Newzoo’s latest Trend Report on Online Casual and Social Games shows that 126 million Americans, or 87% of all gamers aged 10 to 65, play games on social networks or casual game websites such as Pogo, AGame, Miniclip, AddictingGames, Yahoo and King.com. In the US social networks, obviously dominated by Facebook, attract 60% of these gamers, 41% of time and 38% of money spend. The share of paying gamers averages 22%, totaling to 28 million Americans. The situation in European, Asian and Emerging markets is comparable, in terms of share of total game time and wallet. The only exception is that Europeans are less likely to spend money. Also, the popularity of social networks as game platform is significantly higher in Emerging and Asian markets than in the West.

Key Take-Aways

• Online casual and social gaming takes 39% of all 215 million hours spent on gaming each day in the US and 29% of money.
• Share of time and money is comparable in Asia, Europe and Emerging markets except for the share of money in Europe which is considerably lower: 16%
• 87% of all 145M US gamers aged between 10 and 65 play on casual websites or social networks.
• 22% of 126M US online casual or social gamers also spend money doing so.
• Europeans are less likely to spend money (18%)
• The share of paying online players is highest in Asia (46%)
• Only 8% of online casual or social US gamers spends all his or her online game time within social networks. This is higher in Europe (19%) and Emerging markets (15%).
• 87% of US Facebook gamers also plays games on casual websites.

Newzoo Trend Report: Casual Social Games – February 2012

We’ve been building our own location based games platform for a while now and we’re gearing up for the launch of the first game using that platform over at Vampire Cities. Simple Lifeforms believe location games are going to be a very large and important sector of growth for the on-line games industry.

Darrell Etherington from Betakit wrote a fascinating article on Location Games I thought I’d reprint it here.

Location Based Games (SOLOMO) The Next Big Thing

With the proliferation of mobile devices that come standard with location-aware and social features, it’s not surprising that game makers would embrace new technologies to provide gamers with experiences that leverage those abilities. A number of startups are trying to stay ahead of the game in social/local/mobile gaming; here are a few of the ones who appear to be doing it best so far.

Massive Damage’s Please Stay Calm is a zombie survival story that pits players against hordes of the undead, all from the devices they carry around in their pockets. The iPhone-only title launched in October of 2011, and the team is currently hard at work on an update that will allow large groups of players to battle one another for control of real world global landmarks. The company is also working on a web-based graphic novel to leverage the IP it created for the game.

Massive Damage CEO Ken Seto said in an interview that Please Stay Calm has been doing well since its debut. “Since launch, we’ve had 650K downloads, 2.4 million unique locations [where players checked in], 16 million checkins, and 17.3 million zombies destroyed,” he said. “On an average day, our players spend 53 percent more time playing our game than the industry average and they play 68 percent more frequently than the industry average [referring to time spent playing social games on iOS].”

Seto said that despite the fact that Please Stay Calm employs both mobile and location-aware technologies, the majority of players still play mostly from stationary places. “The majority of our users play from stationary environments like their office,” he told us. “I believe this is a use case or trend that is not going to change so you have to shape the location-based gameplay around that conceit, especially if you want to expand beyond a very small niche group of people willing to travel around to play a game.” Rather than providing motivation to play on the run, Seto says location offers “an emotional link from the game world to the real world,” but also says the team tried to make sure “location did not get in the way of fun gameplay or social elements.”

Another zombie-themed game focuses much more on the location features of mobile devices, and less on the social aspect.Zombies, Run! is a Kickstarter-funded app that raised $73,000 from the crowdsourced financing site. It debuted on the iOS App Store on Monday, and combines the zombie survival genre with a fitness-motivation game that uses the iPhone’s GPS data to measure speed and distance while a player runs. The running is then tied to a zombie survival story – runners are characters in the game, getting medical supplies and other resources while avoiding virtual zombies during their workout.

For Adrian Hon and game co-creator and writer Naomi Alderman, the use of mobile technologies isn’t about limiting the experience, but about broadening it. The game doesn’t actually tie to a specific real-world location — it just uses that data to map activities in the virtual world.  ”It might seem like this makes the game less immersive and attractive,” Hon said in an interview. “But the opposite is true. By giving players a great experience wherever they are in the world – a city, a town, the countryside – we can reach more people.”

The goal for Zombies, Run! is to introduce more social features, including multiplayer modes, as well as a certain level of location-awareness, but even in its current state Hon is excited about their early progress. “We’ve had fantastic reviews, so we think it’s been received very well,” Hon said. “Since our launch Monday, we’ve been in the 20 Top grossing apps worldwide, competing toe-to-toe with the likes of Zynga.”

One of the earliest hits in location-based gaming and a title that continues to grow through global expansion is Shadow Cities, from Finland-based Grey Area. BetaKit talked to Grey Area co-founder and CEO Ville Vesterinen about the game, which pits players against each other in virtual, magic-based battles in cities around the globe.

“In playing location-based games people get a shared feeling of familiar context, which gives the gamers a common discussion point to socialize over,” Vesterinen said about what modern mobile tech brings to gaming. “This is a very strong driver in making our gamers more social and helps us build around our gamers, not around our content pipeline.”

Vesterinen also echoed what Seto noted about players tending to stick close to home even with location-aware gaming titles. “People play location-based games, just as other mobile games, mostly at homes and offices, but that does not mean location is not very relevant in the game,” he said. “Actually the opposite is true. Where one lives and works are very important to people and build into part of one’s identity.”

With $2.5 million in funding and what Vesterinen calls a “comfortable revenue stream” from Shadow Cities, the company is looking to expand beyond the 40 countries where it’s currently available, and is also working on a second Grey Area game which Vesterinen said “will again redefine what is possible in mobile gaming.”

One last company we spoke to is taking a different approach, by applying gaming mechanics in a much broader way. Quest.li is a new Russian startup which recently opened offices in San Francisco that aims to make a game out of virtually anything, via both mobile apps for iOS and Android and a browser-based client. Anyone can post a quest to Quest.li, which could be something as simple as answering a single trivia question, or as elaborate as sending people on a multi-stage scavenger hunt through a specific city or neighborhood.

“We do bring gaming mechanics into the real world, but it’s a result of developing interactions in the real world,” CEO and co-founder Danil Kozyatnikov said in an interview. “[Gaming just happens to be] the easiest and the most fun way to do that right now.” He said that what Quest.li is really about is creating “adventures” for groups of friends.

One important aspect of how those adventures work brings to mind the simple concept of a shared office pool. “You can play quests alone, or with other people. If you play with others, everyone gets the quest at the same time, and the first to complete the goal wins,” Kozyatnikov told me. “People can actually chip in real money at the beginning, so a quest might require players to chip in $10 to join. When they do so, at the end of a quest the person who wins gets 70 percent of the total, and creators of the quests get an and additional 15 percent.” Kozyatnikov said it’s a little like eBay, in that people who come up with good products (e.g., quests) stand to reap greater rewards through that 15 percent take they get when other players buy in to their game. Quest.li makes revenue by taking the remaining cut.

Because a lot of Quest.li’s quests involve going to real-world locations to uncover clues or answers, it makes sense to think of it like geocaching, but more competitive and with higher stakes. Even aside from that aspect, however, Quest.li holds a lot of appeal as a direct marketing tool for brands. Businesses could create quests that encourage players to learn more about their products and offerings, for instance, and then answer questions in exchange for rewards.

The same technology that enables the games listed above to take advantage of location information also has its downsides, however, including how much data it uses, which can end up causing big bills for users. Figuring out more efficient ways to handle data will be a priority both for game developers and for handset makers, and the motivation is definitely there to find alternate ways of offloading data costs for end-users.

Games that incorporate social, local and mobile features are only just beginning to emerge, and there’s already an interesting mix of approaches from companies trying to win big in that space. No Instagram-style juggernaut has yet to emerge, however, but as the technologies required for these experiences to work properly continue to be more widely used thanks to the rise of smartphone ownership, the likelihood of someone hitting it really big in this new frontier of gaming grows.

You can read the original at - http://betakit.com/2012/03/01/location-based-gaming-the-next-big-payday

Interesting data from the report which can be viewed here 

- 1 in 4 US consumers between the ages of 13-54 purchased virtual goods in 2011 up 100% since 2009.

- Purchases among US gamers increased 50%.

- 48% we’re purchased on a connected console marketplace (i.e. Xbox live or PlayStation Store)

- 42% we’re purchased directly within a game application.

- 40% we’re purchased using pre paid cards at retail stores.

- The average spend on virtual goods was $64.

Location games are coming.

Or so called social, location, mobile (SOLOMO) games

Your MMO guild members may be good friends but they’re scattered all across the world. Your mobile games steal your attention away from talking to people. Your social game hassles you to bug your friends for gifts, but otherwise you play alone. Your co-op sessions of Portal 2 tend to be played with mute strangers.

Most innovations in digital gaming tend to produce solitary experiences. This is fine most of the the time, but players don’t always want to be solitary. They like to gather to play, to participate and hang out. Social contact is healthy, and games have always had an important role in helping to bind communities together.

Video games have not really tapped into that spirit yet, but it feels to me like that’s the next wave.

It should come as no surprise that Steam is doing well, but this infographic puts in perspective just how much better Valve’s PC gaming digital storefront is doing than its competitors.

Note that some of the sales data dates back to June 2011, when Electronic Arts’ rival platform “Origin” was still known as the EA Store.

Some of the Most Interesting facts and figures are

- 40 Million people have steam accounts.

- 60% of PC game sales are now through digital distribution and not Retail – 51% of these are through Steam.

- 90% of game on steam are downloaded and played on Windows OS

Games are the obvious killer app of the mobile marketplace.

- 64% of people who pay for an app also download and play games.

- IOS is by far the most popular content centre with 300,000 APPs which is more than Android, Ovi and Blackberry combines.

- Social networking, weather and maps and navigation are all represented pretty significantly.

Deloitte predicts that in 2012 revenue growth for the social games industry may slow to less than 20 percent.

Deloitte predicts that in 2012 revenue growth for the social games industry may slow to less than 20 percent. This compares to the period 2008 to 2010, when social gaming revenues grew 20-fold (¹⁶²⁾. Slowing growth makes it probable that social games makers will begin experimenting with different business models. Shifting the mix to more advertising and less virtual goods looks likely, and at least some games companies are likely to move away from the hallowed “freemium” model and start charging for games up front, especially for those games with higher production values and complexity.

Social games are online games, typically played within a Web browser via a social network. They typically include light multiplayer elements and asynchronous (not real time) activity. The predominant business model up until now has been freemium: it costs nothing to start playing the game and there is no subscription to pay. Aside from advertising, monetization occurs when players pay for extra content, such as additional virtual artifacts or access to new levels of games.

Social games enabled the addressable market for video games to reach men and women of all ages: effectively anyone with a computer of any description, from a MP4 player and up. One sixth of social gamers are over 60 (¹⁶³⁾. The majority are female (¹⁶⁴⁾. As recently as 2008, the traditional console game player was predominantly male, and aged 18-49 (¹⁶⁵⁾.

Due to their crossover nature, mass market audience, platform-neutrality, and low entry costs for players and developers alike, social games were expected to transform the entire industry. At first, this seemed likely: the easy-to-enter freemium revenue model coupled with social rewards (¹⁶⁶⁾ rapidly proved a compelling combination for hundreds of millions of consumers.

However early growth numbers have proved difficult to sustain. By some metrics, and for some developers on certain platforms, the trend was actually negative in 2011 (¹⁶⁷⁾.The social games user base grew very little over the past two years (¹⁶⁸⁾, even though revenues have continued to grow. Although the percentage varies across games and over time, it appears that only about one to three percent of those playing social games spend real money on virtual goods (known as the conversion rate (¹⁶⁹). Further, the core group of paying users, or “whales” (¹⁷⁰⁾, already provides an outsize portion of social game revenues. 46 percent of one company’s revenue comes from the top one percent of users. This group may be reluctant to up its spend beyond the hundreds, and in some cases thousands of dollars invested per year in their virtual ecosystem.

Social gaming companies can also generate revenues from other sources such as in-game advertising, but at present virtual goods remain the largest piece of the pie. One large social games company gets only five percent of its revenues from advertising (¹⁷¹⁾, and even across the broader industry the average ad contribution appears to be only about 14 percent (¹⁷²⁾.

If the audience cannot be grown, and users are reluctant to play, one approach for social games companies could be to increase the number of titles each user plays or the number of hours they spend on each game. But the average person is already spending almost eight hours per month on even the most popular social networks, and that number has risen only slightly in recent quarters (¹⁷³⁾.

Another approach is to add another layer to the social games business model: pay. This may seem counter to the spirit of social games. But today’s leading social games boast ever higher production values and storyboarding. In other media, and in other gaming sectors, consumers are willing to pay for content that they previously received for free, especially if it is perceived as being of high quality. Pay TV is a prime example of this in traditional media, and in the games sector, enthusiasts already pay for access to massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), or to access the online services for consoles.

Bottom Line

Social and casual games are likely here to stay, but it may prove challenging to increase their share of the total $63 billion global video games market significantly beyond its current two percent¹⁷⁴, if the monetization model remains constant.

Social games’ path to higher revenue may lie in iterating the business model, and charging to play games. Revenue models for social games have been primarily dependent on three factors: increasing the installed base, usually measured as “monthly active users” or MAU; increasing the portion of users who pay for content; and increasing the amount that each user pays. All three approaches are valid, but it may now be the time to add a fourth approach – charging to play at the outset.

The social games sector should also learn from the console gaming industry. Developing strong franchises and quality sequels may not be cheap, but it can be very lucrative. The media title that reached $1 billion in revenues faster than any title in history is not a famous 3D movie about aliens… but a video game from a franchise in its eighth iteration and over eight years old¹⁷⁵. It may be time for the leading social games companies to recognize the much-changed quality of their latest titles and charge for them.

Download the report - Extracting the premium from social games

¹⁶² HIS Screen Digest News Flash: Zynga Preliminary IPO Filing Legitimizes Social Gaming Market, June 30, 2011, http://www.isuppli.com/Media-Research/News/Pages/IHS-Screen-Digest-News-Flash-Zynga-Preliminary-IPO-Filing-Legitimizes-Social-Gaming-Market.aspx

¹⁶³ PopCap/Information Solutions Group, 2011:http://www.infosolutionsgroup.com/pdfs/2011_PopCap_Social_Gaming_Research_Results.pdf

¹⁶⁴ PopCap/Information Solutions Group, 2011:http://www.infosolutionsgroup.com/pdfs/2011_PopCap_Social_Gaming_Research_Results.pdf

¹⁶⁵ 2008 Sales, Demographic and Usage Data, The Entertainment Software Association,http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2008.pdf

¹⁶⁶ Exposing Social Gaming’s Hidden Lever, Gamasutra, 8 November, 2011,http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TylerYork/20111108/8849/Exposing_Social_Gamings_Hidden_Lever.php

¹⁶⁷An In-Depth Look at the Social Gaming Industry’s Performance and Prospects on Facebook, InsideSocialGame, 24 January 2011: http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2011/01/24/an-in-depth-look-at-the-social-gaming-industry%E2%80%99s-performance-and-prospects-on-facebook/

¹⁶⁸ Zynga Builds Its CastleVille Walls, As Its Facebook Traffic Flattens And Falls, TechCrunch, 27 November 2011: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/27/towerdefense/

¹⁶⁹ Social Gaming Monthly, Thomson Reuters, September 2011, Rpt. 18160425http://www.industrygamers.com/news/social-games-see-just-1-3-of-playersconvert-to-paying-customers-says-crowdstar/

¹⁷⁰ Zynga’s Quest for Big-Spending Whales, Bloomberg Businessweek, July 2011:http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/zyngas-quest-for-bigspendingwhales-07072011.html

¹⁷¹ This Is Zynga’s IPO Road Show Presentation, Business Insider, 2 Dec 2011:http://www.businessinsider.com/its-out-this-is-zyngas-ipo-show-presentation-2011-12?op=1

¹⁷² eMarketer, Virtual Goods and Currency: Real Dollars Add Up, July 2011 (includes PC-based social game revenues only.)

¹⁷³ Nielsen, August 2011: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/august-2011-top-us-Web-brands

¹⁷⁴ IHS Screen Digest, IHS Screen Digest, DTTL analysis

¹⁷⁵ The Telegraph, Call of Duty: MW3 breaks $1bn sales record, December 2011  

The fact that professional makers are feeling under threat is not news. There are calls for tax breaks for game makers and novelists, scrambling efforts to lock down (or at least shut up) the Web through legislation. There is even Rupert Murdoch, once champion of antidisestablishmentarianism ideals of publishing, tweeting about why a search engine and mass theft are supposedly the same thing.

They have good reason to feel threatened. The Great Recession has accelerated the process of deconstruction. Nobody wants to invest in professional art in a time when we’ve started to use the word “trillion” in everyday conversations about national debts. Add to this the chorus of devaluation that digital distribution has wrought in all creative fields, the largely hazy arguments surrounding piracy, and cultural trends toward lionizing the past (great for back catalogue sales, not so much for new artists).

To many, it looks like Doomsday. However I think not.

Those Who Know

Creative industries tend to be like clubs. You can get into the club in many ways, but all of them are equally difficult. You’ve put the time in, done the training, had the lucky breaks, struggled and finally made it.

Once you are actually in the club then life is easier. You have a name, you are a part of a network and you work with a lot of the same people year in year out. Members rarely fall out of the club entirely.

I am a member of the games club, for example, through a combination of luck, hard work and some amount of aptitude. I am now in a position where others in the club talk to me (and I to them) and we have a kind of commonality. We are pros. We are “in”. And we are aware that there are so many more people who are not “in” that would like to be.

Perhaps they have an overly-romantic notion of what it’s like but that’s just how it is. All creative fields, from modern art through to advertising have that lustre because people like the idea of making things for a living. In many ways the desire to be “in” is where fans come from. Many fans like to be close to an artist almost as a participant in the creative process. They support the artist, and in a sense support themselves. Those who are “in” understand this, and the good ones encourage others to take the next step and make things of their own.

The Squeeze

However, part of being “in” is the sense that the club can’t get too big, and for many the internet is actually pushing to make the club smaller. Book publishers, for example, no longer offer much in the way of advances. Long-tail services like Netflix and Spotify have such huge libraries that every new artist is competing not just with their peers, but their antecedents also. Distribution may rise but prices fall.

They feel squeezed by piracy. Though they dislike it, many who are “in” quietly believe that they have to keep many more people “out” in order to hold on to what remains. I don’t mean executives etc. I mean established writers, musicians, game makers and so on. We live in a curious age where the freest of thinkers (artists of various stripes) are the ones that want to curtail freedom the most.

Those who are “in” also feel squeezed by something else: Democratisation of tools. It’s bad enough that they have to deal with a loss of revenue, but a reduction of difficulty in getting into the club threatens to increase its size many times over. The future is a world awash with low-rent ebooks, GarageBand music and GameMaker-developed games. Quality will collapse, and there will be no future for the professional any more.

The future, it seems, looks like an amateur hour idiocracy.

Pro-Amateurs

In the startup world, the reduction of barriers is a great boon. You can, for example, assemble a small team and go create a tool that will change the world. As an individual you can create a blog that causes conversations and change. You can develop a game, make music, start a design agency, and all you need is a laptop.

Seth Godin calls the laptop the new factory, and the new age a creative economy where mass production is no longer required. Lacking the previous barriers, we get to see many new kinds of art and entertainment that simply didn’t exist before. We get great new games, novels, rich media ebooks perhaps (Apple may be announcing a tool to that effect tomorrow) and Youtube series.

It’s not amateur in the sense of a lack of diligence, nor is it professional in the sense of those who are “in”. The forces of technology distribution and cheap or free tools creates a space for talent to do what talent wants to do. It creates a class of pro-amateur makers.

A pro-amateur perhaps works on a project as a side-line to her day-job but she treats it seriously. Like any struggling writer, there is the work and the need to pay the rent. The difference is that the pro-amateur then takes her work and distributes it directly. She creates a book, an album, a TV series and just puts it out there. It only really costs her time to do it, and if it works it works. If not, she does something else.

The magic of the internet is therefore this: It substitutes time spent getting into the club with time spent finding fans. Expertise with experience. Legitimacy with audience. Jargon with generosity. And for those with the talent to do it well come the rewards because niche audiences that blossom into tribes exist for almost anything you can think of. No longer is it the time when the frustrated artist with the marionette show has to climb inside the head of John Malkovich to catch a break (see image above). Now he can go global on his own.

It’s a Cambrian Explosion and it is the future-present. Many people will be “out”, as before, but the process of how they get “in” will change. There will be less structure and more aggregation. Less marketing and more marketing stories. Less reliable processes and more productive risks.

For most, those days of a publisher acting as an angel investor to an artist while they hone their craft are over. The publisher can’t afford it and the pro-amateur doesn’t need it.

Instead the new model sees the pro-amateur doing the work of building the market, and then perhaps later a publisher or aggregator cuts a deal with her to scale that operation up. The artist becomes part-business person and so she makes better art. And, in the end, we will all win.

“The Worm has turned”, Jack Nicholson once said in the otherwise-forgettable Wolf, “and it is now packing an Uzi.”

I’m minded of this quote when reading various reactions to the concerted move by the established entertainment industry to stop piracy. It’s not just SOPA and PIPA, but also ACTA in Europe and a variety of national-level legislative campaigns which propose draconian, over-reaching controls to protect content industries at the expense of all others.

The normally-placid geek industries, which prefer to make stuff rather than lobby, are nettled to such an extent that key figures are declaring that it’s time to saddle up. That it’s time to lobby and cajole on issues like relaxing copyright and patents for real rather than talk about it. That it’s time to, as Paul Graham wrote last Friday, kill Hollywood.

So do you want to take up the call?

First, not all entertainment is the same, nor should it be. Though certain sections of the games industry like to over-inflate the story power of games (because of emotional validation and legitimacy issues), they tend to be less interesting as stories than most books or films. This is fine, and not a judgement on any medium. It’s a reflection on how attention span works and what the brain can reasonably be expected to focus on at any given moment.

Second, stories are important. Again, this is not a value statement to disenfranchise any other kind of art (including games) but just an observation. Stories are retold from generation to generation with new signifiers and emotions. Stories teach wisdom and activate the art brain’s wider sense of perspective and theme. This is why as long as there has been language there have been tales, epics, sagas, myths, allegories and so on. They serve an important function in understanding who we are.

Third, stories are universal. They take many forms, but the plots, themes and struggles that they reflect do not change. A story as old as Gilgamesh still has relevance in the modern world, but it has to be translated into the communication form of the day. Not many people really read epic poetry any more and its mode of communication seems arch in a time of multimedia experiences and diversity. Yet when it is translated for them, they get it.

All of which means that the story will live forever and not be subsumed or supplanted by games (or vice versa). However that offers no guarantee regarding specific modes of expression.

…But Movies Might

There are already plenty of relic genres of storytelling. Opera, for example, largely survives on the life support of grants, while the novel seems to exist in a permanent cycle of death and resurgence every three years depending on whether there’s a Harry Potter in play or not. New technologies offer the possibility of doing interesting new things (such as Apple’s new iBook software) but that comes at the expense of other forms.

It is simply about attention span, and the worldwide collective amount of it that can be devoted to one activity over another. It is also about cost, although not the freeloading that the various content industry lobby groups like to paint it as. It is instead about the sense of feeling over-charged, over-handled and controlled. To watch or listen to many forms of content today requires having multiple solutions, publishers who want business from the viewer and so on.

It is also about relevance. Movies used to have a power to define generations, but that has drifted away as the industry started to spend ever more money on process. Many Oscar-winning films are such heavily internal conversations with other movie makers (such as The Artist) that the public barely relates. While at the same time many of the giant summer spectacles are more about emotional validation than exploration.

All of which means that movies might die. Perhaps to be replaced by better television (in the United States, television writing has been considerably sharper than film writing for over a decade). Perhaps to be replaced by Youtube, with series like The Guild. The point is that movies as we understand them do not have some inherent right to exist just because they have existed. It is up to movie makers to make movies worthy of attention, cost effective and relevant once again, which they seem unwilling to do.

Silicon Valley Doesn’t Really Get Culture… Yet

To Valley geeks, everything is a solution to a problem. Graham’s post outlines a future which looks like some sort of more sophisticated Zynga. For many gamers, that shows a devaluing of the qualitative aspect of entertainment and reflects a wider sense that the tech community frequently doesn’t get games. It understands them as behavioural systems and engines perhaps, but not so much on the grander ambitions.

Entertainment industries have a long history of not behaving like other industries because they do not solve problems. They make magic, bottle it and sell it, and the process has rarely been easily repeatable. Nonetheless the Valley is on the move, sick of dealing with contra-evolutionary protectionism from an industry that it regards as corpulent and uninterested in change. It is actively interested in forcing that change because it is to the benefit of the technology economy and the economy of ideas. Y-Combinator is looking to fund startups that promise better ways to entertain. YouTube wants you to make shows, Apple wants to connect iTunes to your TV set and so on.

They may not grok the finer points, but they’re willing to disrupt it anyway and are looking to games to do the disrupting. Games, after all, are increasingly the home of the freemium model of entertainment payment and clear demonstrations of the willingness of fans to pay for the things that matter to them. As I’ve advocated in this blog before, other media have much to learn from this model but seemingly don’t want to. They would rather lament.

This creates a lot of possibilities. You should be paying attention.