Casual MMOs

What the hell is a Casual MMO? A zero barrier to entry massively multiplayer online game; examples are sites such as Puzzle Pirates, Webkinz, Gaia, NeoPets, Club Penguin, Kart Rider, Barbie Girls, PMOG and Facebook applications like Food Fight, Zombies, Vampires and Pirates. Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Venture Partners hosted a session entitled Casual MMOs: Serious Revenues with the following panelists:

• Adrian Crook – freetoplay.biz
• Nabeel Hyatt – conduitlabs.com
• Michael Acton Smith – moshimonsters.com
• Joe Hyrkin – gaiaonline.com

For casual MMOs graphics don’t matter, you don’t need complex 3D worlds, virtual worlds are possible in HTML. To date MMO’s have targeted kids, teens and young adults 7 to 24. The big growth area is 25+. They can be big business: NeoPets has 250M users, Kart Rider has 100M, in contrast with PC application MMOs like World of Warcraft which has 10M.

So how how do you make money? The top 10 revenue models are:

1. Virtual items sales – Gaia make $1M a month with this.
2. Merchandise – Webkinz made $20M in physical goods sales.
3. Information Sale – Food Fight Food Fight offers surveys for Vcash. Potential: 36K users daily, Avg 2 surveys/user, 25c per survey, $18K/day. Annual: $6.6M
4. Advertising – anners, PPC, Video, Sponsored Items
5. Auctions/Player Trades – Live Gamer, Entropia, Station Exchange
6. Subscription Tiers – RuneScape, Club Penguin (700K subscribers), DR
7. Event/Tournament Fees – Shot Online (Golf), Ultimate Baseball
8. Real Estate/Land Use Fees – SL, Entropia
9. Affiliate – TrialPay, $uperRewards
10. Donations – Kingdom of Loathing

Adrian Crook has produced a good Powerpoint on the subject which is posted on his blog.

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