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This is an edited version of a speech I gave at the Digital River Monetization Summit at the Game Developers Conference last week. A lot has changed in gaming in the last week, and I’ve added a few remarks to reflect that. I hope you enjoy it.
I hope you are aware of the term opportunity cost. I am grateful that you are here and not somewhere else. You came here to listen to a talk on games from someone who has never made a game in his life. That also means I have never monetized a game in my life, except by writing game reviews or game news.
Above: GDC 2014
You are missing out on something by being here. The best thing you could do right now is leave here, go straight the Changyou booth, and get a check from them. The Chinese online game company announced it would invest $600 million in mobile game developers. So leave early, and save me a spot in line. For the rest of you, I’d like to show you how I try to connect the dots for readers. We do that on our web sites, GamesBeat and VentureBeat, and at our own game conference, GamesBeat 2014, which will be held Sept. 15-16 this year in San Francisco.
After all this time covering games, I figured it was time to give my own talk, even if it is filled with the thinking of a lot of smart people and not so much my own original ideas. What I would like to do is toss out some facts in this talk, connect the dots, and answer some questions about the state of the industry.
My first statement is that numbers can tell you something.
That $600 million figure from Changyou is telling. Changyou’s value in the market is $1.5 billion. If you want to buy it, you have to pay that amount. Changyou is risking about 35 percent of its value on mobile gaming. Now that takes guts. The former CEO of HP got fired because he risked 20 percent of the company’s value on an acquisition that brought in 1 percent of revenue.
Read more at: VentureBeat
