PlayTeeVee Launches Free Tivo Gaming Service
An old friend of mine from my EA days today launched an innovative service called PlayTeeVee.com that allows Tivo users to play games for free on their sets. Right now it's primarily family / casual games, but I know he has plans for deeper games in the near future. I can't reveal exactly what, but it's cool stuff.
If you have Tivo Series 2, definitely check it out. It's free to play, after all.
Full PlayTeeVee press release after the jump.
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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NHN: Lessons on Virtual Items Sales in the US and Korea
Last week I attended the Casual Games Conference in Seattle. One of the better talks was by Whon Namkoong, CEO of NHN USA. He discussed why he thinks the North American market is primed for virtual item sales games and the lessons his company has learned while trying to enter this market. I've summarized his points below.
In 2001, the US and Korean game markets were quite different:
Piracy
- Rampant in Korea
- Not nearly as bad in the US
Broadband Penetration
- 15% in Korea
- 2% in US
Broadband Speed
- 6.8mps in Korea
- .2 mbps in US
Number of Online Payment Methods
- 5+ in Korea
- Only PayPal in US
Today, things have changed in the US:
- 47% broadband penetration
- 4.8mbps broadband speed
- Lots of online payment methods
He listed the well-known advantages to a virtual item sales model:
- Low barrier to entry for user
- Unlimited ARPU
- Dynamic item updates, support for season items
But more interestingly, Whon covered the lessons NHN learned about virtual item sales in the US market:
Lack of efficient payment methods
- 90% of virtual item sales in Korea are paid for via SMS
- Korean SMS transaction fees are less than 10% (vs 40-50% in US)
- US requires bank account linked to mobile phone; Korea does not
US network cost is 5x more than Korea
- In the US, NHN changed their Gunz product from P2P to client/server.
- Resulting network expense made the product inviable - the more users, the more money Gunz lost.
Serious hacking attempts
- Asian hackers do it for the money - i.e. dupe and sell
- US hackers do it to "break stuff"
- Korean hackers don't reveal their methods, so they can continue to profit from them
- But US hackers do it to share their knowledge, which causes a much larger problem
- In 5 years of Korean hacking, NHN never experienced the US hacking techniques
- Additionally, when ijji.com was launched in English, it essentially invited hackers from all over the world (rather than just those who could read Korean) - so hacking increased dramatically
Finally, Whon urged North American developers to work together to:
- Support the use of prepaid cards and other payment methods
- Make an alternative delivery system like P2P viable
- Share info on hacking and hackers
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