Big Fish 411

[DFG]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002447906_btinterface22.html

Points of interest:

37 full time and four contractors, up from about nine in December.

Its games are downloaded about 170,000 times a day.

The audience for these casual online games is 65 percent to 75 percent female, Thelen said, and most are over age 35

The company is opening sites in Europe, starting with the July debut of a German portal. Look for Big Fish to roll out sites in French and Spanish this summer.

[arcadetown]

Mostly same info have seen before. Paul's pretty darn good at media exposure (something I always neglect). Most interesting part to me was...

Angel funding: Thelen said the company recently closed a $1.7 million round of angel funding — its first external round — which helped pay for its April acquisition of New Jersey games site, IonThunder.com.

[Anthony Flack]

Surely it's about time some rich entrepeneur decided to try to sell downloadable games to people that aren't older women? The non-older-woman market surely has at least some untapped potential. You would think.

[princec]

I'm trying :)
Oh bugger! I'm skint.

Cas :)

[cliffski]

I'm trying too. The problem is collecting the right games together. there simply arent very many high qaulity downloadable games for non casual players yet.

[Jack Norton]

I'm trying too. The problem is collecting the right games together. there simply arent very many high qaulity downloadable games for non casual players yet.
WHAT?!
Look my site!!! :D

joking ;)

[Sirrus]

I'm trying too. The problem is collecting the right games together. there simply arent very many high qaulity downloadable games for non casual players yet.

Sounds like a good business concept ;)

[Matthew]

PlayFirst speaks a lot about an emerging "ex-gamer" market: the hardcore gamers of yesteryear that now have families, jobs, and other obligations that prevent them from playing games like they used to. I believe this was their target with publishing Oasis. No idea how well that worked out for them by the numbers, though.

[tentons]

PlayFirst speaks a lot about an emerging "ex-gamer" market
That's exactly the market I'm going for since that's also me. So I'm making games I would like to play and would have time to play. I think there's a lot of potential in that market because they/we can't play AAA games (due to time) but don't like the simplicity of casual games.

[princec]

We've mostly all known about this market for a long time... in fact I reckon most of our games here are written for this mythical bunch. The problem that has been everyone's bugbear is actually finding the buggers.

Cas :)