Gamigo's Ralph Frefat
The rise of online games, and why a €10 million investment could move the goalposts
While the videogames business continues its diversification, the rise of browser- and client-based free-to-play online games has been one of the startling growth segments in the past couple of year.
Here, Ralph Frefat, from one of Germany's main online publishers Gamigo, explains how the scene is changing, why traditional publishers haven't been early to the scene, and why the company is betting €10 million on one of its free-to-play titles.
Well Gamigo was originally the number one games website in Germany. When I was working at Atari, I was advertising there, back in 2002. They were a very solid company at that time - but then the whole online industry broke down, but Gamigo started to pioneer the free-to-play massively multi-player online games - they had successful brands there, including Anarchy Online, for example.
Nobody was really focusing on these games at that time, and after a while they realised they could make more money in games than with the website - so they went on with the publishing business. But initially it wasn't so successful, and nearly went out of business, but they got some investment, some new management and started again with two or three games in 2007.
From then on everything's been very successful, with several hundred per cent growth each year.
At the moment Gamigo is the number three in our business segment in Europe, and we opened an office in the US last month. We have the biggest portfolio of its kind, worldwide - more than 20 titles actively running - and we've signed eight or nine more titles which will be coming out this year.
I think this is a must - you have a hit-driven market, as with retail, but nobody will tell you which ones will be hits, or not. There are really huge games coming out from Gamigo this year.
At the moment we look after our casual users, so around half are games you know already - fantasy role-playing games, and so on - because those are the cash cows. But we're also experimenting with new kinds of games, including on Facebook and iPhone platforms - and combinations of all of them.
So we have one game that will run on the PC as a client, on iPhone and on Facebook, and we'll see how it works. We're open to all kinds of new games.
The company originally invested in client download games, but we've now got three browser games in the portfolio, as well as others in development - so we're going in a similar direction to Bigpoint, while Bigpoint is moving more towards us... I think we'll meet somewhere in the middle.
To be honest I believe that most of our customers are either core gamers, or very close to core gamers - maybe they've been core gamers in the past, but don't play that much any more. I wouldn't say that we have casual gamers who are playing our fantasy RPGs - our target is more-or-less young male adults.
Some of our games - Fiesta, for example - has about 40 per cent female users. It's very cartoony, doesn't have violence, and so on. And we also have a golf game which has a target audience of people in their 40s or 50s. You can see there are a lot of opportunities for lots of other target groups.