To Heck With The Super ...

Good Old Games is running a $4.99 sale on multiple Sierra titles including Space Quest and Kings Quest. The games come in packages of three and are compatible with Windows (sorry, Mac users, but here’s a consolation prize ). Each package includes three parts of each series, including Police Quest, Space Quest, and King’s Quest. This includes such hits as the original King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown rendered in beautiful 16-color CGA, a game that literally made my jaw drop when I saw it boot up on my friend’s XT computer in about 1985. That, my friends, was true gaming, before the days of rail shooters and endless RPGs. Product Page via The Verge

Facebook Could Jumpstar...

Facebook’s late-comer HTML5 mobile app platform lags way behind the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace. Yesterday I spotted Facebook’s latest effort to catch up — a test showing bookmarks for third-party applications at the top of the mobile news feed. Currently, Facebook buries HTML5 app bookmarks at the bottom of its mobile site’s pull-out navigation menu, and only shows them in the iOS or Android Facebook app’s search bar. Placing them much more prominently atop the mobile home page could increase engagement — the first step in attracting developers to the platform and earning money on in-app purchases. The Facebook mobile app platform launched in October to help the social network start monetizing mobile through in-app payments on which it collects a 30% tax. Apps run through an internal web browser within its iOS and Android apps, allowing it to circumvent Apple and Google’s tax. However, the platform hasn’t gained serious traction with developers or users, and that’s a serious risk  the company noted in its S-1 filing to go pulbic. Some developers don’t want to re-fork production to support HTML5 in addition to iOS and the various Android versions, at least not until Facebook’s platform is a proven money maker. HTML5 also needs time to mature before it can handle the most advanced native apps. With limited choice, and no ads to promote third-party apps within Facebook’s own mobile apps and HTML5 site, users aren’t installing them in the first place. Since bookmarks for the HTML5 apps are only found at the bottom of the Facebook mobile site’s nav menu, and have to be located through the search bar in the Facebook iOS and and Android apps, users aren’t reengaging with HTML5 apps either. But Facebook has been pulling its punches. It has hundreds of millions of daily active mobile users who first see the news feed where these bookmarks are being tested. Facebook says similarly styled bookmarks on the web interface’s games canvas page have been proven  to drive traffic. The small percentage of m.facebook.com and Facebook for iPhone users in the test could click bookmark and after some confusing lag an internal browser would launch Words With Friends, The Washington Post Social Reader, CityVille Express, Warimals, or another game or app. The test may have run on the Facebook for Android app as well. Facebook is likely testing to see if users click these bookmarks, and if their presence decreases news feed engagement or session length. If Facebook can get more eyeballs on third-party app bookmarks without degrading the user experience, it may have found a way to leverage its natural assets to begin the steep uphill battle against Apple and Google’s mobile platforms.

Investors Drive $ZNGA U...

Those of us who have been following the social gaming industry already know that Zynga makes up a big portion of Facebook’s revenues. But lots of public investors only seem to have gotten the memo on Wednesday evening, when Facebook’s S-1 filing revealed that the developer accounts for 12% of its total revenues , or $445 million. In the two days since, Zynga’s stock has gone up more than 26%, to close at $13.39 this evening. This is far more than most analysts had previously projected. The ones who began covering Zynga after its December IPO had pegged its stock well under ten bucks. When analysts at banks who underwrote Zynga entered the fray a couple weeks ago, they were unsurprisingly more bullish . Following the end of the quiet period, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Barclays Capital, along with analysts from banks not involved in the IPO, all put their target price above Zynga’s public opening amount of $10. This drove the Street’s average target price up to $11.08, as you can see from the StreetInsider table below. Existing industry research, namely the Inside Virtual Goods report from my previous company, Inside Network , had indicated as of last fall that virtual goods revenue from Facebook applications reached $500 million last year . Facebook’s prospectus more than confirmed this on Wednesday, revealing that a strong fourth quarter had actually put the number a little higher, at $557 million. There are other data points you can use to try to figure out Zynga’s position with that number. AppData traffic shows that it has a dominant traffic position on Facebook’s platform. It gets 90% of its revenue from Facebook, but first Facebook collects 30% of its virtual goods transaction sales, per terms that have been in effect since midway through last year. And, Zynga has since at least 2009 used Facebook ads as a main way to bring in new and returning users. The problem is how to add this up. The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler explains the confusion in how to calculate the results: Different assumptions lead to different estimates for Zynga’s fourth-quarter “bookings,” which is the preferred method for measuring Zynga’s top line. Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter’s quick-and-dirty analysis says Facebook’s disclosure implies $268 million for Zynga’s bookings for the fourth quarter, short of the $302 million analysts are expecting. Baird Equity Research analyst Colin Sebastian digs deeper, making more assumptions, and comes out with a number of $315 million. Both analyses included many caveats. Heavy trading volumes indicate high volatility among investors. Zynga will do its first ever earnings call on February 14th. Get ready for some new estimates.

Back To Basics: Sony Ap...

If there’s been one complaint my contacts inside large CE companies have had, career-wise, it’s been the inability to rise far in the hierarchy. While there are clear exceptions to this rule, the complaint has always been that succeeding in Asian companies has been contingent on (literally) speaking the language and knowing the rules of the road, as it were, culturally. When Sir Howard Stringer took the reins at Sony, it looked like this tendency had been bucked. However, with the appointment of Kazuo Hirai, it looks like Sony is going back to the old ways – but why? First, Stringer’s note “passing the brandy snifter,” as it were: “Three years ago, I started to work with the Board on succession plans, and in February, 2009 we named a new generation of leaders to be my management team. Among them was Kaz Hirai, who had distinguished himself through his work in the PlayStation and networked entertainment businesses. Kaz is a globally focused executive for whom technology and the cloud are familiar territory, content is highly valued, and digital transformation is second nature. I believe his tough-mindedness and leadership skills will be of great benefit to the company and its customers in the months and years ahead. I look forward to helping Kaz in every way I can so that succession leads inevitably to success. It was my honor to recommend him to the Board for the positions of President and CEO, because he is ready to lead, and the time to make this change is now.” Sony is no longer in the position they were in when Stringer became CEO. In June 2005, when he was appointed after a long career in Sony’s media divisions, Stringer looked like they guy to lead Sony through the rocky shoals of media distribution. You’ll remember that the iTunes store started selling music two years earlier and streaming video was still a few years off. The way ahead was clear – Blu Ray would carry HD content into homes and streaming would always be the second best solution. HD piracy was difficult because of the huge file sizes and the best solution for digital distribution was to include a nice DRM-ed video file in with the DVD, complete with a with a special Sony player. It was a simpler time and it looked like Stringer could make content work while Japanese engineers could make the TVs and Walkmen work. Today Howard’s world is completely changed. Sony is no longer the darling of the computing world (Apple owns that limelight) nor is it good at CE (Samsung and Vizio have shown that cheap TVs don’t have to suck) nor can it make phones. Blu Ray is fast becoming irrelevant and distribution channels have curved around Sony like light around a dying star. Stringer’s Sony is a shambles. So Sony went back to a Japanese CEO who ran the company’s most prosperous product, Playstation. It makes perfect sense: the next decade isn’t solely about hardware or content or mobile – it’s about all of those and more. Gaming consoles take the best of those three worlds and actually sell products to people who want to pay for them. Gaming is a huge business and it’s the one place that Sony can excel in this century. In the end, Stringer was a CEO for a Sony that wanted to appear more plugged into Hollywood, media, and content. Now Sony needs to look like it cares about gaming and the capital of Sony’s gaming empire is Japan. It was fun to try new things, Sony is saying, but when it comes to turnaround they’ve come back to basics.

What Recession? Razer’s...

For months we’ve been waiting on Razer’s Blade notebook , a $2800, 17-inch beast that we weren’t sure whether to laud or mock. It’s just that it’s kind of a strange thing to see making a big debut when people are more cautious than usual with their money, and PC gaming (as ever) is being declared dead. But after our hands-on at CES , we were convinced that it was at the very least impressive and well-built, and apparently enough other people thought so that Razer sold out almost immediately. Now, the actual number sold isn’t mentioned, but Razer isn’t a small company and they were going all-out with this thing at CES. But we’ve seen devices launch to sales of dozens, so a strong response to a launch like this is definitely good news. The company shared the news on their Facebook page , and urges prospective buyers to sign up for a notification email list . Hopefully that $2800 won’t burn a hole in your pocket in the meantime. Personally, I’m more excited about their plans to disconnect the touchscreen and LCD keys from the laptop, making a customizable piece of hardware you can use with your existing PC. I’m not really down with the small-screen gaming and I like my keyboards a little meatier, so the Blade isn’t for me — but I do have gear envy when I see all those future toys on the side.