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人物专访:Lloyd Melnick谈社交游戏公司playdom进军欧洲

发布时间:2010-08-11 16:08:34 Tags:,,

social game sobserver(社交游戏观察家)日前就社交游戏巨头playdom(全球排名前三)进军欧洲市场采访了playdom海外运营负责人Lloyd Melnick。

Lloyd Melnick称playdom旗下的facebook游戏将率先实现对欧洲各个语种用户的支持,之后他们才会正式进入欧洲当地的社交网站。Lloyd Melnick还预计他们将在欧洲获得不错的发展空间,因为这里没有他们在北美必须面对的激烈的竞争。

Lloyd Melnick

Lloyd Melnick

Lloyd Melnick有一个很好的理由就是如果你是某个社交网站为数不多的几个高端游戏开发者之一,那么你的营收就是相当可观的。在myspace,playdom是核心的开发者,而在facebook,zynga是核心的开发者,他们同样获得了高额回报。

Playdom is one of the Top 3 social game developers worldwide. The US based company has been constantly in the news spending Venture Capital one acquisitions of small developers almost weekly.

Finally, two weeks ago Playdom itself was acquired by Disney for $763.2 Million. Furthermore, Playdom announced to expand on European social networks and enter the European market. What sounds like good news to users means strong competition for European developers. We talked to Lloyd Melnick, who is on charge of International Operations at Playdom about Playdom’s goals and the market potential in Europe.

Social Games Observer: Playdom will to come to Europe. Can you name some details of your rollout plan?

Lloyed Melnick: First, our games will be available in the major European languages on Facebook. After that we will go live on major European social networks. We have a deal with StudiVZ, agreements with all three Russian networks and Netlog same as with Nasza Klasa who is rolling out games and we are one of the first partners. Hopefully, we will launch our games on Skyrock and other social networks as well.

SGO: How strong do you see social game monetization in Europe?

Lloyed Melnick: I think it is going be even better for us than it is in

North America because there is less competition. One of the reasons why Playdom is expanding to European social networks now is that we were the major player on Myspace for a very long time same as Zynga had Facebook all to themselves. When you are one of the first few developers on a social network the revenues are just insane. I think it is going to be the same on StudiVZ or Netlog. One example why we think the expansion is going to be successful is our revenue on Orkut.

SGO: So you think users in Europe are going to spend as much money on virtual goods as North Americans do on Facebook?

Lloyed Melnick: I think they will even spend more but it will depend on the market. Of course users in Turkey are not going to spend as much money as users in Germany.

SGO: How do you see the Russian market? It is a big question mark for many developers.

Lloyed Melnick: That is a market where we are working with local partners because it is a very difficult market: it has three social networks plus Facebook, payment is totally different, some of the social networks are closed networks, etc.  Undoubtedly, it is a big market and we have always been very successful in Russia because it is a huge gaming market where all sorts of games are popular. It is a very important market for us and we see a lot of potential.

SGO: Operating in the Russian market, what are your trademark concerns?

Lloyed Melnick: To name an example: There are six copies of Social City in the Russian market, including one copy where you hardly see the difference. My philosophy has always been to push your games out there as quickly as possible and get strong rather than to fight them because you are not going to win. So we are not going to deal with pirates directly. Once our local partners have legal versions to our games they can put pressure on the social network to take down our copying competitors. That is what we are going to do – we are not trying to go to court.

SGO: The development cycle of Playdom games is short. Is it an advantage to “polish polish polish” the games so they do not get copied that easily?

Lloyed Melnick: Not really because they actually “copy copy copy” with the same pace. After we release new features we see them on the pirate versions two days later. It is incredible. Russians have great programmers, maybe the best in the world together with Ukrainians. We are probably setting up a development studio in Russia, Ukraine or Poland next year.


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