Facebook is well regarded as the main hub for social gaming; the company’s top gaming partner, Zynga, makes up 12 percent of the networking site’s revenue. However, while Zynga seems content to make 90 percent of its own revenue through Facebook, one social gaming publisher, Kabam, is looking to move beyond its Facebook beginnings.
Kabam, founded in 2007 as Watercooler, is the company behind The Godfather: Five Families, Dragons of Atlantis and the popular Kingdoms of Camelot. According to Inside Social Games, based on the company’s recent quarterly bookings—which are up 10 times over its 2010—Kabam believes that it is second behind Zynga when looking at social game revenue
“The key isn’t about how many users you have,” said Kabam Chief Executive Kevin Chou. “It’s about how much money you are 
making.”
Despite the company’s recent layoffs, this month, Kabam took it’s 450 employees to a new headquarters in downtown San Francisco, California. There it joins other big name social gaming companies like Zynga, 6waves Lolapps and Disney’s Playdom.
Kabam also announced an interesting new partnership in February with Gamestop-owned gaming portal Kongregate. The Kongregate portal provides free browser-based games; it boasts 16 million monthly uniques, and 28 million hours spent gaming by users. Kabam will initially bring three of its free-to-play games to Kongregate, including Dragons of Atlantis, with plans to bring The Godfather: Five Families and Thirst of Night.
The move is a sign the company is looking to become more independent from Facebook; an idea Zynga had been mulling in 2011 with its Zynga Direct/Project Z gaming platform but has been slow to enact.
While publishers find social gaming appealing due to the low up-front costs, the Facebook route requires game companies to typically spend a lot of money on advertising to hook new users. Other networks like Google Plus have been more helpful for promotion.
Also, Facebook gaming has predominately been a realm for casual gamers. While Kabam has targeted the loyal minority of hardcore gamers on the social network, the vast majority of new users attracted to Kabam’s games are coming from outside of Facebook. Kabam’s August 2011 numbers of 12.9 million active monthly Facebook numbers has recently shrunk down to 2 million. Users from Google Plus, Pokki and the Kabam web site comprise the rest of the player base. Alongside the Kongregate announcement, Kabam announced that its Kingdoms of Camelot will be headed to iOS.
Kabam has two gaming pushes for 2012 and beyond. Chiefly, the company briefly announced a propriety framework it is calling Pyramid. The company built its reputation off of its asynchronous strategy games, but is looking to connect all of its user base, regardless of platform, in one synchronous environment; no barriers. The Pyramid investment has been large, but it means a game universe where players across multiple platforms such as iOS, Google Plus, Facebook, Kongregate, etc., will all be able to interact with each other in real time. On the company blog, Kabam writes, “The world is a big place, but we like to think that Pyramid will help make it a little smaller.”
Along with Pyramid, Kabam’s acquisition of Fearless Studios to push into 3D has not been wasted, and the company is enthusiastic about its future products having console-like 3D graphics. Kevin Chou believes that 3D is the next upgrade for social gaming and pointed to the work done with Unity 3D and Google’s Native Client as examples of the movement.
Images via Kabam.com
I moderate Kabam’s forums. It’s not a surprise to see Kevin being quoted saying something like that. Their “most popular game” Kingdoms of Camelot has always been glitchy, but recently they’ve been pushing the need to SPEND SPEND SPEND, pushing new content to spend on, and not fixing any of the existing issues. I’m shocked Kongregate would agree to such a partnership. Especially since a short browse through their forum will show all kinds of issues, the key one being the fact that Kabam doesn’t know how to communicate.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/16/kabam-looks-beyond-facebook-for-its-growth-in-hardcore-social-games-exclusive/
Is another article similiar to this.
I am going to take one of the blurbs from this post: That has led to a decline in Facebook users. In August, Kabam had more than 12.9 million monthly active users on Facebook, but that number has shrunk to 2.0 million, according to AppData. Meanwhile, the cost of advertising on Facebook is rising.
They are blaming facebook for this with the reasoning facebook is taking 30 percent of their transactions for the virtual goods and that facebook has expensive advertising. This might be maybe 5 percent of their problem but they cannot blame it all of facebook. Facebook as of today have given them their clients. The other areas they need to look at are within their own company. The fact is they have horrible customer service, lack on communication, and cannot be trusted. Let’s talk about these promised Domain Mergers? Where are they?
They talk about going away from facebook to hardcore game users. It doing this they have created these new enhanced domains. So far I believe all of the users on these enhanced domains have came from facebook. Where are these hardcore game users at? Kabam has created 3 to 4 of these enhanced domains which are currently closed.
To get these other hardcore players from outside of facebook they will have to advertise and spend some dollars. Can you imagine what the advertising will cost them compared to facebook for this? Okay so lets say they get some new users for doing this. They will encounter the same problems they are currently having with users. So once these users have shrunk too what other options will Kabam find for revenue?
The above does not make sense nor was their reasoning in the article. It is just an example of the lack on communication you receive from Kabam. They talk a good talk to sound more important what they are, like to shift the blame and refuse to acknowledge their customers.
They should pay attention to why there numbers are declining and fix the current problems instead of blaming everyone else. They can try new revenues which will be unsuccessful as well do to these facts. This is the real reason for their problems and eventual demise. Why don’t they just sell the company to someone that understands this?
As far as i can see kabam just keep adding new features instead of fixing the on going issues ive never seen a game with so many glitches and the customer care is nothing short of a joke some times i think its just a computer that dose customer care either that they have not a clue about the game, also all these new tournaments they want us to spend money on well stop all the cheating in them and maybe just maybe we might, and also stop trying to push the none gem buyers out the game ofcourse there not buying why should they spend money on a game that dosent work and everyone is cheating at maybe if you start dealing with some these issues the none gem buyers will buy i was a gem buyer myself alot aswell but no more not till things change id rather go spend my money on a fruit machine than on this game the way its running and getting run just now.