Kotaku: club penguin

How Casual MMOGs Are Making Money

Maggie Greene — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:30:00 MDT

Lightspeed, a venture capital firm, checked out the average revenue per user for some casual, free to play MMOGs (Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel, Runescape, and Second Life), establishing that other that SL - which pulls in a little over $9 a month in ARPU, thanks mostly to virtual land upkeep - these sorts of casual MMOGs pull in around $1.25 ARPU per month. Which, until one considers the user bases of games like Club Penguin, seems like a damn hard way to make some money:

Second Life: $9.30/mthly user/mth
Club Penguin: $1.62/mthly user/mth
Habbo: $1.30/mthly user/mth
Runescape: $0.84/mthly user/mth

Having spoken to many other MMOGs and virtual worlds on a private basis, this estimate seems to be a good gauge for what a well performing MMOG can aspire to from a free to play business model.

Left out are a number of other popular MMOGs like MapleStory; I'd be curious to see firmer statistics for a wider spread of games, though the comments section does include some speculative numbers for a few other games.

Successful MMOGs can see $1-2 in monthly ARPU [Lightspeed via Worlds In Motion]

Will More Gamer Girls Mean More Gamer Women?

Leigh Alexander — Tue, 20 May 2008 18:40:00 MDT

A new Next-Gen Screen Digest piece takes a peek back into console market war history to see how Nintendo seems to have won out in the quest for that most elusive of goals: bringing a broader audience of women and girls into the gaming fold.

In the last console generation, Nintendo's GameCube appeared to lag behind as Sony and Microsoft battled it out for the twenty-to-thirtysomething male demographic - but time has shown that Nintendo's patience in luring a more casual audience has brought in ladies' loyalties, as well, with the cute lil' DS as strategic lynchpin:

Actually, at this time Nintendo, although failing to effectively compete with the adult male-centered home consoles, was already delivering on a strategy to increase kids' spending on games through its handheld devices. While Sony and Microsoft started a front battling for the 'core' gamer, Nintendo maintained a link to its early consoles and new generations of young gamers through its handheld devices.

However, as the article continues, Nintendo can't take all the credit for birthing a new generation of young females interested in games. The boom of gender-neutral or girl-friendly MMOs targeted at young teens and 'tweens means that most young girls are eager to get online and play with virtual pets and dolls:

Since the early 2000s there has been a steady introduction of sites, including Habbo (formerly Habbo Hotel), Neopets and Club Penguin, that cater to young gamers.
While in traditional MMOGs users are predominantly male, in these social-networking-driven communities the male to female ratio is normally pretty equal, or even sometimes weighted towards the girl gamer. All three of these sites have been hugely popular and also financially successful - so much so in the case of Club Penguin that Disney was prompted to splash $350m in cash acquiring the site (with the contingency for a further $350m based on future earnings) to add to its portfolio of kid-targeted online games and sites.

So today's 8-12 year olds see a higher percentage of their female peers involved in some form of PC, console and handheld gaming - but does this mean that a decade from now, those young girls will be beating our hindquarters at traditionally male-focused hardcore gaming? Probably not so much, but it's reasonable to expect that in the years to come, the entire video game industry will be looking at ways to keep this expanded demographic involved as they grow up, to ensure that all these eager Nintendogs-petters and Webkinz-hoarders don't simply leave their game habits behind the way they'll ditch their dolls.

ANALYSIS: Here Come the Girls [Next-Gen]

Talking Club Penguin, Disney, and 'Emergent Play'

Maggie Greene — Sun, 11 May 2008 10:30:00 MDT

I'm really fascinated by the success of MMOs aimed at kids — both in terms of their current (and potential) earning power, as well as the attachment people have to them. Club Penguin has been a massive success, and GamesIndustry.biz chatted with Lane Merrifield, one of the co-founders and current general manager, on Disney, the business model, MMOs for kids, and the birth of Club Penguin. Asked whether or not the success of CP was a surprise, Merrifield had this to say:

Absolutely, I'd be silly if I said I wasn't. We built this for our kids - I mean we built it scalable, and part of why we didn't have any VC money, no investors, was because we didn't build it as a business - we built it as a side project.
Lance, another of the partners - his oldest child and mine are about three months apart, and we were talking about how they were learning to use the mouse, starting to use the computer and the internet.

And it was that dialogue, and some technologies that Lance had been working on that really was the birth of Club Penguin. So a lot of this has come as a surprise.

I think there's a tendency to brush off these niche games since they're not 'serious' MMOs — even though they've done an incredible job of pulling in the subscribers with reasonably limited advertising and so on. Where will these types of games go from here — and their players? Club Penguin player today, WoW addict in a decade? I guess time will tell.

MMO Week: Club Penguin [GamesIndustry.biz via PlayNoEvil]

Online Worlds Do It For The Kids

Michael McWhertor — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 16:00:45 MST

Second Life may pull in big numbers, attracting furries, virtual real estate moguls, corporations desperately attempting to appear "hip" and Something Awful forum goons raining penises down upon the unsuspecting, but it's online worlds targeted at kids that are drawing attention from executives. Take Webkinz, for example, the online world that sees wee lads and lasses logging on to the tune of six million uniques per month. That's three times the amount who logged on a year ago. Similarly, according to the New York Times, Club Penguin, which involves dressing up penguins platonically, has seven times the traffic of Second Life.

Everyone's getting into it, for those of you not aged in the single digits, including Disney, Lego, and Mattel. The goal? Shill wares to kids while they play free games, establish brand recognition, then help them "graduate" to the next-generation of online worlds, whether it's Pirates of the Caribbean Online, World of Warcraft or simply fantasy baseball. Oh yes, it's quite dastardly. Good thing I'll be raising my kids with good Quaker morals and no electricity.

Web Playgrounds of the Very Young [New York Times - thanks, Duane!]

Disney Pays A Lot of Money For Club Penguin

Maggie Greene — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 14:30:55 MDT

Club Penguin is a kid's MMO that features ridiculously cute and chubby penguins. It's gotten some press in the past couple of months, especially back in April when there was speculation over acquisition by a number of much bigger companies. Well, speculation is over - Disney has shelled out $350 million, and when the dust clears, that number could reach as high as $700 million over the next 3 years if profits increase. Not bad for a kid's MMO with limited advertising and a user base consisting entirely on kids dependent on their parents to cough up the monthly subscription fee.

Other than renaming the service "Disney's Club Penguin," Disney said it has no immediate plans to change Club Penguin's operations, which will continue to run from Kelowna, Canada.
"Club Penguin is going to continue to exist as is," Iger said during the company's conference call to report quarterly earnings. "The experience will not change at all. We don't intend to get in the way of that or do anything that would in any way have a negative impact on their business."

Over at Terra Nova, Mike Sellers weighed in on how this might positively impact the future of browser-based MMOs: "If you were betting on a new MMO, would you bet on a scrappy, quickly deployed no-download, no-choking-on-retail, low-cost world, or one that sucks up $50M and five years on a roulette-like bet? Maybe those are the extremes, but I have to think that the bar for what might be considered to be viable worlds has just been lowered, and in a very good way."

Disney Acquires Club Penguin for $350M [Forbes via Terra Nova]

Top 10 MMOs

Kim Phu — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 11:40:00 MDT

In news outside of the console industry, the top ten most popular MMO games have been listed. Not surprisingly, World of Warcraft is sitting pretty at number one, but the rest of the list is a bit of a head scratcher. Habbo Hotel, that Finnish playable MySpace to the youth, comes in second, which begs the question,"How old do you have to be to own a credit card these days?!":

1. World of Warcraft, released 2004 - 8.5 million subscribers.
2. Habbo Hotel, released 2000 - 7.5 million active users.

3. RuneScape, released 2001 - 5 million active users.

4. Club Penguin, released 2006 - 4 million active users.

5. Webkinz, released 2005 - 3.8 million active users.

6. Gaia Online, released 2003 - 2 million active users.

7. Guild Wars, released 2005 - 2 million active users.

8. Puzzle Pirates, released 2003 - 1.5 million active users.

9. Lineage I/II, released 1998 - 1 million subscribers.

10. Second Life, released 2003 - 500,000 active users.

Both Habbo Hotel and Webkinz are for kids. When I say kids, I mean the kind that enjoy eating Ling Ling potstickers from Costco while watching Kim Possible and Gilmore Girls (yes, we're all sad it's been cancelled). I'm all for kids playing video games, but I do think it's weird that they pay to be exposed to everyone in the world. Maybe my maternal instincts are starting to kick in, but it's probably more likely that I've been watching too much "To Catch a Predator". Kim Phu

Top 10 Most Popular MMO Games List [Videogames Blogger]

The Penguins Are Popular

Maggie Greene — Sun, 20 May 2007 15:30:03 MDT

But does Club Penguin signal a change for the MMOG industry at large? I seriously doubt it, since the WoW players who want to play WoW probably aren't going to be lured away by cuddly fuzzy things, no matter how cute. Still, big companies like Sony seem to be taking an interest and (reportedly) talking about lots and lots of money for a possible acquisition. Terra Nova has a look at Club Penguin and some thoughts:

I don't think mainline/first-generation MMOGs are dead, but I do think this sort of value-recognition in Club Penguin is more of a bellwether than an anomaly. The dinosaurs aren't gone, but the small mammals (or well-dressed flightless birds, as the case may be) are starting to claim their due.

The combination of subscription, free to play, and pay for item upgrade models is interesting to me - the free to play model has really spurred growth in some Asian markets and it's becoming increasingly common in games that hit Stateside from East Asia. Combine free to play with "so cute it's painful" and you've usually got a recipe for success - could the same thing be happening in the West? Maggie Greene

There's Gold in them thar... Penguins