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硅谷大型公司争相介入,社交游戏可能将继续并购潮

发布时间:2010-07-30 04:47:59 Tags:,,

10年前,甚至就在5年前,当被告知硅谷或好莱坞的大公司追逐收购依靠出售虚拟商品的小公司时,大多数人会难以置信。但是目前这种事比比皆是,这正是目前社交游戏行业最常发生的故事。

eaplayfish

eaplayfish

社交游戏公司推出的Sorority Life、FarmVille以及Pet Society等社交游戏正成为数字媒体产业的新宠。大公司都认为,社交游戏隐藏着大金矿。社交游戏行业最近发生了不少大事件:迪斯尼公司周二宣布以 5.632亿美元价格收购社交游戏开发商Playdom,后期还有可能追加2亿美元。迪斯尼最近在社交游戏领域频频出手,此前刚刚收购了Club Penguin和Tapulous。去年冬天,EA收购了Playfish。GameStop本月收购了Kongregate。

就在本周三,华尔街日报报道称,谷歌正与最知名的几家社交游戏公司Playfish、Playdom以及Zynga进行谈判,希望推出一个广泛的社交网络服务同Facebook展开竞争。该报导暗示这将是是谷歌在社交媒体领域的一个大动作。

谷歌多年来一直希望在社交媒体领域有所作为,从一开始的Orkut到Buzz,再到Google Me,谷歌一次次地尝试,试图在这个快速增长的市场分得一杯羹。有传言称,谷歌已经向Zynga投资超过1亿美元。Facebook与游戏开发商的关系,尤其是Zynga,正处于低谷。Facebook的虚拟币政策在经过多次推迟和测试后终于推出,该公司将借此获得30%的分成,但是并不是每家公司都愿意被宰一刀。

其实,很有很多的大公司没有进入社交游戏领域,OMGPOP公司首席执行官Dan Porter周三发表博客称,预计更多的媒体公司会进入该领域选择目标,维亚康姆、福克斯、IAC等媒体巨头都还没开始行动。当然还有大的游戏开发商以及亚洲游戏巨头还没有进入这股社交游戏狂潮中。(据techweb)

Ten years ago, or even five years ago, most people would have reacted with disbelief if told that shortly some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley and Hollywood would be in a madcap race to get a piece of companies that facilitate the purchasing of virtual pink tractors.

But that’s exactly what’s happening in the world of social gaming. The companies that make games with names like Sorority Life, FarmVille, and Pet Society have become some of the most sought-after in the digital-media industry, and now huge companies are starting to take sides. We already knew that there was a lot of money being thrown around in social gaming, but now it’s evident that there’s far more money at stake even than that. Billions of dollars, even.

A recap: Walt Disney announced on Tuesday that it’s acquiring Playdom, one of the biggest social-game manufacturers, for $563.2 million plus a potential $200 million more in performance-based payments. That makes Playdom Disney’s third major casual-gaming buy in the past few years, after Club Penguin (about $300 million) and Tapulous, a mobile game manufacturer. This follows Electronic Arts’ acquisition of Playfish last winter and GameStop’s purchase of Kongregate, a smaller but still significant player in the market, this month. Keep in mind that virtual goods were already big among a more subcultural set, with virtual world Second Life and role-playing game “World of Warcraft” continuing to tick along as cult phenomena.

So, then, on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal ran a story suggesting that Google was in talks with all the big social-gaming companies–Playfish, Playdom, and Zynga among them–to develop a kind of “broader social-networking service” that would go head-to-head with Facebook and would be relatively games-centric. This, the Journal article suggested, would be Google’s big social-media push.

Well, sort of. Google has been making one foray after another into offering “a social-networking service” for years now: from Orkut, which remains popular enough in Brazil to provide a barrier to Facebook’s growth in the region; to Buzz, a head-scratching Twitter-like service with a launch that was maligned because of privacy concerns; to the allegedly forthcoming Google.Me, the Mountain View, Calif., behemoth’s latest attempt to take a chunk out of Facebook’s still-fast-growing market share.

And this “Google Games” thing has been rumored for some time, ever since word got out a few months ago that Google had invested over $100 million in Zynga.

But if Google wants to poke Facebook where it hurts, then yes, social gaming is a ripe target (and perhaps the ripest, considering Google’s tepid track record elsewhere in social media). There are no concrete numbers onto just how significantly social games have benefited Facebook, traffic- and revenue-wise, but it’s clearly a pretty sizable figure. One of the reasons why Facebook’s advertising revenue was boosted so significantly over the past few years is that social-gaming companies were so eager to pull in new players, as well as convert existing players to fresher game titles, that they started buying up millions of dollars in Facebook advertisements. Games like FarmVille have proven so addictive that some of Facebook’s 500 million users are logging on to the site almost exclusively for gaming. They’re putting real money into it, too.

Yet relations between Facebook and game developers, particularly Zynga, have been chilly at times. Facebook’s Credits virtual currency, which is finally opening up after significant delays and testing, gives Facebook a 30 percent cut of transactions, and not all developers like the fact that they’re being encouraged to make the jump to Credits.

As much as social-gaming companies like to talk themselves up as “platform-agnostic” and able to be flexibly deployed across the Web–sometimes as a quasi-defensive statement to assert that they aren’t as dependent on Facebook as skeptics think they might be–it’s evident that sides are being taken now. Zynga now has financial ties to Google. Playdom will soon be the property of Disney, which has both Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on its board of directors. (Jobs, because of Disney’s $7.4 billion merger with Pixar Animation Studios in 2006, is also the Mouse House’s biggest individual shareholder.) The presence of huge industry powers as well as the hit-driven way that titles are pushed out is making some independent developers nervous or outright frustrated.

Still, the interesting space to watch ahead isn’t just which bigwigs have selected their teams, so as to speak, but also which ones haven’t yet made moves. Dan Porter, the CEO of a independent social-gaming company called OMGPOP, wrote a blog post on Wednesday morning that brought up the number of big media, tech, and gaming companies (notably those in Asia) that haven’t jumped fully into the social-games craze yet.

“Expect more deals as competing media companies like Viacom, Fox, IAC and others as well as large public game developers and Asian gaming giants roll through and answer back,” Porter wrote.

Well, Viacom’s MTV Networks just launched a new tie-in game for its hit “Jersey Shore” reality show in which you can throw virtual pickles at an animated version of its self-professed “guido” protagonists, who have nicknames like “Snooki” and “The Situation.” So there’s that.(作者Caroline McCarthy,CNET)


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