Braisl, 4º maior mercado de videogame do mundo

“A pesquisa quebra paradigmas e mostra uma nova realidade de mercado, sendo uma importante referência mundial e no Brasil, principalmente para os anunciantes, que estão investindo cada vez mais nos jogos digitais como uma mídia para promover seus produtos”, afirma Ronaldo Bastos, diretor executivo de América Latina da Atrativa – Real Games, que já conta com 12 milhões de usuários em toda a região, dos quais 6 milhões no Brasil. Ele ressalta que, pela primeira vez, foi mapeado o perfil destes usuários no País.

Outro dado muito relevante é que os 35 milhões de usuários de jogos digitais no Brasil gastam 10,7 horas por semana jogando. Esse dado inclui todas as plataformas de jogos.

Além disso, o tempo gasto com jogos, entre esses jogadores, é quase o dobro do dedicado a assistir TV – de 5,5 horas por semana. Também é bem superior ao período destinado a ouvir rádio (4 horas) ou a ler revistas e jornais (1,8 horas). E é praticamente equivalente ao tempo que gastam na Internet, de 11,3 horas por semana.

Em relação à força dos dispositivos móveis (celulares e smartphones), a pesquisa mostrou que o Brasil possui 24 milhões de jogadores.

Outro paradigma que a pesquisa quebrou é o de que os brasileiros não gastam dinheiro com jogos digitais. Segundo os dados levantados o tamanho do mercado brasileiro, quase 47% dos jogadores gasta dinheiro com jogos. Mais de dois terços do orçamento para jogos são gastos diretamente online.

O perfil dos usuários de jogos digitais no Brasil apontou 19,2 milhões de homens – ou 83% da população masculina ativa na internet – e 15,8 milhões de mulheres – ou 69% da população feminina ativa na rede.

Via

“The Elements of Player Experience”

Do fodástico A Momentary Flow.

Por que a Disney tem que comprar o Angry Birds

Not just because Angry Birds is clearly the leader in the new generation of mobile games, but because Angry Birds and Disney are the same business.

You might think that Disney’s business is making movies and TV shows, but that’s only part of it. Disney’s business is taking beloved brands and monetizing them across as many media as possible.

It’s what Mickey Mouse, Spider-Man and Hannah Montana have in common. It’s already well established that most of the money in children’s movies is in merchandise, and that the movies are almost ads for toys by now. But it’s true across most of the amazing brands in the Disney portfolio. That’s why they bought Pixar and spent $4 billion on Marvel.

And Angry Birds has that same quality. Rovio built an amazingly beloved, global brand in a record short amount of time, and are already busy monetizing it through awesome merchandising deals. That’s exactly the business Disney does best, in an rocketship market Disney needs to be a leader in.

It would also be a nice coup for Disney board member Steve Jobs, who also has a company that makes most of the phones Angry Birds is on, and is quite happy to see mobile developers make a lot of money.

At worst, Angry Birds is one great brand that can be monetized across Disney’s assets — cartoons, theme park attractions, you name it. At best, the Angry Birds guys are geniuses of this new medium, the Walt Disneys of smartphone games who will build many, many more beloved games and brands. Disney has shown with Pixar that they can nurture creative geniuses and with its history that it can monetize the hell out of their creations.

Via Business Insider

A obscena margem de lucro da Zynga

47%. Sim, é isso mesmo. 47%!! Nada simboliza tão bem a estupidez do tempo em que vivemos.

By way of comparison, Google’s profit margin is is 29% and Apple’s is 28%, and both of those are considered fantastically profitable. Facebook had a profit margin close to 30% as well in 2010. Salesforce and Amazon by contrast, also very respected companies, have profit margins closer to 5%.

In fact, tech companies might not be the best comparison. Hermès, the world’s most lauded luxury brand — a company whose business is selling $20,000 handbags — has a profit margin around 30%. When one of your writers was in business school, a professor with extensive experience in the luxury industry told us that Chanel, a private company which doesn’t report financials, was rumored to be the most profitable company in Europe with profit margins of 45%.

Zynga is either the most profitable company ever – or it’s very close to it.

The main reason this kind of profitability is possible is that Zynga sells “virtual goods.” They don’t cost much of anything to make, don’t need to be shipped to shelves, and don’t need any kind of sales force to be sold.

Detalhe: isso aí já inclui os 30% que a Zynga tem que pagar ao facebook.

Nesse link da Business Insider dá pra ver uma assustadora análise da mecânica de um dos jogos da Zynga, o FishVille. Sim, tem idiotas que criam aquários virtuais e compram peixes virtuais.

“Video Game Developers vs Publishers: Who Wins?”

Belo vídeo para entender essa indústria.

Via The Guardian

“Do you believe social games are evil? ‘Yes. Absolutely’.”

A opinião que tá no título é de Jonathan Blow, um game designer, em uma boa entrevista sobre jogos:

Jonathan Blow: Well, they’re not very social. A game like World of Warcraft or Counter-Strike or whatever is way more social. Because you actually meet new people in clans or guilds. You go do activities together and help each other out, right?

[With certain social games] it’s about the game exploiting your friends list that you already made, so it’s not really about meeting people. And it’s not really about doing things with them because you’re never playing at the same time. It’s about using your friends as resources to progress in the game, which is the opposite of actual sociality or friendship. Maybe not exactly, but it’s not the same thing, right? They’re really just called social games because they run on social networks but they’re way less [social] – like sitting down and playing a board game with friends at a party is a way more social game. That’s an intensely social experience, right? So, like whatever. I hate that name.

PC Gamer: Do you still think social games are “evil” then?

Jonathan Blow: Yes. Absolutely. There’s no other word for it except evil. Of course you can debate anything, but the general definition of evil in the real world, where there isn’t like the villain in the mountain fortress, is selfishness to the detriment of others or to the detriment of the world. And that’s exactly what [most of these games are].

Como fazer o Steve Jobs ter orgasmos múltiplos

Foi isso que o pessoal que inventou o Fling fez.

Via UoD

Kinect + WoW

This middleware, with some tweaks, lets FAAST quickly facilitate “integration of full-body control with games and VR applications,” via a clever processing server that streams the user’s skeleton pattern, including body position and gestures which can be mapped onto keyboard controls.

The code is free for non-commercial use, because the Institute has big plans for it–including simple, medically inspired games for rehabilitation of motor-skills after a stroke, and even for reducing childhood obesity through “healthy gaming”

Via Fast Company

 

Little Big Planet

Porra, como que eu não conhecia esse jogo?? Pancada nas orelhas.

Você tem a possibilidade de criar fases, do jeito que quiser, e como quiser. Na ferramenta de construção de fases, é possível utilizar qualquer material para criar praticamente qualquer coisa. A customização varia desde cores, tipo do material, formato, assim como a criação de monstros, de explosivos, de mecanismos, de sons… Depois da criação, a fase é colocada no servidor da Media Molecule para que qualquer pessoa possa jogar. Veja o trailer mostrando a criação de fases e a ideia de poder criar qualquer coisa:

Via

“Dystopian fantasy”?

Tom Chatfield entrevistou Cory Doctorow acerca de seu novo livro – For The Win. Antes da entrevista propriamente dita, Tom explica um pouco a história:

Extrapolating from the relatively benign present of massively multi-player online creations like World of Warcraft, the novel imagines a future of exponentially more sophisticated games where three of the world’s 20 largest economies are virtual play environments controlled by the Coca-Cola corporation. Within these, vast Third-World labour forces serve the illegal but lucrative market of Western clients willing to pay hard currency for someone else to undertake the grinding labour of winning in-game gold and possessions; a shadowy profession that has come to be known as “gold-farming”.

Fantasioso? Que nada.

While this may sound like dystopian fantasy, the passages on gold farming come pretty close to reportage. As writers like American author Julian Dibbell, whom Doctorow cites, have witnessed, digital sweatshops really do exist in China and elsewhere. Labourers work long shifts for a pittance, sleeping in dormitories and returning in their spare time to play the very games that are their jobs.

Cory Doctorw explica:

“The thing that got me starting thinking about this was when American auto jobs started to move to Mexico. The United Auto Workers responded to that with basically racism: those dirty Mexicans have stolen our jobs. Now, the forbears of the auto workers movement saw industrial jobs move from town to town across America as trade unionists took hold, and also move from ethnic group to ethnic group, and their response wasn’t to demonise other workers, but to unionise them, to say we all have common cause. It is undeniably hard to go and organize a trade union in Mexico if you are an American. But once you get into videogame labour contexts, everyone is playing in the same virtual world. And they are playing in a world their bosses rarely venture into and have less proficiency in. This, I thought, is a really interesting turn of events.”

Pra fechar, uma parte foda da entrevista em que Cory Doctorw relaciona o crescimento dos videogames com a interdição dos espaços públicos para os jovens:

“Kids aren’t stopping playing outdoors because of video games. Kids are playing video games because they are being prohibited from public spaces. We have taken most of our public spaces away from young people, turned them into malls where you no longer have civil liberties; instead, there’s a user agreement over the door that says management has the right to deny entry at any time.”