Virtual Goods News

Gamigo Acquires European Rights To Mytheon

UTV True Games has announced that German publisher Gamigo will have the exclusive rights to distribute, publish, and operate the freemium MMO Mytheon in Europe. Initially the game's European publisher was to be GOA, but that deal was terminated six months ago when GOA shut down the servers for UTV True Games's other free-to-play title, Warrior Epic. 

The announcement follows UTV True Games and Mytheon developer Petroglyph setting aside pending litigation in order to release the game in North America. Mytheon is the first freemium title developed by Petroglyph, which is otherwise known for developing console and PC titles. Mytheon went into open beta back in late April after numerous delays. 

Facebook Takes $120M, Opens New Office

Elevation Partners has invested $120 million in social network Facebook, buying up 5 million shares of the company on the private market. According to TechCrunch, Facebook generally controls who buys its private market shares and Elevation founders Roger McNamee and Bono personally invested in Facebook. At roughly the same time, The Economic Times reported that Facebook planned to open its new office in Hyderabad, India in the next two months. 

Facebook plans to hire 500 new employees for the Hyderabad office. The office will be tasked with providing multilingual and around-the-clock support to users, advertisers, and third-party developers. The Hyderabad office will be Facebook's fourth, joining offices in Austin, Dublin (Ireland), and Palo Alto. The 50,000 square foot office will reportedly cost Facebook $150 million. Facebook has only around 9 million users in India, but the city's location will allow it to operate when the Austin support office is closed. 

Super Rewards Partners With Clan Wars

Today Resistor Productions announced that it would integrate support for Super Rewards's ad offer platform in the latest version of its Clan Wars MMO, which is scheduled to be released today. Resistor's relationship with Super Rewards will go beyond the usual monetization support. Super Rewards will actively promote the game through its network, which Resistor hopes will drive significant new user acquisition. Super Rewards will also handle all payment processing services for Clan Wars. 

Virtual Goods Wrap-Up For The Week Of June 26, 2010

Welcome to the Virtual Goods News Wrap-Up for the week of June 26, 2010. The Wrap-Up is where VGN spotlights stories that we didn't get to cover individually, but still make for interesting reading about the virtual goods industry.

• Facebook Gamers Are Frequent Players: Roughly 90% of fans of Zynga's FarmVille return to play the game once per day, according to a survey conducted by Inside Networks. For players who convert to paid, the top 10% of paying players spends 10 to 20 times more on their favorite social games than other players. 
• Naspers Shares Plunge On Tencent News: Naspers shares fell over one-third on Tuesday, driven by the Chinese government's decision to ban underage players from acquiring or spending virtual currency. Naspers owns roughly one-third of Tencent, which derives a substantial portion of its income from teenagers who spend virtual currency in its QQ Messenger IM program and other online games. The ban may be an attempt to curtail the use of Tencent's Q coins virtual currency in online shopping as payment for physical goods, which is common with retailers that sell products for teenagers and young adults.
• PlayStation Network Gaming Gets Freemium Title: The Japanese PlayStation Network will soon see release of a game called Bakumatsu Revolution that's offered for free, despite being a console title released for the Sony PS3. The game will monetize through sales of virtual items offered for 100 to 200 yen (around $1 to $2) each. Users will also be able to buy expansion packs loaded with new quests and other game content for 300 to 500 yen (roughly $3 to $5). 
• RealNetworks Layoffs Shutter Casual Game Development Division: RealNetworks' recently-opened GameHouse division has lost all internal development capability due to a round of layoffs that have affected 85 people.
• Social Game Developers Need Strong Tie-Ups In Asia: Top American social game developers need to partner with local distributors if they want to be successful in Asia, according to Pearl Research's Allison Luong. Popcap Games's partnership with RenRen, which offers versions of the games that feature virtual currency and goods, is offered as an example. 
• Square-Enix's Digital Future: Square-Enix President Yoichi Wada has said that his company's model for game distribution, moving forward, will be the free-to-play MMO games popular in China and Korea. He promises that no future Square-Enix products will ship without social gameplay or online components. Tencent is cited as a specific success that Square-Enix would like to emulate.
• Video Game Marketing Vet Forms Social Gaming Start-Up: France Tantiado has announced the formation of a new social games studio called Brandyl that hopes to publish its first games by the end of the summer.
• We Built We City: ngmoco is following up its social iPhone hit We Rule with a modern-themed city builder called We City. As in We Rule, users can spend real money to obtain a virtual currency called Zap that makes their city produce resources more quickly. 
• Wizard101 Reaches 10 Million Registered Users In 20 Months: Kid-friendly MMO Wizard101 has passed the 10 million registered users benchmark in just over one year and a half, which the company plans to celebrate by distributing exclusive virtual goods to its users. 

Ukash Expands To New Zealand

The alternative payments firm Ukash has signed a deal with Epay that will allow its vouchers to be sold at over 200 convenience stores across New Zealand's North and South Islands. This follows another deal with Epay last year that brought Ukash service into Australia. The New Zealand vouchers will be available in $10, $20, $50, $100, $200, and $500 NZD denominations. That ranges from roughly $7.13 to $356.84 USD.

"Ukash enjoyed substantial growth last year, which is continuing throughout 2010. The Ukash offering has been very popular in Australia and we are confident that consumers in New Zealand will also welcome our launch, as the demand for using cash online and the benefit of shopping safely and securely on the internet continues to grow," said Paul Coxhill, Marketing Director at Ukash, in a press statement.

Playdom Acquires Hive7

Within days of announcing its latest round of funding, social game developer Playdom has already announced the acquisition of rival social developer Hive7 for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition has been in the works long enough that Hive7 has already moved its offices and personnel into Playdom's Mountain View headquarters. Hive7 was founded in 2005 and has released social titles like Knighthood, Youtopia, Kick-Off, and Sindicate across social networks including Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo.

iPad Summit Registration Ends Today, First Session Starts Monday at 10am

Our iPad Game Summit takes place this coming Monday, June 28th, at the South San Francisco Conference Center. There should be some great insight and perspective shared, specially with more than 3 million iPads sold and now that the iPhone 4 is out as well. Online registration ends today so grab your ticket if you haven't already. We will be accepting registrations at the door but the price goes from $425 today to $495 on Monday.

Zuckerberg: "We Intentionally Weakened The Viral Channels"

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that the recent loss of users in top Facebook social games is the intentional result of an attempt to orient the platform toward user re-engagement instead of app virality, according to an interview with Inside Facebook. Facebook intentionally weakened its viral channels, according to Zuckerberg, in order to cut down on the number of apps that were relying on user churn for monetization and let high-quality apps with high re-engagement rates compete better. 

"People were using viral channels to reengage people, and you basically had apps that were growing very quickly, and their best way to get a good user count was to get new users and churn through them. That really optimizes for apps that are very viral instead of apps that are high quality and that people want to reengage. So we intentionally weakened the viral channels recently, and intentionally strengthened reengagement with emails, so that there will be better apps," said Zuckerberg.

FarmVille Launches On iPhone

FarmVille launched on iPhone this week, alongside the new iPhone 4G handset. Zynga published games for iPhone early last year, but CEO Mark Pincus reported being disappointed by the monetization opportunity Facebook offered. Since then Apple has added in-app transactions to iPhone games, so FarmVille may perform very differently than its predecessors. 

Southern Comfort Raising Gulf Relief Funds With Virtual Gifts

Liqueur brand Southern Comfort is raising funds for gulf oil spill relief using virtual gifts and its Facebook page. Beginning today, Southern Comfort will donate $1 to the Gulf Relief Foundation every time someone sends one of its free branded virtual gifts to a friend, up to a limit of $25,000. The money will go to help support the fishing community and wetland preservation in Plaquemines Parish, the location of the Woodland Plantation that was featured until recently on the label of every bottle of Southern Comfort.