On Technology and the Future: Education, IoT, AI, Mobility, Games

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Orange UK on Gaming Offensive

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On 30/03/2010

In 1

The UK arm of Orange, the France Telecom-owned operator that is merging with T-Mobile’s UK bit, today offered a lot of news on the mobile games side. They made an announcement on the introduction of not less than 3 different gaming services that they will be launching over the next couple of weeks:

  1. Playtomo is a social gaming service to be used within the users’ social networks (e.g. Facebook; no others were mentioned). Users can download the app (?) from Orange’s portal and then share scores etc on the social network of choice. It sounds a little like a “posh Facebook Connect” solution (and this is not meant derogatory at all!). Friends can be invited from any UK network operator.
  2. Games Zone is a subscription-service where “just” £5 per month buy you two games and a 20% discount on all others. It also offers “exclusive competitions”.
  3. The third offering is a little unclear to me: Orange will launch the aptly called “Orange iPhone Games” offering, which will feature games that are “designed specifically or published by Orange for iPhone customers”. They say it will include a variety of game genres as well as the aforementioned Playtomo. Now, this one, I am not sure about… Orange clearly looks to bolstering their brand (or, perhaps, use their brand as a lever to lift otherwise unbranded games into the limelight) but this seems like a tough proposition. It is an interesting one, too, though as it would seem the first time an operator steps into the ring as a publisher amongst many. Watch this space…

The really uplifting thing about this is that Orange clearly recognises the significance of games to their overall offering and playful interaction is – as I have often pointed out – likely to be a driver for interaction between people in the mid- and long-term.

Finally: do you think this gives any hint as to which brand will survive the merger of the Orange and T-Mobile UK operations? 😉

Mobile + Social: The Case for Games / Presentation

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On 17/03/2010

In 1, Events, Slides

Here is the deck to the talk I gave at the Social Media World Forum (or rather its mobile track, which was called Mobile Social Media Europe) in London this week.

Mobile+social: the case for games

Carnival of the Mobilists # 213

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On 03/03/2010

In 1, Carnival of the Mobilists

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is out, and it is hosted – very, very fittingly – from Vancouver by the good folks over at WIP Connector.

As always, there is exciting stuff on there. Besides not one but two posts of yours truly (which I trust you have read by now; if not, they’re on the Freemium model for mobile and a look on the web v apps), a lot of the industry’s luminaries are speaking out:

  • AJ Wright has an intriguing post on how software and services dominate the overall experience (over and above hardware). A sneak preview into the future…;
  • MobiThinking’s Andy Favell looks at if mobile search is working;
  • Ajit Jaokar offer us a free download of his latest book on “Open Mobile: Understing the Impact of Open Mobile – Implications for Telecoms/Devices, Web, Social Network, Media and Personal Privacy” (I know the title is a mouthful but the man has a very sharp mind indeed!); and
  • Tomi Ahonen, master of stats (and many other things) treats us to an account of Google’s mobile firsts.

Enough teasers, this. Now, go over and read the good stuff here.

The joy (and cost) of Freemium

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On 24/02/2010

In 1, Thoughts

The term “Freemium” has been coined first a while ago by Union Square Ventures founder Fred Wilson and has been articulated further by Chris Anderson of Wired fame in his book “Free”. It has since attracted significant interest, last but not least because the concept seems to work… 😉

Ngmoco goes Freemium

Yesterday, Ngmoco, one of the new world’s (scil. Apple App Store’s) giants announced it raised another chunk of money ($25m to be exact) and acquired Freeverse, an iPhone developer that recently announced it had sold (sic!) more than 5m games, which are, alas, not always free – in the contrary. Together with this, Ngmoco announced a push into the Freemium model. So there we are…

To recap: the company had released two titles so far under the Freemium model, namely Eliminate Pro and Touchpets. Both are rumoured to having done, well, OK in terms of revenue (although Ngmoco CEO Neil Young said they were clumsily made). They had previously acquired Miraphonic, makers of Epic Pet Wars and other games, and Neil wants to use the the combined forces of development power to push the Freemium model onto the iPhone properly. Good on him!

What is it about this Freemium?

The term describes games (or apps or services or whatever you can think of) that are initially free to use but use micro-transactions from within the game to monetise it. Eliminate Pro did this by selling Power Packs without which players needed to wait X hours before they could continue. Online, we have had other examples, e.g. Zynga’s Farmville where you can buy hard cash in order to immediately acquire items for which you would otherwise have to play hour after hour after hour. You get the gist… If interested, you should read Chris Anderson’s book since the underlying rationale does not only work in the little work of games.

The principle is simple and also compelling – from both the developer’s and the user’s side: the developer gets a shot at grabbing a multiple of eyeballs allowing for a multitude of chances to convince users that it is the real deal. Users get to look into the mystery bag before having to cough up hard cash. Win-win, you think.

And yes, it is: act honestly and transparently and you shall win over the hearts and minds of your users. IF your product is good and useful, the users will appreciate it, become fans (and maybe even fanatics) and will thus serve as your secondary sales force by recommending things to their friends who are much, much more likely to buy on the recommendation of their friends than from anyone else. What a wonderful idea.

Things to get right

There are two issues with this though, and it is important to get these right:

  1. Make sure to get the mechanics right. This does not work for any game or app or service. There must be some initial intrinsic and compelling value. Why would users otherwise use it? There must also be a good reason to buy. Why would users otherwise want to buy premium features? If you get it wrong (i.e. if too many users do not feel fairly treated), your users are gone. And what is the price of user acquisition? Yeah, you get it. It is MUCH more economical to treat users well; they will come back AND they will recommend you and your products.
  2. Make sure you get the balance right. Don’t be greedy, don’t be too tight. The aforementioned Eliminate Pro didn’t get the weighting right. The result was a) a couple of seriously upset users and b) sales that were not comparable to the top of the class (anecdotally, Eliminate Pro featured in the top-100 top-grossing list of Apple only very shortly). Remember that you need to deliver value; otherwise users – rightly – won’t feel properly treated but ripped off. And then? See above on customer acquisition costs.

The other side of balance is, however, that giving away too much will kill your business. And that is no good either.

Tools

There are tools to make your (the developer’s) life easier on this: create avenues of the players’ passion, make it easy for them to communicate their passion to their friends (which form the only community that truly matters to most of them) at a time when it is relevant to them, and you’re a big, big step closer to getting the principle right, which is to deliver value. Very, very few users will object to paying for value. But they will only do so (and in this fluid, transparent world more than ever) if the value is true and not some cheap glass pearls conceived to deceive.

Challenges, rewards, and incentives etc have shown to be powerful tools to spurn user activity. If you deliver value, there will not be hard feelings. If you want to learn more about available tools, get in touch…

The Power of Fanatics

74% of users buy things based on recommendations of friends. That is an astonishingly high number. If you manage to convert simple players into fanatics, you turn them into ambassadors and then you just need to do the maths: if the average iPhone user has 100 friends, you have a potential 74 sales (or free downloads with subsequent monetisation) per initial user. Woah!

Most importantly though: this approach does not alienate users. Why not? Because you delivered value. Deliver value and users will appreciate that (just ask Tony Hsieh, he just sold his company for $887.9m; he sells happiness, he says!).

Cartoon Credit: http://www.gapingvoid.com/thisbusinessmodel876-thumb.jpg

Nokia Maps for free: signs of life on Ovi

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On 04/02/2010

In 1, OEM

Nokia recently shook the world by starting to provide its Ovi Maps app including turn-by-turn navigation for free. And only just under 2 weeks later, it announced that users have downloaded the app more than 1.4m times. Good stuff.

The numbers led some people (Nokia’s Vanjoki as well as various industry pundits) to claim the dawn of Ovi downloads had arrived. I beg to differ, and here’s why:

1.    A mapping application with turn-by-turn navigation cost, until very recently, anywhere between $30-80 a pop. And all of a sudden it is free. It is a little akin selling a Porsche Cayman for the price of a VW Polo: people will jump through any number of hoops for that. This is not proof that the download boom has finally also arrived with proud owners of Nokia phones; it merely shows that this is too good an offer to decline.

2.    1.4m downloads across the Symbian install base of c. 300m is not actually that impressive a number. To put it into context: a simple ad-funded game, Waterslide Extreme by German high-end development house Fishlabs, which is also a free download, clocked on the iPhone more than 10m downloads. As far as I am aware, the developer still sees around 40,000 downloads per day. And this is a long time after its release and for an app that fills significantly less of a need than satellite navigation. But even if one leaves aside this last bit (which is taking a very favourable view – no ceteris paribus here), Ovi Maps would need to hit roughly 100m downloads before it could say it was, pound for pound, as successful as Waterslide Extreme (NB: this is not exactly true because Nokia only supports some 20m devices to date).

3.    It is not actually proof that the Ovi Store works as users can also download the app via the Nokia Website or via the “SW Update” application on the phone. At a time when the store still needs 90 seconds (measured on an N97 running on a Vodafone UK 3G network) and more to even load the opening screen, I struggle to believe that the store will see an uptake across the band.

4.    It is likely being a bit of a one-off: Nokia also announced that, from March, every Nokia will come pre-loaded with the app.

Now, to clarify things: it is great news for boosting awareness of mobile phones as location-aware devices, and the pre-install on future phones will help that. It is likely that this will contribute to the fall of the dedicated satnav sector in much the same way Nokia’s landmark deal with Carl Zeiss lenses (and the resulting higher image quality of photos taken with your phone’s camera) was a doomsday scenario for the lower end of the digital camera market.

Also: Ovi Maps looks like a VERY good app: it covers more than 180 countries (car & pedestrian navigation: 74; traffic: 10), it is available in a whopping 46 (!) languages. It includes 3D landmarks for 200 cities around the world and incorporates Lonely Planet and Guide Michelin city guides. It is good, no doubt!

Finally, Nokia started early with the mantra of location-awareness. It was just that it had not executed particularly well to date. I know there is probably much more in the works than is visible to the untrained eye (or any other eye not from within the company) but the company does need to ramp up here since its hard-earned (and well-deserved) fame is/was beginning to fade quickly.

It would be fantastic if the world market leader would see uptake of applications rise sharply. I would very much like to ask them though not to fool themselves into believing that the store is not so bad after all only because of one successful application on it. There is a lot of work to do. The Ovi Maps case simply shows that one does not have to be a crazy Apple fan boy to be craving cool and useful apps. So, dear Nokia, continue to study the app store and try solve the shortfalls of the Ovi Store. It’ll be good for everyone!

In celebration of Tetris (and Jamdat)

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On 25/01/2010

In 1, Deals

The mobile version of Tetris, the iconic game published by EA Mobile, has now clocked up in excess of 100m paid downloads, cracking a landmark that is arguably miles ahead of everything else. This in itself is to be lauded.

However, in the press buzz around this incredible achievement, I have not seen anyone reminiscing on what brought this franchise to EA Mobile, and the deals leading up to that are something not to be sniffed at either, so here’s to the people who made an audacious move in 2005 when they bought Blue Lava Wireless, the Hawaiian studio run by Henk Rogers (who is also the CEO of Blue Planet Software, which still controls the rights to the game), together with a 15-year license to the mobile game for a rather breathtaking $145m ($137m + c. $8m non-recoupable license advance to the Tetris Company in which Blue Planet Software holds 50%).

The company at the time was Jamdat who some people described as the only company ever to go public on the back of a bowling game (Jamdat Bowling was one of the first run-away successes in the mobile space). Jamdat had just floated on Nasdaq in a $86m IPO (here’s the original S-1) with its market cap at the end of the first day of trading standing at $439m (up 45% from opening). They had struggled a little outside North America (as per their S-1/A nearly 80% of their revenues were North American) and were hence pondering to leverage Tetris’ global appeal to grow their markets outside the US. And how well they did!

At the time, however, few people thought the transaction would amortize ever. This might have been besides the point since the amortization for the original Jamdat shareholders came soon by the $680m acquisition by EA but few people (me included) had thought that the mobile Tetris property could yield a positive ROI (in isolation) on the back of, effectively, one game. This is naturally grossly simplifying since the lever of Tetris into carriers Jamdat did not reach prior to that provided incremental growth across the portfolio but the fact that it appeared to being an extraordinarily rich deal remained.

I do no longer have my numbers on what was needed to provide a satisfactory return but, over the 15-year license term, I believe it stood somewhere around $225m. With 100m paid downloads, EA may very well be there already – and this after only 5 years or so (this is again a simplification since there were of course sales prior to the acquisition).

I therefore tip my hat to Mitch Lasky, Jamdat’s former CEO and now a General Partner with Benchmark Capital (his very enjoyable personal blog is here), who had the foresight and/or luck to score this deal and I bow before the success of Tetris!

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