Social Gamer Survey Shows Them Open To Ads

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RockYou recently released the results of a study of over 2,000 social gamers, (60 percent female and 40 percent male who play at least one hour a week) detailing their spending and playing behavior in-game. Positive for advertisers, 44 percent are open to viewing in-game ads in order to earn virtual goods and 24 percent have clicked on an ad and made an online purchase, even if 96 percent of players in general don’t buy virtual goods.

Many social gamers play console games, with 52 percent of players saying they owned a Wii, 46 percent owned an Xbox 360 and 34 percent said they owned a PS3. These game players are, not surprisingly, enthusiastic game players spending 13 hours per week on social networks, checking or updating 17 times per week, with an average of 218 followers or friends.

The surveyed social gamers spend 9.5 hours per week on social games, and average over 16 friends who play the same game. They note that they made an average of 20 new friends through social gaming and 82 percent of social gamers say they regularly play online with someone they have never met in real life.

Skyrim Might Influence Dragon Age II

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BioWare has claimed in the past that they had learned lessons from the reception to Dragon Age II and would apply them to the sequel appropriately. BioWare CEO and co-founder Dr. Ray Muzyka said the company will not only draw on the strengths and weaknesses the Dragon Age series, but will also look to other game series as well.

“Dragon Age is gonna have the best of features from the prior Dragon Age games, but it’s also gonna have a lot of things I think players are gonna find compelling from some of the games that are out now that are doing really well with more of an open world feel,” said BioWare CEO and co-founder Dr. Ray Muzyka. “We’re checking Skyrim out aggressively. We like it. We’re big admirers of [Bethesda] and the product. We think we can do some wonderful things.”

“Our goal is to surprise and delight our fans,” Muzyka said. “I’ve seen something in the last couple of weeks that is really the future of that franchise that is so compelling, I am so looking forward to being able to announce it.”

Source: Wired

Star Wars: The Old Republic Talk Free-To-Play And More

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Star Wars: The Old Republic has been a long time coming, combining BioWare’s classic cinematic storytelling with MMORPG conventions. While scouting for a studio began in 2005, development didn’t begin in earnest until 2006 when the Star Wars IP was locked down.

“[BioWare co-founders] Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk believed it was time to get into the MMO space; they’re always thinking about how BioWare can continue to be successful in the future,” recalls James Ohlen, creative director. “So they sent a few of us down to Austin to open a studio.”

“[Austin was chosen] because of its rich history as a great location to make online games,” says BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk. “Any time you start a new studio, there’s a challenge in getting the right mix of people, culture, and personalities. That’s probably the biggest thing you need to get right and something we took a lot of care doing.”

When they first started on the game, they realized that the rabbit hole went deep – it would involve more systems and dialog than all other previous BioWare RPGs combined. “There are more game systems in it than in any other BioWare RPG,” says Ohlen, “with a lot of those systems having a lot more depth than in any other RPG I’ve ever worked on. The fact that this is a game with huge worlds that are each the size of a game by themselves — that’s been a huge challenge for us.”

One of the difficulties was managing the size of the Austin studio. “It took me a decade to build up the Edmonton staff,” says Ohlen. “But I had to build Austin in like four years.”

On the front of free-to-play games, Ohlen says, “First of all, I believe that there is only a group of developers — like Zynga — who are making smaller games. For the most part, the successful ones are still the big ones, like World of Warcraft, Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and all of EA’s big sports franchises. What you are seeing is just two different areas, both of which are growing, and I think it’s good that small games exist because they allow for more innovation and more risk-taking because you’re not betting the farm every time you build one.”

“Yes, it’s getting difficult for companies to compete in the subscription space because players’ expectations are so high,” he added. “That has been a big challenge for us, mainly because Blizzard set the bar so high with World of Warcraft. But I think we’ve hit it and we’re bringing innovations that are really going to change the way people view the AAA subscription MMO.”

As for going F2P down the line, Ohlen says, “I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future but, right now, we’re very much focused on making it a subscription game.”

While the game has finally released, that hardly means that the job is over for the various writers of Star Wars: The Old Republic. “Though the game is now a trilogy — with Chapters I, II, and III — we are planning to keep it going for a fourth chapter — and more,” says Daniel Erickson, writing director. “That is my hope… that I’ll continue to have a job here. The writing team has been hard at work on additional content because the lead time for content is quite long when you’re doing AAA professional voice acting and such.”

As far as success goes, there are plans in place to make a profit regardless of how much of a hit it is. “While I can’t give away exact numbers, I can say that we have plans for super success in the millions of subscribers… and then we have plans for if we have a much smaller subscriber base,” said Ohlen. “While it would be great to get the kind of numbers that World of Warcraft gets, we don’t have to come close to those in order to be wildly successful. We could be well below WoW and still be incredibly profitable.”

Source: Gamasutra

Crytek Looks To Free-To-Play, Mobile Development

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Crytek director of global business development Carl Jones says that the company is looking more towards mobile and free-to-play. The German developer is currently developing the free-to-play shooter WarFace and its engine technology is also be used in other free-to-play titles, such as MindArk’s Entopia Universe.

“At the lower end of the development scale where you maybe aren’t creating such complex games, you’re generally delivering more content throughout the lifecycle of the game,” explains Jones. “If you’re trying to create content on a weekly basis, which is quite often necessary in a free-to-play, mobile or casual game, your pipeline to get it out there has to be super-fast and very robust. And that’s something we’re concentrating on a great deal.”

“Obviously we continue to build on our realtime tools,” he says. “We don’t want to end up with massive teams having to work on games in future. There are some very, very big name studios that have made games that you would think are a success, but actually they’re closing down because the sheer cost of making that game was too high. Obviously that’s untenable, except for a very small number of games per year.”

Source: Edge

Virtual Good Sales Come From Older Demographics: Survey

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MocoSpace recently conducted a three-month survey polling nearly 500,000 gamers on the company’s network of 22 million users. The study found that while gamers aged 25 to 35 spend the most time playing social games on mobile devices, gamers over the age of 45 spend far more on virtual goods.

Gamers over the age of 35, who made up 18 percent of those surveyed, were responsible for 42 percent of virtual goods purchases. By comparison, gamers aged 18 to 25 (43 percent of those surveyed) were responsible for only 18 percent of the purchases.

“We’re seeing parents go from spending money on buying games for their kids, to spending money on virtual goods in games for themselves,” said MocoSpace CEO Justin Siegel. “The time-versus-money balance seems to come into play here, where young people have more time than money, and the reverse holds true as we all grow up.”

The results of the survey suggests that certain monetization methods should work better on different demographics. For instance, while younger demographic are likely to spend less, they might be more amenable to games that are ad-supported.

Source: MocoSpace

YouTube Reaches Trillion+ Views For 2011

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YouTube says that it had over a trillion playbacks during 2011. There is no specific designation for how a “playback” is determined but it is believed to be five seconds of video playback watched.

“That’s about 140 views for every person on the earth,” writes Kevin Allocca, YouTube Trends Manager. “More than twice as many stars as in the Milky Way. And if I had a penny for every … OK, you get my drift, it’s a big number.”

The top viewed channels included the gaming related Machinima, IGN Entertainment and Rooster Teeth. For all the large movies that released this year, the trailer for Immortals was the most watched.

Source: youtube-global.blogspot.com