Facebook Talks About ‘Plenty of Opportunity’ For New Games

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There’s a perception by some that breaking into the Facebook gaming scene is very hard between powerhouses like Zynga or EA Playfish. However, director of game partnerships at Facebook Sean Ryan says that there are over 375 games with more than 100,000 monthly active users and Facebook developers in 190 countries.

It s not a market where 10 apps get all of the users, Ryan recently said at Casual Connect. The market is growing like crazy and you can participate in it.

He noted the burgeoning potential for casino games, strategy titles, hunting games, fishing games, religious titles, fighting games, and more adding that the romance game category is a potential target with $1.5 billion in the entertainment market not being currently catered to. If you are not building social games, then you are not building games for the majority of the market. You are building games for a shrinking market, he said. It s easy to forget that this market is less than four years old. It s too late to clone a game that is a clone of another game, but there is plenty of opportunity.

Source: VentureBeat

Facebook Makes Large Brands Relevant Locally

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Facebook provides a potential treasure trove of information to marketers, though that’s under utilized by most brands at this point. Somewhere between 60 percent and 70 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from small businesses right now, not large brands.

Such businesses are realizing the benefits of targeting consumers on a local level, similar to the way small businesses take advantage of radio, newspaper and billboard advertising to drive local sales, writes Dave Williams. National brands shouldn’t feel excluded — they, too, can engage their audiences on a more intimate level by targeting locally. And unlike traditional display, Facebook gives advertisers national scale on a very local level. Unfortunately, many are leaving this opportunity untapped.

There are many ways to engage with consumers between local events, new store openings, holiday offers and other local promotions It’s like the way Sunday edition circulars used to work pushing weekly specials out to relevant localized audiences with efficiency, mass reach and frequency.

We recently ran a campaign to promote a celebrity in-store appearance for a cell phone provider. By targeting the youth market in that region with customized Facebook display ads, we achieved a 0.26 percent click-through rate, relatively high for any type of display. That high CTR foreshadowed massive attendance at the in-store event, completely surpassing expectations, wrote Williams. Groupon and Living Social are two other companies that know how to effectively leverage this local display strategy, and you’ve undoubtedly seen one or both companies advertise deals in your city in Facebook’s right-hand column. Both companies have national reach, but their business model operates on a local level, so proper targeting pays dividends in scale.

Facebook can alleviate problems that come up from broad and general websites to smaller regionalized sites with little ROI. Companies can use the self-serve ad tool and Facebook’s Ad API to automate the process, scale and target the correct audience without breaking the bank.

Marketing on a local level maximizes the impact of your marketing campaigns on Facebook by minimizing advertising waste and maximizing your reach and frequency with the right audiences, making the brand offering more appealing, said Williams. Customizing an ad makes your brand message relevant to a consumer on a level where he or she can easily engage and take action. It combines the reach and targeting capabilities of Facebook in order to maximize brand awareness and drive consumers into an actual location to make a purchase which is, after all, the purpose of marketing.

Source: AdAge

Iwata’s F2P Views Characterized As ‘Smack Talk’

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Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata recently railed against the quality of social, mobile and particularly free-to-play games in a GDC 2011 keynote. Tenshi Ventures partner and former co-founder of Kuju Entertainment Ian Baverstock has renounced that point of view during a speech at the Develop conference.

“I just don’t agree,” he said. “This lack of craftsmanship is really a reflection of Nintendo’s point of view they are completely obsessed with retail, and have been very successful in that. Ultimately for Mr. Iwata to be able to sit there and say that we’re losing craftsmanship, we’re losing skills… at the same time that Minecraft comes out, sells millions and makes one man lots of money and creates a huge public buzz, is a shocking indictment of his view of the world that we all see.”

To Baverstock, what the speech really was about was maintaining the current power structure between publishers and developers. “In the end, once you get past that preachy title of why developers need to change, the reason why I’m so riled by Mr. Iwata’s point of view is that fundamentally it’s smack talk: ‘You, Mr. Developer, stay in your box, you stay down there, we’ll do with this other stuff, you just carry on making games.’ he said. “I think that, fundamentally, Mr. Iwata’s view of this market from a value creation and number of title point of view was skewed entirely to his interests as a successful platform holder, and is in no way a reflection of what ordinary consumers want.”

Source: GamesIndustry.biz

Incubus Goes 8-bit with Album Promotion

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8-bit style is in right now and , is taking advantage of that with Incubattle: Leak Stopping Band of Destiny. The title is no doubt a response to the fact that the band’s new album titled “If Not Now, When” leaked onto the Internet months ahead of release.

The game is evocative of River City Ransom/Final Fight/Double Dragon style beat-’em-ups. It probably won’t stop people from pirating music, but it’s a fun little way to turn the situation around.

Source: Game Set Watch

Charlie Sheen Enters Anger Management

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Lionsgate and Debmar-Mercury have announced that they will be producing Charlie Sheen’s newest sitcom. Called Anger Management, it will be based loosely around the 2003 movie, with Sheen cast in the role of the eccentric therapist for debut sometime in the 2011-12 season. 

Who better than Charlie Sheen to tackle Anger Management, said producer Joe Roth, who has worked with Sheen in five feature films, including Major League, Young Guns, and Three Musketeers. With Charlie s incredible talent and comedic gifts, he remains the leading man of TV sitcoms.

Anger Management is being produced for first run syndication, a format coming back from other Debmar-Mercury productions like Tyler Perry s House of Payne and Meet the Browns. Our sitcom model is all about building well-known brands around extraordinary talents like Charlie that, thanks to their large profit participation, are highly motivated to succeed, said Debmar-Mercury Co-Presidents Mort Marcus and Ira Bernstein.

Source: AdWeek

Activision CEO Talks Facebook Games

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Activision has mostly avoided the call to do more social and mobile games like what its main competitor Electronic Arts is doing. However, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick recently revealed that they are taking a good long look at Facebook as a platform.

Sometimes we need some kind of a specialized skill like right now there is a lot of work being done on Facebook games, said Kotick. We ve always been a platform agnostic company, we ve always said, if you have a platform and you have a big enough installed base of that platform we ll evaluate it as an opportunity to make games on. And Facebook, with 750 million users, clearly has enough of a platform. The  challenge always is, can you deliver a shareholder return by investing in said platform, and in the case of Facebook we think we can.

But the skills that are required to do social games on a Facebook platform include analytical skills that are different than what we have in our business intelligence unit today. So we ve had to go out and find people who have these unique kinds of skills and there are very few of them that actually have proven their skills, he added. So you have to find people who have the characteristics of being able to develop systems to analyze game play or game behavior.

Kotick also revealed that development schedules now include marketing budgets. We have a ‘green light process,’ and it s evolved over a very long period of time, said Kotick. But it s a pretty exhaustive process, very milestone based, and there is a whole process of peer review where you ll come in and show a prototype or a game concept. Now actually includes all the marketing, because the marketing is so integrated into the game experience. The green light process has evolved to include all the marketing materials, the marketing schedules, the marketing vehicles, to be creative.

Source: Forbes

NBA 2K12 Gets Jordan, Bird, Magic

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2K Sports has announced that NBA 2K12 will have three separate covers. The stylized artwork highlights Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson; the Bird and Johnson covers will be available in limited quantities.

“Bringing Michael Jordan to the virtual hardwood last year was a huge success for NBA 2K11; however, we didn’t want to stop there,” said Jason Argent, vice president of marketing for 2K Sports. “We’re bringing ‘His Airness’ back to the NBA 2K franchise as part of a multi-year extended partnership, along with two other legendary icons — Larry Bird and Magic Johnson — for a special cover athlete collection representing the NBA’s greatest heroes.”

Epic Says Samaritan ‘Not a Game’

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Epic turned heads with its recent Samaritan demo for the Unreal Engine shown off at GDC. While this has led to speculation over a new IP from the company, Epic has confirmed that it was just a tech demo done by 12 men in three months.

“We have a character and we’ve got a set of animations we can hook him up with and move him around. But there’s not really any type of gameplay. It’s more a cinematic experience, said Senior technical artist and level designer Alan Willard. “He looks great. It was definitely a big win for us to do something a little different. Obviously he’s not a huge leap away from the design of some of the characters we’ve had in the past, but it was nice not to do a big space marine.”

When asked on whether Samaritan may ever form its own game, Willard responded, “It was what it was meant to be. [The message was:] Here’s our vision of what we can do by taking these designs and putting them together.”

Source: CVG

Battlefield 3 Billboards Up In The Summer

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Electronic Arts has put up a series of Battlefield 3 billboards up across the U.K. in locations like London, Birmingham, Salisbury and Bracknell. It is believed that they might be trying to up the hype in preparation for Gamefext at the NEC Arena on September 16.

This is still just the opening salvo in an advertising war with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 that’s expected to top $100 million between the two shooter titles.

Source: CVG