Posted on July 29, 2007 - Filed Under Editorials, Industry News |
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The casual game industry is becoming a big industry, especially with all of the big players like Microsoft and EA turning their eyes towards casual games. The biggest problem facing the casual gaming industry is the conversion rate. The buy and try method is working, but not as great as it could. The conversion rate is only 1 - 2 percent.
Some people in the industry, such as Daniel Bernstein CEO of Cake Mania, feel the try and buy way of doing this is working, but needs to be tweaked to get a higher conversion rate. Personally, I think the casual games industry needs to stick with some form of the try and buy because there are many games that are similar out there and not all incarnations of a certain games are good games. The try and buy gives you a good understanding of what the game is like before having to buy it for $20 USD.
Other people in the industry feel the try and buy model is not popular with some players. RealArcade, a popular portal site for casual games says that the population on their web site is about 50:50 split between men and women, but the people that actually purchase the games is split 3:1 in favor of middle aged women.
Still other people in the industry hold a different view and think game portals are the way to go with paid subscriptions to play. EA’s game portal, Pogo.com, has 1.5 million paying subscribers and half of those people play daily.
Of course, there is the camp that thinks the money is in advertising within casual games. There are some developers that disagree with this. The advertising seems to help the game portals, but are harder for the developers to get the ads into the games. Not to mention, the developers do not see a good portion of the ad revenue. Google is trying to come to the rescue here with their Adsense for Games. Google will make it easy for developers to put ads in their games and hopes to entice sponsors to sign up to advertise in games. Google made it work with web sites. If anyone could make it work with casual games, Google is a good prospect.
The casual games industry is still fairly new in the aspect of profit. There are a lot of big players all trying to find out how to get your money. We will have to wait and see what actually ends up working.
One Response to “Trials Of The Casual Game Industry”
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Last week’s Casual Conenct conference presented some new alternatives to the Try-and-Buy model targeted at solving the 1% conversion rate problem.
The solution micro-licnesing. Letting people play with a pay-as-you go model but getting a guarantee never to pay more than the price of the game. To put is simply, once you reach the price of the game it is yours.
The model has proven success at reducing the customer resistance, and therefore increasing conversions, while at the same time generating significantly more revenue than the traditional try-and-buy.
For the players it’s the best of all worlds, download as many games as you want, play them as long as you want and never have to pay more than if you just bought the game.
If you want to see this in action check out: http://www.PlayOnArcade.com