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Finding the User: the case for gaming operators (with slides)

Earlier this week, I gave a talk at the Mobile Gaming Conference at ICE, the premier i-gaming (that’s gambling to you and I) event in London. Below, you will find the slides to the talk.

Let me outline briefly though why I think that social elements to gaming is something that I find the gaming (as in gambling, real-money gaming, etc) sector should be excited about (and it was hard to tell if many people were; ’nuff said):

“Social” games work if they address or are based upon a community of sorts. This needs to be supported by the game design and its mechanic as well as through tools that actually allow those communal juices to flow (and, yes, that’s what we at Scoreloop are doing and that’s why I am preaching about the subject so regularly). Now, the gaming folks have a lot of this sitting on a big silver plate right under their noses: “proper” gamers, i.e. those who spend money on their pastime, are tied together by that particular passion (this of course equally applies to all those passionate about lost puppies, cows and golden eggs…). For the real-money folks, there is also the billing side to consider: their clientele is used and quite willing to pay, and a billing relationship is often already in place.

The addition of social elements to such “real” games can essentially do two things then:

Cement existing customer base and avoid promiscuity of users

I have been hearing this a lot: users on, say, real-money poker sites often play on multiple sites. This is painful to the gaming operators as they spend considerable amounts recruiting their folks. It is a race to the bottom (of sustainable margins) and the adjustment mechanisms are scarce and largely reduced to bounties and clever marketing. Adding social elements adds that glue that increases the likelihood that players will stay with you. Why? Because they receive value over and above the core proposition: they feel better nestled into their community, which is – albeit a little intangible – real and not only perceived value. Incidentally though, it is also value that is not that expensive to create (cf. above under “margins, low).

Attract new users

Outside the hard core of gamers, there is a whole lot of people who are quite content to play for fun (Zynga Poker still has more active users than most “real” poker sites combined). Funnily enough, Zynga also makes more money with its soft version than a lot of gaming operators do with its real one. This is because a) they tie it into the social graph and b) a lot of users just like to play for fun – but they still spend money, only in more manageable increments.

I suggest that this is a major entry gate for gaming operators to attract new users (though I do not suggest that “hooking” people is something good!). A softer approach that introduces many shades of grey rather than only offering black and white will make it so much more compelling to play, properly or only trying it out and the very folks that are in the prime spot to capture these users (because they have all the experience, background and know-how) leave a lot of money on the table there (pun indeed intended).

But now, without any further ado, here are the slides:

For those of you who like that better, I have also uploaded it to Sribd here.

Mary Meeker’s Wisdom, 2010 Edition

Every year at Web 2.0, Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker unveils her Internet Trends. I will not rattle down the entire list (the briefest of brief summaries over here at TechCrunch) but one thing that is really noteworthy as compared to last year’s edition (which I briefly covered here) is that mobile takes centre stage: in 2009, she started covering mobile in earnest on pages 28 et seq. This year, it is topic # 2 (but even topic #1 [Globality] has more than 50% mobile in it).

Now, the learned readers of this blog have (I suspect) known this all along but it is good to see that one of the more influential analysts of the web at large “decrees” this on the Web 2.0 (sic!) stage, too.

And it is of course blindingly obvious: large parts of the world leapfrog the desktop Internet simply because they do not have access to desktops. The access instrument of choice is mobile. And these parts of the world just happen to be the ones where most of the growth occurs.

Incidentally, Meeker’s third point was social ecosystems. And there as well, we are seeing the huge impact of mobile. If you take Tencent, China’s IM/Social Networking solution of choice with a whopping 637m active IM users, and compare that with the Chinese Internet users (384m), we have a delta of 250m people who are accessing this via mobile. Just like that… Again, it is not that surprising: after all, mobile is – by design – the most personal digital medium we have ever had and when this coincides (as it does) with it being the prime access for digital content bar none, you create a very powerful mix indeed. And this will not be constrained to the somewhat crude experiences of feature phone WAP browsers either: in 2011, we will see smartphone penetration breezing past the PC size (desktop and laptops alike). It is mobile, mobile, mobile!

If you want to have a read through the presentation, you find it here.

Social Gaming Summit (Slides)

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of delivering a talk at the Social Gaming Summit in London (which was fun even though it was at Chelsea FC…). Given that the audience was fairly clued up on all things social, I was focusing a little more on the mobile side of things – highlighting market sizes, roll-out speeds and platform risks (and opportunities!).

Here’s the deck, I hope you enjoy it:

Conference: Social Gaming Summit, London

Sometimes, the good things come quickly and without much fanfare. Tomorrow (that’s 11 November), the Social Gaming Summit will open its doors at the Stamford Bridge home of Chelsea Football Club in London. And  I will talk about how to bring the social element into the mobile sphere (and, yes, regular readers of this blog will be rather familiar with my stance on this).

So if you fancy a trip to Fulham to hear from the social games gurus from Playfish, Facebook, Playdom, RockYou, PopCap, etc, etc, please come along (a full speaker list is here). It is a tremendous line-up and should be tons of fun!

The conference programme is here and you can sign up here.

The Economics of Apps / Slides

Last week, I had the great pleasure to attend Mobile 2.0 Europe in Barcelona. I thought it might be interesting to share the slides of my talk on the “Economics of Apps” there. So here you go…

The Economics of Apps

For those of you who prefer it, I have also published it to Scribd here.

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