Girls In Tech

MediaBistro, along with sponsorship by Girls in Tech presents…

Already wildly successful in San Francisco and London, Social Gaming Summit comes to New York for the 1st time this year, and will focus on building, monetization, and growing social games.  Social Gaming Summit unites leaders in free-to-play games, social networking, and payments infrastructure for a full day of panels andsiscussions. Social Gaming Summit is where established and emerging leaders in the social gaming space converge to share their thoughts on what works in the world of social games as well as the key issues impacting the future of the industry.

This one-day event will feature a series of talks organized around the following key themes:

Growth

• How can new social games developers grow on Facebook in the current environment?
• What does it take to bootstrap a successful new social game?

Distribution

• What opportunities exist to build successful Facebook games off Facebook?
• How can developers take advantage of opportunities to build games for international audiences?

Monetization

• What role will brands play in monetizing social games?
• What new opportunities are there for social games developers to monetize their games?

Speakers include:

• Davin Miyoshi, GSN
• Katharine Lewis, FM Ventures
• Manny Anekal, Zynga
• Trip Hawkins, Digital Chocolate
• Paul Chen, PapayaMobile
• Dennis Ryan, Popcap
• Peter Wexler, TrialPay ….and More!

To register, click HERE. |  Use GIT Discount Code: SGGIT – for 15% off

See full details, HERE.

Correction, change of date…

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Tags: AllFacebook, Charles Hudson, Digital Privacy Forum, MediaBistro.com, Monetization, privacy, Social Games, Social Gaming, Social Gaming Summit East, Social Times
Posted in All Chapters, New York | No Comments »

The Fourth Annual Virtual Games Summit returned to San Francisco’s Moscone Center on October 12 – 13, 2010 with a jam packed agenda and a stellar list of speakers and panelists ranging from game industry veterans like Trip Hawkins who now heads up Digital Chocolate and Teemu Huuhtanen of Sulake Corporation, makers of Habbo Hotel, to executives from the hottest social game developers/ publishers in social gaming, including Niren Hiro, CrowdStar, Christa Quarles, Playdom, Mark Skaggs, Zynga and many more.

With several years of social gaming and micro transactions behind us, the fourth annual summit was focused on understanding lessons learned about the social gaming environment and what’s next, how to optimize micro transactions in-game including converting the 95% of non-spending players, how to measure the health of a game’s virtual economy and the lifetime value of both paying and non-paying customers.

Key takeaways from the conference were as follows:

• Mobile will become increasingly more relevant to social gaming. The population of mobile web devices in the West is anticipated to explode from 100 million to 2 billion in the next couple of years resulting in better browsers, payment methods and social features (Trip Hawkins, Digital Chocolate)
• Games need to be treated less like a product and more like a service. Focus on continual updates and support.  Watch your users, gather demographics and create user personas that represent the different types of people that play your game (Teemu Huuhtanen, Sulake Corporation – Habbo Hotel)
• Measure your virtual economy by two data sets: the paying 5% of users and the lifetime value of players (LTV). LTV is measured by the amount of new players some users will bring to a game as well as their individual spend (Albert Lai, Kontagent)
• Balance the flow of premium currency and purchased premium currency and understand how those currencies move through your virtual economy (Mike Ouye, CrowdStar)
• Gamer profiles are becoming critical for optimizing micro transactions through contextual merchandising: Providing the right goods at the right time within the game experience helps to create frictionless transactions and a higher individual spend (Chethan Ramachandran, Turiya)
• Social, mobile and geo-location services will be where innovation continues to evolve in social gaming (Christa Quarles, Playdom)
• Asia continues to be a hot market for US online gaming companies. Japan represents a market potential of $7 Billion on 1 Billion people, $2 Billion on 100 million people (Niren Hiro, CrowdStar). Korea is $3.3B market (Benjamin Joffe, +8*). China’s per capita spend is 50% higher than in the US (Atul Bagga, ThinkEquity)
• Facebook Credits gains acceptance by game developers/publishers as the seeding of Facebook credits is perceived as helping audiences become familiar with premium content

Additional details and videos of the VGS 2010 Summit sessions will be available online at: www.mediabistro.com.

Tags: Social Gaming, Virtual Goods Summit
Posted in All Chapters | 1 Comment »

The Flash Gaming Summit is back for its 2nd year! Join in for a one day conference dedicated to fostering the growth and success of the Flash games community. The conference will bring together leaders in the flash game space to share industry insights and strategies on successful game design, development and monetization.

The program includes panel discussions plus a keynote by Jameson Hsu, CEO of Mochi Media. Other panelists include:

* Chris Hughes, FlashGameLicense.com

* Jim Greer, Kongregate

* Vikas Gupta, Social Gold

* Renaun Erickson, Adobe

* Mark Skaggs, Zynga

*David Stewart, Playdom

They will speak on topics such as “Money in Flash: Next Gen Monetization of Flash Games,”  “Everything About Sponsorship & Licensing” and “4 keys to a successful social game that all game developers should know.”

For more info. & to register, go to: http://www.flashgamingsummit.com/index.html

Jump to Register: click here

Tags: Flash Gaming Summit, San Francisco, Social Gaming, Social Gold, Vikas Gupta, Virtual Currency
Posted in San Francisco | No Comments »