New-York Based Companies Discuss the Games Industry
September 30th
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NYConvergence ORIGINAL
In two of this morning's sessions at the New York Games Conference, taking place at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan's Battery Park City neighborhood, NYConvergence heard from two NY-based companies about the current state of the gaming industry and their predictions for 2010. If you're interested in following the discussions going on through the end of the day from off-site, you can follow #nygames on Twitter.
First up was Joost van Dreunen of SuperData Research. Van Dreunen, who also teaches at New York University and Columbia University, spoke about what he sees as the top five trends in gaming, smartphones, digital distribution, trading card games, prepaid game cards, and the growing "free to play" market.
Then, Tal Kerret of Oberon Media spoke about the casual-gaming industry, initially about the two main segments of casual gamers, the "Bart,"s young men in their mid-20s, and the "Marge"s, women in their mid-40s (The "Bart" and "Marge" displayed on screen alongside the demographic information were the characters from The Simpsons.). He presented a couple of case studies, one on the average number of applications on new iPhones (40-70) and Facebook's revenue from gaming (approaching $500 million). From reviewing information such as this, Oberon has learned that all demographics are, in fact, involved in casual gaming, viral gaming is "explosive," and microtransactions work globally.