Startups associated with social gaming were all the funding rage in 2008. (Think SGN’s $15 million last May, for example, or the $17 million that went to Playfish in October.) And though executives with casual game startups recently told me they’re confident they’ll survive this recession, the challenges and opportunities for social games, which still primarily exist on major social networks, are considerably different. So what about the coming year worries and excites top execs in the social gaming space most? Continue »

As this holiday’s video game sales are tallied up, one thing is already clear: As an article in the Wall Street Journal notes, Sony’s PlayStation 3 remains in a fairly distant third place, still eclipsed by Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii. While it’s probably too drastic for Sony to walk away from the PS3, I definitely think they need some bold and creative changes to make their console competitive, namely to acquiesce to market realities while leveraging two underutilized assets. Here’s how: Continue »

He’s a zombie commando with a British accent and a sensitive side, and he’s one of gaming’s biggest (if relatively unheralded) heroes of 2008. He’s Sonny, lead character in a Flash game of the same name, and when Armor Games published the title last December, it quickly became this year’s Desktop Tower Defense — in other words, a casual web game that’s attracted a huge, passionate following.

Armor CEO Daniel McNeely estimates that Sonny has been played 20 million times by 12 million unique players. On the casual game platform Kongregate, it’s by far the community’s highest-ranked, most-played title. Amid much geeky celebration, the sequel, cleverly dubbed Sonny 2, went online last Friday. It’s already been played over 700,000 times. Why the enthusiasm? Continue »

Way back during the Cold War, the North American Aerospace Defense Command began a cute Christmas tradition meant to reassure anxious kids that it was not planning to shoot Santa Claus out of the sky. NORAD’s annual Santa Tracker has since gone Web 2.0, in an ongoing partnership with Google that imports Saint Nick’s trajectory data onto Google Maps and Google Earth. Now, iPhone owners have a free app of their own, the Santa Tracker for iPhone, so they can keep tabs on the jolly fat man from the palm of their hand.

It’s an application running on Earthscape, a very cool “mirror world” technology that displays a 3-D, navigable globe, taken from satellite imagery and geotagged photos from users. (Featured on GigaOM last September.) With the Santa app, you can follow the airborne sled’s route across the world, and even better, zoom in to see photos that have been uploaded by Earthscape users at his various stops.

It was inspired, CEO Tom Churchill explained to me in an e-mail, by “the observation that we had users all over the world taking beautiful photos of their holiday festivities, and that this would be of interest to a wider audience — children, for example — if packaged the right way.” (As it happens, this demo video features Churchill’s 6-year-old daughter at the controls.) So, it’s also a clever way of showing kids how the rest of the world enjoys the holidays…or, at the very least, it’s something to keep them occupied while you wrap their presents.

Last year, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello told The Wall Street Journal that his company was “boring people to death and making games that are harder and harder to play.” Prophetic words, though no one was listening at EA. In early December, EA said it was going to miss its revenue target of $5-5.3 billion for 2008.

And on Friday, it announced that it would cut 1,000 jobs or 10 percent of its workforce so it could save $120 million annually. They will only put efforts behind preexisting blockbusters or those in the making. Does this strategy shift really address the company’s bigger problems? Continue »

UPDATED One reason casual game startups are still confident in these recessionary times is that the top titles attract millions of players. Our friends at casual game ad network Mochi Media have provided a list of the 10 most popular casual games hosted on its network, each of which is played millions of times every month on thousands of sites.

Update: “The most common theme that can be seen in the [most popular] games is that they are very simple to play and amenable to almost any demographic,” company founder Jameson Hsu told me by e-mail. “Most of the games have simple control mechanisms and can be confined to just the mouse.” Hsu won’t say how much each of these titles makes from advertising, but claims that the top developers on their network typically earn four to five figures a year month in ad revenue. (Mochi emailed us to say they misspoke, so we’ve updated the figure accordingly.)

What’s the secret to their success? “First of all, these games are simply fun,” Hsu said. Beyond that, Hsu says games that are quick to hook users do well, as are games that do so in new, original ways. While Mochi sees a lot of knock-offs of popular games, “when something unique comes out, it tends to strike a chord with people looking for something new,” he said.

The list of top 10 games is below. Continue »

This year we watched a tremendous amount of money go into casual web game startups, many or most of which heavily depend on advertising as a revenue stream. As we’re all too painfully aware, however, when the economy turns sour, advertising budgets are among the first things to get slashed. So how will these companies survive through the coming quarters, until the economy stabilizes? I emailed the heads of five casual game startups, to get a sense of their strategy. After compiling their thoughts, three themes emerged: Continue »