Professional
Promise of the gaming market
The gaming market promises to be even more of a major market than it already is. Consider this;
- To start gaming, someone only needs a computer in his house, something that’s seen as a requirement to function in this society
- The availability of games is only growing (iPhone, wireless internet, etc.)
- A greater variety of games is released every year
- Game interface is ever changing; who could’ve imagined the Wii a few years back? or the Natal?
- Integration of gaming in our daily lives; friends meeting on WoW or for a game of FIFA is not strange or uncommon anymore
Rethinking the economic model
Recent posts on various media I like; Wired’s piece ‘In Praise of the 3-Hour Game‘ and even more recently New York Times’ article ‘Video Game Makers Challenged by the Next Wave of Media‘, all seem to focus on one message: The way gaming and game development has worked for the past 15 years is coming to an end. This fact is presented as some surprising development, while it could be said to just be behaving like all the other media. Music industry anyone? Newspaper industry anyone? I could probably find plenty of examples.
Preferably, I would take a lesson learned from this and be done with it.
Professional: Short update
Because of exams and papers to be written for school I have not been able to update my blog as regularly as promissed. I will try to remedy that today/this weekend to be able to say I completed yet another full week.
For my professional activity this week you should look towards www.wiihuren.com a site aimed at the Dutch region for professional rental of gaming hardware! Let me know what you think!
Professional: Sales Challenge at WZZRD
As some of you already know, I started working for WZZRD B.V. this November as Account Manager Sales. A very elaborate function, but what I actually do is connect the dots for people that want to host an event and incorporate gaming. I work directly for one of the owners of the company and my previous experiences at Netgamez serve me perfectly in organizing and running these events.
As this is a sales oriented job, I’m still working out how this business is different from the one I was in before. Right now the major difference basically is that I don’t have to worry about anything but selling events, and having them run well ofcourse. Before, I was worrying about cashflows and liquidity, right now I can just focus on making money for the company. I really noticed I had to focus more on general information and networking, walking up to people and talking about their needs and expectations. I’m not saying this is running at its best, but obviously there is some experience already there so I’m comfortable in saying that I will manage quite well in the coming months.
For me, this is the kind of job I would like to stay in. The Revol7 project is still very much alive, but its all on a more long-term track right now. So what I expect is to be working this job at least for the coming 6 months. After which I will decide what more there is to be done. The company itself, WZZRD B.V., is looking to make the event division seperate from the main company that’s based on running gamingcafe’s, but this will only be possible after reaching a certain key revenue point.
Main challenge? Getting to that revenue point!
Next week I will try to be a bit more extensive about the Revol7 project. I might even put up some of the artwork we had prepared for future presentation purposes.
Economic downturn settling in?
In this press release, TNS Media Intelligence talks about the changes in the US advertising market. And it seems the 1.7% across-the-board decline leads to the conclusion that the economic down-turn, that was already noted superficially in 2007 is setting in to stay.
But is this true? Ofcourse, a 1.7% decline in the biggest advertising in the world is a big sign, but we’re talking about a country that is seeing one of its biggest employers slipping (car industry) and while the president-elect shows signals of hope, the rest of the world, and especially the national businesses are not that positive for the coming year. After the read more I’ll show the table that lead them to these conclusions.
New Acquisition: gamingprofessionals.com
A few months there is nothing, suddenly there is stuff happening. This morning I made a deal for the domain gamingprofessionals.com, very clear, even though it is a bit long and very likely to get misspelled. Perhaps developing something that is worth a bookmark? Or SEO, even though my friend Yvo is seeking other conversion methods.
Do you like the name?
For the ones celebrating, enjoy Sinterklaas, it is what I am going to do!
New Acquisition: gamingzoom.com
The domaining market, of which I wrote already some time ago, is also feeling the financial crisis. Because I own a small set of domains (I might publish a list later) I keep checking the numbers, and even though there are still quite a few domains that sell for substantial amounts of money the lower parts of the market have really dropped their price levels.
With that in mind, yesterday, I made my first acquisition in quite some time.