Sramana Mitra: I would like to spend the next segment of the interview double-clicking on those two areas. Tell us what you see happening in the casual gaming world. What does the lay of the land look like? What are the trends of the casual gaming space? We should talk both about web and mobile
Have you heard of in-chat gaming? Read on… Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction about yourself as well as Palringo. Martin Rosinski: To give Palringo’s quick story, I founded Palringo close to 10 years ago. In August, Palringo will be celebrating its 10th birthday. It started out back when mobile apps and the idea
Sramana Mitra: How many games have been funded on the various crowdfunding platforms? Scott Hartsman: I wish I knew the answer but I’m afraid I don’t. Sramana Mitra: Is it hundreds or thousands of games? Scott Hartsman: The order of magnitude, at this point, I would say is around hundreds. I would say there are
Sramana Mitra: You’ve said several times that one of the organizing principles of your portfolio is that you want the business model to be fair for the customer. Can you talk about this a bit? You are coming from where the customer will subscribe into your games and you started monetizing right away. Now the
Sramana Mitra: When you are working with third parties who are developing the games, and you are going to publish them as part of your core business, how do you determine which ones you want to bet on? Scott Hartsman: It’s the kind of methodology you would actually expect out of a game developer because
Sramana Mitra: Are there developer tools out there that a Joe Developer can afford to develop on and are high quality tools? Scott Hartsman: Yes, these are definitely commercial-grade high-quality tools for a far smaller price point. Sramana Mitra: How many of these are there?
Sramana Mitra: Rift started with a certain storyline. You were basically allowing people to subscribe to the game and play however long and in whatever way they wanted. When you introduced free-to-play, obviously that storyline had to accommodate that model of commerce in the game. Can you talk about that in concrete terms? Scott Hartsman:
Sramana Mitra: I don’t know if you saw this Economic Developer Survey that came out about gaming. Mobile apps in general are large portions of games – somewhere around 50% both on Android and iOS, but the developers make $500 a month or less. Scott Hartsman: That’s exactly right. I saw a report last week