Launches - Saturday, March 22, 2008 5:21 - 0 Comments

Risk-Like War Is War Of Words

From TechCrunch: Two Startups Battle Over Who Invented Risk-Like War Game First

There’s no doubt that casual gaming is a hot sector these days.  One need look no further than the current crop of funding events around companies like Zynga, SGN, and Conduit Labs to see that the VCs are excited about the prospect of putting money to work in these eyeball magnets.  The sustainability of these companies is what the VCs find attractive, needing to look no further than PopCap to see that it’s possible to create a sustainable and highly profitable business around the casual gamer.

As a topic, this is a good one, but the topic of this coverage (from Arrington himself no less) is a bit of a he said, she said, with a who done it mixed in for good measure.  I’m not sure that the readers of TechCrunch care all that much about the back scene drama of who might have stolen what idea from whom.  Besides, it happens all the time.  Certainly, they care even less about the disparaging remarks that one founder has to say about the code base of the other company.

More interesting topics for coverage would have been the lack of creativity surrounding the causal games industry.  How many iterations do we need to have of “fit these blocks together” or “match like colors to make things disappear?”  What’s more interesting is that the most popular of the games that have been created on the social networks are based in large part on ancient titles from the board game business: Scrabble (Scrabulous) and now Risk (Attack, as well as these two new entrants).  Card games are more or less in the public domain, and will be recreated over and over again, but original titles are starting to feel like Hollywood, with mindless sequels showing up instead of creative thought.  Creativity and risk taking are not rewarded in the marketplace because of the variability in outcome.  The problem is that casual games, unlike their hardcore gamer title brethren, are not like the Hollywood blockbuster.  Development costs are very low.  So why then is there not more risk taking and creativity in the market?

The market dynamics of lower cost of development and deployment is likely causing a reduction in market opportunity for early entrants.  The probability of market success is decreased to the point where it almost doesn’t matter that you have a great idea - it can be copied so very quickly.  Distribution becomes the competitive advantage.  Playability and experience matter.  Absolutely.  However, distribution and adoption wins the game.  The XBox guys understand this with their XBox Live Arcade and the ability for amateur developers to have their games in the marketplace.

So where does this leave the potential investors looking to put money to work in this space?  The path of funding a parent company that can roll up titles, either through fast following or acquisition of IP, is the most probably path to success.  Zynga is certainly showing that this is the case.  Zynga CEO, Mark Pincus, is executing amazingly well against this plan.  The notion that a lone independent developer can create a game and stand alone in the market place is seeming less and less likely as the funding of companies like Zynga increase.  Scrabulous is, of course, evidence to the contrary.  Frankly, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a fast follower on that development meme.