developer XPD Media, is now solidified as the $150 million is confirmed. Zynga and Softbank will work in a joint venture to develop and distribute games across Japan.
Playdom Voluntary Succumbs To Facebook Credit Exclusivity
Facebook’s grand plan for domination continues as it annexes Playdom with the aura of Facebook Credits, enticing the social gaming giant to succumb to exclusivity over a five-year contract. Playdom, whom recently got acquired for $563.2 million, joins the likes of Crowdstar, RockYou and Zynga to enter into a five-year contract (notice: a long term contract is separate from a contract about exclusivity). The choice of going exclusive is expected to benefit all the players involved but there are others, such as Vikas Gupta of Jambool, that feel differently.
Interview: Dawn of the Dragons Proves MMOs Can Work on Facebook [Video]
At this year’s Social Developer Summit, I had the chance to sit down with Robert Winkler, co-founder of 5th Planet Games and creator of Dawn of the Dragons. The team is small, and two things stand out about Dawn of the Dragons. The first is that the game has that high production value and infinite customizability that reminds you of classic MMORPGs. The second is that with such a small team, they’ve accumulated nearly 100,000 MAUs and are continuing to grow. See the video after the jump to see Robert take the time to explain and demonstrate the game.
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