Anders Evju tells ME that PlayPhone is more social and more global than its rivals.
As we penned this article, web reports were trickling through that Zynga’s forthcoming IPO would make it worth $8.9 billion – more than the $6.93 billion valuation on EA.
Barely four years since its creation, Zynga has mesmerised the market to such an extent that it believes there's more potential in virtual micropayments for casual web games than there is for the combined multi-format sales of FIFA, Need For Speed et al.
I need hardly remind you that EA is as aware of this as anyone – it's why it bought Chillingo and PopCap after all.
In short, casual social gaming is hot hot hot.
Another company that's embraced the switch in market dynamics is PlayPhone. Although not on the scale of EA, the US D2C firm did once offer a catalogue of 30,000 personalisation products to consumers all over the world.
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That model came unstuck (in mature markets at least) in 2008/9, prompting a re-think which saw PlayPhone redirect its tech platform and marketing nous at the social games space. Its social gaming network was unveiled in November 2010 and formally launched this week after a pre-launch build up that saw it gather 35m registered users.
PlayPhone is a little different from OpenFeint, Papaya et al in that it wants to aggregate games and be a destination rather than just a platform used in the background by third party developers. Neither does it plan to make first party games.
ME spoke to Anders Evju, SVP and GM of PlayPhone Social:
How many games are on the network?
1642 as we speak including Perfect World, Big Blue Bubble, Nimbus Games, Tictoc Games and others. More are signing up all the time. We're adding two or three games a week. There are 22 games that are fully integrated with billing, while the others are 'lite' games incorporating leaderboards, achievements and so on. We're very happy with the developer response, but then we have worked hard with them through the $10m fund and so on.
Give us an example of the results being delivered.
We have a Poker Game that's delivering $20 a month ARPU and generating between 38 and 40 minutes average gameplay per user a day. The extra benefit of this kind of participation is that it can drive more usage, so we've seen high take up of Blackjack with no marketing because we've recommended it to Poker players.
You soft-launched last year with Harvest Moon, which was a huge browser hit in Japan. What happened to that?
It wasn't a success. Didn't get the support needed from the developer. We turned our attention to Hakuna’s Farm Invaders on Android instead, and that became a big hit.
You work closely with operators. How are they adapting to the app market?
They say to us 'we want to monetise this market, but we don't have the bandwidth'. They know they can't remove Android Market from devices, but they can offer a good alternative through their own stores. We're working to make the most of our 26 carrier relationships, especially because of our carrier billing integration. We've just signed AT&T, for example.
How do you compare yourself with the other social games specialists?
I think the big difference it that they're building out from the bases in Asia, where the market and the gamers are pretty different. We're coming at this from a position of having built a genuinely global business in PlayPhone. It's interesting. Gree got a lot of coverage for its plan to create a global network, but it's what we're doing already.
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