Sunday Herald, The, Jul 11, 2010
A Dundee gaming company is vying to become the first in Scotland to crack social gaming by releasing a new football game for Facebook.
Soccer Tycoon, which will be fully released by the end of the month, is the product of 18 months of development by Dynamo Games.
With an eye to the all-important US market and targeting more than a million users, the game enables players to build a stadium, watch games, hire and fire managers and sell everything from hotdogs to popcorn while building a world-class team.
Soccer Tycoon will follow the “freemium” business model of most Facebook games, where users play for free but are offered various add-ons to improve their performance that can be bought more quickly using real money.
Where big sites like Twitter and Spotify have been better at attracting users than monetising them, this has meant this fast- growing new niche has serious financial potential.
Brian McNicoll, managing director of Dynamo, said: “If you look at FarmVille, which has 63.5 million monthly users developing farms, the rough estimate is that 3% to 5% of players are paying customers. Each customer spends $1 a month, so it can easily add up.”
This success has enabled US-based Zynga, publisher of FarmVille and other titles like Cafe World and Mafia Wars, to build a $1 billion-plus company in a relatively short space of time. Of the 200 million Facebook users that are playing games regularly, Zynga boasts four of the top five games on the network.
“If you release to a hundred people, within a few weeks there could be hundreds of thousands. It’s crazy,” said MacNicoll.
“It’s the first time that a gaming platform has opened up gaming to the masses. Everybody has got a computer and everybody can get access to the internet.”
The drawback for a company like Dynamo, which has grown from three founding members to 15 in six years on the back of a rolling contract to make the best-selling Championship Manager for mobile phones, is it does not have the financial muscle of the market leaders.
“Zynga uses a lot of Facebook advertising and cross-promotion between its games, but because this is our first game we can’t do that
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