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29 business models for games (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:06:16 GMT

At the Social Gaming Summit recently, on the panel about Monetization and Business Models, David Perry mentioned that there were 29 business models for games that he was familiar with. I asked him to do a guest post listing them all and he agreed. David Perry is a 27 year industry veteran whose games have sold [...]

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Top Friends still missing after 5 days; marks change in Facebook’s approach to app developers (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:10:29 GMT

Inside Facebook has an interesting post about Facebook’s evolving approach to platform management. Justin notes that Slide’s Top Friends app has now been suspended for the platform for 5 days, the most serious punishment for any app so far. He notes that while initially Facebook tried to control app developer behavior with rules, it is [...]

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How to design a reputation system for your social media site or social game (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:19:21 GMT

Bokardo has an interesting interview with Bryce Glass of Yahoo, about Yahoo’s social design pattern for reputation. Building reputation systems can really help drive high quality engagement on a social media site, but is also fraught with danger and unintended consequences if not done thoughtfully: What are the biggest hurdles in designing for reputation? I think it’s [...]

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Who is Fake Jeremy Liew? (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 04:34:19 GMT

I got an email today from Kyle Brady titled “Response to Your Response on My Blog” which puzzled me as I hadn’t come across his blog before. I clicked through to his post; he had been called by a recruiter about a job at my portfolio company Rockyou, turned it down and explained, in some [...]

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IMVU selling over $1m/mth in virtual goods (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:04:09 GMT

GigaOm says that IMVU is generating over $1m/mth in revenue: Flying under the proverbial radar for the last four years, the web-based virtual world chatroom IMVU has released new jaw-breaking data: Since April 2004, it has amassed 20 million registered accounts, with 600,000 of those active monthly users. By comparison, Second Life took five years to [...]

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Acclaim to make $30m in revenue from free to play games this year (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:45:39 GMT

Howard Marks spoke at Paris GDC today, and Worlds in Motion has a writeup, including quotes from Marks about key stats for Acclaim’s free to play games: For example, profitability is often measured through average revenue per user (ARPU). “Most of the time ARPU is $30-$40 a month,” said Marks. “A month! Not just one time.” “The [...]

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The elements of Crafting as a game mechanic (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:24:53 GMT

Psycochild posted on crafting from a game designers point of view last week. He notes: Crafting is typically broken down into the following steps: 1. Learn a recipe. 2. Collect resources. 3. Create the item. 4. Sell (or use) the item. 5. Longer term: Advance your skill He [...]

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Going viral without going down (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:52:48 GMT

This guest post was written by Saran Chari, CTO and co-founder of Flixster. Flixster is a Lightspeed portfolio company. _________________________________________________ As the social web evolves and platforms like Facebook and MySpace open up to applications, many companies and developers are rushing to get distribution to their millions of users by “going viral”. For the successful applications,...

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How casual MMOs benefit from hardcore players (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:46:16 GMT

One of the take aways of the social gaming summit last week was that even casual MMOGs need to focus on their hardcore players as that is their source of paying players. David Perry of Acclaim noted in one panel that the players of Dance Online monetize far better than the players of “traditional” MMOGs [...]

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Lightspeed Venture Partners names CFO (bizjournals)

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:11:32 GMT

Lightspeed Venture Partners on Tuesday named Andrew Moley chief financial officer.

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Hints, tips and cheats to better datamining (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 04:55:13 GMT

As web based product development and game development both become more iterative, better datamining and analysis becomes more and more important. But the data generated by users behavior can be almost overwhelming. How should a startup think about getting the most insight and value from their data? Anand Rajaraman is a co-founder of Kosmix, a Lightspeed [...]

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Notes, video and commentary on the Social Gaming Summit (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 04:34:12 GMT

The Social Gaming Summit was quite a success on Friday. Over 400 attendees seemed to enjoy the sessions based on the high proportion of people in sessions (vs in the lobby) and the fact that even the last session, that ended at 6pm on Friday evening, was very well attended. The attendee list was a [...]

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Great agenda for the Social Gaming Summit on Friday (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:36:39 GMT

I’m very excited about the Social Gaming Summit on Friday that I’m co-producing. The program looks fantastic: 10:00am What Makes Games Fun? » Erik Bethke - CEO, GoPets » Dr. Ian Bogost - Founding Partner, Persuasive Games » Nicole Lazzaro - President, XEODesign, Inc. » John Welch - Co-Founder, President & CEO, PlayFirst (Diner Dash) » Me (Moderator) 11:00am Casual MMOs [...]

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How many of your MMOG’s monthly users can you get to pay? (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:58:54 GMT

I recently concluded that good MMOGs can expect $1-2 per user per month from a free to play model, with Second Life as an outlier at almost $10 per user per month. This relatively tight band of monetization masks some fairly high variability in the ratio of paying users across games and virtual worlds. From the [...]

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Rupert Murdoch says 40% of all mothers in America are on MySpace (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:34:36 GMT

A remarkable stat from Rupert Murdoch at the D conference, as quoted in the WSJ: MR. MOSSBERG: Does [MySpace] skew younger? MR. MURDOCH: No. That is a very old-fashioned view. Forty-five percent of all the people who use MySpace are over 35. We have 40% of all the mothers in America on MySpace. [...]

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Second Life monetizing at 5x higher than other casual MMOGs (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:52:30 GMT

Yesterday I pulled together some analysis of monetization rates for casual MMOGs. In my analysis I estimated that Second Life was making around $1.4m/month in revenue from premium memberships and selling Linden Dollars. A number of people noted in comments that the majority of Second Life’s revenue came from land maintenance fees that I had [...]

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We Will, We Will RockYou! $35 Million Series C Round of Funding (Pulse2)

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:21:15 GMT

RockYou announced today that they have raised $35 million Series C in funding. The firms that invested in RockYou includes DCM, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Partech International, and Sequoia. RockYou! created some of the more viral applications on Facebook including Vampires, Superwall, and Likeness. RockYou! also created marketing campaigns for Microsoft, CBS, Sony, New Line,...

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Successful MMOGs can see $1-2 in monthly ARPU (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 01:58:57 GMT

There are not many publicly available statistics on the free-to-play industry in the western world. Here is what I found on the web for some of the popular virtual worlds and MMOGs: Second Life Second Life’s economic statistics are reported monthly. In May 2007, Second Life reported: $165m Linden dollars sold by Linden Lab through the Linden Exchange [...]

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Social Gaming pwns the industry (Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog)

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:23:22 GMT

I have a guest post on Techcrunch about social gaming that covers some of the trends I’ve blogged about here as well. Check it out.

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Social Gaming Pwns The Industry (TechCrunch)

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:54:54 GMT

This guest post is written by Jeremy Liew, a Managing Director at Lightspeed Venture Partners where he focuses on investments in gaming, internet and consumer enabling technology companies. Jeremy is co-producing the Social Gaming Summit next Friday, June 13th, at UCSF Mission Bay. Most of the companies mentioned below will be presenting. The last few [...]

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