The Secret Growth Driver Behind Hit Casual MMOs
At last month's Casual Games Conference in Seattle, I spent about 30 minutes chatting with Daniel James, CEO of Three Rings. Daniel told me an interesting story about how Puzzle Pirates, the hit Java MMO, has accelerated user base growth.
Puzzle Pirates utilizes few other distribution portals outside of www.puzzlepirates.com. But one site Daniel has had phenomenal success with has been Miniclip.com, the browser-based games portal.
In Daniel's experience, a stunning 1 million out of Puzzle Pirates' 3 million players have come via Miniclip alone.
Because Miniclip users are younger, they don't monetize as well as other players. Daniel's estimation was 1% monetization for Miniclip users vs 5% among the rest of the Puzzle Pirates user base. However, according to Daniel a secondary wave of word-of-mouthers join Puzzle Pirates shortly after each wave of new Miniclip users and the conversion rate among this secondary wave is much better.
I bring this up now because of this very recent Ypulse article, which contends that Miniclip has been the primary growth catalyst for games like Club Penguin and Runescape as well. A degree of influence not surprising given the "explosive growth" of the Miniclip.com site itself, as illustrated on this chart.
Here are some quotes from the Ypulse article:
Without Miniclip, it is likely that there is no Club Penguin phenomenon. The product launched in October 2005 and was able to eke out a base of about 25,000 users. A few months later, the game was posted on Miniclip and experienced explosive growth. By September, the product had over 2.6 million users. Runescape's user base saw a similar, if slightly less dramatic, increase from a niche game to a multi-million user success.
With a core demographic of 10-24 year olds, Miniclip has built a portal with the power to instantly launch a youth brand. What network TV was for The Transformers, so Miniclip has been for Club Penguin. Great products can travel virally, but the task is a lot easier if the starting point is 30 million exposures.
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Neopets is Hunting for an Executive Producer
US-CA-Glendale-Executive Producer, Neopets
Here's an opportunity that doesn't come around every day. Neopets is looking for an EP.
The Neopets Executive Producer reports to a VP and interacts with the longest list of Director types I've ever seen included in a job description. I quote:
This position will interact closely with:
-Director, Technical Development
-Director, Multimedia Applications Development
-Director, Casual Game Development
-Director, Marketing and Operations
-Director, Promotions Marketing
-Director, Fraud Management
-Design Director, Neopets Creative Resources
-Director, Consumer Products
-Director, Research Analysis
But as we all know, the market for talent is tight. So I wasn't surprised to see a relatively light set of prerequisites:
EDUCATION/EXPERIENCE:
-BA in a related field or equivalent experience. MA a plus.
-3+ years working as a Product Manager, Producer or Associate Producer on multi-player on-line games or similar position.
-2+ years experience with project budgetary processes.
And after listing off 23 bullet points under the KNOWLEDGE/SKILLS section, I always find it odd when companies throw in a line like this:
-Proficiency in the following software or systems:
-Microsoft Office, Visio, MS Project, Outlook
In any case, it's late at night and I'm being overly critical. If you're interested in this opportunity, email Mia Burgess (mia.burgess@mtvstaff.com) or go straight to the top by tracking down Kyra Reppen, SVP & GM of Neopets.
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Sony Online Saying All The Right Things
From a Gamasutra interview with Nicholas Beliaeff, Sony Online San Diego studio head… here are a few quotes:
On reducing barriers to entry:
We've got a lot of streaming going on, and we've reduced the barrier to entry for players. There's no big download, and no credit card required. We're really excited about that.
On multi-platform development:
For us as a company moving forward, all of our MMOs in development have a console component.
On min specs:
Whenever you're making a game and are proud of it, you want as many people as possible to play that game. In the PC world, the lower the machine spec you can get, the bigger potential audience you have, and the more chance you have for people to look at your work.
On Free to Play:
If you look at some of the free to play games like Club Penguin and RuneScape, it's a huge market. If you look at the actual numbers of people playing RuneScape, there may actually be more people playing RuneScape than there are playing World of Warcraft.
Interestingly, Nicholas and I met in 2001 when I was pitching a product of mine to him and Trip Hawkins at 3DO.
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