On last weeks pioneers conference call it was announced that progressive jackpots are to be externally tested next week…
This will create a surge of excitement within the uVme network as players will now be able to play to win some serious money! The more people playing the bigger the jackpots!
Imagine a Speed Pool tournament, what an rush that would be with players from all corners of the globe…
We will announce when the tournaments are live on the games site, however (if you have not already done so) you may wish to register your free player account and be told from uVme themselves…How much will you win?
On Monday the 23rd of June 2008 – The reVolution selected second gear…
The Black Diamond uVme business building site was born!
This signifies the transition between the pre-launch phase of uVme as we move forward into the summer months of 2008.
The website is slick, shiny and really shows the quality of the opportunity we all have in our hands. It has fantastic features that enable associates to really dig deep into their business to see how it is developing.
We are now able to show off our new site to all our contacts to show them what they are missing out on!
The amazing thing is that this site is only a starting point and will continue to evolve…
USA Gamers Walked Away From Monterrey’s Hot Sun With Overall Team Victory, Achieving Seven First Place Prizes
Monterrey, Mexico, June 23, 2008. The third annual World Cyber Games Pan-American Championship wrapped up this past weekend in Monterrey, Mexico. The nine-game tournament took place over three days and featured a who’s who of gamers from many countries in North, Central and South America. Featuring some of the most intense and competitive matches of the 2008 World Cyber Games tournament series, the competition set many familiar faces against each other in the finals.
The USA team had an excellent showing, winning nearly all the games featured in the tournament and achieving the overall team championship.
Leading the USA to victory were:
Nikolasus Cassidy - USA - (WarCraft® III: The Frozen Throne™) - 1st place
Team EG - USA - (Half-Life®: Counter-Strike™) - 1st place
Kamran “omegaelite” Siddiqui - USA - (Need For Speed™ ProStreet) - 1st place
Team Final Boss -USA - (Halo® 3) - 1st place
Sean “maximus” Heffelfinger - USA - (Project Gotham Racing® 4 ) - 1st place
David MoB “Wolfe” Briers - USA - (Guitar Hero® III: Legends of Rock) - 1st place
Raghav “parfait” Phadke - USA - (Age of Empires® III: The Asian Dynasties) - 1st place
“The city of Monterrey opened its doors to the World Cyber Games and put on one of the best Pan-American games we’ve ever had,” said Mr. Hyoung Seok Kim, CEO of ICM. “With an incredible list of sponsors and a great venue, Monterrey was a fantastic location to host this major e-Sports competition.”
The Pan-American Championship began on Saturday and included welcome speeches from Hyoung Seok Kim, CEO of ICM, global organizer of WCG; Joo Ho Song, CEO for Samsung Electronics México; Erick Baca, Marketing Director for XBOX Mexico and finally, Mario Valle, Marketing and Sales Director for Electronic Arts Mexico.
Some of the world’s best gamers came out for this event, as 105 top gamers from 13 countries battled in the heart of Monterrey, with nearly 10,000 spectators attending over the course of the three day event - making this one of the largest Pan-American championships to date.
ABOUT THE WORLD CYBER GAMES
The World Cyber Games (www.worldcybergames.com) is the premier blue chip global video game tournament and culture festival. First founded in 2000 to promote global harmony through e-sports, the WCG has grown steadily ever since. Behind the slogan “Beyond the Game” and with contestants from more than 70 countries expected to participate in this year’s event, the World Cyber Games has developed into a true global phenomenon with arguably the largest prize amount at stake. The World Cyber Games prides itself on leading the “Digital Entertainment Culture.”
CONTACT:
For The World Cyber Games
Adam Fenton / Andrew Kelly
212-689-6360
adam_fenton@bhimpact.com / Andrew_Kelly@bhimpact.com
Happy news to all Sims gamers who are also into casual gaming. Sims Carnival, the portal with a plethora of casual games, is now in public beta! Game developer, EA, saw this great opportunity to expand the sims gamer network by bringing the carnival games online. Just like its predecessors Sims On Stage.
What’s great about the offering here is that its similar to the mini-games that you play while waiting for the game to load or install. And you can create your own games based on some limited custom options.
And if you ask me, it has the making of its own social network since it gives the gamers the opportunity to play and interact with each other online. Its now available for everyone with the launch of its public beta. This I will try myself, soon!
Source: www.gamerlite.com
Babel is pleased to announce the appointment of Lewis Glover as Director of QA, overseeing Babel’s expanding QA teams in Montreal, New Delhi and Brighton. Babel has over 400 QA testers delivering functionality, localisation and compliance QA, as well as separate Quality Standards, Evaluation and Training teams.
Lewis has previously been at Jagex where he managed QA of their MMO titles, and Atari Europe where he was Quality Director looking after all their European SKUs and was instrumental in the definition of outsourcing processes and migration to an offshore testing model. Lewis will be based in Babel’s Montreal facility, and will also be part of Babel’s new MMO task force.
Babel provides a global delivery capability via its facilities in Montreal, Brighton and New Delhi. Using its three time zones, a QA team of over 400 testers and a localisation department that is currently translating over 1 million words per month, the company is able to offer maximum scale when needed for time-critical launch titles. Babel is a Microsoft approved Xbox 360®test house in Europe and North America, an Approved QAAP test house for SCEA, and a partner with Nintendo.
About Babel Media
Babel is the industry leader in specialist outsourced services for the games and interactive entertainment industry. The company has offices in Brighton, Los Angeles, Montreal and New Delhi, providing comprehensive games-focused localisation, QA, certification, audio, print and services. Clients include SCEA, SCEE, SCEJ, SEGA, Nintendo, Microsoft, THQ, Atari, Ubisoft, Eidos, Capcom, Nokia, Activision – Blizzard, Namco Bandai, Konami, Majesco, NCSoft, Take 2, Square Enix, Rising Star, Hudson, EA, TT Games, Bethesda Softworks, Warner Brothers, Aspyr and LucasArts.
Jeremy Liew
, Lightspeed Venture Partners, www.lightspeedvp.com Jeremy is co-producing the Social Gaming Summit at UCSF Mission Bay.
The last few years have seen a transformation in the consumer internet world as online media has evolved into social media. Many new social media companies have shot to tens of millions of users very quickly, including Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Yelp, YouTube, Slide, RockYou* and Flixster*. The trends that have driven the growth of these Web 2.0 companies include:
- Dramatically reduced development costs and cycle times, which have led to highly iterative product management
- Dramatically reduced marketing and distribution costs as CPC advertising, viral growth and social network platforms have replaced Superbowl ads and distribution deals with portals
- Easier monetization due to the proliferation of ad networks
As the game industry embraces web games, multiplayer games, and social games, we are seeing these same trends emerge. Web games and multiplayer games are well understood. Social games however, are a newer phenomenon.
Social games are not just multiplayer games. In social games, existing social relationships add context and motivation to the gameplay. Social games are more fun to play with people you know than with anonymous strangers. Examples of social games include Friends for Sale*, where you had better buy your girlfriend back from that guy who has been hitting on her at the gym, (fluff) Friends, where if your BFF feeds your pet, you are compelled to reciprocate, and Power Challenge, where you can’t let your team’s loss to your fraternity brother’s team go unavenged.
Even single player games can become social when the right infrastructure for community and social interaction are built around them, including high score leaderboards, achievement badges, challenges and simple message boards, as Kongregate, Addicting Games, MiniClip and MindJolt are demonstrating.
The gaming industry is now starting to experience the same trends that the online media industry has experienced over the last few years:
Dramatically reduced development costs
Lazard estimates that Halo 3 cost $30m to build. Rockstar says that they spent $100m to make Grand Theft Auto 4. While both have been wildly successful games that sold over 10m units each, these are big numbers to spend on development. A new generation of lightweight web games is now being created at a fraction of these budgets, and these games are being played for free by millions of users. Games like Zynga’s Scramble, Social Gaming Network’s Warbook and Stardoll (originally Paperdoll Heaven) were all originally launched on less than $100k and all have entertained millions of players.
Of course these free games can’t compare to the complexity, quality or polygon count of Halo 3 or GTA 4, but they do provide entertainment to their players, and they are all evolving and improving over time. Because all these games live in the browser, they can be constantly updated and refined as game designers watch their players’ usage patterns. They give players more of what they like, and cut out gameplay that players don’t like. Teams are small and development is fast and iterative in reaction to player feedback.
In the extreme, users generate the game rules themselves. Some users in online communities and immersive worlds including Dogster, Habbo Hotel, Gaia and IMVU have gone so far as to create games on their own, ranging from dance parties to plays to petting zoos to quiz shows.
Dramatically reduced marketing and distribution costs
Halo 3 spent an additional $30m on marketing, mostly offline. GTA 4 blanketed the billboards of , Nexon’s Maplestory, and Three Ring’s Puzzle Pirates have become experts in success-based online player acquisition.
Furthermore, Games have exploded virally on the social network platforms. On Facebook alone, three games (Texas Hold’em, Zombies and Friends For Sale*) have more than 8 million players (installs). Five of the top ten Facebook apps (by daily active users) are games; Owned, Friends for Sale*, Texas Hold’em, (Lil) Green Patch and Scrabulous. This is a direct consequence of the social games phenomenon. Social games are more fun to play with your friends, and social networks are an ideal environment for killing time with friends. As a result, they have been able to very efficiently ride the distribution channels that the social networks provide.
Easier monetization
The dominant model of monetizing games is still retail - selling crystal cases for $60 a pop. This presents a real barrier to game publishers, who have to convince a prospective player to fork over a substantial amount of money before she has even tried the game. Publishers have to generate demand, which is what led to the high marketing budgets for Halo 3 and GTA IV mentioned previously.
Now more game companies are experimenting with free to play games that make it a lot easier for a prospective player to try before they buy. These games monetize either through advertising or through virtual goods sales. Just as with online media, ad networks like Double Fusion, Massive and Mochi Media have made ad sales much easier for game companies, so that they can focus on their core competencies. Equally, virtual goods business models, well established in is reportedly doing more than $50m in virtual goods sales (mostly in Europe) and Nexon’s Maplestory is doing around $30m in virtual goods sale in the US. Companies like Acclaim, Stardoll and K2 Network are ramping their virtual goods sales in hot pursuit.
Future for social games
The trends outlined above are likely to lead to many new and valuable gaming companies. Let EA, Nintendo, Activision, Ubisoft and the like continue to fight for market share amongst hard core gamers. New social games startups, including free to play MMORPGs, social network games, web based games and single player gaming communities, are busy converting the much larger market of casual players into their customers.
* Lightspeed is an investor in Flixster, Rock You and Serious Business (which publishes Friends For Sale)
Two of the pioneers of the UK video games industry have been recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.
David and Richard Darling, co-founders of game developers Codemasters, were both made Commanders of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).
They built up their company from a bedroom enterprise into one of the best known games developers in the world.
The firm is behind well established titles including the Colin McRae Rally series and Sensible Soccer.
More recently the firm has ventured into online games, releasing Lord of the Rings Online.
“For over 20 years David and Richard led Codemasters as it became one of the video game industry’s great British success stories,” said Rod Cousens, present head of Codemasters.
“Their drive and passion for creating the best in interactive entertainment will always be part of the industry’s heritage and this recognition is well deserved.”
The brothers sold their stake in the company in 2007 after 21 years at the firm.
Brilliant games
The two brothers started their first company - Galactic Software - in 1982, followed by a stint writing for Mastertronic, a publisher of low-cost computer software.
In 1986 they set up Codemasters, along with their father Jim. Their first title was BMX simulator, released in the company’s founding year.
There followed a series of simulator titles including jet ski, flight and even fruit machine games.
Many of these were written for the computer of the moment - the ZX spectrum - although they also produced titles for the BBC Micro, Acorn Electron and Amstrad CPC.
The brothers were famous for putting ringing endorsements of their games on the packaging.
“Dizzy’s Treasure Island is brilliant - it’s like a real cartoon but with amazing gameplay,” read one.
These were usually quotes from the creators of the game or the Darling brothers themselves. The Treasure Island quote was by David Darling, for example. Practices like this drew equal measures of mirth and criticism from the games press of the time.
But the company gained even greater notoriety when it developed a series of unlicensed games for Nintendo’s Entertainment System.
The titles, published by controversial company Camerica, bypassed the console’s so-called “lock-out chip”, designed to prevent unofficial products being played.
Titles included the Quattro Series, Ultimate Stuntman and the best-selling Micro Machines.
The company has continued to grow and now produces games for all three major consoles, PCs, handheld devices and mobile phones.
In 2005 the company was crowned the world’s leading independently owned video games developer by Develop Magazine.
The brothers left two years later to work on other projects.
They were honoured for their “services to the computer games industry”.
Source: BBC
In the current international land-grab among leading social networks, Facebook is overtaking MySpace as the largest social network in the world. But there’s a big caveat — Asia — where a much-maligned older rival, Friendster continues to lead Facebook and everyone else by at least a two to one margin. The most recent data: This past April, Friendster clocked 36 million users in Asia, versus a distant second Facebook at 18 million.
And unlike social networking in the U.S., the opportunity in the Asian market is growing as more and more of the region’s 3.8 billion residents come online.
Friendster, because of its growth in Asia, has seen its user base nearly double from 23 million monthly active users in April of 2007, to 40 million users this past April, according to comScore. That growth rate seems to be increasing, as the company has added 10 million of those users since December. Friendster also points out that comScore doesn’t account for users who access the site through internet cafes. Internally, it says it sees range much higher in many countries.
Meanwhile, Friendster users are spending an average of 229 minutes on the site per month, the highest of any social network, according to comScore data from March.
This is looking more and more like a happy ending for the San Francisco-based company, which, as many of our long-time readers know, has seen many ups and downs over the years. Nearly from the start, it has been wracked by painful internal issues, including management conflicts, investor conflicts, technical problems, and mixed messages to its users about what was acceptable on the site.
It gradually ceded grounded in the U.S. to MySpace and Facebook, both of which now dominate the market here. But because the site had become popular with many Asian-Americans in the Bay Area during its early days, these users shared the site with family and friends in other parts of the Pacific.
A shot at the mainland China market?
The international friendships between Friendster users appear to be giving it an ongoing boost in Asia, with 23 percent of an average user’s friends located in a different country. This growth is happening across major Asian ethnic groups. With the site’s recent growth across countries, it may become the go-to social network for large portions of Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore
Most especially, it is the site’s popularity with Chinese speakers outside of greater China that may be give it a better chance of reaching users in the country. Among its international competitors, Facebook is contemplating how to introduce its Chinese-version site without inviting government censorship, and MySpace has been pumping money into its China site.
But life for internet companies in China is especially complicated. Domestic social network offerings from established companies like QQ and younger startups like Xiaonei and 51.com appear to have already grown prohibitively large. I say “appear” because there is little reliable data about any social networking traffic in China, so I — and many China observers I’ve spoken with — tend to doubt any internal numbers given by companies in the country.
Still, from what I hear, Friendster, like MySpace, is seen by the Chinese government as an entertainment site, not so much a place that foments political dissent. (Meanwhile, I hear Facebook is seen by the Chinese government as being about real-world connections — something I’ve argued — real world connections that could foment dissent.)
The best shot at the rest of Asia?
Regardless of what happens in China, the site has already launched versions in both simplified and traditional Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. Today, it introduced a new version in Malay (see screenshot below), and has also recently added Vietnamese. It plans to translate the site into more Asian languages. Note: When I asked Friendster executives about its plans beyond Asia, I got a roundabout answer about Asia’s promise — so I’m guessing Asian users can expect 100 percent of the company’s attention.
The site has been aggressively launching other features, including a “fan page” for musicians and others to promote themselves to Friendster users similar to Facebook’s “Pages.” It has also been building out a developer platform, starting last October. We’ve been hearing positive things about it from some big third-party developers, including Watercooler (which counts Friendster as its second largest platform, with 1.5 million total users), Slide, and others. The platform has been live since December, and while it was developed before the Open Social effort to standardize developer platforms came into being, Friendster was a founding member of that movement. There are more than 350 third-party applications, with thousands of developers working on the platform, the company says.
Friendster’s executives attribute its recent growth to a composite of its demographics and new features like its pages and platform, along with its new mobile version. As we’ve written, large, web-based social networks appear to have a strong advantage over mobile-only social networks, so expect Friendster to continue to do well on this front, too.
There’s another interesting angle to Friendster, and it has to do with making money — but not ads. Many Asian gaming companies and virtual worlds are already basing large portions of their businesses on virtual goods. With an established user base of people who are used to spending money on virtual goods, the company is primed to introduce this sort of feature. Maybe in the form of sending virtual gifts to friends for a small fee, like what Facebook already offers — but with a lot more users who care to do so. I’m not sure exactly what the company is going to introduce, at this point, as it isn’t saying much.
Meanwhile, as the number of internet users in Asia continues to grow — and gain more wealth, expect Friendster to do very well for itself. Indeed, if it maintains its lead in Asia, it may one day be larger than Facebook or MySpace.
Source: www.venturebeat.com
Social media is one of the many results of ability to easily connect with others given by the Internet. Social networks are also an Internet driven evolution (you can see the charts regarding top 10 US networks and blogs at MarketingCharts). But the main activity over the Internet has also been transformed: gaming has evolved from hardcore online gaming limited to teenagers to casual gaming opened to everyone. Generating a vibrant environment for people to speak with each other and stay longer has become a standart with well-known examples: Xbox Live, the to come Playstation Home, the famous (but also dying) Second Life, or Facebook (the platform being the environment and applications the different games). Looking deeper into the gaming market to extract best practices over socialization process (which is an easy going when you’re playing online) is the path brands should walk to improve their brand image and above all make people speak about them and engage deeper with them so that they provide you with interesting insights and ideas.
Creating several consumer clusters through inviting to play games related to separated topics to identify and categorize them is one idea that has been provided by ingame chatrooms and game mods. One other big idea is to create addiction by creating a leveling-up competition between community members. It doesn’t need to be marketed, you just have to put it into your community roadmap, but be sure to leak the word to community power users (that’s an easy move, you got the sign-in stats), they’ll do the rest for you.
The last part is more easily said than done, but would definitly do the difference: leave the community you generated to community members. Finding the right moment to switch, the right people to become voluntary community moderators, and to manage all that within your digital house are the item to watch closely. Doing this free you from the hard and not enhancing work, giving you time to analyse and totally leverage your community. Why? By that act, on one hand you’re telling your consumers they’re part of the company, they’re trusted members and brand ambassadors, and on the other and you’ve created your best sellers team and your viral/ word of mouth network you can activate any time.
Check the examples of MMORPGs to get more information (World of Warcraft, Silk Road, Everquest) as well as hardcore games like Starcraft, Counter Strike, and many others. These community management patterns would eventually be the one you’ll see tomorrow at your (competitor ?) brand community. To get up-to-date and find some good insights from social games, bookmark InsideSocialGames.
Americans 50+ are increasingly becoming immersed in the Internet and in many ways can be compared to users who are decades younger, according to findings from the Center for the Digital Future released today in conjunction with AARP. The study takes a look at online behaviors of those age 50+ compared to the under 50 demographic.
“The perception is that Americans over 50 only dabble on the Internet, but we are finding that they are increasingly spending time online becoming involved in robust Internet activities, such as online communities,” said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. “In specific areas, there is often little difference in use of online technology between older users and some of the youngest users.”
As the leading membership organization for the 50+ demographic with nearly 40 million members, AARP is the industry authority on behaviors of the boomer and 50+ audiences.
“AARP members are continuing to expand the ways in which they choose to receive information and the ever-changing Internet landscape allows us to do this in more integrated ways than ever before,” said Kevin Donnellan, Executive Vice President and Chief Communications Officer, AARP. “Our Web site, aarp.org, is experiencing steady growth among people 50+.
Not only are they visiting our site for information, but they are also using our social networking, gaming, and news channels in ever-increasing numbers as this study confirms.” Because of an increased interest in news, AARP recently launched AARP Bulletin Today (http://bulletin.aarp.org), the go-to daily news source for and about 50+ issues.
– The Internet as news source - Users 50+ go online more frequently to check for news compared to those under 20. Forty-two percent of users 50 and older check the Internet for news daily or several times a day, compared to 18 percent of users under 20.
– Participation in online communities - A large percentage of Internet users 50 and older who are members of online communities report extensive involvement in their communities and benefits from their participation. Fifty-eight percent of members 50 and older log in to their online community daily or several times a day, compared to 47
percent of members under 20.
– Social activism - Thirty-six percent of members 50 and older said their social activism has increased since they began participating in online communities for social causes, compared to 29 percent of members under 20.
– Online games - Eighteen percent of users 50+ said they go online daily or several times a day to play games, compared to 22 percent of users under 50.
– Browse in retail stores, then buy online - Users in both the 50+ and under 50 groups have similar online shopping habits. Sixty-eight percent of users 50+ say they sometimes or often browse in retail stores and then buy online, compared to 72 percent of users under 50.
– Maintaining social relationships - forty-six percent of users under 50 said the Internet was important or very important in maintaining their social relationships, which is identical to the percentage for those over 70.
– Importance of online information - A larger percent of users under 20 compared to those over 50 (85% vs.76%) said that the Internet is an important or very important source of information. However, the percentage of those over 50 who state this has grown substantially in five years (2002 to 2007), up slightly more than half (51%).
– Importance of online communities - Both 50+ and under 20 online community members say their online community is very important or extremely important to them: (70 percent of members 50 and older, and 68 percent of members under 20).
– Instant messaging and video downloads still tools for young users - While many Internet functions are used increasingly by older people, some online technology is still in the realm of the young - in particular instant messaging and video downloading. When asked about the importance of instant messaging in maintaining social relationships, only 9 percent of users 50+ said IM was important or very important compared to 48 percent of users under 20.
Source: hitsearchlimited.com