VIRTUAL WORLDS : Funding News

mEgo has raised $2.5 million in a second round of angel funding. mEgo lets users create widgets with avatars that serve as a central point for all their social media information.

IMVU closed a $10 million Series D round of investment led by Best Buy Capital with participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures, Allegis Capital and Bridgescale Partners. IMVU says it will use the money to invest in continued development of its community, which has grown to more than 30 million registered users. The company monetizes off of a virtual goods catalog, which boasts over 2 million user-created items and is proving especially attractive to investors as the advertising market shrinks. IMVU says it currently generates over $1 million a month in revenue, 90% of which comes from the sale of credits for purchasing and selling virtual goods.

Moggle Raising $10M for Development Platform

It announced yesterday that it had signed two deals to help it raise several rounds of financing this year. RCF SA, a Swiss banking firm, will work with Moggle on a variety of investment and banking issues, including raising equity outside of the U.S. Alexander David Securities Limited, a London-based securities firm, will serve as lead corporate financial advisor and broker for Moggle in the United Kingdom, help the company enter the London Stock Exchange's, AIM market and raise private equity capital outside of the U.S.

Moggle, which is working on a platform to develop at the convergence of MMOGs, virtual worlds, and social networks, says it is raising $10 million in two equal rounds this year. The first is set to close next month.

CHARTS: Hardware Sales

Its always good to know your market potential, so if your thinking about platforms, check out this weeks sales for consoles and the total installed base.

Some things to think about.

Most important is the game good?

1) what support can you get from the platform, developer tools etc...
2) How flooded is the market (genera)lots of DS, but lots of games on Ltd shelf space
3) Who supports down loadable?
4) Original IP or licensed
5) Are you good at marketing or do you have a team?

Do not overlook a good marketing strategy, I don't mean putting up a website with some info about your release and screen shots that's not gonna wash.

NEWS: Hay ZAP the Youtube of Gaming

Worth mentioning in case you had missed the embedded games player on the right side of this blog.

Useful tool and allows quick browsing of indie games.

Have fun get the plug in from my link below or click here

heyzap.com - embed games
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NEW GAMES :Cartoon Network launch Fusion Fall

Here it is the much anticipated online MMO Fusion Fall

Check out the game here or watch the video below.



CTN will obviously leverage their position and characters to entice players to fusion fall. The key thing will be, is story engaging? and most importantly will the game be fun? Lets wait and see what the real kids think. As expected the early figures are showing above 1.5 million Unique Visits Per Month, but will that rise and can they sustain it, lets hope so.

NEW GAMES :Crayon Physics

Very smart UI, and a very innovative game, this is certainly a concept for the future that could become standard in gaming, and could work really well on the DS. However I wouldn't expect to see massive sales for the PC if you need to use a tablet to get the experience. (may be the mouse is just as good I'm off to download and try)


Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

CHARTS: This weeks top 10 casual games

1=Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox
2=Build-a-lot 3: Passport to Europe
3=Burger Island 2
4=Way To Go! Bowling
5=Fishdom
6=Haunted Hotel II: Believe the Lies
7=Mystery P.I. - The NY Fortune
8=Little Shop - Memories
9=Mushroom Age
10=County Fair

New Addtion :- Virtual worlds charts

I have added a list of virtual worlds which will be organized by the amount of unique visitors per month. Later on I will organize them into sections, above 10K, above 50K above 100K above 500K and 1M+. But for now this gets things started.

The idea is to demonstrate the the spread of players across the web and highlight similarities in worlds. As more and more worlds are coming online, coupled with the online internet population not growing as fast as worlds come online the only thing that can happen is a shift from one world to another. That said the race will be all about the fun factor, quality of experience and who delivers it best. That can only benefit players.

EVENTS: The Who.Where.When

Casual Connect Europe Hamburg Feb 10 - 12 Feb

Engage Expo (used to be virtual worlds conference) NYC March 10 - 11

The Game Developers Conference San Fransisco March 23-27

The Taipei Games Show Taiwan 12 - 16 Feb

NEWS: Lloyd Weber eyeing up games

With the successes of Rock Band, Guitar hero and other music titles 09 promises more as many a board room will be a buzz with the words; "cant we do a music game"...Dollar dollar bills...Ka-ching!

Really Useful Group, a publishing and production company setup by musical theatre composer Andrew Lloyd-Webber, is speaking with several video game publishers about possibly developing games that let players sing as characters in Lloyd-Webber's shows.

Ok....the thing that could work here aside form the recent success of the TV shows is the that Singstar has been massively popular with the female audience and RUG could follow suit, and possibly get new players due to the popularity of musicals like Phantom & Sunset Blv etc. However Singstar was popular because they always used popular music. They question will be, will the songs from these musicals be as popular? and will be people have the desire to singalong?....if this Christmas with my 64 year old mum singing along to the Mama Mia DVD was anything to go by then probably yes... Quick grab the ear plugs and smile.

PROFILE: CAFE.com

URL Cafe.com
Unique player numbers per month 150,000 U.S
Biz Model:- PC Downloadable games, Micro-transaction for in-game boosts & Advertising
Accepts game submissions from developers.

take a peek

BUSINESS: Meez & Pulse Merge

I told you lots of partnerships, mergers and acquisitions this year, hear is one of the first.

Meez announced yesterday that it has merged with Pulse Entertainment, an avatar-based messaging service for phones and the Web, and that it had raised a new round of financing led by Anthem Venture Partners. Meez will integrate Pulse's messaging with its own avatars, social network, and virtual world. Meez, has around 500k UUPM in the US but virtual worlds says that they boasts 8 million users but I guess that's registered. This mean pulse customers get Meez products and Meez gets out into the mobile world.

Now that is a smart move, this follows the other prediction I made about 1 login across multiple platforms allowing users to take their experience with them.

The merger will also see a shake up in the management team. Read about it on the Meez website.

One thing I would say is that Meez seems to be positing itself in competition with the popular IMVU which has around 2.5 million UUPM in the US, and the look and feel is leaning towards one that IMVU made popular, Both sites look really great and Meez has some unique features like the content deal they did for on demand TV, while IMVU offer a unique music features.

BUSINESS: Nexway swoop for Boonty

Casual games portal Boonty, owned by US-based Café.com, has been sold to French digital content firm Nexway for an undisclosed amount

Clearly this is one of those deals that suits both companies strategy moving forward.

For Cafe who are seasoned in Casual Gaming they see that there is a strong future in online F2P community games and focusing on that is a smart move for Cafe as I think they would have struggled to maintain or grow Boonty especially as the paid downloads model in casual gaming has a low conversion rate and many other portals continually pop up trying to take a share of a very busy market.

As for Nexway they never had a great presence in Casual gaming but now have the opportunity to leverage the position they have with their distribution platform. It could work well for them as they are well positioned in the market With a catalog of more than 6,000 software and video games, Nexway partners with more than 500 publishers to help with their digital strategy.

NEWS: 7 Headlines you should know about consoles

The PlayStation 2 passes 50 million units sold in the North American market

Guitar Hero III rakes in $1bn
Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith has claimed that 2007's Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock has now surpassed a sales value of $1bn - a milestone the exec claims has never before been achieved by a single title.

Sony PS3 home is downloaded 3.4 million times and over $1 million in item sales. Sony also mentioned that the worldwide installed base of the PS3 and PSP now totals 63.1 million, meaning there is a huge potential for Home to continue to expand.

Console installed base reaches 22m in UK
The latest generation of home consoles - the Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 - have a total installed base of 10 million units in the UK and Ireland.

UK households spend 6 hours gaming per week - survey
Deloitte has revealed that the average UK household plays over six hours of videogames each week. The survey, conducted with 2,023 consumers ages 14-75, further revealed that 55 per cent chose console gaming, while 30 per cent chose PC or Mac gaming.

Deloitte added that it had found that one quarter of households currently own a Nintendo Wii, with a further 24 per cent planning to buy one in the coming year.

"Gaming has been traditionally frowned upon by parents. However it is now considered 'family time' for many people aged between 26 and 42," said Jolyon Barker, head of technology, media and telecoms at Deloitte.

"Although interest declines after the age of 40 this could change as a generation of gamers grows up."

Wii Sales Driven by Women and Girls, says Ubisoft
Nintendo has done quite a bit in making their system appeal to females, and Ubisoft has done their fair share as well with brands like Imagine and Ener-G.

PS3 at $299 in April, Xbox 360 Price Cut to Follow
Leading analyst Michael Pachter has stated that Sony will drop the PS3's price to $299 this April, but Microsoft could also lower its MSRP on the Xbox 360.

PREDICTIONS: 10 for 2009

1 Micro-payments will dramatically increase in popularity in the USA and Europe

2 A flurry of browser based MMO's will start to emerge

3 More alliances and partnerships, companies more open to working together

4 Casual games industry to release blended Genera games.

5 The birth of a new Genera for Casual Games (expect to see a revolutionary game mechanic in 2 to 3 months)

6 Less in store releases and more Episodic content to be released via digital distribution on the PS3,XBLA allowing greater risks and lower costs.

7 True cross platform experiences will excite with one login across multiple platforms

8 Web 3.0 to start rising to the surface

9 An increase in music, film & TV collaborations in the gaming world

10 VC's show a big slowdown in investments with a focus making their portfolio companies lean mean and profitable. (about time)

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2009

I wish you all a wonderfully fabulous 2009.

Be thankful for what you have including the opportunity to work in the Entertainment industry....there ant nothing better let the games begin.....