Disqus - Latest Comments for DianeLagrange

Re: Online games trends in 2012

Diane Lagrange — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:20:13 -0000

Hi Justin, thanks for your comments! I'm not sure integrated billing come in many game engines. From what I understood, Herocloud and Papaya are doing that, but there may be other engines as well.

Re: Bigpoint does sell the Tenth Drone for 1,000 EUr, but may not have made EUr 2 million from it

Diane Lagrange — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:12:10 -0000

Thanks for the clarification Nicholas!

Re: Whales, True Fans and the Ethics of Free-to-play games

Diane Lagrange — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 06:02:58 -0000

Nice article. This is especially true for the energy and shortcut purchases, which make a lot of the revenue coming from the whales (last study from Papaya Mobile shows the whales buy much more consumables than the average paying user, and amongst consumables, a lot of accelerators) : http://china2valley.com/you...
However, another type of whale spender tends to be collector types, is that closer to a true fan behaviour, or just another psychological exploit? Ultimately, it's difficult to draw a line and decide for people what's right for them. I'm not sure the people who spend a lot of money on energy and shortcuts end up regretting it, even if that may seem irrational to many.

Re: What’s the lifetime value of an ad-funded gamer?

Diane Lagrange — Wed, 25 May 2011 10:04:16 -0000

They're also much more difficult to scale internationally compared to micro-transactions...

Re: Minimum specifications on a Facebook game? Are NOVA mad?

Diane Lagrange — Fri, 13 May 2011 09:47:13 -0000

Those specs seem very inclusive (and likely to be required for most Unity games), even if the auto-playing music is bad and their funnel could probably be improved overall. On the other hand, I would think we will see it more and more as more Facebook games will target hardcore genres. Even with much lower conversion rates than casual facebook games, the sheer volume of traffic on Facebook can make it a good bet if your retention and monetization are good (which I'm not sure of in NOVA's case looking at AppData).

Re: Did OpenFeint really just sell for 368x revenues?

Diane Lagrange — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:29:21 -0000

Wow, that's a huge bet. OTOH they have the dominant position in terms of mobile gaming network, even if monetization is hard. It's still a better deal than DeNa's $400M for the 14M registered on Plus+ if you just look at network size.

Edit : just saw Thomas has been quicker :)

Re: Help needed again please

Diane Lagrange — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 11:51:28 -0000

Sidequests

Re: Licensing versus self-publishing

Diane Lagrange — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:51:22 -0000

Steven - very good point, I should have precised it in the article! The approach can work to a certain extent, provided that the operator has the resources to ensure a good quality of service - making sure that customer support and community management are available in the selected languages, and that generally the publishing process is aware of the differences in the local market. Time difference can also be problematic. As you put it, it can be a good first step towards self publishing in the region. On the contrary, if the operator has future plans to license to a local operator, it's not advisable to start doing so, as it can undermine their future partner's service.

Re: Online game design: which of the three business models will work for you?

Diane Lagrange — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 09:10:47 -0000

Cool article. I am suspicious on the need to pick one : in the end, you can't have sustained virality without stickiness, and if you want to monetize, it's generally better to think of it early enough to integrate it in your game design.

Re: If QuakeLive can’t survive on advertising alone, who can?

Diane Lagrange — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 05:48:44 -0000

I thought that IGA was already aggregating audiences from all the games in their portfolios in channels, so I am not sure if they were selling just QuakeLive players. FPS is also one of the most costly multiplayer genres to run. It was strange not to have planned any kind of direct monetization.

Re: Future and challenges of community management

Diane Lagrange — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:26:17 -0000

Edited, thanks for spotting this :)
There are stuff like Friendfeed that aggregate feeds from different social networks, blogs, and web services (Amazon, Picasa, Delicious, etc). Also, specifically for blog comments, Disqus or Facebook Connect can help.

Re: Hardcore browser games

Diane Lagrange — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 13:50:12 -0000

Thanks for the link, I missed his interview, it's very interesting. 60% loss between registration and in-game actually isn't too bad, our experience was worse than that. As things scale, every little percentage adds up - removing any kind of barriers to entry is essential for free to play games. Attention is another form of currency, and some free to play games have insane player acquisition costs based on that.

Re: Hardcore browser games

Diane Lagrange — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:57:36 -0000

Thanks a lot for the comment Steven!

The plugin problem is more due to the fact it's hard to do good 3D in Flash or Shockwave - if these games could do without a plugin, they certainly would.
I'm less sure about the Asian client-based MMOs losing nothing by not being in a browser - from our experience, it is a big barrier for a F2P game in the West (and countries like China seem to go more and more web-based too). Actually, in Western countries a lot of non-RPG downloadable online games have failed to gain any traction, and a lot of companies are trying everything they can (Bittorent, Pando, specific downloaders, retail, covermounts, thin clients for pay to play games' trials...) to get the client on players' machines. Customer acquisition costs are really high for those games, and a lot of the solutions above (Bittorrent, etc) are not realistic options for a non-hardcore audience.
The separate application question is different - Even though the plugin really lowers the accessibility of being browser-based, I think there are still some advantadges in being in a browser versus being a separate application. It's true that you lose the ability to have your own environment, but you have also advantadges at install (you can sometimes install browser plugins in office/school PCs were you couldn't have installed a separate application, and a lot of plugins installations also have less steps than regular executables installs, making it smoother for the user and blurring the line between the web and app ) and you are also more accessible once the plugin is installed for the users to come back to your game and interact in its environment - unless you configure your app to run by default at computer start (which can be quite intrusive), it's hard to replicate that in a separate environment. For instance, personnally I would be much less enticed to click on a URL invite to an InstantAction match if I knew it would start an app rather than opening a new browser tab. Also, I agree this has more to do with the way they are built than the fact of being a separate app, but a lot of game apps tend to make multitasking very difficult. I agree being browser based is not necessarily a panacea though, there are also more things you can optimize.

Sorry for the genre/technology confusion, we should have worded it otherwise - we wanted to highlight the fact that high end/demanding genres like FPS were moving to the browser, not describe a change in the audience of browser games in general (as you rightly point, Travian, Tribal Wars, etc have been here for years and are really hardcore).

Re: 5 warning signs: Does A/B testing lead to crappy products?

Diane Lagrange — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:58:59 -0000

Great post, it's particularly interesting for creative apps like games (which very often tend to fall in the opposite excess)

Re: Why the iPhone is changing the games market

Diane Lagrange — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:08:50 -0000

For me the main issues with iPhone games are :
-the lack of virality in the way the apps spread (there's no way in the App Store to see which games your contacts are playing, and you can send suggestions but it's not widely used)
-the difficulty of maintaining a community (few available communication channels)
-the lack of ability to patch a game (you have to release a new version each time)
-the lack of recurring revenue options.
All of this makes it hard to use for service-based models, which is a shame as it would be a convenient way to raise the production values while keeping free or cheap access to apps.

It looks like Sony and Nintendo got the App Store message though, with the DSi and its online store and the download-only games for PSP (there's also a rumour these days about a UMD-less, download-only new PSP).

Re: The black & white era: are games finally waking up to aesthetic style, or taking a step back?

Diane Lagrange — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 08:25:25 -0000

Online games are also pushing that trend forward a lot. When you plan to maintain a game for 10 years+ if successful, you need graphics that won't age too much, and style is the best insurance for that. And you need clients to be as small as possible, even preferable to run in a browser, so there's a real incentive to favour style over realism.

Re: Why micro-transactions won’t work

Diane Lagrange — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:20:42 -0000

Offering value to customer is the essence of any sustainable business model, micro-transactions are no different.It doesn't work for newspaper articles because they are essentially commodities, that you can't try them before you buy because their value drops as soon as they're consumed, and that it fragments your audience as it slows their viral propagation. Basically, there's zero advantadge to owning a piece of news article.

In games, selling anything that fragments your player base is generally a bad idea - the in-game quivalent of selling news articles that you can't share with non-purchasers is to sell maps or game modes you can't play together with non-paying players. Offering the option of "VIP" areas can be good. But if they're totally exclusive, how would the paying players feel like VIPs?

Micro transactions have already proven they work even when free alternatives are available : Facebook still sells gifts while Free Gifts exist (or images pasted in an email, that have been here for a long time). Everybody knows that Free Gifts are free, and knowing that a person paid is an important attribute of gifts, so a paying gift is more valuable than a free one. Being able to show off your popularity is also why Facebook Gifts have more value than an image pasted in an email. Actually, a lot of people reproach to Facebook that the paying gifts all have the same value and are all cheap.

Intangible value also has a role to play : The main functions of brands, in virtual as well as real goods, is to avoid being commoditized and bypassed as soon as a cheap or free alternatives appear.

The service also matters : iTunes has also grown the market for online music because it made music easy to find, reliable and of predictable quality, secure to download, recommended or not by user reviews, clearly labeled, etc. The free alternative, downloading on torrents, can require more skill and time to find what you want, sort it, and organize it. Classical music sales rose a lot when iTunes appeared. There's a "long tail" effect of niche demand aggregation here, but the classical music audience is also maybe not necessarily expert at downloading on P2P sites and values the quality and accessibility the iTunes service provides.

Also, open marketplaces like IMVU show that micro-transactions are working with platform approaches and user-created content as well.

Re: Game Development Begins

Diane Lagrange — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 12:03:53 -0000

Congratulations! Can't wait to play it!

Re: News roundup – 28/01/09

Diane Lagrange — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:00:32 -0000

Thanks a lot for the correction Daniel, I got mixed up on this. Many thanks !

Re: The PC is dead, long live the netbook

Diane Lagrange — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:17:43 -0000

Congratulations on the blog, it's a pleasure to read!

Netbook growth is sure to have a huge impact on online games as the hardware base changes, and in a way so leaning towards cloud computing.
Apparently the trend is even more developed in Europe (We have posted an article on our blog about it : http://www.icopartners.com/...