Kickstarter Game Funding Over $100 Million

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Kickstarter has revealed that games have received over $109.45 million in funding. This comes from nearly 4,700 gaming projects, with 1,481 having met their goals, resulting in over $90 million in delivered pledges.

Gaming has also seen the largest amount of projects raising seven figures, as 13 of the 22 projects to raise over $1 million have been in the games section. 2012 saw over $83.14 million raised in pledged funding for gaming, and 2013 has already seen over with $22.42 million in pledges to date.

Source: Kickstarter.com

YouTube Celebrates 1 Billion Monthly Users

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YouTube announced that over a billion people are now visiting its online video site each month. YouTube first hit 800 million monthly visitors in October 2011.

Over the past two years, YouTube has tried to prioritize watching along distinct channels from its content creators. In 2012, the streaming video site seeded 96 channels with around $100 million in funding to help them accelerate that growth.

When asked if the channel funding investment had paid off, vice president and global head of content partnerships Robert Kyncl said, “Every year we reserve the right to get smarter. What we’re looking for is the acceleration of those who are figuring out how to retail their content.”

Source: PressTelegram.com

Zynga Creates Accounts Separate From Facebook

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Zynga has announced a subtle but important change with Zynga.com. While in the past it was required that players sign into the site using Facebook, that is no longer mandatory.

“We heard you want a place that is even more dedicated to games and allows you to easily find and connect with other players,” said Zynga CTO Cadir Lee. “We heard you want to share your big wins, level ups and in-game achievements, with players who love the games you do. You also want to create a unique player name like you do in Words With Friends and Draw Something.”

“We appreciate this feedback and are excited to bring you a new Zynga.com. So what’s new Starting next week, when you visit Zynga.com you will see a new streamlined signup that lets you create your own account just for playing games,” he added. “We also wanted to make sure that existing Zynga.com players continue to have the best experience possible so you don’t have to start from scratch. All players will have the option to connect with Facebook and keep your game friends and game progress, while deciding what you share with your gaming community.”

This has a very tangible benefit for Zynga where they will not have to surrender 30 percent of its revenue from the sale of virtual goods with these new accounts to Facebook. Zynga will also be able to better control the advertising being shown on Zynga.com, which is leading to more video ads.

As Zynga builds its own game portal, the company also plans to release more third party titles. “We also want to thank all our Zynga partners — the third party developers who helped bring you more ways to play on Zynga.com. Without our partners we wouldn’t be able to introduce you to some of the most fun and entertaining games on the site — RPGs like Legends: Rise of a Hero and an awesome sim game like Village Life. We know it’s a challenge to keep up with platform changes as we’ve been through it a few times ourselves, so we’re fully committed to working closely with all our partners to make this update as simple and painless as we possibly can. For any developers who are interested in getting their social games in front of millions of people who love to play, please visit us at developers.zynga.com/partners.”

Source: Blog.Zynga.com

Ken Levine Playfully Denies $200 Million Price Tag For BioShock Infinite

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The New York Times recently posted an article where an unnamed analyst pegged the cost of BioShock Infinite at $200 million, or $100 million for the game’s development and $100 million for the marketing. Ken Levine took to twitter and humorously rejected the suggested cost of BioShock Infinite.

“200 million for Infinite Did someone send some checks to the wrong address #unnamedanalyst“ Levine tweeted.

He later added, “Analyst: @IGLevine‘s American girl doll collection cost 200 million.”

Source: Twitter.com

Quantic Dream Explains Partnership With Sony

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Quantic Dream is an independent developer, but it has chosen to work exclusively with Sony on its past two titles: Heavy Rain and the upcoming Beyond: Two Souls. Quantic Dream co-CEO Guillaume de Fondaumiere says the reason why they’ve stuck with Sony is the freedom they’ve granted in pursuing the projects they’ve wanted todo instead of pushing them to do Heavy Rain 2.

“This isn’t a partnership where we are forced by a big company into giving immediate results. That’s fantastic for a studio like us,” he said. “Ever since we started our partnership, Sony just said it was going to give us the money to build these games and we said we were going to work as hard as we could and reward it for its trust.”

“We proved with Heavy Rain that we can be profitable by making a game for just one platform. Would we have made more money by going multi-platform Of course, but on the other hand, we wouldn’t be working with Sony as a publisher,” he added. “We’re certainly not going to change partner for the sake of making more money. That’s not the philosophy behind our studio. As long as we can create the games we want to create, we’ll stay with Sony.”

Source: OfficialPlaystationMagazine.co.uk

PS Vita: One-Third Of Sales Are Digital

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According to PlayStation director of product planning and platform software innovation Don Mesa, a third of all sales on the PS Vita are digital. He also said that a survey of Vita owners showed that the system had a 86 percent “satisfaction rate” and that 90 percent of Vita owners play Vita once a week or more for an average of 18.7 hours every week.

“I know there”s been a lot of noise about Vita recently,” Mesa admitted. “There were some negative impressions and so forth. One thing we haven”t had the opportunity to do is talk about how our Vita owners are feeling about the platform. It”s a good gut check for all of us, to know what”s happening now.”

“Our users are embracing the PlayStation Store on the device and finding it very easy to download and get their games on their device and start playing,” he added.

Source: IGN.com

Elder Scrolls IP ‘Cuts Through The Noise’

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There are lots of established game franchises in the MMO space, like World of Warcraft and EverQuest, and plenty of famous IP outside of games that have attempted to break into the space with varying degrees of success, like Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and Star Wars. However, Elder Scrolls Online game director Matt Firor believes that the IP he’s working on will be more than enough to drum up attention.

“It is a crowded space, but this is Elder Scrolls,” said Firor. “One of things of having a huge IP like Elder Scrolls is it cuts through the noise. It’s safe to say – looking at the lines for people to play – that everyone knows about it. That is the first step to getting a lot of people into the game. Part of the crowded landscape is it’s hard to get your message out there. When you say ‘Elder Scrolls‘, we don’t have a problem getting the message out, which helps us immensely.”

“Elder Scrolls is definitely a quality target, but everything it brings with it intrinsically is almost perfectly suited for an MMO. Giant open world, lots of cool classes, lots of history and depth, the cool combat system that you just experienced. That came from Elder Scrolls. That by far outweighs the expectations of the crowd who hear Elder Scrolls and want to come in. We want to make it meet their expectations,” he explained. “We know we have Elder Scrolls players and MMO players that are interested. Skyrim and Elder Scrolls players won’t have problems adapting to the system; it’s very similar. If you’ve never played an Elder Scrolls game, you’re going to need to wrap your brain around it.”

Source: GamesIndustry International

eBay Study Says Large Companies Benefit Little From Google Ads

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eBay is publicly questioning the value of Google ads. Specifically, they released a study examining whether the ads it bought on Google and that show up to the right of search results were worth the investment.

“The conclusion: Incremental revenue from paid search was far smaller than expected because existing customers would have come to eBay regardless, whether directly or through other marketing channels,” eBay spokeswoman Johnna Hoff.

This might be worrisome for Google, because eBay and Amazon.com have traditionally been some of the biggest buyers into Google searches, resulting in $46 billion in ad revenue last year. “This has to be a major concern for Google,” said Oren Etzioni, an online search expert at the University of Washington and co-founder of shopping search service Decide.com.

“Strong brands like eBay, Amazon, and others need Google less and less as they have established a loyal online following,” he added. “The eBay study validates this common-sense conclusion. Even at the far smaller Decide.com, we’ve found that buying ads on Google was not cost effective.”

eBay Research Labs economists Thomas Blake, Chris Nosko, and Steve Tadelis looked at eBay sales after halting purchases of some Google search ads, then kept the ads going in some regions for a test group. There was no drop off for the eBay listings where the Google ad purchases were switched off, though it was more likely to bring in users that use eBay less than three times in the last year.

The authors believe that paid search ads generate about 25 cents in extra revenue for each $1 spent. “eBay’s experiences suggest that all companies should look carefully at how much bang they’re getting for their search marketing dollars,” Columbia Business School professor Ray Fishman wrote in a Harvard Business Review blog.

Google’s own studies said that 89 percent of search ad clicks were “incremental” meaning that the ads generated more visits to the advertisers’ websites. “Since outcomes differ so much among advertisers and are influenced by many different factors, we encourage advertisers to experiment with their own campaigns,” the Google spokesman added.

In this the eBay study agreed, saying that paid search ads may work better for other companies. Smaller businesses that lack the name recognition of eBay and Amazon may get more out of Google search ads.

Source: HuffingtonPost.com

Blizzard Announces Hearthstone: Heroes Of Warcraft

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Blizzard Entertainment has announced Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. The free-to-play CCG strategy title will focus on creating decks based around the character classes of World of Warcraft, with a beta for the iPad and PC cross-platform title expected by Summer 2013.

“We’ve always loved collectible card games at Blizzard, so it’s been exciting to bring everything we love about the genre to life in Hearthstone,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment. “We’re putting a lot of focus into creating a fun new game that’s easy to pick up and play, but also has a lot of depth. We can’t wait to share it with everyone.”

Exclusive: Remaking Lara Croft

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Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics recently lifted the hood a little to show what went into producing their now hit Tomb Raider game, putting on a master class session in Los Angeles sponsored by BAFTA. Geoff Keighley hosted and a string of presentations followed by Karl Stewart, who led global brand for Crystal Dynamics and is responsible for marketing in the US, Darrell Gallagher, head of developer Crystal Dynamics, Noah Hughes, the studios creative director, and Jason Graves, the game’s music composer. Each looked at the painstaking effort they put into remaking Lara Croft by creating an origin for the storied franchise, and marketing her as a gritty survivalist, not the slick, pretty action hero gamers had come to know.

Stewart focused on how Square Enix took on the challenge of creating not just a successful game but another blockbuster in the Tomb Raider franchise, one long in the making. He showed a chart highlighting how brand recognition for Lara Croft compared to other game characters and only Mario had higher notoriety. Lara handily beat out a selection of rivals in the action game space such as Master Chief, Sam Fisher, Kratos, and even her new male counterpart Nathan Drake from Sony’s best-selling Uncharted games. One would think that made Square Enix’s task easier, as if their game had a built-in audience. Except Tomb Raider has a legacy of hits and misses, with recent releases mostly falling into the latter category.

Stewart was forthcoming in saying how both Square and Crystal Dynamics looked to how, from a sales perspective, Uncharted had unseated Tomb Raider in the action-adventure genre. Uncharted’s take on the genre was grittier and more rooted in reality. They also looked the evolution of James Bond from slick spy to Daniel Craig’s no-holds-barred action her, which Stewart said was inspired by the success of Jason Bourne films. These led to the decision that the Tomb Raider franchise needed what he called “a shot in the arm,” and that meant reinventing it from its starting point – where Lara’s own adventure streak started.

We talked with Stewart and Crystal Dynamics’ Darrell Gallagher after the event.