GameTrust: Making Them Pay to Play…With Each Another

Electronic Gaming Business, Feb 25, 2004

Monetizing the casual gaming market has become a chief topic as console penetration peaks and hard core gamers responded to a lackluster Christmas lineup of titles with an appropriate ho-hum at retail. As America Online recently crowed not only is the casual online gaming market enormous but it is every bit as dedicated to playing as the typical fan boy segment. The key question remains, however, how do you monetize this fervor from an audience accustomed to playing those card and simple arcade games for free?

Let these mass market gamers pay to play each other, says Bret Brase, president, GameTrust, which recently launched a middleware platform that lets publishers "tournament-enable" most games so that players can wager against one another online. The operators take a share of the pot before paying it out, of course, and, all according to the model and deal involved, GameTrust, too takes a share. Nevertheless, according to the GameTrust pitch the average player in cash tournament play can generate $19 a month, with the top 10% most active players generating up to $90 a month.

While the overwhelming majority of casual gamers will never play for cash, the audience for these games is so massive that if a portal or game publisher converts only a few percent of them to wagerers, "the numbers are staggering," says Brase.

UK games portal MiniClip.com is using GameFrame to let players pay about $2.00 to enter an online multiplayer pool game with cash prizes. According to CEO, Rob Small, about 15% of his users opt into the pool game each month and they generate "about $20 per paying member per month," he says. GameTrust says that more than 400,000 people signed up for the tournaments in the first three months, with usage leveling off now to about 60,000 a month. And apparently the wagering process is addictive because 90% of players have made multiple deposits to the payment system.

Brase says that in GameTrust's experience a major game portal can convert between 1% and 3% of its free users to playing against one another for cash. Curiously, it is the penny ante games that become the real cash cows. Pool games like the one at MiniClips will generate about $20 a month per member for the site because it takes time for a tournament to run through and the game play experience is longer. "Speed games like Pyramid Panic take 35 to 45 seconds and players pay a quarter to enter," says Brase. That pocket change adds up quickly, however. "The operator can make $40 a month per cash player in fees. For a quarter, people get very hyped up."

Most players deposit a set amount on account and almost always draw down the entire account without withdrawing any remaining funds. The net effect is that while a 25-cent per-game fee seems like a micropayment, the GameFrame back end is actually aggregating those penny ante wagers into a larger credit card charge that avoids a prohibitively high fee.

Similar peer-to-peer wagering models such as UltimateArena emerged last year to create play-for-pay tournaments of major multiplayer action titles like Unreal and America's Army. Alternatively, GameTrust's GameFrame is a middleware solution that wraps around just about any game a wagering engine, a lobby for multiplayer meet-ups, player rankings and a tournament ladder as well as cheat protection and micropayment handling. While GameTrust does offer a suite of about 70 casual games to major portals like the Hispanic giant StarMedia, "We didn't want to be a games builder," says Brase. "We wanted to provide this middleware piece. We wanted to tournament-enable any game over any network and over any device." The software can handle games written in C , Java, Shockwave, Flash or HTML and is designed ultimately to work with game playing over Web, connected consoles and even set top boxes.

Of course Brase feels that getting cash direct from users beats the ad model any day and represents "seven figures a month to be made rather than two." The GameFrame middleware can integrate with most retail PC products to make them cash tournament ready, but Brase admits that mainstream publishers are always afraid they will have to slow down their development cycle to fold in a third party API. A full-blown implementation of the GameFrame software across multiple games will cost in the "low six figures," he says, but the company is also trying to entice smaller developers of online downloadable games with a low cost of a few thousand dollars to integrate the GameFrame engine into a single game. "We can make the economics work out. If people play for cash tournaments everyone wins," he says.

With his cash-enabled pool tournament only running at MiniClips since May, Small says it remains to be seen whether the play-for-cash model proves more lucrative than advertising in supporting the majority of gamers who still prefer free game play. He does attest to the enormous amount of traffic that a casual game portal like his attracts, only a fraction of which could generate significant revenues if they became cash customers. On Presidents Day, MiniClip. com released a satirical arcade game involving President Bush defending the White House against attack, and Small says "more people will play our Bush Shoot-Out game than will see an average Hollywood movie." The site's most successful game to date (not coincidentally, another G.W. Bush send-up) has been played 100 million times.