Play, not storytelling

I find the most interesting part of online entertainment to be more about play than storytelling, i.e more about World of Warcraft, Club Penguin, King.com, Hattrick, Habbo Hotel, Kart Rider, Battlefield and Stardoll (of course ;-)) than video and tv. This weekend the following game-oriented articles caught my eye.

The blog billsdue writes that the Chinese MMOG market will have a turnover of $1.2 billion in 2007, with the largest company rumored to make a net profit of over $100 million.

Sulake, makers of Habbo Hotel, spoke at the Austin Game Developers Conference leading to an interesting blog post on Gamastura as well as a weekend feature on GigaOM. Last (2006) year's revenue for Sulake was about $50 million according to the company, not $77 million which a New York Times article claimed.

BioWare's Gordon Walton highlighted 12 lessons from World of Warcraft in his AGDC speech. Some of the lessons: low system requirements (which also was true for Counter-Strike, seems like a platform won't get dominant if the price of admission is to high), quality counts, solo play important, don't tune for the hardcore, an accessible game is directed.

Habbo Hotel till börsen

I samband med köpet av den finska communitysajten IRC-Galleria, meddelade Sulake Corporation de att ämnar gå till börsen (Helsingfors eller London) inom åtta till 16 månader. Under 2006 ökade Sulakes omsättning med 29 procent till 38,5 miljoner euro. Under 2007 verkar det som om ledningen tror att bolaget kan växa 50 procent och ha en EBITDA-marginal på 20 %. Förra sommaren värderades Sulake till runt 300 miljoner euro, enligt Helsingi Sanomat.

Johan Kinnander lämnar Google

Googles Sverigechef Johan Kinnander har slutat efter 2,5 år. Såväl Google som Johan är fåordiga till det hela. Det är värt att notera att Henrik Höglund, som var vapendragare till Johan Kinnander redan på Espottingtiden, tidigare i år lämnade Google för att bli Executive Vice President, Advertising Sales hos Habbo Hotel-skaparna Sulake.