Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 2)

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 where somebody drew out what the long tail looks like on PC versus the tail on mobile. On mobile, only a fraction of the top 1% is making any money at scale.

Sramana Mitra: The long tail of PC is healthier, is that what you’re saying?

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Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 1)

The Online Gaming world has changed dramatically over the last five years. Business models have changed. Funding models have changed. Development models have changed. Read my interview with Trion Worlds CEO Scott Hartsman to get a grip of where things are going.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with an introduction to Trion. Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to Trion.

Scott Hartsman: I’m the CEO at Trion Worlds. We bring high-quality core gaming out to the Internet, primarily on PCs. We are a very core, gamer-friendly, free-to-play company. We are in online games. We are primarily in PC games, but we also support consoles. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Doyon Kim, CEO of Pangalore (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: They are more powerful, which makes it a PR nightmare. So, you don’t have a solution to this. You observe a problem; I observe a problem. There is no solution. We’ll just have to deal with this muck. It is an open problem, don’t you think?

Doyon Kim: It is, yes. It is becoming a more serious problem. I read a book about five years ago – and I don’t remember the title of the book, and at the time I didn’t like it – that was criticizing the Web 2.0 movement. What they were saying, basically, is this Web 2.0 thing gives too much power to amateurs, and anybody can be an expert. Anybody can be influential with this new Internet. Because I was in the Web 2.0 industry, I didn’t like the tone at the time, but now I kind of agree. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Doyon Kim, CEO of Pangalore (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That was my impression also, that cross-promoting using each other’s ad inventory that is not being sold, because nobody wants to advertise. There is a huge amount of unmonetized ad inventory.

Doyon Kim: And also, it’s a very targeted audience.

SM: It’s a very targeted audience, yes. So, barter is one of the trends in the industry. I see that, too. Is there any other major trend you’re seeing in gaming? One of the observations you were making – and I’m in sync with that – is that Zynga came into Facebook before all of these privacy settings came together. So, the virality was still there. And then anybody who came in before there were privacy settings with which the virality could be turned off used Facebook virality to scale up. But it’s no longer viable. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Doyon Kim, CEO of Pangalore (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It’s an execution game.

Doyon Kim: Right. And we don’t expect people to play our games for three years or four years. Yes, they can copy it, but we have a head start.

SM: So, your strategy is to continuously come up with cross-platform games, keep using the user base, and market new games to them.

DK: Yes. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Doyon Kim, CEO of Pangalore (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What are the top five things you need to do when you design a game to be a cross-platform social and mobile game?

Doyon Kim: One thing is you have to understand the technology. One way to do it is have one game for this platform and completely rewrite everything, maybe use the graphic assets for another platform, but that’s a doubling of resources. There are a couple of technology platforms that enable this multi-platform development. One of them is HTML 5, but you have to understand what it can do. HTML 5 is not really designed for gaming. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Doyon Kim, CEO of Pangalore (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This was more about page views. You did the searching yourselves, so they can’t get into searching.

Doyon Kim: Right. Content providers had to get some sort of code from us, but that code could track every activity of people on the website. Sites like TechCrunch implement a code, so we track their website traffic and see what are the most popular articles of the day. We could get everything [and know] overall, what were the most popular articles.

SM: But it required that you became a quoter yourselves, wasn’t it? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Doyon Kim, CEO of Pangalore (Part 1)

Video games are popular with people of all ages. The popularity of  games like “Farmville” and “Angry Birds” is proof of that. Pangalore, a San Jose, California–based universal social games developing company  launched its Universal Play HTML5 technology in December 2011, further satisfying the public’s desire for more games to play online and making it easier for them to play those games. With Pangalore’s new technology, users can play games on any platform at any time and provides continual saving and updating of their progress.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Doyon. Please give us some context about you and the kinds of things you’ve been involved with, what you’ve been around, and then we will start exploring trends. >>>