Small is big in gaming world

Small can mean big bucks in the world of gaming where micropayments are being seen as playing an increasingly important part in making money for the industry.

Amid a downturn in advertising revenues, a recent survey at the GamesBeat conference in San Francisco found that 66% of those polled “were excited about this growing trend” which is most often seen in so-called ‘free to play’ games.

That is where it costs nothing to play but developers sell items or different levels within the gaming experience.

“Micro payments have been proven to work very well in the far east, Korea and China,” said Dean Takahashi from VentureBeat, which organised GamesBeat.

“Initially they took off there because there is such a big problem with piracy and with a micro-transaction, you can always verify the credit card transaction or the payment system so you are assured people will pay up.

“The big test is whether North American gamers, the biggest market, are really going to go for this or not,” Mr Takahashi told the BBC.

Analyst Michael Cai, who is the vice president of video games at Interpret, said young gamers like the new model but that is no guarantee of success.

“As this generation grows up the big question is what are they going to adopt and embrace? A lot of the publishers have started to embrace these (payment) models as well and everyone is looking at micro-transactions very carefully,” said Mr Cai.

One game often cited as making the most of micropayments is Mob Wars, where players rise through the mob ranks by committing crimes and fighting other players.

Real money is used to buy weapons and other virtual goods on the site. The TechCrunch blog noted “some estimates suggest revenue may have peaked at $1 m (£667,000) a month and there are nearly 2.5m active users of the application on Facebook today.”

Games as a service

In the free to play marketplace a company called Playfish has grown from 20m users to 60m in the last 18 months.

It has five out of the top 10 games on the world’s biggest social networking site, Facebook. Playfish games like Pet Society and Who has the Biggest Brain? are also available on Apple’s App Store.

Read more . . .

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Tags: credit card transaction, dean takahashi, gaming experience, Innovation, micro payments, micro transactions, mob, payment models, venturebeat

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 11:34 pm and is filed under BBC, Gaming, Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.