Game Demographics & Metrics

Unity is one of the more exciting game engines available as it is powerful, easy to develop for, and more 3D friendly than Adobe's Flash. It is possible to either create a game as a stand alone executable or load a game through the company's player, making the game a "no download" experience comparable to Flash.

According to a press release from Unity Technologies, the player has been downloaded 30 million times.

I haven't seen browser penetration numbers for the player yet (anyone?), but this is a pretty good metric.

The closest number I have is that Adobe's Flash program manager stated that Flash had 18 million successful installs per day (out of 33 million downloads per day) in 2008 (WOOF!).

"Unity Technologies Celebrates Five Years of Continual Leadership and Innovation in Making Cutting Edge Game Technology", http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Unity-Technologies-Celebrates-iw-3659955691.html?x=0&.v=1

E. Huang (2008), "Two! Four! Six! Eight! Numbers we appreciate!", http://blogs.adobe.com/emmy/archives/statistics/

A bill has been introduced to legalize intrastate Internet gambling in New Jersey. The proposed bill would allow currently licensed traditional casinos to set up web sites that could be used by New Jersey residents to bet online. Other discussions of this issue have suggested that interstate compacts between states that legalize gambling (similar to combined lottery pools) may be the way online gambling is legalized within most of the US (bills have been introduced in Florida and California as well).

The claim is that there are around 500,000 NJ residents who wager $150 million a year at offshore voting sites. (that's $300 each - not a huge amount considering this is likely counting each wager made).

A representative of Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association claims that 1500 jobs and $200 million in revenue could be raised.

"Some N.J. lawmakers betting on the Internet for new casino game revenue", http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2010/06/some_nj_lawmakers_betting_on_t.html

Its not bad to be an indie MMO. Dofus from Ankama Games just announced 3.5 million subscribers and 30 million registered users since launch in 2004. The subscribers pay €5 a month or $283 Million per year. The game has 250,000 peak concurrent users and is turn-based.

Wow.

This follows on the recent disclosure that Jagex games reported $58 Million in revenue in 2009 and $27 Million in profits for Runescape.

E. Caoili (2010), "Dofus Reaches 30 Million Registered Users, 3.5 Million Subscribers",
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28171/Dofus_Reaches_30_Million_Registered_Users_35_Million_Subscribers.php

"Free doesn’t work? Try telling that to Jagex making £38m from one free game, RuneScape…", http://www.gamesbrief.com/2010/04/free-doesnt-work-try-telling-that-to-jagex-making-38m-from-one-free-game-runescape/

Arkansas, whose definition of games of skill includes video blackjack and poker, had wagers totaling $100.1 Million in March. Payouts at the 2 racetrack casinos, Southland and Oaklawn, totaled $94.5 Million, according to the Arkansas Racing Commission.

Pretty good payouts for players.

"EGS WAGERS TOP $100 MILLION IN MARCH AT OAKLAWN, SOUTHLAND", http://www.talkbusiness.net/article/EGS-WAGERS-TOP-100-MILLION-IN-MARCH-AT-OAKLAWN-SOUTHLAND/141/

Apple has certainly convinced everyone that it is the next big thing in gaming. A recent article trumpeted that there were 50,000 games available for the iPhone and iTouch compared with a mere 4300 games for the Nintendo DS.

And, excitingly, 30,000 iPhone games have sold for a total of $500 Million in 2009 (according to Flurry via Kotaku) and total application downloads have exceeded 4 Billion.

Pretty Awesome.

Nintendo certainly doesn't have the number of titles, but it does have revenues. As of January 2010, a mere 688 million Nintendo DS games have been sold. At $20 each, that would make the DS game market to date worth a $13.76 billion - more than the total of all "App Store" markets that are projected to exist in a couple of years. Nintendo's profits were $500 million (not sales) in 2009 - comparable to the size of the entire iGame market.

PopCap recently announced that their game, Plants vs. Zombies, had sold 1 million units at $2.99 on the iPhone. Nice, I guess, Back in 2008 on the DDS, Professor Layton and the Curious Village sold 1.6 million units still sells for $30 each and Nintendogs had sold 22 million starting at $30 and coming down to just under $20 today (depending on the dog).

All the "top download" lists on the App Store are a racket. They seduce game developers with unquantified riches and the chance to "be the one" who will make "millions" on their game at $2 a copy.

50,000 total games means that the odds of your success are insignificant and $2 a game means that even if you DO sell a million copies, you may wind up modestly profitable.

More competition, lower prices. Not really a recipe for business success.

B. Parfitt (2010), "iPhone out-numbers DS and PSP", http://www.mcvuk.com/news/38412/iPhone-out-numbers-DS-and-PSP

J. Reilly (2010), "Worldwide DS Sales top 125 Million", http://ds.ign.com/articles/106/1064657p1.html

James (2009), "Nintendo reveals all time Wii and DS software sales", http://www.digitalbattle.com/2009/05/08/nintendo-reveals-all-time-wii-and-ds-software-sales/

B. Crecente (2010), "Nintendo Doesn't, Shouldn't Fear the iPad", http://kotaku.com/5509655/nintendo-doesnt-shouldnt-fear-the-ipad

B. Crecente (2010), "Plants vs. Zombies rakes in $1M", http://kotaku.com/5480038/plants-vs-zombies-rakes-in-1m

A new survey comes with good news for online gambling proponents:

GOOD NEWS: 49 percent of Americans and 55 percent of Canadians favor legal online gambling.

BAD NEWS: 63 percent of the Americans and 77 percent of Canadians think that online gambling is already legal. (Its not)

Market research firm Ipsos Reid as part of a joint U.S.-Canada Lottery study taking in 1,006 U.S adults and 1,032 Canadian adults.

CONFUSING NEWS: 67 percent of American residents oppose legalization of online gambling.

From a random telephone poll of 1,001 adults earlier this year by Fairleigh Dickinson University

David Kushner has written a fascinating article "Steamed: Valve Software Battles Video-game Cheaters" in IEEE and he didn't mention Valve's most powerful security tool:

570 games.

Well, he did mention that the service has 570 titles, but it wasn't mentioned as a security tool.

570 titles means more and more of Valve's 20 million members have multiple titles in the service and each of these titles is an additional tie that binds players to Steam and reduces their incentives to cheat.

Those 570 titles make banning effective.

Since being launched in 2004, Valve has identified 200,000 cheating programs (some are sold and a figure is cited of $10 to purchase though some MMOs actually have cheat programs that also are sold for a subscription).

Back to Steam:

The service has 20 million accounts, is available in 14 languages, there are 200 servers in 40 countries and pumps 40 to 80 Gigabytes per second (I'm not sure if that is over Steam or between active players).

Back to Cheating and Security:

Valve Anti-Cheat is a program that is installed along with the Steam client. It scans in-game memory for running programs and looks for new and different programs. First, it checks against its signature database of 200,000 known cheat programs. Then, if there is unusual behavior by game players, Valve's security team of 16 engineers can look at for unusual programs to collect information about new cheats. Valve Anti-Cheat also implements a challenge response system with Valve's servers to prove that it is running properly as well as look for any anomalies in its own state, the state of state of the game and the Steam client, and key values in memory.

Valve takes cheating seriously because it believes the longer people play its games, the more people will buy its games:

“Cheating is a superserious threat,” says Cook. “Cheating is more of a serious threat than piracy.” The problem first showed up on the company’s radar in 2004, after it heard rumors that a cheater had devised a way to see through walls. “Our reaction was, we want to keep our games online as long as possible,” says Holtman, “and we couldn’t do that with this going on.”

An attitude almost unique to Valve (and another success Blizzard who has its similar Battle.Net) and one that may be key to their respective successes.

(Go read the article!)

D. Kushner (2010), "Steamed: Valve Software Battles Video-game Cheaters", http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gaming/steamed-valve-software-battles-videogame-cheaters

The economy is floundering (still). States are drowning in an ocean of red ink. Any source of new revenue is being considered. Anything. Everything.

In Kentucky, games of skill are being proposed as a way to raise $28 Million to help the state's horse industry. Anything but gambling. No casinos, but games of skill. The definition of skill seems pretty broad:

House Bill 601, filed by Rep. Harry Moberly, D-Richmond, would let Kentucky racetracks install video poker and blackjack, and games such as Instant Racing, which lets players bet on replays of previously run races.

Even more aggressively, Iowa is considering full-fledged legalization of online gambling with revenue estimates as high as $80 Million(!). The article estimates that 50,000 Iowans gamble online illegally with 1/3 addicted. This latter number is dubious based on previous studies of gambling addiction which estimates just a couple of percent of the gambling population is addicted.

J. Patton (2010), "'Games of skill' could add $28 million to Ky. purses under House bill", http://www.kentucky.com/2010/03/03/1166129/games-of-skill-could-add-28-million.html

"Legalizing Online Gambling", http://www.kcautv.com/Global/story.asp?S=12080462

While independent game developers have struggled on Xbox Live, small, supported developers and conventional publishers seem to be doing pretty well with games on Xbox Live Arcade earning $103 Million in 2009 according to Forecasting and Analysing Digital Entertainment (FADE).

Why does it work? Well, in part because individual games average in price of $9.12 up from $8.33 in 2008.

It is an interesting question as to what is the "sweet spot" for pricing smaller games. $0.99 on iPhone is going to make it impractical for a developer to generate a decent return, but is the right price $5 or $10 to allow a developer to make a reasonable profit.

M. Martin (2010), "Xbox Live Arcade topped $100m in 2009", http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/xbox-live-arcade-topped-USD100m-in-2009

Stick with the PC, Indie! Xbox Live Arcade has seemingly joined the iPhone as yet another platform where indie developers cannot make money. Indies can thrive on Facebook, do pretty well with Flash, Unity, or old fashioned self-publishing.. but proprietary platforms just don't seem to be in the cards.

GamerBytes has an excellent analysis of Indie sales on Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) and the top indie game earned $129,500.

Not very impressive. At least the top indie iPhone game developer has earned a fair chunk of change.

R. Langley (2010), "XBLA: In-Depth: Xbox Live Indie Games Sales For 2009, Plus Some Perspective", http://www.gamerbytes.com/2010/01/indepth_xbox_live_indie_games.php