George Dearing dot com

One of the items Byron shared was a list of ten items shared between gamers and the workplace. These items are critical to success in a game but equally so for success in the workplace. The virtual world and game ingredients applicable to work include:

1. Self representation – virtual teams are fundamental to business and enabling virtual team members to reflect their own brand is critical to empowering and motivating employees
2. Compelling narrative – great stories equal great program/project plans
3. Real time feedback – important to get feedback immediately in order to course correct to achieve the end goal
4. Ranks and levels – understanding the chain of command and how one can climb the ladder can be very motivating and drive innovation via competition
5. Transparency – this is critical as a transparent environment enables a higher sense of ‘buy in’ from those engaged
6. Economics (aka budgeting) – no game or business plan is able to be successfully navigated without having a clear understanding of the economics related
7. Teams – no one can be successful individually in a game or in a business program, it takes a village to really meet success criteria’s
8. Communication – open communication via real time feedback and transparency using tools that nimbly enable the participants to engage is critical to success
9. Rules – knowing the rules and how they create the structure for achieving the goal/s is fundamental for any gaming or business teams
10. Time pressure – both games and business programs have time pressures which drive competition, motivate the team, and provide structure/rules for meeting the goals

Can't name the game on the lower left...

My 3-year-old knows this one by name.

"All three games could be called second-generation iPhone games. They reflect a lot of work that EA is putting into the iPhone platform, and the investment involved here suggests that the smaller titles from one-person shops are going to have a harder time competing in the AppStore as brand owners such as EA launch more titles for it. Already, the top ten paid iPhone games at any given time have multiple brands in the rankings."

"On balance, though, Microsoft's done a fine job integrating Facebook's key features and giving Twitter an even more elegant interface than the service's native browser-based one.

Where's Sony in all this? The company just announced on its official PlayStation blog that upcoming firmware update v3.10 will add Facebook and Twitter functionality to the PS3's XMB interface."

CrunchBase Profile	Zynga	Playfish	Playdom
Location:	San Francisco, CA	London, UK	Mountain View, CA
Money Raised:	$39M	$21 Million	$0
Revenue:	Estimated $200M	Estimated $75M	Estimated $60M
Rumors:	Strong 2010 IPO candidate	Possible acquisition talks with EA	Raising Venture Capital
Key Apps:	Facebook: Farmville-61M Mafia Wars-25.8M Yoville-19.8M Texas Hold Em’ Poker-18.3M	Facebook: Pet Society- 20.5M Restaurant City-17.3M Country Story- 8M 135 million total installs for all games	Myspace: Mobsters -14M Bumper Stickers-11.7M Own Your Friends-10.1M; Facebook: Sorority Life-7.1M Mobsters 2-3.5M Poker Palace- 1.5M

 

Michael Arrington describes part of their collective strategy..
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"The cycle of all of these games is pretty standard. Get new users playing for free, give them incentives to message all their friends to signup, hit them hard for cash or lead generation for revenue, and move them up the levels. Rinse. Repeat."

And according to Nielsen and Interpret Research, gamers have a recall rate of more than 70% for in-game ads.
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"Market researcher Screen Digest estimates the global in-game advertising market will reach $1 billion by 2014. The rationale is that people are watching less TV and so advertisers are trying to reach them via new media, including video games. While the recession has hurt game sales, Massive contends people are spending more time playing games. (That means gamers are playing the games they buy for a longer time and are consuming less traditional media). Massive says it can reach 40 million Xbox 360 and PC gamers in 31 countries."

I totally missed that piece when I was configuring it for my son last weekend. Must.Go.Back.Now.