[THIS POST ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON ADRIAN CROOK’S FREETOPLAY.BIZ SITE.]
Virtual Goods Summit 2007 – Conference Videos
As has already been reported on several sites, the videos from June’s inaugural Virtual Goods Summit at Stanford are now online. Thanks to the organizers for making the videos freely available – I wish more conferences did this.
I took a heap of notes at the Summit, so why not share them now as well, both in “Top 10” and raw format.
My Top 10 Notes from the Virtual Goods Summit:
1. James Hong of HotorNot.com
On HotorNot, users can purchase a $10 rose to send to other users. The rose dies 2 weeks later. HotorNot figured there were three value propositions inherent to a real life rose: the flower itself, the gesture of giving it, and the trophy effect of having received it. HotorNot figured that for virtual roses, 2 out of 3 of those values weren’t bad – and they were right. The $10 rose is HotorNot’s highest priced item, but it is still their best seller. James Hong said re: price elasticity, “It’s not impossible that if we raised the price of the rose, we’d sell even more.”
2. Paul Thind of Habbo Hotel
Habbo puts spending caps on every payment method to control economy & keep parents happy – so users can spend money only on 2-3 set days of the week.
3. Craig Sherman of Gaia Online
Gaia has three full time people on staff whose job it is to open envelopes filled with dollar bills and coins because people are desperate to get money into their accounts but can’t find a suitable payment method.
4. Min Kim of Nexon
Average user lifetime in a Nexon game is 2-4 years; Audition, Nexon’s newest game, is 50% female; Maple Story and Kart Rider are 20-30% female.
5. Tim Stevens of Doppelganger
The typical console game would not benefit from virtual item sales because of its lack of a continuing connection with its audience. I.e. the game launches, everyone buys and plays it, then most if not all of them leave very quickly for the next game. The community doesn’t grow and care about their presence in the game long-term.
6. Daniel James of Three Rings
The average Puzzle Pirates user spends 2.5 hours per day in the game. Some drop in and leave, but others spend up to 9 hours a day in-game.
7. Raph Koster of Areae
Regarding preventing and tracing fraud: “You need to serialize everything – so you can trace the path of a virtual coin right back through to its minting.”
8. Kyra Reppen of Neopets
Neopets builds their item packages and costs around a template metric of $10-15 per complete outfit.
9. Kevin Efrusy of Accel Partners – Facebook’s VC
The Facebook gifting service was just an experiment. A third party will use the newly-launched Facebook Application Platform to deliver a far more successful gifting solution. He said if he were an independent developer, he’d be working on that right now as he believes it is a huge opportunity.
10. Eric Bethke of GoPets
GoPets users are 80% female, one third of whom are in North America. Users are spread throughout the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s age groups. Interestingly, GoPets highest ARPU is from the low 30s age group.
All of my raw, totally unedited notes from the Virtual Goods Summit, after the jump.