At the Social Gaming Summit recently, on the panel about Monetization and Business Models, David Perry mentioned that there were 29 business models for games that he was familiar with. I asked him to do a guest post listing them all and he agreed. David Perry is a 27 year industry veteran whose game...

One of the take aways of the social gaming summit last week was that even casual MMOGs need to focus on their hardcore players as that is their source of paying players. David Perry of Acclaim noted in one panel that the players of Dance Online monetize far better than the players of “traditio...

The Social Gaming Summit was quite a success on Friday. Over 400 attendees seemed to enjoy the sessions based on the high proportion of people in sessions (vs in the lobby) and the fact that even the last session, that ended at 6pm on Friday evening, was very well attended. The attendee list was a g...

Massively has a summary of the panel discussion from ION last week that gave a five year forecast for MMOs. Lots of interesting predictions from the panel, but the quote that really struck me was: The number one reason people leave games are basically f*ckwads. While this comment generated laughter ...

CNN , the Times of London and others have been covering Miss Bimbo recently, which Jezebel describes as: essentially an online competition in which each registered player is given a “Bimbo” all her own to take care of — sort of like those Tamagotchi pets, but, well, not. According to M...

The NY Times has a story on Nickelodeon planing to spend $100m on 600 exclusive casual web games over the next two years. They certainly have a huge audience of people playing casual games across a network of sites: With a series of customized sites for different age groups (preschoolers, tweens, te...

This is a guest post from John Szeder. John has been kicking around the gaming industry for a ten years now and is a frequent speaker at GDC and other gaming conferences. In his words: John Szeder is an enthusiastic digital content creator and evangelist. He is presently working on a project in stea...

Erik Bethke of Go Pets Live gave the standout presentation of day one of the Worlds In Motion Summit at GDC. He talked about applying game dynamics as a panacea for operators of virtual worlds. From my notes: 1. Use points and leveling up to get people to do ANYTHING. (similar perspective to Amy Jo ...

The latest charts of MMOG market share by business model show the free-to-play (F2P in green) model to be roughly neck and neck with the subscription (P2P in yellow) model, with buy to play (B2P in blue) making up just a small fraction of the total: However, I think that we’ll see the free-to-...

Today we’ve got a guest post from Matt Mihaly. Matt was the founder of Iron Realms Entertainment and CEO from 1996 to early 2008. He launched four successful text MUDs while at Iron Realms and pioneered the virtual goods business model in 1998 with its first MUD – Achaea, Dreams of Divine La...