Middle School Marketing: Gaming Is Growing
Josh Chambers, Former Viget
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This month's Middle School Marketing we set out to talk about geo-based marketing, but instead found ourselves discussing gaming and its long term viability.
One thing is certain: gaming isn't going anywhere. In fact, it's growing and it's growing fast. And it's not just black-t-shirt-and-square-rimmed-glasses-wearing-with-dirty-facial-hair-stuck-in-their-mom's-basement-playing-WOW nerds. Gaming is invading reality, and everyone is playing:
- As of today, Farmville has 83,105,118 active monthly users and Mafia Wars has 25,080,678. Seriously?
- Farmville has more players than Twitter has accounts
- Two and a half years ago, Disney purchased Club Penguin for $350M - a game which at the time boasted 12 million accounts, 700,000 paid subscribers, and $40M in annual revenue. I'm sure the numbers are exponentially larger now
- As of February 20th, PlayStation has 20M users worldwide and Xbox Live has generated $1 billion dollars since its 2002 launch
- MyTown recently hit one million users after only two months in existence. And let's not forget about Gowalla and Foursquare, and Causeworld
- Gameloft brought in $170M in iPhone App Store revenue - and that's just one company