SharkJumping

We released an update to Meez this week, which brought a series of bug fixes and performance improvements, but best of all, Meez now offers animated MeezCards and animated exports.  I have attached one here (click on it to see animation), or you can see another with my profile in the top right corner of the blog - it's a great way to show friends your Meez in full animated glory on your blog or social media page :) 

Our merchandising focus this week is on our partner National Hockey League since it's the NHL playoffs, and we have an array of Prom merchandise available for those high school students getting ready for the big day.  We also launched a virtual Tringo T-Shirt to celebrate the release of our Tringo GBA game, so come pick one up for your Meez after you purchase the game at Amazon or other game retailers. 

Other popular items are:

Best Selling Scene:  Golden Gate Bridge
Most Popular Male Animation:  the laptop (come on guys, get a life)
Best Sellling NHL Jersey:  San Jose Sharks (go Sharks!)
Most Popular Male Shoes: Downtown dress shoes

Having followed the original Napster case quite closely, it was always interesting to see how Federal Judge Patel would rule on certain motions.  She often surprised both sides by issuing very wide rulings, some of which were late rejected by the senior courts, but this tendency made her courthouse a tough place to be since you never really knew what was going to happen.

Well, the music labels re-learned that lesson on Friday when Judge Patel ruled (Reuters link that EMI and Universal may have deliberately misled the US Department of Justice about how much information they had on competitor pricing policies in the digital music business, and she ordered them to turn over all related materials.  Without boring everyone with the details, this is related to the label-led creation of PressPlay and Musicnet as "independent" digital music companies in 2001, which we at Listen.com (and others) fought as a clear anti-trust violation.  Unfortunately, the DOJ political appointees cowered under their desks when it actually came time to finish off the action, so they dropped the case in 2003, but it now appears that the labels may not have been entirely forthcoming (yes, shocking, I know).

So the "Son of Napster" case continues along (the 3 labels suing BMG and Hummer Winblad for funding Napster), dragging everyone in its wake, and again pointing out why being a start up in the digital music business is not an attractive proposition, and showing why having Judge Patel is always worth the price of admission.  And the good news is that this action looks like it will continue to put pressure on the concept of the Most Favored Nation (MFN) clause, which is inherently anti-competitive, and yet still shows up in many label and publisher contracts - I would be wary of insisting on that clause going forward.

Our licensed game received a prominent mention in this week's great Business Week cover story about our friends at the virtual world Second Life. 

Excerpt: It's time to try Second Life's most popular game. Tringo is a combination of bingo and the puzzle-like PC game Tetris, where you quickly try to fit various shapes that appear on a screen into squares, leaving as few empty squares as you can..  Instead, I seek out Tringo's creator, Nathan Keir, a 31-year-old programmer in Australia whose avatar is a green-and-purple gecko, "Kermitt Quirk." It turns out Keir's game is so popular, with 226 selling so far at 15,000 Lindens a pop, or about $50, that a real-world company called Donnerwood Media ponied up a licensing fee in the low five figures, plus royalties. Tringo soon will grace Nintendo Co.'s (NTDOY ) Game Boy Advance and cell phones. "I never expected it at all," Keir tells me, his awe evident even in a text chat clear across the world. He's working on new games now, wondering if he can carve out a living. That would be even cooler than the main benefit so far: making his mum proud

We've talked about our upcoming Nintendo GBA game, which lands in stores on April 25th, but we have also licensed Tringo to a public UK media company called YooMedia, which will be producing a multiplayer ITV version of Tringo in Europe.  A nice article about the great potential of that deal is here from the UK Sunday Times Online, towards the end of the article.

Next steps are to finish off the PC and mobile discussions we started a few months ago, as well as to nail down an ITV deal for the US.  Tringo is ready-made for these platforms, with a simplicity and addictive quality rarely seen in most games, so I'm excited to see it finally ship.  Plus we'll have Tringo merchandise available for your Meez next week after our next release, so come back on Wednesday.

I'm clearly biased, but I'm thrilled that my brother Kevin (former CEO of Doubleclick) officially launched a new venture today, an innovative shopping search engine called Shopwiki.  Co-founded with Dwight Merriman (former CTO and co-founder of Doubleclick), Shopwiki is addressing the large, but fast growing commerce market by offering unbiased results, comprehensive site coverage and additional editorial information through what I think is the most innovative use of a wiki since Wikipedia. 

What's great about this sector is that the top 3 players (Pricegrabber, Shopping, Shopzilla) were sold for around $500M each (see Forbes article here), but if you ask most women (who control household shopping dollars), they will usually tell you they don't use shopping engines, making this segment feel like search did a few years ago - it's big, but will be much bigger going forward, and I think Shopwiki is clearly differentiated from the others.

Following the ABC/"Millionaire" textbook example of how to over-extend a premium brand, Rockstar Games & Take2 Interactive today that they will be launching Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories for the PS2 on June 6 for the bargain bin price of $19.99.  For those needing a score card, Take 2 introduced Liberty City Stories as a very good PSP title in late 2005, but it was essentially a PSP version of their earlier Grand Theft Auto 3 - now it looks like they're taking the same code and releasing it on PS2, just to grind the last dollar out of the franchise.  If they're introducing new games (albeit, recycled) at the $20 price point for the PS2, then my guess is that almost all games will be at that price point by this Summer, which may not be the worst thing for this part of the console cycle.

Some would argue that a premium brand like GTA should really be nurtured and only line-extended when it's truly worth it, such as delivering a top game for a console launch rather than re-packaging the code for every possible price and platform but apparently that's not the plan at Take 2.  At least they have the simply amazing Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion XBox 360/PC game to take up the slack.

I have been working my way through Games' Age of Kings DS over the past couple of months.  It's a turn-based DS version of the successful Age of Empires series on the PC, and it's a pretty good game, except for the fact that Majesco apparently forgot to do any QA on the product, making it impossible for me to finish since the game has frozen up 3 times in the last campaign scenario.  It's bad enough that it has bugs in the middle of the game, but at least I could generally get around them enough to finish each battle, but I've now given up in absolute frustration.   Do NOT buy this game unless you feel the need to throw your DS against the wall.  Hopefully, our Tringo GBA game (published by Crave Entertainment) will be a better experience next week when it hits stores on April 24th.

So why is this a problem?  Companies release beta products all the time, including Google News and our own Meez, as they work through bugs and performance issues.  The key problem here is that Age of Kings is not free and isn't labeled BETA, as other Internet products are.  In addition, unlike the other services, there is no way to update a non-WiFi enabled DS game, except by having it replaced, which is clearly not going to happen even though this is a well known problem on Majesco's .  Finally, Majesco (COOL ticker)has been an absolute catastrophe since going public in a back-door reverse merger, going from a split-adjusted $35 two years ago to today's $1.40, and it's now trying to refocus back on portable console games, but this is only going to work if they actually do some QA on them before releasing them...

In an interesting attempt to leverage the strong momentum of hit game Mystery Case Files: Huntsville (see earlier review here), as well as to combat the "clone plague" (other publishers bringing out very similar games soon after launch), BigFish Games has already released a sequel, entitled Mystery Case Files: Prime Suspects (download free trial here).  As with many sequels, this is an expanded version of the previous game, keeping the same overall successful theme while adding in a couple of minor new features such as need to use a flashlight or x-ray machine in certain scnearios, and tweaking the "Clue Computer" finale to each section with a couple of new twists.  It's a good move for MCF fans, mixing in just the right amount of new game play while keeping the experience very familiar for those who purchased the previous one - will definitely be another hit.

Although I applaud GameFish for leveraging its hits and attacking the clone issue, I am not sure what this means for the casual game business since a need to release sequels so quickly may point the way to a shorter life span for hit games than previously where some titles would in the top 10 for over a year, generating a tremendous return on investment.  I probably would have released the sequel at a higher price point while the original was selling so well at $20, then brought it down after a few months as momentum slowed on the original.

For other casual game reviews. try the new site BlueStub at www.bluestub.com

The flaming death spiral of mobile game console company has been profiled in many places, including in this blog, but apparently not even the recent soap opera-worthy Ferrari crash saga (great SF Chronicle article here) is enough to keep these "enterprising" executives down.  Yes, the children of Gizmondo have already returned, and are up to their old Reverse-Merger tricks, last week going public by reversing a "company" into a public shell called Desi Tv to create a new mobile advertising firm called Xero Mobile, trading under . 

The general concept is to offer free mobile minutes to users who listen to ads, a concept quite similar to the Smart Adds unit of Gizmondo, which one of the Xero executives used to directly operate.  The Financial Times has an (subscription only) with some truly ridiculous claims in it (will take only $100M in investment to create $1.8B in revenue in 3 years), but there are no public SEC filings yet, so it's hard to understand what the overall plan theoretically is.  I was slow on this one and it has been given a pretty thorough take down by a variety of other blogs such as Om Malik and Moco News, but I have no doubts that it will provide enough humor for all of us this year.

recently announced that it would soon begin testing a network DVR which would allow their cable subscribers to record tv shows to Cablevision's back-end systems, and then stream them to the actual cable set top box, just as if the subscriber had recorded them on a separate DVR box on top of their TV.  The primary advantage to Cablevision is that they can deploy much cheaper set top boxes since there is no need for a hard drive, which both costs more money and has a greater chance of failure, as anyone with a DVR finds out at least once every couple of years.  Assuming the cable network can handle it, it's pretty cool from a subscriber perspective as well, although one worries that Cablevision won't allow commercial-skipping, or will somehow control the content in a way a Tivo user doesn't like.  So what's the downside?

Well...there once was this digital music company called MP3.com which was doing really well until they launched a similar service called MyMP3.com - this service allowed users who verified that they owned the CD to immediately access it online from a MP3 storage locker - they didn't have to rip it themselves and upload it a server.  The end result was a set of lawsuits, about $170M in legal settlements, and the eventual sale of the company.  I'm not a lawyer, but the crux of the case was that the court determined that MP3.com didn't have the right to rip and store music CD's on its central servers, even if they made the content available only to users who they determined to be rightful owners of the physical CD.  What's the difference here?

According to this Reuters Tom Rutledge, COO of Cablevision, makes the point that Cablevision will not pre-record any shows until the subscriber pushes the button to trigger the recording, just like with a standard DVR.  In MP3.com's case, they pre-recorded all of the content, and then made it available upon verification.  It's a subtle, but potentially important distinction when looking at new copyright law.   However, I can't imagine that every content provider is going to let this happen, so I would expect at least one lawsuit, and the problem is that the potential penalties are quite large, so it will be an interesting situation to watch.

The online gambling (as opposed to gaming) market is obviously a very attractive one, as seen by the huge success of PartyPoker and similar companies, but it's always been difficult for American entrepreneurs & investors to directly participate in that sector due to the aggressive anti-gambling stance of the US government.  And yes, we have seen skill-based gaming (betting to a certain extent, but outcome based on skill, not luck) sites such as WorldWinner and Skill Jam appear in the market, but they didn't really move the needle since the games were not classic "gambling" style games - e.g. World Winner was just sold for $23M - nothing to sneeze at, but certainly not a billion dollar market outcome like Party Poker.

So I recently stumbled across Betzip, a gaming/gambling company started by former Looksmart (where my wife used to work) CEO Jason Kellerman.  What is really clever about this approach is that it brings you the classic poker-style gameplay and lure of cash prize tournaments, but with what appears to be a clear end-around the US gambling regulations since there is no actual money wagering - you have to pay $20 to be a member of the club, but you can't lose any money in it.

I have only played a bit, but the concept seems strong.  You have the opportunity to win good-sized prizes ($5,000 first prize) in the weekly or monthly tournaments, so it probably keeps you from really doing dumb wagering like you would if no money was at stake, but the lack of actual money pots keeps the event from being a gambling enterprise, so it's probably legal in the US.  At $20 a month, it's a decent amount of money, but it's not so large that you're going to gamble away your house and your first born child - however, it's a step above the $.50 wagers one often sees in true skill-based gaming sites, which is good since those low wagers don't keep stupid bets from happening since the price is too low to limit moronic behavior.

The downside?  It feels like a traditional online gambling site without having the upside to the company of taking large amounts of money from each user - I have received 3 emails since registering 12 hours ago, which feels a little aggressive.   And the the $20/month fee may not keep the really stupid gamblers (AIWCC - All In with Crap Cards) from still screwing up games since it's a free play site, but I'm not sure that's as big an issue as it is with free sites.

I'm not an online gambling expert, but BetZip feels like a really clever mix of poker-style gaming with a subscription style economic method which appears legal in the US - give it a shot

As I mentioned in a previous post about emerging creativity in the casual gaming space, a wonderful game called Mystery Case Files: Huntsville (download free trial directly here) has been turning heads in the sector with a new style of game play.  Published by BigFish Games, it's basically a timed I Spy game wrapped with a light mystery story, and although I thought it was not my type of game, it has been sucking me into its grasp all week.  I have heartily recommended it to my mother as well.

It's simply a great casual game which does more than just clone other types of gameplay, as has become common .  The game is perfectly paced, letting the user steadily move through levels, while still being hard enough that there is a definite learning curve with positive feedback when you attain certain benchmarks.  It  has simple, but beautiful graphics, and requires only a mouse to play.  It doesn't require any special skills or coordination, and the mystery theme should resonate with the current 35 yr old female demographic, at least if the literary world is any comparison.  It has significant replay value while still seeming to be deep, it's made to play in 15-20 minute segments, and it's certainly a franchise-style game with room for sequels.  Definitely go download it now.   Now if we could only figure out a way to get a Meez into it...

Update:  See review of MCF's Sequel, Mystery Case Files: Prime Suspects, here

For other casual game reviews, try the new site BlueStub at www.bluestub.com