[casual_games] Top Download List

[Matthew Ford]

I'm afraid it may be the good old inverted Prisoner's Dilemma dynamic: each
one can share their numbers and theoretically help themselves by helping the
whole industry, but if some do it truthfully and some do it untruthfully, or
not at all, that "defection" hurts the truthful ones. Since everyone
suspects others will defect, nobody makes the first move.

We discussed something similar when debating whether to disclose subscriber
numbers (or even concurrency numbers) in Asheron's Call 1 and 2. Unless you
are sure you are #1, why do it and make it more clear to the customers you
are not at #1 or close to it? Disclosing would help the whole industry, but
who wants to do it first?

I wish it were different but it ain't. So what alternatives do we have? Is
there even a rough way to turn the numbers we have-- the size of the whole
industry-- into individual guessestimates for titles given the info we do
know about them?

Which of these casual game publisher/distributors are public and therefore
might have open-enough books to help us start some deductions here?



-----Original Message-----
From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of James C. Smith
Sent: Tuesday, 17 January 2006 7:22 AM
To: 'IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List'
Subject: RE: SPAM-LOW: Re: [casual_games] Top Download List

I agree that the current state of the casual games industry is very
different than the box office and that portals have many publishing
interests.  But I don't see why that would stop them from wanting to promote
the industry in general.  As James G. pointed out, having a standard top
sellers list to quote would create numerous opportunities for the mass
market media to mention casual games.  When this happens, everyone in the
casual games industry would benefit including portals, publisher,
distributes, retailers, and developers.  Everyone want a bigger slice of the
pie, but I think everyone also want to help the pie get bigger even if they
are a publisher and a retailer at the some time.  

-James C. Smith