John Fan introduced his Facebook Application development company, Cardinal Blue Software, along with their headline app/game, Friend Stock, at Barcamp Shanghai 2009, while sharing some insights on Social Network Gaming and operating his development team in Taipei, Taiwan.
Observations shared by John and the audience:
- Online gaming revenues are heavily skewed, going beyond the 80/20 notion where 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your users. The numbers he’s seeing through his own app is described, half-jokingly, as 90/2.
- There’s a lot of good talent in Taiwan, but even if they are not all at Yahoo, the environment is dominated by Yahoo.
- With regards to making inroads into the mainland China market, John feels that Taiwanese online gaming companies really need to be in China and not try operating remotely from abroad in Taiwan.
- Another major issue for Taiwanese companies is suddenly finding their website and service completely blocked by China’s GFW simply due to some content on their websites. The ensuing outage would naturally severely impact the company’s service and growth.
- An audience member also astutely pointed out that apps or games hosted abroad tend to be much slower than those hosted domestically in China. The speed of an internet application or game has a big influence on whether Chinese netizens or gamers will use or not use, play or not play.
More CNR Barcamp Shanghai 2009 coverage here.
Nice try Johnny, but no cigar.