This Week In Social Games

This week in social games kicked off with an interview with GM of 6Waves Jim Ying, an announcement of Mentez' partnership with Playdom, Meez' experience of high time spent on site with virtual goods purchases, the launch of a new casino game on Facebook, gWallet's new advisory board, a Casual Connect Seattle 2010 take aways guest post, myYearbook's partnership with OMGPOP, Hello Kitty Online picking Playspan for monetization, Zynga's removal of Farmville from MSN Games, Google Ventures' investment in ngmoco, Disney/Playdom's work on Marvel game, Heyzap's support for HTML5 and Zynga's hire of former Facebook CRO as EVP of Business. Interview: 6Waves GM Jim Ying Discusses Foreign Social Game Markets [Video] 6Waves is one of the largest Facebook Game publishers on Facebook, with between 40 and 50 million monthly active users each month playing their series of social games including Mall World, Kings of Camelot, 6Waves Poker and more. The company is based out of Hong Kong, and has recently set up an office in San Francisco to attempt to help connect with game developers who want to have better distribution and monetization for their social games. At Casual Connect, we got a chance to flag down Jim Ying, the General Manager of North America for 6Waves, and chat with him about 6Waves' strategy and plans. Latin Social Games Publisher Mentez Partners with Playdom, Announces Funding Emerging markets can be a tough cookie to crash for social game developers because they need to get all the pieces of the localization puzzle figured out correctly. Miami-based Latin American Social Game Publisher called Mentez is helping companies like Playdom do exactly that. In addition, Mentez just announced an undisclosed round of funding from Insight Venture Partners that it will use to expand social games portfolio, increase growth in Latin America and position itself as the leading publisher to partner with. Mentez' strong presence as a publisher, its monetization offerings and brand relations should be considered by all looking to get into the Latin American market. High Engagement Means More Virtual Goods Sales for Meez, ComScore's Most Engaging Virtual World Meez, a web-based virtual world/online community, is drawing the best engagement rates of any virtual world in the US, according to ComScore's June 2010 figures. The traffic measuring service reports that Meez users visit the site an impressive 203 minutes per month on average, just a few minutes behind YouTube, and sixth place in engagement overall. (Casual game site Pogo and Facebook hold the top two positions with 377 and 263 minutes, respectively.) According to Meez CEO John Cahill, there's a correspondence between those high engagement rates and users spending on virtual items for their Meez characters. Build And Play In Your Dream Casino with Las Vegas' Golden Nugget Casino for Facebook Big lights, the gambling, the strip... Las Vegas is synonymous with action and Last Legion Games is partnering with Las Vegas' Golden Nugget casino to build the first casino-branded Facebook game. The game allows players to build their own casino and include games like Blackjack, Video Poker and Roulette. The more popular your casino, the more people that use your machines, and you use your earnings from this to add style to your casino, but also create an avatar, visit your friends' casinos, and play games there! Advisory Board to Help gWallet with Social Media Monetization When Social Times spoke with Gurbaksh Chahal, Founder and CEO of gWallet, in February, he told us, "We have always been an advertising company, we will always be an advertising company." Today's announcement of an advisory board of marketing executives to help direct gWallet's strategy strengthens that message to the industry as the company continues to feint and jab its way through the rapidly changing social media monetization landscape. 10 Key Take Aways From Casual Connect 2010 Seattle SUMMARY: Every July, the casual games industry gets together in Seattle for Casual Connect. Originally focused on online PC casual games, the conference highlights the many forms of casual gaming such as handheld, online console, mobile, free to play or light MMOs, virtual worlds, and the latest iteration, social games, which took center stage myYearbook Lands Elusive OMGPOP As Games Partner myYearbook and its 20 million users are about to get a lot more OMG and a healthy dose of POP as talented games designers OMGPOP have agreed to release their games on myYearbook's newly opened application platform. OMGPOP has consistently been one of our favorite games portals here at Social Times, and we covered its battle with standard casual gaming portals last year. The game designers focus on fun realtime multiplayer games that require active participation and create a stronger community across their games. Will this lead to OMGPOP making more distribution deals in the future? Hello Kitty Online to Get Majorly Monetized With PlaySpan When Free-to-Play MMO Launches This Year Hello Kitty Online, the upcoming free-to-play MMO based on the gargantuan franchise of the same name, has selected PlaySpan to handle its monetization services when it launches commercially sometime this year. Players will be able to buy Hello Kitty virtual goodies in the game's Item Mall via PlaySpan's UltimatePay service, handling transactions via credit cards, PayPal, mobile, and its pre-paid retail card sold in tens of thousands of locations across the US. With all those payment methods, Sanrio anticipates at least 3-8% of their players will buy Hello Kitty virtual goods (since those rates are the general industry standard for online games.) Zynga Plucks FarmVille From MSN Games Some relationships are just not meant to be. Announced in February, Zynga struck a deal with MSN Games that would allow Microsoft Live Messenger and MSN Network users to play Facebook connect-enabled Farmville. This was the first time Farmville would be available outside of Facebook itself. The reason? To expand the reach of social games. The affair, however, was short lived as Zynga has removed FarmVille from Microsoft's gaming portal according to Inside Social Games. Google Games Again: Google Ventures Invests $3-$5 Million in Mobile Games Maker ngmoco if Google couldn't make any more investments into the gaming world, their venture capital arm, Google Ventures, has invested a reported $100 million into mobile games maker ngmoco. This comes soon after their strategic investment into Zynga, their near $200 million acquisition of Slide and recent announcements to hire all kinds of different gaming posts. The latest investment into ngmoco is slightly different in that it comes from Google Ventures rather than Google itself, but as TechCrunch points out, this probably won't change much in terms of the new Google-ngmoco relationship: ngmoco will be feeling the pressure to make sure they port their games to Android. Disney Reveals That Playdom Is Working On A Marvel Facebook Game; Which Characters Will It Feature? Playdom, who was recently acquired by Disney for $763.2 million, has been rewarded for good behaviour with the gift of Marvel Intellectual Property. At a Disney earnings call yesterday, Disney CEO Robert Iger announced that Playdom is working on a game that will feature "Marvel IP". Which characters and what type of game could Playdom possible be working on? I take a look below. Expert Game Designers Explain Social Augmented Reality Gaming And Virality Game developers around the globe are looking to move beyond the farming and restaurant games and utilize new mechanics that help them increase virality and revenue. According to the NPD group/Gamasutra US retail video game industry sales in January 2010 decreased 13% from the same time last year. Social games have also suffered on the viral front due to Facebook's changes and competition from large gaming companies with a lot of effort. To address some of the issues facing developers, CEO of e23 Games Joe Dunn and CEO of Flying Wisdom Studios Josh Rose presented at the SF Game Developer Workshop titled 'How to Grow your Online Games for massive player engagement and revenue' hosted by Sana Choudary and Japheth Dillman, to present on virality, feedback loops, and geo-located social augmented reality gaming. Heyzap Launches Platform Support for HTML5 Social Games Heyzap's innovations in social platform technology are right on the cutting edge of today's web technology. As part of its cross platform solution for games, Heyzap is extending its offering to support HTML5 games through its new in-game JS API. Heyzap will provide game developers access to its social tools to help them easily work with HTML5, an up and coming alternative to flash thats the primary development method for iOS enabled devices. Heyzap has been quite active, having built a games network of 270,000 websites with over 35,000 games Zynga Hires Former Facebook CRO Owen Van Natta as EVP of Business Zynga has hired casual gaming and social networking heavyweight Owen Van Natta as their new Executive Vice President of Business. This is big news for Zynga, who is attempting to recruit all the top talent they can as they hint at an IPO and continue receiving sizable investments from across the globe. Van Natta will also join the Zynga board of directors and help guide the company through this very important time.

Social Pro Daily

This Week In Social Games - Aug 9, 2010

Interview:

Azam Khan

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

Interview:

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Azam Khan