Jon Radoff’s Entrepreneur 2.0 Blog

I recently gave a presentation at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival about new trends in the videogame market.  A few things I pointed out:

• Games with strong social components are engaging people for longer periods of time
• The people playing games are getting more diverse
• Games are attracting an increasingly global audience

The slideshow is below:

Did you like the ideas I presented? If so, I’m planning to collect a ton more information over the next six months–and present an uber-version of the presentation at South by Southwest in 2009.  If you think it would make for an interesting subject, please vote for my SXSW panel.

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While riding the T to work this morning, I noticed this advertisement on the Red Line:

Vecna Medical? Sorry, but keep your risky necromantic procedures to yourself. It is extremely well documented that the Eye of Vecna and Hand of Vecna are extremely dangerous and risky. I’m sure that some people would be willing to amputate their own limbs and replace them with otherworldly artifacts of incredible power yet dubious origin, but I won’t be one of them. Consider yourself warned.

I guess there were no Dungeons and Dragons players amongst the branding committee for this company.

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In another example of how videogames have already become a part of mainstream media, there’s a new media campaign that ties together 7-Eleven (the chain convenience store that’s well-known for its “Slurpee” drink) along with Coca-Cola.

According to the original press release, 7-Eleven wants to associate with Guitar Hero to keep Slurpees “cool”–a clever pun, but also a real challenge that’s facing many aging consumer brands.

The key question is whether game tie-ins like this will help up the coolness-factor for a brand like Slurpee, while also keeping games true to their spirit and mission.  The opportunity is to build new revenue streams, but the risk is that games might get perceived as just another glitzy way to promote a product. I think it’s definitely possible to craft win-wins, so I’ll be watching this campaign closely.

Another potential opportunity: beyond making Slurpees cool, will this result in any extra sales of Guitar Hero?

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The blogosphere is abuzz with news of Bing Gordon’s departure from EA to join the legendary venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. There’s a few take-aways from this:

• Aside from losing one of the spiritual leaders of EA, it just lost one of the executives who really “got” the power of the Internet and social media within the game industry. He’s spoken about his love of projects like Warhammer (an MMORPG) and Spore (the game which is going to change how the industry thinks about games and social-media convergence). Those will be big shoes to fill.
• Kleiner Perkins is going to be pouring a lot of money into opportunities around Facebook and/or the iPhone (just last month, they announced a $100MM fund to back Apple iPhone development). With Gordon on board, it seems obvious that Facebook and iPhone games will be one of the key areas of investment.

Make no mistake about it–games and consumer entertainment products are becoming a major area of VC investment; and with KPCB putting so much money in, there will be many more funds to follow.

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I wrote an article for Gamasutra on the subject of viral games. You can read the full story here over at Gamasutra.

For those who want the Reader’s Digest version, here were my main ideas:

• Design games that sell themselves; make them watchable and easy to engage with. Magic the Gathering (the card game, not the online version) is a great example.
• Design games with fansites in mind. World of Warcraft has done a great job creating an ecosystem around the company, supported by data from the Armory.
• Support guilds and clans; in other words, support the social groups who pick up games.
• Support player-created content. This is like an adaptation of the “supporting fansites” idea, but it expands on the idea. Games need to be larger-than-life–and larger than themselves. They need to allow members to participate in the whole lifestyle of the game, through machinima, player-created maps and mods, customization, etc.
• Avoid level segregation: I think this is the biggest mistake of many MMORPGs. Yes, this has worked fine for World of Warcraft…but they now have amazing scale, and they were relatively early to market. Unless friends have easy ways to play with each other, you aren’t going to engage them.

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