Few observers would consider much, if anything, about John Malone and his Liberty Media Corp. casual.
But the Douglas County media company has staked a claim in the online casual-games industry with its $195 million purchase of 51 percent of casual-game maker Fun Technologies.
Liberty Media executives want to capitalize on Liberty’s knowledge of primary players of those games – women who shop its QVC home-shopping network.
“It’s one of the spaces on the Web that is heavily utilized, and few large companies are benefiting from it,” Liberty spokesman John Orr said.
Casual games are described as video games that are easy to play and require less time to complete than their more-complex counterparts. Popular casual games include puzzle and card games such as solitaire, mah-jongg and Bejeweled, and arcade-style games like Luxor, Collapse and Tetris. They can be played online, downloaded, or purchased from a retail store.
According to a 2006 study by the International Game Developers Association, women ages 35 to 50 comprise the largest audience of casual games, although men and women of all ages play.
In terms of revenue, the casual-gaming industry grew from “almost nothing,” in 2002 to more than $600 million in 2004. “By 2008, industry experts anticipate that the market will surpass $2 billion in the U.S. alone,” the IDGA report states.
“There’s no QVC of casual games. There should be,” said Michael Zeisser, senior vice president for Liberty, in charge of the company’s gaming efforts. “We want to build the trusted brand in casual games.”
QVC is one of the key cable networks that Liberty has a controlling interest in. QVC showcases products that viewers can purchase over the phone or online.
“QVC has had to learn to create programming that gets consumers to engage and to participate. All of those things are very applicable to casual games,” Zeisser said. “In many ways this is a retail business.”
Fun Technologies, which Liberty invested in last November, has several websites, each appealing to a different casual gamer. Its leading sites are SkillJam.com and Fanball.com.
While Fanball.com targets fantasy-league enthusiasts, SkillJam specializes in games in which the winner is determined based on the skill of participants, rather than on chance.
SkillJam offers pay-per-play and subscription models. Players can enter tournaments and win cash prizes.
Gamers playing on Fun Technologies sites won’t see advertising for QVC or other Liberty assets, Zeisser said, although tournament winners may one day win gift certificates or merchandise from QVC.
“We have talked about some trials. It may be a very bad idea,” he said. “We don’t believe in synergies in the classic sense, forcing people to work together when there’s no consumer logic.”
Paul Jensen, president of Dallas-based casual-game maker MumboJumbo LLC., which developed Luxor, said Liberty’s interest in the casual-games sector is a positive sign.
“It helps brings professionalism and helps grow the industry through exposure and marketing it didn’t have in the past,” he said. “As people become aware of where casual games are, I see casual gaming being a big driver of the video-game industry,” he said.
He said the casual-games industry didn’t have much respect five or six years ago.
“Most sites didn’t realize that most of the people visiting their websites were women,” said Jensen, who is also the former president of SkillJam. “You brought in all the gamers that just didn’t like shooters or racing games.”
Fun Technologies, based in Toronto, appears to be just the first such company Liberty has set its sights on, Zeisser said as more deals are possible before the end of the year.
“We are constantly looking at acquisitions. We think we’re helping to build an industry,” he said. “We expect that consumers are going to play casual games for the next 30 to 50 years. We see ourselves in the first half-hour.”
Staff writer Kimberly S. Johnson can be reached at 303-954-1088 or kjohnson@denverpost.com.
