Casual games aren’t exploiting the long tail
Forbes.com has an interesting article on the casual games bubble bursting, that mentions that the portals aren’t really exploiting the long tail. They’ve trained their customers to grab games from one of three genres only, and cycle stuff off the top so rapidly that a game with a six month ramp to success (such as Peggle) need massive marketing pushes in order to be profitable.
But the biggest problem facing casual game developers is the Web portals they depend on for the majority of their sales. Most developers provide their games to portals for free in exchange for the mass audience drawn in by a Big Fish Games or a PlayFirst. In exchange, portals receive a 30% to 40% cut of revenues. Since the casual game portals make the most cash off spikes in game sales, it behooves the portals to constantly feature new content. The best games are lucky to survive on a portal’s front page list for more than a month.
It goes to show that it’s easy to make a shelf-based, hit-driven business even in a long-tail sort of environment. The article comments that this situation could be fixed if the portals ran more like Amazon or Netflix, marketing their back catalog much more aggressively instead of only grabbing the latest. On the other hand, this may be tricky for games, which are so heavily driven by neophilia: playing old games is a tough sell often, because as the Theory of Fun tells us, if you’ve moved on from a game, it is probably not fun for you anymore.
In the long run, this isn’t good for the portals, as their smaller developers exit the market in search of more financially rewarding pastures. Social networks are mentioned — I think many of these developers are in for a shock as to how different an environment Facebook is from Big Fish.
14 Responses to “Casual games aren’t exploiting the long tail”
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I think casual game still very popular, my wife usually like to play solitaire card games and so is my Daughter, also my son like 3D games like I do but he sometimes plays solitaire card games too and download other card and table games to play.
Greetings from Kansas! 🙂
And this isn’t true of books? How many books do you “re-play” a second time?
It seems to me that playing old games doesn’t work because (a) our eye-candy expectations are continually increasing, making old games less palatable, and (b) game design is evolving from niche to mass-market. (Ex: Even if Zork were remade with fantastic eye candy, most people still wouldn’t play it because Zork’s puzzles are a bit too hard (niche-market). And some circular reasoning: (c) old games are given away, so people that don’t care about (a) or (b) don’t actually pay money for old games, so there’s no incentive to keep a back catalog.
I once went cruising the casual game portals and purposefully tried out the least-played games. It really felt like I was digging in the back of the virtual bargain bin. They’re not easy to find.
And then I found out why they’re so buried. (Hint: They’re not very good.)
I don’t see much call for pimping out a company’s back catalog. For one thing, like you said, people move on from games because they’re not much fun anymore. But people come back to games from time to time, too. And when they do that, they actively search for them; again, no pimping needed.
Ideally, you always stock the very best games, all the time, but that’s easier said than done. 🙂
What about those of us who haven’t been tracking the top games of the portal for the last four years? Surely those casual games that were so much fun three years ago are still fun today? There still exist people who haven’t played Bejewelled, for example, so why not let them find it?
I think it is instructive how eager portals seem to be to turn everything into hit-driven media. We keep hearing this “X is hit-driven” when, I suspect, the real reason it is hit driven is because of deliberate attempts to make it hit driven. Movies are like this – you have a narrow window to watch the movie in before it goes poof (at least now we can get the DVD later). No wonder it then is hit driven.
The goal of the back catalog isn’t to bring the 90% crap to the surface, it is to ensure the 10% good stuff of last year is still findable by newcomers.
Reminds me of the fabircated demand that Disney maintains for its back catalog of movies. What they do is take them out of circulation for a decade and then when they bring them back in a “new and remastered” edition, people buy them up like they are never going to be there again. I’m wondering if that’s what Microsoft will do with its expired XBLA games that they no longer sell. One would think that the casual game portals could benefit from the same Disney back catalog type mentality.
Slyfeind wrote:
Are they not very good because the portal’s “sunken ship” has shaped your expectations of products you’ll find in the deep? Or are they not very good because they’re really not very good? Answer: there is no answer. We can’t be sure.
The long tail isn’t about how some products are not very good, but about how some products appeal to a smaller number of people as very very good while most people don’t see any thing of interest. You are unlikely to find content here that speaks to you except by chance or by referal (for example: Someone else on the vegetarian robot forums posts a link to a game he really liked; You might like it too because you share common interests.) So the main portals will never really help with this.
“it behooves the portals to constantly feature new content.”
Which means the portals are following exactly the business pattern of nightclubs having to constantly cycle bands and only recycling the ones with large followings where the bands have learned to cycle material. That pattern, by the way, is what forces bands to either break up and reform in new configurations or to become a top-forty cover band over being an all originals band.
And occasionally the portal has to rip out all of the furniture, redecorate and relaunch. Yep… butts in seats is what it is all about.
I think it is a bit more complex than neophilia: the most popular analog casual games such as crossword puzzles, sudoku or jigsaw puzzles are serial installments of the same mechanic, meaning that many players do not necessarily want something new as much as they want continued variations on something they already like. The large amount of free trial content available means that players can often get that desire fulfilled for free.
[…] Raph Koster linked to a Forbes article complaining that casual games aren’t exploiting the long tail. […]
What this needs is a Henry Ford. He started the auto industry by developing the assembly line.
That’s where things are right now, just before Ford put that together.
Yes, Metaplace is the assembly line, or the first one perhaps, or maybe just “one of”.
Raph, you’re about to become ‘Big Auto’. (The question is, will unions be taken over by organized crime =:O )
I just meant new content/puzzles/etc. I agree they aren’t looking for new mechanics — that’s a different, and complex, problem.
Interesting point: with ample supply, there’s little benefit to the portal milking its back catalog. It only makes sense to fully exploit each title if there’s a supply constraint.
If portals were to be applied to educational uses as some have discussed, there is a good reason for power tools: pedagogy. We’ve been discussing this a little bit on X3D-public. Getting grants to develop courseware is pretty easy when the technology is hot and second generation, but by the third or fourth, there is enough deadware that the grant reviewers start looking for checkbox ways to evaluate the proposals. Then it behooves proposers and requirements specialists to be able to point to features an application must have to qualify.
In that sense, where games and game portals have significant churn, recycling elements becomes a normal part of educational worlds.