Bunchball
April 26th, 2007, By Duncan Gough
I’ve chatted to Rajat from Bunchball a couple of times in the past, and I’ve always been impressed with his grasp of, in particular, social gaming, so it’s nice to see that there’s plenty of activity over on Bunchball.com. Even more so, given that they’ve survived the Techcrunch experience and, unlike a whole raft of companies who’ve been mentioned over there, they’ve evolved beyond their initial exposure and haven’t been afraid to change their direction if the business needed it.
At the moment there are two big sites in the in-browser casual games world – Kongregate and Bunchball. Whilst Kongregate are making great headway in getting developers on board and providing a real alternative to the big two of Miniclip and Pogo, Bunchball are attacking from the other side.
Other companies in the industry will provide you with a microsite – “http://games.yoursite.com,” and then ask you to drive traffic there so that they can monetize your audience by selling them downloadable games. We integrate directly into your site, where your users already are. [...] Integration is a snap, we give site owners a snippet of Javascript code to drop into any page on their site and they’re done.
Casual games, casual integration, and serious thinking about making Bunchball successful using a ’survival of the easiest’ approach to their business:
We quickly learned what a difficult proposition starting a destination site is. [..] We created an assortment of widgets and attempted to seed them out through various mechanisms and partnerships, but this effort also stalled out. It was the same problem of “selling” to consumers, which we still hadn’t cracked the code on, just in a different form. We also realized after some experimentation that there were no good revenue models. [..] But it was good that we had built the widget product, because companies saw that and started approaching us and asking if we could somehow integrate into their existing community and site offerings. This wasn’t an area that we had even been considering, but one that we jumped into with both feet, and that has proven to be very successful to date
And here’s the proof:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7102961185597569883&hl=en
Bunchball are definitely one to watch over the coming months…
« *This* closeBaby Hackers »
