Showing posts with label Electronic Arts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Electronic Arts. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Star Citizen: Gamers Pay For Gaming




Gamers' funding fuels meteoric rise of 'Star Citizen'
Roberts' brain spun out a grand vision: a rich, immersive galaxy; exquisite spaceships traversing between infinite star systems with thousands of computer gamers manning the cockpits, racing, dogfighting and defending humanity. ...... it would be built outside the traditional publisher system dominated by big game companies such as Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts. ....... The vision was clear. All he required was money. ....... Chris is demonstrating you can fund 100% development of a game if you have an audience that wants the game. We've never seen this for a game of this size. ..... Roberts — former Hollywood producer, movie director and veteran computer game creator — had a plan: raise several million dollars from true believers who would place advance orders. That would prove demand to venture capitalists, who could supply the tens of millions of dollars more that "Star Citizen" would require. ...... It turned out he didn't need the venture capitalists......... More than $58 million has poured into the coffers of Roberts' West Hollywood company, Cloud Imperium Games Corp., since "Star Citizen's" inception two years ago. And cash continues to flow — nearly all of it raised from hard-core gamers who make pre-orders and spend cash on digital goods that range from one-man spaceships to interstellar caterpillars that look cool when they explode in space. ....... Small-scale video games have raised as much as a few million dollars through crowdfunding, a fundraising technique in which creators pitch ideas on the Web to attract relatively small amounts of cash from lots of people. But "Star Citizen" did something extraordinary: It quickly reached the several-million mark and then blew past it. ...... The result is a game industry phenomenon. .... The full product isn't scheduled for completion until sometime in 2016, but, according to Roberts, more than 600,000 fans worldwide are playing modules of the partly built game and suggesting improvements to developers. And they're buying digital goods — an average of more than $90 per crowdfund contributor. Roberts attributes the success to the game's possibility to last a lifetime. ...... "The idea is to make it a huge space playground that you dream of spending time in if you've ever watched 'Star Wars,'" he said. "You can be a pilot, a mercenary, an explorer, a salvager; everything's available to you." ....... Cloud Imperium's website features a live fundraising tracker and monthly progress reports on the accomplishments of its 280 employees and contractors ...... He's spent $1,500 on spaceships, including $300 this month to partner with a wingman to buy the 890 Jump, an exclusive space yacht whose "very presence signifies power," according to Cloud Imperium. ...... "How many of us have dreamed of being astronauts at some point?" Snyder said. "This is the only way it's going to happen these days for a lot of us ...... By 2011, technology had "massively changed," he said. Powerful graphics processors, computer chips and memory cards had become cheap enough for Roberts to deliver a game that drops people and their friends into an Internet-hosted universe where players by the thousands interact in a virtual reality. ....... Activision's console title "Destiny," a first-person shooter game released last month, sold 5 million copies in its first five days. ...... With their support, he avoided the strings of big corporations and wealthy individuals......... The video game market is huge: $15.4 billion in U.S. sales alone in 2013 .... About half of that revenue comes from digital content like "Star Citizen," downloaded on a computer, not bought in a store. ...... Cloud Imperium's marketing budget includes large dollops spent on keeping the community engaged, holding live events, producing regular programs on YouTube and Twitch, and pumping out promotional videos that trumpet the latest spaceships on sale as if they were the newest must-have Mercedes-Benzes. ...... I wouldn't be surprised by $100 million in crowdfunding



Monday, August 06, 2012

Zynga Fixes


Mobile is a trend, it is a tsunami, and it is not new, it has been going on. So the thought that Zynga should place a major emphasis on mobile is to state the obvious. Mobile is going to be the central computing experience for most people. They are out and about but they are connected, they are online. Mobile is where the center of gravity is headed, if it is not there already. And that has implications for numerous companies, many industries.

Being metrics driven is important. But being only metrics driven can feel empty. Creating games is artwork. You can't get rid of the metrics, but you can't be a slave to the metrics either. What makes for a great actor? A great director? A great movie? What makes for a great game?

There's A Major Flaw In Zynga's Plan To Fix Itself
It has no choice but to figure out mobile. Zynga's mobile users are growing three times faster than its web users. ...... Farmville, which first put the gaming company on the map, has led to a slew of other "ville" attempts, like Castleville, Cityville, YoVille, PetVille and FishVille. Most have not been able to attract the same user-base as Farmville. .... "The 'With Friends' network is the same strategy as ville games," says the source "Pick a franchise that has one hit and double down on the franchise as each game performs worse and worse."
Going mobile is as much a strategy as going online is. That is a broad direction. Then you have to figure it out.

Wall Street is even more metrics driven than Zynga. Way more. It looks at cold, hard cash, earnings.
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Thursday, August 02, 2012

Zynga Getting Hammered


Its IPO has not been good for Zynga, nor for Facebook. They have been hammered. Not long back Fred Wilson on the East Coast and John Doerr on the West Coast talked of Zynga as the fastest growing company they ever had in their portfolios. I guess there are ups and downs. Right now happens to be a down time. It is not that Zynga's user base has shrunk dramatically. This is more a case of Wall Street looking at cold, hard cash. If you don't have it, you don't have it.

Just like Facebook Zynga is also struggling with mobile.

Zynga COO Said To Lose Product Oversight As Growth Slows
Pincus embarked on the overhaul in early July, at the close of a quarter marked by slowing sales growth and a drop in demand for virtual goods. Schappert, lured away last year from Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) with a pay package worth $42.8 million, has lost support within the company and taken some of the blame for its underperformance ..... “The place is in utter meltdown mode” .... The stock has dropped 72 percent since the market debut. The decline accelerated last week after Zynga reported sales and profit that missed analysts’ predictions. ..... The reorganization was aimed in part at making mobile- software development more of a priority across Zynga

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Friday, January 20, 2012

SOPA Went Down

Jack Valenti, former President, Motion Picture...Image via WikipediaWhat just happened? SOPA went down.

The enormous passion some of the early opponents of SOPA exhibited told me right there and then that SOPA was so going down. And now it is official. SOPA will not make it to the floor of the House. This is victory.

Copyright asks for a new definition. Intellectual property has to be redefined. The nation state itself has to be redefined. There is a guttural feeling among tech innovators that that is the case. And the jinn is out of the bottle. There is no going back.

SOPA Has Egg In The Face
SOPA Is So Going Down

More people consume more news than ever before. But many newspapers have crashed and burned. What is going on? Enormous amounts of music is being created, more than ever before. More books are being written than ever before. If piracy is devaluing intellectual property then there should be this strong signal to authors and music people and creative people in general that they should cease work. But the signal is the exact opposite. What's going on?

Artificial scarcity is being made fun of. Access is being democratized globally. If you have internet access, you are in. Compare that to the pains of getting a visa to the US.

There is so much good news going on. How could such enormous good news be bad news to some people? One person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist.

As far as I was concerned this was a fight between good and evil. Good won.