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每日观察:关注九城财务报表和Omgpop并购借鉴点(3.24)

发布时间:2012-03-24 10:53:47 Tags:,,

1. 前Lolapps首席执行官Arjun Sethi正式离任6Waves Lolapps ,早先6Waves Lolapps宣布裁撤80%的研发人员,将更多精力集中在社交和手机端的游戏发行工作。Arjun Sethi在Lolapps任职长达四年的时间,并于去年7月份将工作室同和总部位于香港的6Waves合并。

ravenskye from venturebeat.com

ravenskye from venturebeat.com

2. 九城日前发布财报称2011年净亏损4520万美元(2010年的净亏损额度是7630万美元)。消息称在2010年失去具有超级营收能力的魔兽世界运营权后,九城一直在尝试寻找新的游戏立足点,特别是在手机领域,创建了名为The9 Game Zone的社交网络,并入股OpenFeint(后为GREE收购),还和Sony合作运营中文版PlayNow app store。

chart from insidemobileapps.com

chart from insidemobileapps.com

3. 据周三新发布的SEC文件显示,Zynga收购OMGPOP的报价是1.8亿美元,这同时也是Zynga史上单笔最高收购价(之前最高收购是Newtoy的5330万美元)。Zynga在文件中并未提到之前传闻的3000万美元盈利支付条款。

zynga stock from insidesocialgames.com

zynga stock from insidesocialgames.com

4. Dan Frommer总结关于Omgpop被Zynga快速并购的可借鉴点:A. App Store一夜成名的励志故事一直存在,Draw Something发行时间不过是刚过不久的2月1号。Dan Porter称同样聚拢100万用户,AOL用了九年,Facebook用了九个月,而Omgpop则只用了九天。

draw something from readwriteweb.com

draw something from readwriteweb.com

B. 你可以失败30次,但下一次你仍然有充足的理由成功,在推出Draw Something以前,OMGPOP已经有超过30款名不见经传的游戏,这个和Rovio推Angry Birds前有50多款不怎么成功的游戏相似,更相似的是他们最终都取得了轰动性的成就。

C. 在游戏最巅峰的时候将作品出售给更具运营实力的大型机构,以保障产品形象的价值最大化,事实上要像Rovio那样只靠一款产品连续获得成功并不容易(最终售价是1.8亿)。

5. Yahoo Mobage(由Yahoo日本和DeNA在2010年10月份共建的PC端社交平台)日前宣布其用户量突破700万,其数据里程碑如下:第一个100万用时51天;第二个100万用时53天;第三个100万用时61天;第四个100万耗时73天;第六个100万耗时183天。

现在Yahoo Mobage拥有超过200款的游戏,比较成功的包括Dragon Collection和Kaito Royal,但很少有游戏的用户数量能够达到百万级别。

6. 关于Zynga是否进军Xbox游戏市场,早在去年Brian Reynolds就曾认为相比较于Facebook和手机市场,这一市场明显规模过小(大约只有3000万用户),并且和休闲游戏的类型走向不一致。

但Josh Wittenkelle认为,如果Zynga想要在跨平台领域更有所作为,他们就必须考虑不同平台的兼容性,尽管就目前来看这种可能性还不算高。

7. 因为社交游戏付费比例一直都不高,Facebook日前针对Facebook Credits的首次消费者进行促销,玩家只要花费1美元就能够获得价值5美元的Facebook Credits(目前只有5%的Facebook玩家会通过此货币进行虚拟交易)。但是事实上只有20%的首次消费玩家会在一个月内重复消费。

8. 据SEC文件披露,Zynga首席执行官出售了(二次发行)自己持有股份的15%,价值大约为2.27亿美元。这样Mark Pincus在公司的投票话语权就从36.5%微降至35.9%。另一些减持的高管和机构包括Owen Van Natta、首席运营官John Schappert、首席财务官Dave Wehner、IVP、SilverLake、Union Square Ventures、Google、LinkedIn联合创始人Reid Hoffman和Dreamworks首席执行官及Zynga董事会成员Jeffrey Katzenberg。

本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转载,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

1. Former Lolapps chief executive Arjun Sethi is leaving the recently merged 6Waves Lolapps after a slew of layoffs to the social gaming company’s development staff.

Sethi, who was with Lolapps for four years, announced the departure in a blog post this afternoon, saying:

“Most important to me is the culture we built together. Everyone we have hired is an entrepreneur and a leader in their own way. I hope to see multiple new ideas and startups emerge because of the type of people and culture we have created over the years. It’s a culture that is seen as among the strongest! I am very proud of each and every one this team and will miss you most of all.”

6Waves Lolapps recently cut a significant portion (read: nearly 80 percent) of their developers, after merging with Hong Kong based 6Waves in July. 6Waves focused on placing third-party games on Facebook as opposed to developing games in-house, which was Lolapps’ specialty. The merged companies, now called 6L, are taking on 6Waves’ model for the time being. The company released this statement after the layoffs:

“6waves Lolapps will now focus on working with independent developers to launch and grow their mobile and social games. As a result we have restructured the company to focus on key functions which include developer outreach, product advisory, user growth initiatives and our publishing platform. The re-structuring means that we will have more resources to continue our leadership in the social and mobile game publishing space.”

At the time of the layoffs, it looked like Sethi was going to stay on board and continue as a chief product officer. It’s unusual that an executive would leave the company so recently after an acquisition, which make the layoffs look like a significant influence.(Source:venturebeat

2. Chinese gaming company The9 has reported a net loss of $45.2 million for the 2011 fiscal year, a 43 percent decrease over the company’s 2010 net loss of $76.3 million. Its overall loss in the third and fourth quarters was $34.9 million, up 240% from the first half of the year, when the company reported an $11.7 million loss.

The company attributed the loss to an increase in marketing expenses for its game Firefall, as well as increased research, development and headcount expenses due to the establishment of overseas offices.

The9’s net revenues improved in its third and fourth quarters, increasing to $8.7 million, up 7 percent from its earnings in the first half of the year, but down slightly as compared to same time last year. Overall the company’s net revenues for 2011 were $16.9 million, up year-over-year from 2010’s reported net revenues of $15.4 million.

The company has struggled to find its footing since losing the extremely lucrative Chinese license for World of Warcraft in 2010. The company is currently expanding its mobile operations, creating its own mobile-social network called The9 Game Zone that uses GREE’s OpenFeint platform and launching a mobile gaming fund worth $100 million with Chengwei Ventures, ChinaRock Capital Management and China Renaissance K2 Ventures. The company also recently inked a deal to run Sony’s Chinese PlayNow app store.

According to its balance sheet, The9 still has more than $170.2 million in cash and equivalents on hand, slightly more than its market cap of $168.3 million. In trading today, the company’s shares dropped 4.42 percent to $6.70 each.(Source:insidemobileapps

3. A new SEC filing has revealed Wednesday’s acquisition of Draw Something developer OMGPOP cost Zynga $180 million, confirming it as the most expensive deal in Zynga’s history.

According to the filing:

In March 2012, we acquired OMGPOP, Inc. for  purchase consideration of approximately $180 million. We believe that our existing cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, together with cash generated from operations, will be sufficient to fund our operations and capital expenditures for at least the next 12 months.

While it was speculated that OMGPOP’s acquisition would include a $30 million earnout, but the SEC filing doesn’t include any references to any payments above the $180 million already noted. Zynga’s most expensive acquisition prior to OMGPOP was Words With Friends developer Newtoy, for which it paid $53 million.

The filing also revealed that Zynga shareholders are planning to sell almost 43 million shares. Zynga confirmed this secondary offering last week, and it revealed that the stock will be split into three tiers. Class A stock will have the lowest voting power, while Class B and C stocks will hold 96.9 percent of shareholder voting power.(Source:insidesocialgames

4. 1. App Store Overnight Success Is Real (And Unpredictable)

Draw Something’s meteoric rise to the top of the App Store charts is the sort you’d dream of. From its launch on Feb. 1, it started shooting up the charts, reaching no. 1 in about a month.

As OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter tweeted yesterday, “It took AOL 9 years to hit 1 million users. It took Facebook 9 months. It took Draw Something ~9 days.”

How did they do it? It wasn’t an original idea – drawing games have been around forever. Heck, the web version of “Draw Something” launched as “Draw My Thing” more than a year ago.

It just hit. “No one had any idea that this would take off, and no one knows why it did,” an OMGPOP investor told All Things D’s Peter Kafka.

And, by the way: When overnight success hits, brace for impact. Porter tells a good story of OMGPOP’s scaling challenge: “We had to move completely off of Amazon and host everything ourselves. As soon as we did that, our growth exploded again. Going from the 25th to the 1st most popular app was as much about performance as anything.”

2. You Can Fail 30 Times And Still Succeed

“Draw Something” wasn’t OMGPOP’s first game. Its website actually lists more than 30 game titles, from the 2007-vintage Tetris clone “Blockles” to 2008′s “Hamster Battle” (that one was pretty fun) to the “Jigsawce” puzzle game.

hamster-battle.jpgSimilarly, “Angry Birds” was Rovio’s 52nd game. Today, four of the top 25 most popular paid iPhone apps are “Angry Birds” varieties.

In a hits-driven business like gaming, stamina is as important an asset as creativity. (And luck!) Be patient.

3. “Sell High”

It’s only been a day, and “Draw Something” has already been knocked off the no. 1 App Store spot by the new “Angry Birds Space” game. Who knows, the “Draw Something” craze could fade as quickly as it started.

So, sure, it’s possible that OMGPOP could have kept growing like “Angry Birds” parent Rovio and become a billion-dollar company someday. More likely, arguably, it could have raised a new round at a high valuation, lost momentum, and gone back to the drawing board.

After all these years of hustling and struggling, it’s no surprise that Porter and OMGPOP’s investors would have been thrilled to see a $200+ million exit. That is a lot of money with the power to change many peoples’ lives. Especially when the lights could have easily gone out by now. (Fortune’s Dan Primack has an interesting story of the company’s funding challenges: “The deal that saved OMGPOP.”)

Anyway, if you’re going to sell the company based on a hit, sell on the way up. Great timing for Dan Porter.(Source:readwriteweb

5. It has become quiet about Yahoo-Mobage, the PC-based social gaming platform Yahoo Japan (the country’s biggest website) and DeNA launched in October 2010, in recent months.

But now Yahoo Japan, on its company blog, says that the platform has reached the 7 million registered user mark.

It took Yahoo Mobage:

* 51 days to get to the first million members

* 53 more days to add another one million

* another 61 days to reach 3 million users

* another 73 days to get to 4 million players

* and 183 (or so) more days to reach 6 million users in November 2011.

There are currently about 200 games on Yahoo Mobage – spectacular success stories like Dragon Collection or Kaito Royal are scarce, but a few games do have over one million users.
The platform is the only PC-based social gaming platform in Japan that really matters (Mixi has more users and a PC site with social games, but the number of players is low, and 80% of Mixi’s traffic is mobile).(Source:serkantoto

6. Given their recent display of copious spending, it’s no surprise that social games empire Zynga will stop at nothing in order to increase their company’s already enormous reach. Given their history of spending sprees and expansion over the past few years, it’s almost surprising that it’s taken them until now to begin to hint at expanding to the home console market.

In a recent interview, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus suggested that they were working on back-end technology that would allow them to transfer save states between multiple gaming platforms. Microsoft’s Xbox was mentioned specifically, which has led to speculation that Zynga integration with Xbox Live may soon be upon us. On one hand, it seems like this kind of natural expansion is a no-brainer. On the other, though, this concept doesn’t seem very natural or necessary.

For starters, this announcement seems to contradict the sound knowledge that Zynga developer Brian Reynolds presented last year: he believed that the Xbox demographic was “too small” for Zynga’s prominent Facebook and mobile reach. At just 30 million subscribers to Xbox Live, it’s hard to conceive that much of the hardcore gamer demographic would feel the urge to play casual social games.

Even if a hardcore gamer did want to dabble in a lighter experience (and we’re not saying they don’t!), couldn’t they just play it on their computer or mobile device? Despite the fact that in the interview Pincus suggests games could be “customized for the Xbox controller,” few of Zynga’s major properties seems like they would carry over well. A majority of their biggest games rely on point-and-click functionality best suited for a mouse or a touch screen. Control is the main reason that the real-time strategy genre will never blossom in the console market; it seems only natural that point-and-click social games would suffer under a controller as well.

Granted, if Zynga wants to gear future titles toward a larger cross-platform audience, they surely have the capital to invest in it. But with their current selection of top titles and the overall ease of their current platforms, it doesn’t seem like an Xbox-compatible Zynga library would change their bottom line much.(Source:gamezebo

7. You can get $5 worth of Facebook Credits for the price of $1 if you have never bought any credits before

Facebook has announced a promotion whereby users who have never bought Facebook credits can make a one-time purchase of $5 worth of credits for $1. Only about five percent of gamers on Facebook have ever bought anything using Facebook Credits up until now.

Facebook developers will be able to implement a new widget wherein users who haven’t previously paid for virtual goods will see in-game icons promoting the offer.

“New Payer Promotions are offers that encourage game players to make a first-time purchase using their credit card or PayPal account,” writes Facebook Engineer ratap Pv. “These offers are sponsored by Facebook, and early data shows that about 20% of the users who make that first-time purchase come back to spend more within a month.” (Source:gamesindustry

8. Mark Pincus is offloading about $227 million in shares
Zynga

Zynga’s newest SEC filing not only revealed the purchase price for OMGPOP, but it also provided further details on the previously announced secondary offering from the social giant.

Zynga will be selling off around 43 million shares under the secondary offering. The idea behind the offering is to ensure that people don’t all start selling at the same time when the six-month lockup following the IPO expires; if that were to happen it would significantly ding the company’s stock price.

CEO Mark Pincus will be selling about 15 percent of his own shares; that’s roughly $227 million in shares. Pincus’ voting power will be very slightly reduced from 36.5 to 35.9 percent.

Other prominent sellers of the stock include Zynga employees like Owen Van Natta, General Counsel Reggis Davis, COO John Schappert, CFO Dave Wehner, along with IVP, SilverLake, Union Square Ventures, Google, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Dreamworks CEO and Zynga board member Jeffrey Katzenberg. (Source:gamesindustry


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