Craig Sherman, CEO of Gaia At this point, Craig is talking and flipping through slides SO fast that I’m not sure he wants anyone to really take this stuff in (later confirmed as he says slides won’t be avail online – it’s a management slide deck). So I stopped taking notes for this segment. ZOMG producer comes up Be Both Accessible and Engaging Three Key Lesssons MAKING IT FUN Identify your Audience, then own it Keep your Audience Involved Talk to your Users Bite Sized Content Keep New Features Coming Build a 20 Ring Circus Create a variety of experiences Gaia invited fans to meet employees after a company softball game in San Jose. Fans travelled from Florida, Washington state, etc to meet them. Very passionate. ZOMG is Engaging Users Get them to stick, then you win Get Users to Want to Buy What do they buy? How Does Community Affect Revenue? Are items entertaining? You bet they are? Non-Item Revenue Examples Make Buying Easy Recap Q&A Any mobile plans? Average age of Gaian? Sponsorships – can you talk about it? Have you found a sweet spot for price? How do you value sponsorships? How do you QA new content without breaking old stuff? Along the QA lines, how much do you use automated QA or is it all manual? How big is the development side of the organization? Is Membership Suitable for Gaia? Do you have a mix of time-based vs consumables vs permanent items? Is 60/40 split for Gaia the same within ZOMG? Demographic among national boundaries? What were your advertising efforts to get your name out when you launched?
David Georgeson, Producer ZOMG
Cater to many different player types with features such as:
Craig: great evidence you can be successful in this area. GREE and DNA (Mobile Game Town) in Asia are both doing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of revenue
Craig: Median age is 18 years old, 60/40 girls; doesn’t work for a 10 year old – sweet spot is 19-20 girls.
Craig: Sponsorships work well for us. We had no ads 3 years ago, now we’ve done a ton of deals with big brands. Skittles is on our site – they funded the creation of a variety of virtual spaces that had some game mechanics in them or custom mini-games or cooperative experiences in site where if you did these experiences you would earn Skittles and the community’s goal was to collect as many skittles as possile and build a rainbow. When it was done, there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that rained gold (Currency) down on all users. We partner with a brand to build something that adds value to the user experience. They fund it, but we build it. As a result, turns out you get better response rates for advertisers.
We are still experimenting with that. We don’t have a lot of items over $7.5. Many other companies say there is no price insensitivity between pennies and $7.5. The real issue is the penny gap – charging anything more than $0. Anytime we raise a price, revenue goes up. The sales of the item do not go down.
We have to tie it to CPMs as there is no other way an agency can value a deal. Otherwise they can’t show metrics the way they are used to. We get over 2B page views a month, so it’s easy to offer impressions.
It gets harder and harder. Make thorough checklists and resist tendency to just get it out because "you know it’s good" – gets to be a certain size of an MMO where you try to compartmentalize your code so things are less likely to break, but ultimately good QA processes will make or break you.
It’s all manual in our case. We have some process checks (scripts compile, etc) but in general most of our stuff is manual and we rely on checklists. All our QA is in-house. We only did a hardware compatibility test externally.
105 people in whole company. 40+ of whom are developers. Include QA and backend operations, then maybe 50 dev. ZOMG team is impressive… 15 people (5 artists, 10 devs) on ZOMG MMO (draws laughter from crowd).
Craig: I think you have to choose Runescape or Maple Story model. Pogo has pulled off both though… you can buy sub that gives you a collection of virtual goods. I think you have to decide up front what you want to be. One gives you more users, but less revenue per user. Sub models give you more predictable revenue stream, but microtrans have potential to blow that out of the water due to uncapped ceiling on ARPU.
Most of our stuff is permanent. Then there is time-based stuff (fish only live for 90 days in an acquarium) and then we have consumables. Just did deal with Vivix – you can modify your voice, but it only lasts for a few weeks.
Yes it is. 90% of our users have never played an MMO before. Game has a lot of combat – worried that we would only attract guys. But that hasn’t been the case at all. 60/40 girls, just like main site.
North America is 85% of the player base.
No money was spent. Even still, we spend almost no money on marketing. Almost all word of mouth. Tools within Facebook and their invite loop systems are probably the easiest and cheapest way to acquire users. That said, we haven’t used that yet – most of our growth is word of mouth at school. We have started to test online ads and we’ve got it so we pay less for the ad than we get from that user lifetime.