GamingNexus: Ssafe to assume that all of your games are ad-supported then?
Yes, on GreatDayGames it is an ad supported model. We are going to look to expand potentially into some subscription in 2007 for ad free games because our community has been asking for it. Poker seems to be doing a good job with that.
GamingNexus: Where do you see the site a year from now?
Where we see it going is into casual games to the next level in terms of community and customization. Allowing users to not only benefit from playing our games but giving them the tools to create games of their own and then market them to the community and get other players on our site to play them. So not so much as you’ll have to be a programmer and you’ll have to create a game and submit it to us but more games we can create and offer to the user with an interface that allows them to customize it and make it unique to them.
GamingNexus: Most of your games are single player experiences then?
Yes, right now they are single player. We will also probably be adding multiplayer games in 2007. Right now our community walks a fine line in terms of knowing that other people are on the site and knowing that you are competing against them, being able to personalize the level of competition you have. You can personalize your leader boards so that you can only see your friends as opposed to everybody on the site. We have a list of people who are currently online so you can see what’s going on and there are people talking in the forums.
However we don’t have live chat right now and we don’t for a reason. That is because from what we’ve heard from users from our past experiences, especially with the demographic that we are targeting, people like knowing that they are part of a larger experience but they still have a certain trepidation about having strangers talk to them and not wanting to feel like they have to engage in conversation with them, and not feeling like someone is going to try to pick them up like they were on Myspace or something along those lines.
GamingNexus: You recently released some interesting statistics about the casual gaming audience, are 58% of the casual gamers really women?
I think that’s pretty much in line with a lot of the market research that has come out in the last couple of years. Maybe two or three years ago it was a real shock to people that the majority of the people playing online games were mature women, because everyone just assumed it was teenage boys. Our stats are really inline with what is going on with the free online casual industry as a whole.
GamingNexus: What percentage of all gamers is the casual gaming market?
I don’t know that off the top of my head. I know that it’s something like 350 million people consider themselves to be “gamers”. While I don’t have an exact number I know that it’s a fairly large percentage.
We’d like to thanks Jessica for taking the time to answer our questions.
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