MTVN: Serious Attitude Toward Casual Gaming
Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group to Invest $100M Over Next Two Years
By Multi Channel News Staff -- Multichannel News, 7/18/2007 2:49:00 PM
For MTV Networks’ Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group, there is going to be a lot more fun and gaming over the next couple of years.
In a keynote address at the Casual Connect gaming conference in Seattle, executive vice president of digital media Steve Youngwood said the group would invest $100 million over the next two years to the development, distribution and creation of casual gaming titles, sites and platforms.
The investment by the Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group -- which generates almost 1 billion game plays per month across a variety of platforms including Neopets, Nick.com, Nickjr.com, Shockwave, Nick Arcade and AddictingGames -- will manifest in 2008-09 primarily across seven properties:
• myNoggin: A subscription service where preschoolers can play educational games and parents can track their progress. It will launch this fall with Charter Communications, Cox Communications and Insight Communications. The ad-free service will also become available directly to consumers online in the fall through a subscription model.
• Nick.com/Nicktropolis multiplayer games and tournaments: Nick.com will expand upon its existing gaming franchise, New Game of the Week, giving it a multiplayer focus. The first new effort in this space is 3D Slimeball on Nick.com. In addition, multiplayer, cooperative gaming will become part of Nicktropolis, complementing the safe chat, virtual economy and item-trading capabilities on the site.
• Nick Gaming Club, a subscription offering slated to launch during the first quarter of 2008, will be a safe gaming environment featuring multiplayer games, 3-D avatars and community features. It will include games based on Nickelodeon properties, as well as others.
• Scheduled to launch early 2008, The-NGames.com will become the first major casual-gaming site to focus solely on teen girls. The-N.com -- which previously focused on social games for teen girls with games like“Slasher,”“Avatar Mall” and others -- will partner with AddictingGames to produce this new site.
• AddictingGames and AddictingWorlds: AddictingGames’ offerings will be expanded to include casual MMOGs with the introduction of AddictingWorlds, a way to introduce a variety of virtual worlds to the AddictingGames’ audience. AddictingGames already features a few virtual worlds on its site, having recently entered into a partnership with Habbo and through its extant relationship with sister site Neopets. In addition, increased emphasis will be placed on user-submitted games, including more prominent upload capabilities and game-making engines.
• Shockwave will becomethe games destination for families, with an increased focus this fall on the creation of innovative applications that are both fun for the user and an opportunity for prominent integrated advertising. The first new application to launch is Jigsaw Video.
• Neopets will be transformed into Neostudios, which will focus on developing new virtual-world gaming experiences online, while continuing to grow and evolve the existing ones. The first of these will launch at the end of 2008, with a goal to launch a new one in its second year.
“Across all of MTVN’s online sites, gaming is an important original genre and we are committed to delivering fresh content to our audiences in all of our demos,” Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group president Cyma Zarghami said in a prepared statement. “Particularly in the kids’ space, with more than 86% of kids 8-14 gaming online, we see great momentum for online casual gaming. This investment will not only benefit our audiences, but also our marketing and distribution partners.”
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