News You Might Have Missed

I'm coming back from a long weekend in LA and my head is not back into social games quite yet, so here's a digest of stories from the last couple weeks that should hold you over until I get wordy again.

Webcarrz Raises $4 million Series A for a Car-based Virtual Flash-Based MMO. Pretty nice round for a company that I suspect is build on a Powerpoint presentation (considering their product is being made by a partner) . Their management team must be pretty strong. Here's a link to the CEO's Linkedin profile so you can decide.

U.S. Retailer Kohl's Partners with Virtual Dress-Up Site Stardoll. Read for the all-to-brief analysis of downstream traffic from the Stardoll site.

Google Announces Android Market, the App Store For Android Handsets. Once again, developers will have to choose where to place their development resources, Apple or Google.

T-Mobile Plans Its Own App Store for the Fall: Huge Opportunity for Games Companies

At least if venture lawyers are concerned.

Early last year, when I still had a company, I was looking around for representation and met with lawyers from a bunch of firms. I focused on guys who knew something about the games industry, rather than vanilla startup guys. The first question, all of them asked was, "Are you doing mobile?" Fortunately, we had a mobile component planned, so I said yes. This got them super-excited.

Venture lawyers are an excellent proxy for venture investors. Since they do deals together all the time, lawyers get a good sense of what is exciting to investors at any given time.

Last year, games on mobile must have been scorching. Of course, games on mobile has been the next big thing in games for the last five years, maybe more. However, with a couple exceptions, mobile games companies haven't seen the success everyone expected.

And for that, they all blamed the carriers for making their games available to users. This was largely true.

Apple changed that with the iPhone app store, giving users an easy way to find content, and developers an easy way to charge (or not charge) the users for that content. With games like Super Monkey Ball making 3 million bucks in a couple months. A month or so later, content from Apple's App Store has been downloaded 60 million times equal to the amount downloaded on every carrier combined in the first quarter of the year.

That put the fire under the other carriers, and T-Mobile is the first to announce their own app store for their entire range of handsets, not just smartphones.

It's Facebook vs. Myspace all over again. Like Facebook, Apple creates a successful platform, then a rival with larger reach, T-mobile/Myspace, launches their own platform.

Once again, game developers have to decide the platform on which to focus. Unless you're Zynga who can manage to be on every platform, having $29 million in the bank helps. If you're indie, my good friend Blake (of Zombies infamy) advises sticking to one platform unless you want to drive yourself insane (I paraphase).

Since details are thin on the T-mobile store, I don't expect it to rival the iPhone store. In fact, my cynical side suspects it's just a positioning move by T-mobile and we can't expect to see its app store open until next year.

Regardless, I'm with the lawyers on this one. It is a huge opportunity for game devs. Mobile is finally a gaming platform. Woo hoo!

Disney Believes in Mobile: Two Bits of Info

From Ypulse! Mashup (still processing my notes):

mDisney, Disney's mobile portal gets a 10% clickthrough rate on the mobile banner ads with $20 CPM.

Disney is planning to link its Pirates MMO to a mobile experience that allows the players to earn unique items for use in the online game. These items can only be earned in the mobile experience.

Smart move, especially considering the insight from yesterday's post that the hardcore gamers (most players of MMOs) are also likely to own iPhones.

Core iPhone Demographic and Hardcore Games Demographic are the Same

Obviously, the demographics of the platform should be a huge factor when you're designing games for any new platform. Let's look at the iPhone.

According to Stephen Saiz of mDisney, the core demographic for the iPhone are males 24-35. Right now, only 3% of tweens and teens have iPhones.

So don't build any games for kids.

As you might know from being a student of the traditional games industry (or if you read the title of this post), males 24-35 are the hardcore gamer demographic.

So build something violent. And charge a lot for it.

If I were a game designer for the iPhone, I'd probably build a clone of Dynasty Warriors Advance, it's a button-mashing fight game with an overhead view. Perfect for a mobile screen. Here's a video:

Kristian Segerstrale, CEO of Playfish talks about the Iphone as a gaming platform

Kristian and I have been exchanging emails and I've been bugging him to write about the differences between developing mobile games and developing social games.

He decided to talk about doing both at the same time for the Iphone. Check out his post over on the Playfish blog.

He believes mobile is the future of mass-market games and I agree. The really interesting stuff is going to start happening when people discover how to combine mobile with social games.

They are a few companies working on that, and Playfish is in an excellent position to crack that nut. Other contenders: Mytopia (saw their demo recently, and I was very impressed. They've accomplished what we were trying to do at Tenuki, so naturally I think they'll be huge), and Cellufun (they don't have a presence on the socnets yet, but they have some multiplayer titles with game mechanics similar to the first wave of social games on Facebook).

Gaydar: Why You Can't Trust the Japanese Market

I overheard a pitch in Starbucks that was basically a location-based profile/meeting service. And I thought does anyone remember Gaydar? A company that sold beepers that activated whenever another beeper was within forty feet. Obviously, they were marketed to gay men. It failed.

The interesting thing to me is that Gaydar was very successful in Japan, except it was marketed to straight people. Over 100,000 units were sold.

The reason I find this interesting is because a lot of the next-gen mobile apps show up in Japan first. Japan is way ahead of the USA in terms of mobile usage. I suspect a lot of people look to Japan for business ideas that can be adopted for the US market. I mean, if it worked in Japan, then surely it'll work everywhere, right?

Except it doesn't. Japanese culture is REALLY different than American culture. In Japan, you can get your nails manicured by a vending machine. Japan has a popular movie series called Rapeman, it's about a hero who rapes women who have spurned the advances of lonely salarymen. It was shown at the local cineplex.

Japanese have strict social customs. Every interaction is highly ritualized. I suspect the rising mobile culture allows the Japanese to circumvent those customs and that's a big reason for the popularity of social mobile apps. In the US, social interactions are not restricted. I want to talk to a girl in a coffeeshop, I say hello. No one thinks I'm crazy, unless I happen to be homeless.

My point is this: be careful when you look to Japan for the validation of a market, other companies have been burned, it might happen to you, too.