Archive for the ‘Analysis’ Category

Games law, piracy and free

November 9, 2011

Last month, I spoke at Osborne Clark’s seminar for inhouse lawyers for the games industry. It was afternoon of legal stuff, together with me talking about piracy and free. Jas Purewal (also known as @gamerlaw on Twitter) gave two talks. The first one embedded here covers “Lodsys, the mobile patent wars and interactive entertainment”. Lodsys, [...]

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Posted in: Analysis, Events

Tagged with: free, games law, jas purewal, lodsys, patents, piracy

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200 redundancies in one day: Are the wheels coming off free-to-play?

November 3, 2011

Two announcements today suggest that companies embracing free-to-play business models may have over-extended themselves and are having to cut back. But the key question is whether this is a sensible restructuring of rapidly growing business or a more fundamental issue with the free-to-play business model.

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Posted in: Analysis, Finance

Tagged with: free-to-play, gameforge, layoffs, playdemic, redundancies, restructuring, rockyou

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Facebook changes mean that Cityville lost 20 million mAUS last week

October 18, 2011

Glance at the Appdata chart for Cityville and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Zynga had a terrible weekend. MAUs fell from around 75 million to around 55 million on a single day.

If you thought the change was more likely to be due to a change in how MAUs were calculated, you’d be right.

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Posted in: Analysis, Featured

Tagged with: cityville, dau/mau, engagement, facebook, maus, measurement

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XBLA in Decline, says 2DBoy’s Ron Carmel: a case study for Open over closed

October 4, 2011

Ron Carmel, of World of Goo fame, has written an excellent post on the challenges facing XBLA. He believes that the platform peaked in 2010 from the point of view of developers choosing the platform, that Microsoft hasn’t really noticed. He offers a ten stage plan for Microsoft to recover its standing, split into two lists of five (basically one consists of little tweaks and the other consists of “becoming more like the AppStore”.

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Posted in: Analysis, Distribution, Featured

Tagged with: 2dboy, curation, filtering, microsoft, ron carmel, world of goo, xbla

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How do you compete with free?

September 29, 2011

Undercroft is just one example of a game that is free, with no expectation that it will generate any direct revenue at all. It is a good game with relatively high production values. If you are charging for your game, you are not competing with rubbish, no matter what you would like to believe.

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Posted in: Analysis, Marketing

Tagged with: free, free-to-play, gamasutra, runescape, undercroft

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Are consumers falling out of love with Facebook games? Engagement with Facebook Games Has fallen 25% since December 2010

September 20, 2011

I’ve been doing some analysis of Facebook games over the past year. In particular, I’ve been looking at the engagement rate (DAU/MAU) for Facebook games.

Between December 2010 and September 2010, engagement has fallen by around 25% for some of the most popular games on Facebook.
Is Facebook in decline as a platform?

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Posted in: Analysis, Featured, Marketing

Tagged with: dau/mau, engagement, facebook, retention, sims social, social games

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50 Questions: What are the key terms in a termsheet? (Part 2 of 2)

September 8, 2011

In this post I will cover the other key economic terms; liquidation preference and anti-dilution, the most important control terms; board structure and protective provisions, and then finish with a few words on exclusivity and cost. Over these two posts I will then have covered the most important clauses in a termsheet, and you should be able to tell whether a termsheet is attractive or not, but there is a lot that isn’t covered and they are no substitute for a good lawyer.

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Posted in: 50 questions, Analysis, Finance

Tagged with: games, games industry, investment, venture capital

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