Slush(y) Fund: Piggybacking Bits on Atoms

Someone put this on my radar on Facebook today:

Zynga and 7-Eleven partner to bring game content to ice cream, Big Gulps

Short version is: Buy ice-cream, comes with a code, redeem code in-game for virtual items.

Gimmicky, right? Wrong. Brilliant. OK, why?

I wrote some time ago (wow, 3 years ago!) about how kids "connected toy" products like Webkinz and other entrants were bundling services with a toy.

The most brilliant thing about this is not that "you get a game with the toy!" or vice versa. The way to view it is that the physical product allows the virtual item sale/subscription/etc piggyback on a channel that the customer understands. And if that gets you over the hurdle of a massive number of customers not having credit cards or being afraid to type them into a browser, then it's well worth the cost of the plushy (or in this case slushy).

I'll bet that we're going to see piggy-back revenue models like this (you can call it a promotion, or a bundle) are going to grow significantly.

One way to accelerate it would be to think about ways to remove the friction of having to enter a lengthy code while in front of the PC. Maybe it's texting the code from your mobile to automatically credit your account, or a unique bar code you hold in front of your webcam?

Anyhow, it will be interesting to see how well this does for Zynga. I'm betting it's going to be copied a lot

The coming tsunami of IP infringement

The "User Generated Content" or specifically "User Generated GAME" space seems to be red-hot these days.

Lots of web-based examples (Metaplace, GameBrix, Silverlight, Atmosphir, etc), and now console games are going to be a hotbed as well, with Little Big Planet being the case example getting the most mindshare.

David Edery had a post up doing his own post-mortem on Scrabulous, in which I commented on it's successor, Wordscraper. In it, I said:

Wordscraper... supports user-definable boards and tile weightings. Which means you can do, as I have done, a board and tile set that exactly match those of Scrabble, and VOILA! IP circumvention via User Generated Content!!!

If they were to publish something like a board-sharing service, the developer (or FB?) would be subject to DMCA takedown notices, but now Hasbro/Mattel has a harder job: Vigilantly watch the forums, send repeated DMCA takedown notices, etc. Also, I don’t know if other countries have similar laws.

There are some holders of game IP that have tried to enforce their hold over game rules, mechanics, etc. Obvious examples are Tetris Corp, who recently were in the news for getting a clone pulled from iTunes, as well as the Hasbro/Mattel Scrabble example. Other cases exist where it seems to have flown under radar (e.g. Webkinz's games are almost ALL rip-offs of classics, but with name changes and theme changes. Sometimes game design changes too)

Quite frankly, I just don't see how the IP holders are going to keep up with it all in this new world.

I suppose you could serve takedown notices to - like Scrabulous - only the most successful examples. But then what does that say for all those would-be infringers out there: Go ahead and clone games and be successful with them... but not TOO successful.

There's no such thing as a free lunch

...is what dad used to say.

So if you read my last post, and did your homework, you should have thought of some instances in which games could be given away (maybe DRM free?) and developers/publishers could recoup in some other fashion.

Well, advertising of course is the first thing that springs to mind. It works for part of the music industry, it works for television, and already works for parts of the games industry.

I think another really interesting area of the market to watch is what's happening with kids toys these days is something the industry should watch closely. I've discussed this before, but let's take another look.

It started with Webkinz:

In which the online world is free with purchase of a plush doll.

And now you have UBFunkeys, a comparable model, but the dolls connect via usb.


And Barbiegirls, where it's more like an MMO, since you can actually communicate with other players and the like. The "doll" is also an MP3 player and connects via USB.


Next thought exercise is whether this same model could be extrapolated to 'give away' a big budget single player title or MMO with, say, the purchase of your Mercedes...