Philip Reisberger is Chief Games Officer Bigpoint, a game company that has expanded using free-to-play games on their own web platform. He thinks this is ideal, and that companies like Zynga want to expand outside of their dependance on Facebook.
“Oh they desperately want to,” Reisberger said of Zynga expanding beyond Facebook. “They have plans, they’ve had plans for the last two years. Everyone wants to reduce their dependence on Facebook I think. Eventually it will come, but as some attempts have shown in the past, it’s not as easy to understand the world outside Facebook because it’s a totally different world. That’s why Bigpoint is in a very good position: we’re not just the ones developing, we’ve mastered, to a certain degree, the distribution.”
“For me it’s less the portfolio – I love what Zynga is doing, they really have this iterative innovation,” said Reisberger. “They grow something and then the next thing is a little bit better – they totally understand it – their business sense is quite similar to ours. They have a different basis, though, because we’re outside of Facebook. The 200-250 million monthly actives that they have, that’s say 30-40 per cent of the active Facebook population. Our quarter of a billion registrations we have do not represent 30-40 percent of the internet’s users.”
“So we’re in a bigger market, we’re not relying on a new guy registering on Facebook,” he added. “We have over a thousand media partners who drive traffic, so whenever they venture into new ground, it’s beneficial for us.”
Despite saying this about Zynga’s dependance on Facebook, Reisberger is very positive about the company. “For me, I like what Facebook, Zynga, mobile are doing – they’re educating people to play. What I like a lot is the fact that when we were young the gamer was a guy locked in his attic or bedroom. Now you see people playing everywhere. So I don’t see this peaking, I see it growing, maybe even accelerating because a few years ago we had maybe ten million gamers, now we have a billion gamers. So I think that there’s huge potential. What we really see is that the quality of people’s expectations are really rising.”
Source: GamesIndustry.biz