NY Tech Meetup: Iminlikewithyou Launches Game Network
But here's one tech presentation/comedy routine that had everyone on their toes: iminlikewithyou's Charles Forman invited programmers to join a new casual game network. The plan is to provide would-be Dinglepop designers a bevy of free developer tools to get their games built quickly, and IILWY will handle a lot of the technical heavy lifting for the games on the back-end.
Money? Sure, maybe. Like other casual games promoters, IILWY is premised on Americans learning to love the Asian freemium model. "In Korea, all the games are free, you pay for upgrades," Forman said. He thinks a racing game, for instance, might get dedicated players to pay 50 cents for a custom paint job on their car, or a buck for better tires. The split? He's not sure yet, but thinks developers on his network will keep about 70%.
See also:
Alley Stars In Details, Not Totally Psyched About It
Iminlikewithyou Closes Series A: $1.5 Million From Spark, Marc Andreessen, Others
I'minlikewithyou Launches New Design
Also, Foreman has not distinguished himself as someone who knows anything about developing and marketing games. All I've seen from him so far are a bunch of rip-offs of other successful games, candy-coated for the lucrative iminlikewithyou audience.
How these online transactions will work is still completely up in the air. My feeling is that companies will allow players to enhance their play through cash purchases, although (as the previous poster notes) there is a delicate balance between making play rewarding and fair while providing a value for these kinds of dollars.
You can see some developers successfully experimenting with cash transactions when you look at games like Puzzle Pirates, which allows dollar infusions into player accounts through obfuscation and a money market.
An example of a perfect opportunity (that's being missed) is World of Warcraft. WoW's player base is heavily weighted towards people with lots of free time - the game's nature requires untold hours of play if you're going to be a top echelon player. Thus people with jobs / families often loose out as their available time does not allow them to play with the same frequency as say ... college students. This is something that affects me in a big way - my 60hr/week job doesn't give me much time to play to compete. What I do have is cash that I'm happy to drop in to help my progress in the game. Since Blizzard doesn't offer a way for me to enhance my game through cash, I end up paying any one of the innumerable Chinese gold farmers for my fix, and Blizzard doesn't see a dime.
A Puzzle Pirates model would allow both types of players (infinite free-time & limited free-time) to advance equally. The former by spending lots of time in the game, the latter by paying extra.
None of this is really relevant to iminlikewithyou though. I think the best path forward for Foreman (and one I'm sure he's considered) is to be a sort of hipster Pogo. It's possible that this pitch he's making will take him down that road, but so far I don't hear anything compelling.
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