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Social Gaming Summit: Monetization and Business Models for Social Games My laptop battery had already died, but the final panel at the Social Gaming Summit on monetizing social games was too good to not take some notes. David Perry, CCO, Acclaim, who's been putting together a hefty tome cataloging, if I remember right, as many possibilities for gaming as possible, noted that there are 22 ways to monetize a game. He didn't give a list, but there's certainly a range out there. For now, though, the most prominent for virtual worlds and social games seem to be subscription, advertising, and microtransaction, especially when packaged around a free-to-play experience. You just have to make it clear that eventually there needs to be money exchanged, explained Mattias Miksche, CEO, Stardoll "We've always said this is free and this is pay," said Miksche. "I think a lot of people are missing out by tring to build a big audience around entirely free content and then

This guest post is written by Susan Wu, a Principal with Charles River Ventures, where she focuses on digital media, software, and infrastructure. Susan is coproducing the Virtual Goods Summit this Friday at Stanford University - most of the companies mentioned below will be presenting. People spend over $1.5 billion on virtual items every year. Pets, coins, avatars, and bling: these virtual objects are nothing more than a series of digital 1s and 0s stored on a remote database somewhere in the ether. What could possibly possess people to spend real, hard earned cash on ‘objects’ that have no tangible substance? The virtual worlds space has received tremendous press attention in the last year, fueled in no small part by Wild West stories of fortune and anarchy in worlds like Second Life and the plight of the Chinese gold farmer in World of Warcraft. But people aren’t paying attention to the bigger story. While people preoccupy themselves with mocking the absurdities of some of these vi

My name is Steve Williams, and I am a MMO gamer and also a casual gamer. Give me an MMO, and I’ll play it. Give me a simple Flash game and I’ll play it. Wouldn’t it be fun if someone could mix the two flavors together and make a peanut butter cup of gameplay that would satisfy both MMO fun and casual fun? advertisement So let’s talk about what mini-games are doing in a self-respecting MMO like Stargate Worlds - let’s talk about putting the peanut butter into the chocolate and making something tasty. Since time immemorial, or at least the past few years, MMOs have focused upon two things: Killing stuff (and getting their loot) and making stuff for people to go kill stuff (and get their loot). As building games goes, that’s a pretty good spread of features, and it’s not too hard to make that work. Recently, however, the thought struck the minds of some developers out in the deserts of Arizona that a lot of fiction is built not around killing things (and getting their loot), but in solvi