Business & Games: The Blog

by: Reinout te Brake

Still wondering if you should let your kids loose on the likes of Club Penguin or Habbo? Well consider this:

The Club Penguin Times, after all, is more widely read than New York's Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, or The Dallas Morning News. And it's not even 3 years old. Newspapers have become fascinated recently by the fact that readerships of online publications linked to social networking sites are far greater than their own.

Continue reading "Another Reason for Your Kids to Join a MMORPG" »

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by: Reinout te Brake

Amazon.com has agreed to acquire casual online games portal Reflexive Entertainment, the Internet retail giant said Wednesday.

Reflexive offers free online web games for players to record high scores and earn medals to share with friends.

"We’ll be able to expand our distribution network to include Amazon’s amazing distribution channel,” Reflexive CEO Lars Brubaker wrote in a blog post on the site.

Continue reading "Amazon.com Acquires Games Portal" »

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by: Gary Hayes via Marketing Innovation Blog

OK you should have spotted quite a few characters living on this post :)  - such as the ‘video-real’ talking character centered on the page, click the play button on them for more ’salesy’ characters - courtesy of CLIVEvideo - all will be revealed - and no, I have not gone into wigs, manufacturing!

Continue reading "Inching Towards the Live Web 3.0 - Layered Social Virtual Worlds" »

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Via Interactive Media Technology and Atracsys LLC - Magic In Your Hands

Lynn Marentette, in her Blog Interactive Multimedia Technology, covers two interactive and visual marketing solutions developed by the Swiss engineering group Atracsys.

Continue reading "Atracsys: Serious Games to Catch Your Customer's Attention" »

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This is the final part of an abstract from a new book  Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business by David Edery and Ethan Mollick (here are part 1 and part 2).

Continue reading "Case Study: Burger King's Advergames - Part 3" »

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by: Reinout te Brake

Zapak Scouting for Partners to Launch the Business Through a Joint Venture Route

Continue reading "Zapak Plans Casual Gaming Business in Russia" »

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This is part 2 of 3 of an abstract from a new book  Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business by David Edery and Ethan Mollick (here's part 1).

Continue reading "Case Study: Burger King's Advergames - Part 2" »

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"Despite all the doom and gloom, one tiny sector is offering a glimmer of hope: virtual worlds. Companies such as Gaia Interactive and Habbo are expecting a boost as consumers reduce spending on real-world goods and luxuries and console themselves with so-called virtual goods--digital copies of products that can cost just pennies, allowing users to indulge their materialistic fantasies without spending much. "

Full article

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Serious Games challenging us to play better ads

Here’s an example of the Google AdSense for Games Integration

You are not bothered with ads during the game. At the end of the game Google AdSense comes up and a few seconds later OK button shows up. AdSense is extremely well blended: a game character introduces a video ad saying something like "And now, a word from our sponsor

Continue reading "Google Gets Serious About AdSense For Games" »

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GigaOm has confirmed the ad buy by the Obama campaign in Burnout: Paradise, an Xbox Live racing game. (Update: AP says there are nine EA games in the buy, including Madden 09.)

Continue reading "Obama Campaign Buys In-Game Billboards" »

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This week, Advertising Lab is pleased to offer highlights from a book that just came out, Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business, co-authored (together with Ethan Mollick) by an old friend and former MIT colleague David Edery, who now works as Worldwide Games Portfolio Planner for Xbox Live Arcade.

Continue reading "Case Study: Burger King's Advergames - Part 1 " »

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Google In-Game Advertising is not really in-game, it's more like those pre-rolls they are trying with YouTube. Hope it's not what the Adscape deal and all those cool patents for targeting players based on their in-game behavior are for.

Continue reading "Google In-Game Advertising a Misnomer" »

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by: Gary Hayes

Interesting times ahead - the Console space finally collides with the Social Virtual World space as Sony and Microsoft race to be first to offer non-closed beta, ’social (read: commercial) virtual world’ front ends to their ‘trojan horse’ consoles. Will they start to reap the benefits of a very large installed user base as both are likely to launch this side of Christmas in several international territories, and will they fly?

Continue reading " Marketing to New XBox Experience and PS3 Home Avatars " »

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by: Reinout te Brake

In Google's expanding effort to monetize all Internet content, the search giant today announces Google AdSense for Games.

The new ads will run in Adobe Flash games that run in a browser. Google has been testing the new formats over the past few months and launches today with about two dozen games, from partners like Konami, Playfish, Zynga, Demand Media, and games network Mochi Media.

Continue reading "Google AdSense for Games" »

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" The current percentage of MMO players to the Internet users in the region [is estimated] as less than %1, way below the world average of %23." 

and

" The estimated number of MMO gamers in the region will jump to 5 million in 3 years of actively publishing and promoting MMO Games." 

From here. Now that's a market I know next to nothing about. I do remember bookmarking some reaaaally really screwed up games at some point but that's about it. The full presentation from Game Power 7 can be found here. They also estimate that more than 80% of the kids and teens in the region don't know what an MMO is and how you play it, which does seem a tad exagerated to me (data gathered through their local offices, the presentation says). Time to dig deeper and look into Game Power 7's attempts at launching a MMO on that market by the end of the year.

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ExitReality turns standard 2D web pages into unique 3D spaces

Via: ExitReality Launches Public Beta

Continue reading "Serious Games Allowing Us to Experience Every Web Page in 3D" »

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