He sold his company to Electronic Arts for $275 million last year, as the social gaming craze began looking like the most promising game in town. Now here are Playfish CEO Kristian Segerstråle’s views on the sector, given to Glasshouse this month…
— More social gaming consolidation this year: “I think absolutely we’ll see consolidation. The franchises are going to start mattering – the minute that starts happening, it drives consolidation. The industry is immature, we are going to see consolidation both inside the industry and also broader media companies looking at social gaming.”
— Mobile’s a slow burner: “I wouldn’t hold my breath” – the mobile sector is too slow due to its structure.
— It’s not all about farms and pets: “I wouldn’t go ahead and ‘hey, I’m going to make this farm game and it’s going to be better than FarmVille’ – that’s going to be difficult. But there are very significant opportunities out there, entirely untapped markets.”
— London doesn’t have the right talent: “What we’ve found really challenging in London has been that consumer internet skillset. There’s game skills in abundance, but I’m envious of my Silicon Valley friends for their access to consumer internet talent. London has such a massive opportunity to become a key hub for consumer internet businesses – for us to become that, we need to find a way to build that skillset … both the technical skillset as well as the product management skillset.”
See Jeremy Liew’s recent piece on why the economics of social gaming are so attractive to investors.
Here’s the 25-minute Segerstråle video…