Investors on where the smart money will go in social games

This article, written by AJ Glasser was first published on Inside Network on July 13, 2011.

Late yesterday at GamesBeat in San Francisco, game company accelerator YetiZen led a panel with top social and mobile game investors on the evolving dynamic of funding in the space. Norwest Venture Partners’ Tim Chang, Digi-Capital Managing Director Tim Merel and TinyCo CEO Suli Ali characterize an industry that’s both converging and expanding on a global scale.

“[Developers] need to think globally from day one,” says Merel. As an investor, he looks for developers that either offer a portfolio of existing games or that already have access to various channels in different countries. These companies have proven traction and very likely also have plans for multiple revenue streams beyond in-game virtual goods sales. He describes the potential behind Rovio’s Angry Birds, which now has a line of t-shirts and stuffed animals generating revenues in addition to actual paid downloads of the game. He also describes the nature of game concepts that can succeed in international markets versus those that have limited appeal due to cultural association; like the various Chinese multiplayer games based on the Three Kingdoms historical period that fail to find traction with Western audiences.

“There is a danger of false positives,” warns Chang. He talks about how many developers create a “red herring” for investors by basing annual revenue expectations on peak traffic months when there are no guarantees that the developer can retain those users, let alone monetize them. This is especially true of copycat games or developers that reskin their original game without investing resources into distribution channels.

The road ahead in mobile games

This article, written by Dean Takahashi, was first published in VentureBeat on July 13, 2011.

Mobile gaming is the wide-open battleground of the entertainment industry. While Zynga dominates social games and big publishers rule console games, the global smartphone game market is still up for grabs.

Since there are potentially billions of users in this market, mobile gaming could become the largest game market of them all. Who will win it?

Smartphone games have been growing as a market since 2007, when Apple’s iPhone debuted. Tablet games have been growing since the spring of 2010, when Apple launched the iPad. Now the fastest-growing mobile market is based on devices running the Android operating system. With triggering events such as the success of Angry Birds, the hit Rovio game that has been downloaded more than 200 million times, mobile game companies are raising tens of millions of dollars. Mobile game companies have garnered significant valuations, particularly overseas.

Tim Merel, managing director at Digi-Capital, says, “The time to act is now.”

The potential of mobile games

 

Mobile games could be a $13 billion market in 2014, according to Merel. Mobile and online games together could be a $44 billion market, or 50 percent of the global $87 billion market in 2014. Today, mobile games are around $8 billion, a small slice of the overall game market, which is still dominated by console games, web games, and Facebook games. (IDC estimates mobile games will grow to $5 billion in a few years; Gartner says that mobile gaming was $6.7 billion, or 10 percent of the $67.4 billion game market in 2010; the estimates vary, but few doubt mobile games will have a great growth rate).

How will a huge mobile game market come about? That’s one of the questions we’ll explore at GamesBeat 2011 on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. We’ve got 80 of the game industry’s finest minds focused on the evolution of mobile gaming. We all want to figure out how to connect the dots in mobile games.

The great games market split: the Big V

We are entering a world where the games market is fundamentally splitting in two, like the media market of a decade ago. Back then what we now call "old media" scoffed at "new media" upstarts for giving away content, bizarre business practices, and products and services which made no sense to the wise old birds. "They'll destroy more value than they'll create," was the mantra.

Well welcome back to the future.

Today's games market is fundamentally splitting into "Value" and "Volume" markets, both by sector and geography. The two-speed market this is creating may have more rapid and profound effects on the games market than it did on the media market, with meteoric rises for some and slow going for others.

Global Video Games Investment Review 2011 – June Transaction Update

Games investment bank Digi-Capital (www.digi-capital.com) has just released a quarterly transaction update of its Global Video Games Investment Review 2011 http://slidesha.re/dJwTaX. Commenting on the update, Digi-Capital boss Tim Merel said, “As anticipated, games investment and M&A dealflow has accelerated again. We’re seeing some interesting trends emerging so far this year:

1. MMO M&A is increasing in scale, with Summit Partners/TA Associates/Bigpoint ($350M), Changyou/Shenzen 7Road Technology ($100M including earn out) and Perfect World/Cryptic ($50M) continuing the trend kicked off earlier in the year by Tencent/Riot (est. $350-400M);
2. Social games investments are increasing in both volume and scale, such as Kabam ($115M in two rounds since January), Wooga ($24M), Crowdstar ($23M) and Funzio ($20M);
3. There has been a significant increase in social-mobile games M&A, such as Gree’s acquisition of OpenFeint ($104M), and investment, including Papaya Mobile ($18M) and TinyCo ($18M). In non-social mobile games, Rovio impressed the market with its $42M investment;
4. Chinese, Japanese and South Korean games companies are increasingly seen by Western firms as leading industry consolidators, so critical when companies are selling themselves;
5. The gambling/social games overlap is bringing companies from either side into each others’ markets, such as Caesars/Harrah’s/Playtika ($45M) and Zynga/DNA Games/Market Zero; and
6. Console sector consolidation has been increasingly focused on repurposing quality console developers to online/mobile games markets.

Our global dealflow leads us to expect these trends to continue through H2 2011, and we remain very bullish on online and mobile games growth and investment - now is a fantastic time. We are seeing significant appetite from Chinese, Japanese and South Korean games companies to acquire and invest in strong Western online and mobile games companies, but as our Chinese operating partner often reminds us building the right relationships remains critical. Market innovation continues across the piece (particularly in social-mobile games), with US, European and Asian companies developing great businesses built on great games. We’re also privy to a groundswell of games IPO activity poised to come to market in the next 12-18 months. As people have come to expect, we remain long term bears on the pure console market, despite recent and anticipated hardware launches.”

Tim will be discussing the social-mobile games market and investment at both GamesBeat/MobileBeat (together with Norwest Venture Partners) in San Francisco and Casual Connect (together with Playfish, TinyCo and W3i) in Seattle in July.

The Games Middleware Investment Opportunity

This article was first published on www.gamesindustry.biz on 14 April 2011. 

“Middleware?” you cry.  “Isn’t that the really boring stuff that game developers don’t want to do?”

And that’s the point.

The reason we like middleware is because it is the really boring stuff that game developers don’t want to do. And before anyone gets hot under the collar, we actually don’t think it is boring stuff either.

Let’s start by defining what we mean by middleware.

There are any number of dictionary definitions for middleware: “software that occupies a position in a hierarchy between the operating system and the applications, whose task is to ensure that software from a variety of sources will work together correctly” (Oxford), “software that mediates between an application program and a network” (Webster) etc.  In relation to games, middleware typically means a games engine, providing tools for rendering (2D or 3D), animation, physics, collision detection/reaction, artificial intelligence, sound, networking, streaming and so on.

For our purposes, what we mean by middleware is anything which makes it possible to develop, manage and commercialise games. Simple.

Actually before the rise of online and mobile games, middleware did look like a relatively simple part of the market. But today the middleware market has become more diverse and fragmented, which together with high growth in online and mobile games has created a great opportunity for the company that gets it right.

Video games fundraising talk and meetings at GDC San Francisco (1-3 Mar)

Digi-Capital's Tim Merel will be talking about video games fundraising at GDC in San Francisco http://bit.ly/hgZupz, then following up with high growth video games companies afterwards. Interested companies can contact Tim at tim.merel @ digi-capital.com

Why China could rule the new age of games

This article written by Dean Takahashi was first published by VentureBeat on February 25, 2011.

As the games business transitions from console and PC titles to social and mobile games, China is set to take away the United States’ leadership in the business.

That’s the bold prediction from Tim Merel, who has made a splash analyzing the video game market in the past couple of years as the managing director at investment bank Digi-Capital. Merel believes that in 2010, video game investment and acquisition activity changed fundamentally and accelerated in a way that it never had in the industry’s decades-long history.