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How one Japanese gaming startup is generating $3.8 million in revenue per day

shoestring.com.au

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Re: How one Japanese gaming startup is generating $3.8 million in revenue per day

#41

Post by ksk »

Has anyone actually duplicated any form of success exclusively by studying/analyzing the business models of successful startups? In grad school we went through dozens harvard business review case studies on large and small companies. All the reasoning about why they failed or succeeded just seemed too locally connected to actually be true. Honestly I just felt like there was nothing to learn from reviewing them.

Yes, people already know that luck plays a factor in success, but someone needs to sit down and quantify it. I secretly suspect that it is much larger that most people think it is. Here I'm talking purely about business decisions/strategies. I'm leveling the playing field by assuming that companies are able to hire qualified people to plan/execute the creation of a high-quality product/service.

Edit:

BTW. This is a great read for people interested in how chance affects our daily lives.

http://amzn.com/0307275175

Re: How one Japanese gaming startup is generating $3.8 million in revenue per day

#42

Post by Semaphor »

robotmay wrote: post #4
RyanZAG wrote: post #3

I don't believe this kind of in-app pay-to-win style games will last much longer. It's the kind of thing someone new to games will pay for, but after paying for a bit, those same people seem to 'wise up' eventually. I think you'll see these kind of games slowly decreasing in profitability over the next 5 years. It's similar to many other forms of short term profit in which the value provided does not equal the amount…

I'm not too sure. I see a lot of people these days, and unfortunately even kids, becoming hooked on quick fixes; pay-to-win games, AAA games with 10-hour single-player campaigns, and pretty much all mobile games. I gave a copy of Pokemon Black to a friend's kids (same age as when my brother and I, and all of our friends, were obsessed with them), and they couldn't get more than 15 minutes in without getting bored. Ob…

Good thing Civilization still has a huge fan base. 370h for V on steam and counting for me.

Re: How one Japanese gaming startup is generating $3.8 million in revenue per day

#43

Post by Semaphor »

yareally wrote: post #24
robryan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrong with 10 hour single player AAA games? These generally offer the most refined interactive story type experiences. I much prefer one of these to most movies.

Mostly the price of the typical 10 hour single player AAA game tends to be $60 + additional DLCs or special preorder things making up go up to the $80+ range. That might not seem so troublesome on the surface, but there's generally little motivation to replay such games most of the time. Also, the knowledge that there have been many games with much more single player time as well as re-playability for a comparable or…

> Mostly the price of the typical 10 hour single player AAA game tends to be $60 + additional DLCs or special preorder things making up go up to the $80+ range.

You pay for the graphics and the voice acting. If you can handle having more limited graphics and simpler/no voice acting, you will get games that are better in other aspects (balance, story, development, replayability) for way less.

Re: How one Japanese gaming startup is generating $3.8 million in revenue per day

#44

Post by makomk »

nicholassmith wrote: post #28

The most interesting part (for me) was the mention of the pay for credit to continue. Now that is an interesting use of IAP rather than 'shiny golden boots, £3', as it works on an established model that was reasonably successful for a number of years. Does anyone know of any other games using the same mechanism?

There's some discussion of it in the "Reward Removal" section of this widely-linked Gamasutra article http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/1949..., but their example is again Puzzles and Dragons. Presumably this is the main game that uses this technique aggressively.

Re: How one Japanese gaming startup is generating $3.8 million in revenue per day

#45

Post by dspillett »

BillyMaize wrote: post #33
koralatov wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really miss the days where I'd buy a complete game on release, rather than only getting half the experience. Having just played through Mass Effect 2 and 3 , I couldn't agree more with you. The singleplayer `DLCs' felt like bits of the game they'd deliberately chopped out so they could sell them to me later. Nothing in those add-ons was essential, but it all felt like stuff that would have been included in the game…

This. Honestly, how can they act like we should pay for the DLC when it was ready for ME3 on day one! I am totally against DLC and have only ever bought DLC for Skyrim because it added enough gameplay to be worth the cost.

I cancelled my pre-order for Bioshock Infinite because Steam offered what I saw at the time as "day 1 DLC", and paid half price for the game a couple of months later. You want to sell me half a game? Fair enough, but I'll wait until I can pay half the price.

Of course it turns out that on this occasion I picked the wrong target as they are doing the DLC thing right (they started work on it after the main game was complete rather than it being cut out of the main game and sitting on the disk from day one ready to be activated by a DLC code) but that wasn't made obvious in the sales blurb I saw at the time.

But my principal still stands: if the DLC is genuinely an extra or an extension then I don't mind, but when it seems to be a core part of the content removed to get a few extra $ I'l adjust what I'm willing to pay for the main game accordingly.

Re: How one Japanese gaming startup is generating $3.8 million in revenue per day

#46

Post by rfnslyr »

lazyjones wrote: post #26

The amazing thing about this is how easily these f2p apps/games can monetize "content" while all kinds of web publications struggle with this. Is "serious" content simply to unattractive or is the fact that the payment process is handled by a centralized, trusted mechanism what makes the difference? If the latter, we should probably add payment options to browsers.

Maybe we should further gamify websites? Look at OKCupid, you can purchase a wide array of features. You can buy the ability to be invisible, to disable adds, to send unlimited messages, to receive unlimited messages.

We could build an extra layer on top of websites offering additional features to the site that don't take away from the main experience. All I'm seeing similar to this is a few websites offering ad removal for $x, nothing else.

These games pop out new games on various platforms by the week, then advertise the new game in all the other X amount of games they have. It recycles itself.

Re: How one Japanese gaming startup is generating $3.8 million in revenue per day

#47

Post by yareally »

Semaphor wrote: post #43
yareally wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly the price of the typical 10 hour single player AAA game tends to be $60 + additional DLCs or special preorder things making up go up to the $80+ range. That might not seem so troublesome on the surface, but there's generally little motivation to replay such games most of the time. Also, the knowledge that there have been many games with much more single player time as well as re-playability for a comparable or…

> Mostly the price of the typical 10 hour single player AAA game tends to be $60 + additional DLCs or special preorder things making up go up to the $80+ range. You pay for the graphics and the voice acting. If you can handle having more limited graphics and simpler/no voice acting, you will get games that are better in other aspects (balance, story, development, replayability) for way less.

True and I agree, but those games aren't considered AAA (since the definition of AAA is based on money spent as the sole criteria). Plenty of games have been AAA, of above average quality, and longer than 10 hours in the past 4-5 years (though I don't rush through games and like to enjoy the little details). When they are, I gladly pay for them[1] (probably more than I will ever be able to play lol). As I get older, I find time is harder to come by so I maybe I'm just more picky about what games I'll buy and then invest time in than I was when I was a kid.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Borderlands 1 and 2

Saints Row 3

Far Cry 2 and 3

Bioshock 1

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Rage

Fallout 3

Fallout New Vegas

Tomb Raider

Crysis 1 and 3

Sleeping Dogs (despite the keyboard issues)

Portal 1 and 2

Elder Scrolls: Skyrim

Dishonored

Mirror's Edge

Metro 2033

Hitman: Absolution

Mass Effect Series

Fable 3

[1] http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198025283419/games/

Re: How one Japanese gaming startup is generating $3.8 million in revenue per day

#48

Post by 6d0debc071 »

robryan wrote: post #13
robotmay wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not too sure. I see a lot of people these days, and unfortunately even kids, becoming hooked on quick fixes; pay-to-win games, AAA games with 10-hour single-player campaigns, and pretty much all mobile games. I gave a copy of Pokemon Black to a friend's kids (same age as when my brother and I, and all of our friends, were obsessed with them), and they couldn't get more than 15 minutes in without getting bored. Ob…

What is wrong with 10 hour single player AAA games? These generally offer the most refined interactive story type experiences. I much prefer one of these to most movies.

It seems like a sign of shallow gameplay/mechanics. Supreme Commander, Master of Orion 2, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age (kinda), Mass Effect... Homeworld 2. You could spend - I'd guess at least a hundred hours or so - playing each of those games to see all their content and play around with all the options they offered you.

Story seems to have become a sort of distraction from the things that make a good game. So the story can be told in ten hours - what about the fun potential of the rest of the game? How many times am I going to play the thing? How much enjoyment can I extract?

Even RPGs, where a good story is important, most of the time is spent on quests and character interactions and on playing around with equipment and stats and so on. If you're just speedrunning an RPG's story, it doesn't generally take long. It's the game around it that takes the time.

At the end of the day, I'm not that interested in being passively entertained with the story. Maybe if the stories were better it would make sense as a form of passive entertainment. But games are like movies these days, and movies these days tend to have stories that aren't worth watching. If I wanted a good story, I'd go read a book or fish out some DVDs or something. I largely buy games for the stuff that goes on around the story, the game part of the thing.

Heck, at £3 an hour I could go and sit in a cinema for 10 hours at a comparable cost. £30 is like - I could buy 6+ hours martial arts practice, or go and do some archery, or go canoeing, or buy the materials to make myself a new desk, or.... £30 is not an insignificant amount of resources. It's not clear to me that the pay-off even makes sense anymore - though it did for things that you could play with for longer.

10 hours strikes me as ... there's probably not a lot there to play with. How many toys of any complexity are your bored of a mere 10 hours later? It may be a very polished experience but, how inventive can you be? ... I like finding tricky combinations of things and actually playing with stuff.

Re: How one Japanese gaming startup is generating $3.8 million in revenue per day

#49

Post by kayoone »

mbesto wrote: post #8

I'm going through this market with a friend right now. This is very real. For example look at DeNA.[0] This statement right here is simply amazing: As a result, revenue of the Social Media Business was ¥179,627 million, up 37.9% year-on-year, and segment profit was ¥78,106 million, up 29.4% year-on-year. Their YOY revenue from Social Media (mobile games) is $1.8bil. [0] http://v4.eir-parts.net/v4Contents/View.aspx?te…

Yep, but its also a very crowded market, for ever startup that makes huge money with free to play games, there are hundreds (or even thousands) that fail.
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