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Games - Thursday, May 24, 2007

Casual Games Site Big Fish Games Hauls In $24M In '06 Sales Thanks To Its New Social Network

Seattle-based Big Fish Games, a Web-based video game developer and merchant, did $24.1M in sales for 2006, up 180% from $8.6M in 2005. The startup has its social network My Game Space to thank for its explosive growth. In September, Big Fish launched its My Game Space social networking site. “A lot of our 2006 growth came in the last four months of the year. Without My Game Space it would have been noticeably less,” said the company's founder and CEO Paul Thelen. Registered BigFish users can use My Game Space to set up a personalized web site and interact with other online gamers, write reviews and build favorite game lists.

BigFish's social network project took 14 months to develop and since September, more than 250K customers have created their own online sites. And they have invited more than 1.3M new customers to Big Fish Games more than half of which came in March and April of 2007.

Interestingly, Big Fish found that there is almost no overlap between its My Game Space users and MySpace users. That's because Big Fish's demographic has 75% over the age of 35 with 75% being female. That's over the hill by MySpace standards. So in building My Game Space, Big Fish did not copy MySpace. For example, BigFish users did not want to post pictures of themselves.

The company says it serves more than 500K casual gaming customers daily at BigFishGames.com, where it offers more than 400 titles. Many games are free but subscribers get access to the full line of online and downloadable games.Trials are ad-supported and its seeks to upsell gamers to own the full game, usually for $20. BigFish does not develop most of its games, rather it buys from or does a rev share with developers. I

In December 2005, Bigfish Games announced that it had raised $5M from unnamed angel investors.

View - BigFish Games site
Read - Big Fish Games plays social networking card to lure and keep customers (Internet retailer)