There has been a great deal of conversation the last several days in regards to the closing session at the Virtual Goods Summit. Super Rewards wanted to take a couple of minutes and highlight some of the other content that was discussed.
We will continue to work to drive the highest quality offers for the consumers who have come to love social and online games.
1. Virtual Goods Industry Booming – the industry is on track to be a $1B US industry with new participants from all over the world. It was encouraging to see that the VGS University had sold out educating hundreds of brand new developers who are thinking about entering this lucrative space. The IMVU team all got MoHawks for reaching $2M a month in revenue – sign of good times!
2. Emersion of New Industry Jobs – In its infancy many developers were flying solo and working out of their bedrooms, and now that the industry is flourishing we are seeing more and more individuals turning to incorporation and building out more sophisticated teams to take their social games to the next level. Some of these new titles include Virtual Economists, Game Analysts, Mobile Mavens, Virtual Goods Designers, Game Producers, Marketplace Managers, Platform Integration Specialists and Social Network Monetization Directors.
3. Virtual Currency Monetization Model Continues to Flourish – The model has been proven with month over month sustainable growth for more than two years now. Super Rewards was a pioneer in this industry in mid 2007 and now the marketplace is flooded with new entrants. Competition is a valuable motivator for all four of our customer sets, including advertisers, publishers, consumers and platform partners, because it is forcing all providers to focus on the key metrics of maximizing lead quality, user experience, monetization performance and ROI. We believe that only the ones that can truly excel in all four of these areas will be around at the 4th annual VGS.
4. Economy Balancing is Key – real world economists are having a hard time understanding why the same principals do not work in the virtual economies, but this VentureBeat article does an excellent job of summarizing the differences and why virtual economies are thriving: http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/30/why-virtual-economies-defy-the-rules-of-your-old-college-textbooks/
5. Industry Consolidation – This was one of the hottest topics at the event, in terms of who is buying who, which game giants are looking to acquire smaller game developers and at what price, and of course, the never-ending merging payment providers, who are all looking to leverage global strengths through consolidation. We believe this is only the beginning and there will be more consolidation as the industry matures and the time-to-market advantages will result in more acquisitions.
6. International Expansion – This will be the focus for 2010 and beyond as we see more Asian and European social networks grow with international developers jumping into this space, along with the development of more sophisticated tools to support language naturalization and global monetary conversions. Super Rewards is taking the lead by opening advertising sales offices around the world to focus on delivering localized direct advertising. This will make a huge difference by delivering a more relevant and personal user experience resulting in a higher ARPU for developers and better ROI for advertisers.
7. Social Graph Sophistication - Social network users are becoming savvier with vast and wide interests and preferences. The leading application developers are actively monitoring their user preferences and are taking great strides to accommodate them by creating a database of massive virtual goods inventory and offering unique selections at a range of price points that are targeted to specific users. Super Rewards is helping developers to achieve this goal by delivering direct and unique localized advertising offers utilizing our proprietary targeting algorithms.
8. Multivariate Testing and A/B testing is becoming more commonplace. In the early days, developers would pick a number out of a hat to set their exchange rate, but now developers are quite educated and understand the significance of testing to maximize their overall performance. They are investing in technology and partnering with Super Rewards and others to set up accurate testing models to better understand their user behaviors within various scenarios. We encourage developers to build testing technology into their actual game design for continuous improvement of the user experience and to maximize ROI.
9. Product Innovation – 2008-2009 was all about how fast a developer can re-skin a popular game title, but we are now starting to see a trend towards market differentiation with a more intense focus on product innovation. We are encouraged by the growth in sophisticated Flash animation, multi-dimensional story lines, in-Flash payment systems, and unique virtual goods inventory.
10. Diversification – At Super Rewards, we partner with thousands of game developers who have built wildly successful games and their focus has increasingly turned to product innovation and platform diversification. More and more developers are coming to us for advice and assistance in helping them port their games to other social networks, such as MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, etc., along with porting to the iPhone and other mobile platforms and even to building out their own stand alone website or gaming portal. This strategic maneuver is a great way for game developers to have more flexibility and control over their own destiny.
Please contact info@srpoints.com if you would like to talk with a Super Rewards consultant about any of these topics or to learn more about how we can help take your game to the next level!
