PlayFirst: Can Casual Gaming Get Serious?

Electronic Gaming Business, Nov 17, 2004

Until now, the eco-system for casual downloadable games has been populated by small developers who distribute directly through the major portals like MSN's Game Zone, ShockWave, RealArcade, Yahoo, and AOL Games. In a bid to bring mainstream infrastructure to the genre that is so popular outside of the retail game core, PlayFirst (www.play-first.com) launched in early September as a publisher devoted exclusively to mass-market online casual gaming. These guys want to do for downloadables what the big mainstream game publishers have done at retail, cultivate enduring properties, support development, and leverage marketing efficiencies across multiple titles.

"Our lofty mission is to create the next great game franchises for the mass market," says Jason Rubinstein, VP, marketing and business development.

PlayFirst is coming into the market with serious cash and serious people: $5 million in first-round funding from Mayfield and Trinity Ventures, CEO John Welch and CTO Brad Edelstein, both Macromedia/ Shock-wave veterans, and Rubinstein, formerly of UbiSoft.

But what can the more familiar publishing model bring to the casual game market that isn't already here? Risk and research, most of all, says Rubinstein. Most casual game developers are self-funding their projects and have to be enormously risk-averse. Having a traditional publisher in the space allows for more experimentation. "We are looking to invest in some games that are in new genres and new game play people haven't seen yet and will start releasing this year," he says.

PlayFirst promises that it will contour its deals with developers according to mutual needs. Unlike the high-risk eco-system of retail games, most online games are developed for $100,000 or less, and so at a $20 sale price the break-even point is fairly low. "It's not about is the game going to make a profit. It's about how much of a profit," says Rubinstein. "Traditional game developers do not have the opportunity to make a statement like that." With higher margins, PlayFirst thinks it has more flexibility to experiment with new game play and construct custom deals that keep developers happy.

And unlike retail games publishing, which closely analyzes its audience for potential opportunities, the online casual market tends to be haphazard. "Most developers are making games and throwing them over the transom," says Rubinstein. "We are taking the approach of analyzing all of the available platforms. As a publisher, we are taking a step back and figuring out what isn't in the market. There are many different types of customers, women and others. I haven't seen any developers even talking in these ways."

The casual game market suffers from a general absence of game brands, PlayFirst insists. While PopCap's Bejeweled and the classic Tetris are widely known, there are no properties that spawn user loyalty across sequels and new iterations, a model that is the lifeblood of mainstream retail games publishing. Again, Rubinstein argues, this is where a traditional publisher can help reform the space. "We do believe there are some genres that can be tapped where we can create franchises that last."

On the marketing side, casual games remain just as haphazard as the development end, in that most developers need to depend on publicity generated by the distribution portals. "The distributors don't do much marketing except on-site," says Rubinstein. "They have a formula, but there is a lot more to do there."

Eyes Everywhere

With its CTO, Edelstein having worked on Flash/Shockwave Players, PlayFirst will also provide tool sets that will help developers publish across a wider range of platforms, because the company thinks that the casual market is not welded to the Internet. "We have our eye on everything," says Rubinstein. "People are trying to figure out how to play games on everything." The upcoming handhelds, phone handsets, and even TV set top boxes are ripe for what PlayFirst sees as a library of platform agnostic titles. "Our secret sauce technology will come in handy. We are thinking about both internal and external games being built to be taken into other platforms so we don't have to do a 100% redo. That's the way a publisher thinks," he says.

There is also a lot of room for innovation in casual games distribution, which now rely wholly on four or five major game portals. PlayFirst will leverage its executives' existing relationships with all of these usual suspects, but Rubinstein believes as retailers become more involved with online e-tailing, the casual games model will find a place on vendor portals. Likewise, the broadband ISPs continue to hunger for casual games, and as gateway sites like Comcast.net become more content-rich, PlayFirst hopes to place games there as well.

And in an interesting new wrinkle, PlayFirst may place some of its demos on packed-in magazine discs outside of the gaming segment. "We've already been approached by folks who want to put our games on millions of magazine covers," says Rubinstein.