Why Big Media is Taking Interest in Casual & Mobile Games

Authored by Scott Goldberg on May 21, 2007 - 9:30pm.

From the Games & Mobile Forum: A panel including executives from DIRECTV, CNET, Playboy, and Yahoo discussed the reasons their companies are involved in games this afternoon at the Games & Mobile Forum. The clear bottom line: Gamers aren’t defined as teenage boys in their parent’s basement any longer, said Kitt McCurdy, GameSpot analyst at CNET. “We have a registered user base of 8 million people,” she said, “and we’re seeing more women gamers, more older gamers, more younger gamers. Gamers today include anybody.” The mainstream, ubiquitous presence of games in every day lives, the speed of access, and the variety of platforms is making it easier for large media companies to justify entering the space, and doing so with deep pockets.

User-generated content around games, said Robert Nashak of Yahoo, is a great way to utilize your audience size, if you’re a big media company. Yahoo wants to provide its 50 million monthly users the ability to play a dynamic casual game, not a mundane download with cheap graphics that doesn’t provide interaction, and removes users from the network.

Synchronous games across platforms is the next big step for big media games, said Chris Petrovic, VP of Digital Media for Playboy. “To be able to play 1 game on 3 different screens, following you wherever you are” is the way to do it, he said. “You sign up on the web, play on your mobile, then in your living room.”

Robert Nashak agreed, and said you’d start to see more of that from Yahoo as well as others.

Scott Goldberg