By Chris Maxcer TechNewsWorld Part of the ECT News Network
07/19/07 3:02 PM PT
Nickelodeon, MTV's kid-targeted media outlet, plans to get into the casual gaming market with a $100 million investment. When it comes to making the simple, low-intensity games that tend to interest younger kids and anyone else outside the hardcore game market, $100 million can go a long way. The network plans to get much mileage out of its money.
eMarketer Whitepaper: Optimizing the E-Commerce Experience
From the Web to the Contact Center, are you prepared to proactively engage and keep your savvy customers? Read how e-commerce leaders are optimizing their sites with ratings, reviews, live help, Web analytics, mobile and more.
MTV Networks' Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group will drop a cool US$100 million into its online casual games venture, the Viacom (NYSE: VIAb) business unit announced Wednesday at the Casual Connect gaming conference in Seattle.
"Across all of MTVN's online sites, gaming is an important original genre and we are committed to delivering fresh content to our audiences in all of our demos," said Cyma Zarghami, president of Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group.
"Particularly in the kids' space, with more than 86 percent of kids eight to 14 gaming online, we see great momentum for online casual gaming. This investment will not only benefit our audiences, but also our marketing and distribution partners," she noted.
Casual But Big
Twenty-five percent of Web users frequent gaming sites, and the number of unique visitors to online gaming sites has reached close to 217 million, up 17 percent over last year, according to a recent Comscore World Metrix study on Web sites offering online or downloadable games. The average online gamer visits a gaming site nine times in one month.
"Casual gaming is already the biggest category of gaming," Van Baker, a Gartner (NYSE: IT) analyst, told TechNewsWorld.
"There are more casual gamers than any other gamers, including those for hardcore PC games and console games. It's a very different demographic, primarily females in their late twenties and early thirties ... [but] anyone who is going on the Internet regularly is likely to play casual games at some point in time, and kids are certainly a big segment of that," he explained.
What You Can Buy With $100 Million
Casual games are typically Web-based, simple and not very graphics-intensive. How far can Nickelodeon get with a $100 million?
"It can get them quite a bit," Baker noted. "Online games can be very inexpensive to create -- literally, a few thousand dollars can get them something playable, and obviously they can spend significantly more than that, but it's nowhere near the cost of developing a console or PC title."
Big Plans
The company outlined an ambitious plan to blanket most of the market. Over the next two years, Nickelodeon is launching several initiatives:
myNOGGIN: myNOGGIN is a subscription service where preschoolers can play educational games and parents can track their progress.
Nick.com/Nicktropolis Multiplayer Games/Tournaments: Nick.com will expand its existing gaming franchise, New Game of the Week, giving it a multiplayer focus.
Nick Gaming Club: Nickelodeon's first ever subscription offering, Nick Gaming Club will be a safe gaming environment featuring multiplayer games, 3-D avatars and community features. It will include games based on Nickelodeon properties as well as others. The Nick Gaming Club will launch in first quarter 2008.
The-NGames.com: Launching in early 2008, The-NGames.com will focus on teen girls. The-N.com, which previously focused on social games for teen girls with games like "Slasher," "Avatar Mall" and others, will partner with AddictingGames to produce this new site.
AddictingGames and AddictingWorlds: AddictingGames' offerings will be expanded to include casual MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) with the introduction of AddictingWorlds, a way to introduce a variety of virtual worlds to the AddictingGames' audience.
Shockwave: Shockwave will become the games destination for families.
NeoStudios:Neopets.com will be transformed into Neostudios, which will focus on developing new virtual world gaming experiences online, while continuing to grow and evolve the existing ones.
More than 200 million people worldwide play casual games via the Internet, and by 2008, the casual games market is pegged to hit $1.5 billion worldwide, according to the Casual Games Association. To increase its share, Nickelodeon will be competing against other big players, including Electronic Arts' (Nasdaq: ERTS) Casual Entertainment Group, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Casual Games and RealNetworks (Nasdaq: RNWK).
Xbox Captain to Take Up New Digs at EA July 18, 2007
Peter Moore, formerly the chief of Microsoft's Xbox 360 platform, is moving to the sports division at Electronic Arts and will be replaced by Don Mattrick. As Microsoft's strategy for its gaming division is more or less locked in through the holiday season, the change isn't likely to make waves with the Xbox until sometime next year. As for EA, catching Moore could give its sports games a much-needed shakeup.
Related Stories
Xbox 360 Elite Enters Fray in Japan July 05, 2007
Microsoft will start selling its Xbox 360 Elite in Japan on Oct. 11. Sales of the Xbox 360 in Japan have lagged behind both the Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3 in Japan. The Elite version will sell for $390, less than the $480 retail price its sells for in the United States.
Nintendo Vaults Over Sony in Market Value, Thanks to Wii June 25, 2007
Nintendo's stock market value for the first time surpassed that of Sony on Monday. The Wii manufacturer beat out Sony to become one of the 10 most valuable companies in Japan -- joining global powerhouse firms such as Toyota, Honda and Canon. While Nintendo has found traction in the portable gaming market and with the Wii, Sony has had several stumbles in various markets over the past year.
Related News Alerts
More by Chris Maxcer
The Gphone That Could Catch My Eye November 20, 2009
Rumors are cropping up that Google is preparing to sell its own Gphone -- an Android handset using Google-branded hardware. There are some reasons to doubt it will happen, of course, but the possibility is intriguing. What would Google have to build to make something worthy of an iPhone fan's attention?
Apple's House Rules Won't Be the Death of App Development November 13, 2009
Facebook's iPhone app is one of the most popular wares the App Store has ever carried. But its developer, Joe Hewitt, says he's through with it, stating that Apple's review policies are starting a bad precedent for other platforms. However, good apps from talented developers will always find platforms, and Apple's policies won't prevent that from happening. They may even help.
Let's Give the iPhone Hackers a Big Round of Applause November 06, 2009
It's safe to say most Apple customers are satisfied living in the walled-off ecosystem that the company has created for products like the iPhone. Still, it's good to know that it is possible -- and relatively easy, even -- to bust through those walls if one should ever want to. The work of iPhone hackers is appreciated even by those who've never felt the jailbreak itch.
Headline Feeds
and distribution partners," she noted.
Talkback: 
