WildTangent’s St. John Declares Consoles Dead, Claims PC Renaissance
In this year’s ION Game Conference closing keynote, WildTangent CEO talked about “The PC Gaming Comeback,” predicting the death of video game consoles and the rise of online PC gaming, as well as the increasing importance of monetizing games with advertisements.
I think his model is correct, but there is no reason for consoles not to be able to support it (other then big corporates reluctance to change business model).
Also, I think most people would prefer to play WOW on their sofa’s.
WildTangent showed a lot of promise, IMO, for a while there. I had no idea they were still doing anything. I always thought of them as a Flash developer, but I think they used their own language. A lot was browser based though. Did they ever create anything really good? I seem to remember a space shooter game they were working on that showed promise.
I finally bought a 360 yesterday. Given my track record with technology adoption, there’s a pretty good chance that consoles are, in fact, teh domedzors.
Not a terribly well known name to many hardcore gamers, but they’re huge. From Wikipedia:
"WildTangent is a game network, privately held in the US that exclusively powers game services for PC manufacturers in the US such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Toshiba as well as a growing number of vertical sites and portals. Collectively, WildTangent’s owned and operated service reached over 15 million monthly gamers in the US and Europe with a catalog of more than 450 casual and enthusiast games from nearly 100 top tier and independent developers.
"The company also manages the premium advertising sales for a select group of vertical gaming properties comprised of leading MMOGs and game portals including Jagex’s Runescape and Artix’s AdventureQuest, giving the WildTangent Games Network a total audience reach of nearly 50 million monthly gamers worldwide.
"It owned a patent portfolio covering dynamic in-game advertising and game delivery technologies and operates CPM-based advertising campaigns for more than 50 leading US brands like: Sony, Time Warner, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Microsoft,…
“WildTangent monetizes online game play through a combination of digital retail purchase, subscription, advertising and micro-transactions using brand-new micro-currency called WildCoins.”
Yeah, I’m not a big fan of WildTangent. With my work at BB, I would say that I remove their games+games console about 10 times a day on new computer setups.
