Play Hard Sports, Inc., an online sports network that exclusively offers sport news and entertainment to sports fans, plans to offer casual sport games for desktop computers as reported by the Boston Globe. The Casual Games Association, an industry trade group, forecasts that people will spend $2.25 billion worldwide on casual games this year. Despite the positive outlook, the casual game industry is a tough business, particularly for those who are targeting a certain niche like sports fanatics. Currently, the successful sites are Pogo.com and MSNGames.com.
But the founder, Jeffrey Anderson, who is also the former CEO of Turbine Inc. that turned Lord of the Rings into an online game sensation, is very enthusiastic about it, especially since Electronic Arts Inc., the leading maker of sports games, announced it would stop selling a version of its immensely popular football game Madden NFL for desktop computers. "That changes the dynamic and the landscape dramatically," said Anderson. "It leaves a very big vacuum."
Anderson will first offer a football simulation game and has plans to eventually add on baseball, basketball, and other sports. The game will allow players to create their own teams and use them against other players via the Internet. Players can also customized characters and add them to their teams. To encourage players to come back, their characters can “level up” so that the more the players play, the better their “franchise players” become. “For instance, a wide receiver will break more tackles or a quarterback will become a more accurate passer.” The idea is that frequent playing will help to develop a community of loyal players.
Play Hard will offer the casual sports games for free and expect to make revenue through advertisements. Alternatively, it will offer an ad-free version to users who pay an undetermined subscription fee.
As other have mentioned on the blog and in class, we have yet see if sites that offer free services to users can truly be profitable through ad supported revenues. To Mina’s blog, online games have different audiences and so require different marketing. Now imagine the eccentricities of gamers, who are sport fanatics. Have you ever watch them play? The intensity of how they are locked to the screen and only to the screen is profound. They can go on for hours, switching off with their partners to take breaks, and coming back for more as if nothing else existed in this world. I think there is great potential for marketers, but it will definitely be a challenge to capture their attention.
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