David Chang of GamesCampus Talks Sports MMOGs, Engaging Older Demographics

By Steven Crews | August 1, 2009 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews | Tags: David Chang, Free to Play, Freemium, Gamescampus, Major League Baseball, MLB, Shot Online

David Chang: Oh yeah, absolutely. With that age question, there are benefits and there are detractions, right?

With the MMO game, the MMO game does well in terms of users. It does well in terms of all the MMO statistics, right? It’s a well-defined genre, we know where to get people. People are familiar with the PvP systems, and the game systems.

So, there’s not a lot of evangelizing you have to do with that game. So, whats the downside?

The downside is that they are a little younger, which makes it harder to monetize than with the older people.

Even though they’re familiar with the game system, we find that with the sports game and with the older demographic, it’s much easier to monetize. Which, I don’t know if you think that’s counterintuitive, but it’s certainly what our data shows.

So, I don’t think that there is a barrier in terms of showing the value proposition to these item based games with an older demographic, even though some people would say that’s counterintuitive, because maybe they don’t know about the game system, or maybe this is a weird concept to them.

Actually, we’re finding that the older demographic converts at a better rate than the MMO crowd, because they do have access to credit cards, and bank accounts and stuff like that.

And so, if you can create a great game, and you price the items right, they buy stuff. And they buy more stuff than the young kids.

At the end of the day, it costs us more to attract users to the sports games because it’s an older demographic, and it’s a newer category. But, we also monetize those in terms of our pool at a much higher rate than what our traditional Asian MMO game is.

The MMO Gamer: I believe you said during the demo that one guy spent $15,000 in one year?

David Chang: Yeah, we like him. [laughing] If you’re out there reading this, we dig you, you’re our best fan, we love you!

I think that’s a testament to how engaging these games are. You can’t spend $15,000 on yourself in the game. It’s impossible. So, what this person is doing, is he’s spending $15,000 to build his guild, distribute items, train people, build a virtual clubhouse, all that stuff.

That kind of money is possible when you’re dealing with an older demographic, right? That guy plays our golf game. Think about what a golf club membership costs, and when you think about that and you compare it to what he spent on our golf game, it’s not so crazy.

It’s still a lot, but at least you start to understand the numbers.

The MMO Gamer: I think we’re just about out of time, so was there anything else you would like to tell our readers before we go?

David Chang: Thanks for listening, and I hope you are able to check out our site, gamescampus.com, check out Shot Online for golf, MLB Dugout Heroes, our officially licensed baseball game for baseball, Cue Online for pool, and Asda Story for our MMORPG.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, well thank you very much for joining us. We appreciate it and I hope we can do it again some time.

David Chang: Great, thank you.Steve: And you also say you’re attracting an ol…