Like the ones made on top of the nonoba API?
Ex; http://nonoba.c...ultiplayer-pong

Their consumer site is PlayOnArcade.com. This page explains their model: http://playonar...aspx?page=learn

I plug these guys because (1) I do feel they are doing something different and noteworthy, and (2) I happen to know the founders and they are good guys and very bright. They have been under the radar for a long time and I think their overdue for their 15 minutes of TC fame.

While the idea of being “infrastructure for casual games” sounds good in theory, there are harsh realities when it comes supporting a multitude of small-time, low-budget developers while simultaneously trying to monetize your platform and secure distribution deals.

The article states that: “Third, Come2Play reserves the right to display ads in the game wrappers and in the pre-game loading screen. The company splits this revenue 50/50 with publishers. CEO Alon Barzilay indicates that the company is open to flexible options in regards to the last two points. However, this will have to be done on a business development level.”

This is exactly the approach that contributed to Game Trust’s failure to gain traction. There’s no way small indy game developers will ever pay out of pocket for API access and hosting services (most indy developers, despite being creative and talented, are living just above the poverty line). After splitting ad revenue with publishers and developers, there’s won’t be much left over for Come2Play. Non-integrated advetising around casual games does not perform very well – for the same reason ads on social networks don’t perform well – people are simply too engrossed with specific tasks to pay attention. When you consider these factors you’re looking at a trickle of diluted ad revenue supporting a business that needs a hefty development team, a dedicated support team (both for developers and publisher integrations), biz dev people who are developer facing, biz dev people who are on the distribution/publishing side, and a marketing team to raise awareness.

Also consider that negotiating custom revenue splits and deals is time consuming. Early adopters of this service, both publishers and developers, will most likely be small-time with a low chance of providing any sort of return on the time investment required for deal negotiation, integration, and ongoing support.

Finally, consider the significant customer support overhead that comes from trying to support a multitude of one and two person companies attempting to integrate with a new API.

All this is also assuming they can even ink any half-decent distribution deals – which is not easy since the casual game space is dominated by large publishers (i.e. miniclip.com, shockwave.com, Real Arcade) and portals (Yahoo Games, MSN Games, etc). These publishers already have multiplayer game content directly from the premium developers and, even if they bite on embedding Come2Play widgets, they will often require complex custom integrations such as signle sign on capability (i.e. MSN Passport or Yahoo ID), score syndication, content resizing, etc.

I could keep going, having been very close to this space for a long time but let me instead close by simply saying that I wish these guys the best of luck. This post was not meant to be harsh or insulting, just a dose of reality from someone who’s been down the path these guys are walking. They face an uphill battle and would do well to dig into the annals of Game Trust history to see where they went wrong.

ducks away

Three Ring’s Whirled has a very impressive system (multiplayer + virtual world) for developers http://bit.ly/3MAKYa

Neither list captures all of the deals, so the totals are definitely higher than that.

K1ller: game software doesn’t not even nearly beat Hollywood’s total output when you consider also DVDs and TV network sales. This is a common fallacy which compares the box office receipts to total game software sales. The total game software sales for year 2007 globally were estimate at $37 billion and growing around 15% CAGR. Even music globally is still bigger (around $50 billion, but going downwards).

Games software is bound to go past music sales in a couple of years, but we aren’t there yet.

Investors need to wake up to the gaming space; bigger than Hollywood last 3 years, bigger than music last year – where are all these savvy investors at?

http://nonoba.com/developers

And there’s a whole slew of other multiplayer Flash APIs in the works right now too.

http://www.come...m/Developer.asp

how embarassing