The Virtual Goods Summit WEST Returns to San Francisco’s Moscone Center
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.
Please join Girls in Tech as we sponsor Offerpal Media’s VGS After party on Oct. 30th at 6 PM. Just following the Virtual Goods Summit Oct. 29th – 30th, this will be a chance for all to mix & mingle and let the networking continue on after conference! 
