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Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Crowdsourcing for Social Game Design

Posted by Tadhg | Jun 14, 2009 | Filed under News, Social Games, Spell Souls

Recently we’ve been trying to nail the look and feel of our first social game (Spell Souls), and we had the idea to throw open the normally secretive doors of game development and see what other designers could do.

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Secret order of magi seeks recruits for Spell Souls – The magical duelling game. Register to become a Beta Tester today.

Posted by Alan O'Dea | Jun 4, 2009 | Filed under Games, News

Spell Souls is a free web-based strategy game in development for social networks like Facebook and MySpace. Simple Lifeforms, the game’s developer, is looking for prospective players interested in helping to test the magical duelling game

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Spell Souls – The Magical Dueling Game

Posted by Alan O'Dea | May 13, 2009 | Filed under Games, News

Today we at Simple Lifeforms are pleased to announce a dedicated site for our first game, Spell Souls, to talk about its development, features, and just what it is. It is also a site to help bring would-be players together. Would-be players like you…

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The #socialgames Tag For Social Games on Twitter

Posted by Tadhg | Mar 23, 2009 | Filed under News, Social Games

The hash (#) tag is a way to cut through Twitter’s noise to get to the conversations that you want to hear. We’re promoting the #socialgames tag on Twitter as of today.

Using Twitter’s own search facility or a tool like TweetDeck it is possible to filter out much of the noise and get to what you want. When Battlestar Galactica’s finale was broadcast a few days ago the place to be was on Twitter and watching the #bsg tag for comments and reviews. Similarly, every Friday Twitter now has a sort of party called #followfriday in which users suggest other users that they think everyone should follow.

So the #socialgames tag is to help gather shared links and posts about social games. The tag has also been added to the Tagalus tag dictionary (here). Read on for a simple guide on how to use the tag.

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How do Massive Multi-Player Online Games (MMOs) Make Money?

Posted by Alan O'Dea | Mar 12, 2009 | Filed under News, Research

DFC Intelligence has recently released a report on the most commercially successful massive multi-player MMOs (MMO). World Of Warcraft, the most successful MMO has an estimated annual revenue of $500m. With the top ten MMOs in the world generating estimated combined revenues of $1,875m* there is no doubt they have matured into a highly successful commercial sector presenting considerable revenue and profits for their operators. Successful MMOs clearly can realise significant profits for their operators and investors. How?

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What’s Hot, What’s Not in Game Investments

Posted by Alan O'Dea | Mar 2, 2009 | Filed under News, Research

I saw this article on VentureBeat yesterday with VC Tim Chang talking about what’s hot and what’s not in games investment. It’s a good read and I’ve reposted it up here on the Simple Lifeforms blog.

Game and virtual world investments soared to $885 million in 2008, but the picture is likely to be a mixed one this year. Games are one of the few industries still growing at retail (13 percent in January), and online games are still a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity.

But will the industry hold up in 2009? And will big investments in game companies still make sense this year? We talked about the state of game investments with Tim Chang, a principal at Norwest Venture Partners to get his take on those questions.

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Simple Lifeforms Founded to Develop Social Games

Posted by Alan O'Dea | Feb 16, 2009 | Filed under News, Press

Simple Lifeforms, a social game company, has recently been founded in the online game development hub of Nottingham, United Kingdom. Simple Lifeforms was formed to develop and publish games that combine the best features of online games (such as Runescape and World of Warcraft) and social networks (such as Facebook and MySpace). Simple Lifeforms call these products “Social Games”.

Company founders Alan O’Dea (ex Monumental Games) and Tadhg Kelly (ex BSkyB) were inspired to found the company after researching trends between game players and internet users. They believe that the convergence between the two is happening in social networks. Social networks are quickly becoming the perfect market environment to deliver new kinds of game experience, including such elements as co-operative play, social play-enablement, dating, finding new friends and challenging existing friends. Both believe that this is as revolutionary a development for games as the introduction of 3D graphics was for games a decade ago.

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Hi5’s Big Mistake

Posted by Tadhg | Feb 12, 2009 | Filed under News, Social Games

The social games space is quickly evolving and spreading its wings. It’s a gathering revolution and what’s interesting to note about it as a space is that the kinds of games that are making their mark are markedly different from more regular casual or video games. As it is a very young sector it could be argued that nobody really knows what they’re doing yet and so mistakes are made.  Hi5, one of the top 10 social networks in the world, has recently got into the space with a dedicated Games offering. It’s very attractive in several ways, but they have made one huge (though not irreversible) mistake: They’ve adopted a closed platform policy.

This is an article about games platforms, open and closed strategies, and why it’s a bad idea to try and manage a social game platform in a closed fashion.

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Social Games Industry Overview (08/09)

Posted by Alan O'Dea | Jan 26, 2009 | Filed under News, Personal, Research, Social Games

The social game industry is quickly becoming a significant sector of the games industry and is experiencing explosive growth: $75M was invested in the top three social game companies in 2008 and the top twenty games across MySpace and Facebook recorded over 100M Daily Active Users in January 2009 alone. This article is a quick overview of the sector and we hope serves as a fact sheet for those new to it and interested in what all of the fuss is about. 

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Why Did Virtual Worlds & Social Games Investments Defy the Downturn in 2008

Posted by Alan O'Dea | Dec 8, 2008 | Filed under News, Research

I wanted to comment on why online, causal, social games and virtual world investment has remained strong throughout 2008 and address a simple question. Why are online games now so interesting to investors?

That answer is usually presented in business terms such as return of investment (RoI), EBITDA, market growth, market traction, exit strategies, proven team, killer product, great technology, or multiple returns on investment 5x, 10x, 25x, etc, in short all of the usual metrics that measure and drive a business. However any successful company that raises money has to demonstrate these business criteria so that’s less valuable to answering our question. What’s more interesting to getting to an answer and what investors are most interested in is potential.

This article presents some of the main factors that I believe are at the hearth of answering that question i.e. capital efficiency, online distribution, acquisition costs, monetisation methods, balance of payments and value chain position.

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