Top Five Takeaways from Casual Connect

Mike Pinkerton and Rich Weil spent last week in Seattle representing Metaverse at Casual Connect, a major conference event for the online casual gaming industry.  Casual games are traditionally defined as games with simple rules and a lack of long-term commitment or special skills, in contrast to the more complex and competitive hardcore games.  As they observed last week, however, the lines between these two categories are quickly blurring.  Their takeaway on that diminishing line of demarcation, along with four other takeaways are below:

1.  Bulls Abound

There is incredible excitement in the industry right now, and for good reason.  Everybody and their brother (and their mother) is playing casual games.  Five-year old market leader Zynga is looking to go public with a multi-billion-dollar valuation and nobody seems too concerned with the recent industry bubble talk.  Facebook’s representative declared there are plenty of profitable games yet to be made, and encouraged new developers to tap into new genres and niches.  Bulls definitely outnumbered the bubble-boding bears.

2.  “Hey, I thought you made MMOs?”

Many of our massively multiplayer online (MMO) friends were at the conference, and their take on the state of casual games was universally giddy.  Compared to MMOs, which require significant budgets and can take years to develop, an efficient developer can crank out a casual game in just a few months.  With the shorter production time and broader audience, there is less risk and a quicker reward.  We are certainly not predicting any decline in MMOs or understating the complexities of bringing a highly scalable casual game to market – not everyone is able to do that well – but the allure of casual games is not going unnoticed by MMO game developers.

3.   Intersection Ahead

 Speaking of MMOs, we are definitely seeing a blurring of the lines between casual and hardcore games.  While our customer Kabam builds its games on the casual-game friendly Facebook, its target audience is serious gamers who enjoy the deep, immersive gameplay normally found in MMOs and role-playing games (RPGs).  On the other hand, even the most simple of casual games now incorporate elements of inter-player engagement, which is a natural addition on social network platforms like Facebook.  Like the inevitable melding of virtual worlds and MMOs we saw a few years ago, there definitely seems to be an intersection ahead for casual and hardcore.

4.  Bait or Chum?

The established casual game publishers were there in full force, scouting new games, especially for online and mobile platforms.  There is an interesting dynamic between the small developers who are eeking out a living by self-publishing and the large publishers, who promise funding, distribution, and cross-marketing with their existing titles.  There is the real potential to convert the monthly active users from the thousands to the millions, but the cost is sacrificing a very significant revenue share.  The negotiations related to us are reminiscent of a scene from ABC’s Shark Tank, where the sharks giddily demand a huge equity stake in exchange for the promise of tremendous growth and riches (with proven results).  It will be interesting to compare future results of those who made the deals and those who didn’t.

5.  The Increasing Importance of Community Relations

We were particularly interested, of course, in the industry’s present take on community management, customer service, and outsourcing.  Fortunately, there is clear recognition that even mobile games need to be socially engaging and that player retention is critically important.  With the freemium model (free for basic, but pay for advanced features) gaining widespread popularity, there is a huge responsibility to keep the big spending whales happy.  Kabam’s Andrew Sheppard noted that his company looks past the active user metrics and focuses on marketing to, retaining, and monetizing from high quality users.  Key drivers in that effort are using teams of community managers to publicize new events and content releases and white glove customer support from their internal team and our team based in Sacramento.  As for outsourcing community management and customer support, most publishers continue to handle those efforts internally, which is understandable given the benefits of learning-by-doing at this early stage in the industry lifecycle.  There are already exceptions, of course, and with the maturity of the space, we expect more and more publishers to take advantage of the expertise and savings a boutique digital outsourcer like Metaverse Mod Squad can offer.

See you next year in Seattle!

–Mike Pinkerton and Rich Weil