COLUMNIST
Gaming’s AOL moment is closer than you think
Several social gaming start-ups make tens of millions of dollars a year in pro?ts but if the traditional online gambling industry does not wake up, it could go from being the hunters to the hunted, argues Plumbee’s Raf Keustermans
By Raf Keustermans Co-founder and CEO of Plumbee
any have called it the game-changing moment of the ?rst dot.com wave: the moment in 2000 that AOL, then the new digital kid on the block, managed to acquire ‘old media’ giant Time Warner. While in the end the merger didn’t work out for either company, the main reason this deal was so important was because it changed the minds of many people, especially those from the ‘old, non-digital world’. They could not envisage a world where ‘new media’ would be bigger than proven, pro?table media, and where the internet would challenge print, radio and even television as the main channel for media consumption. They thought of themselves as the big boys, the potential acquirers of new, fast-growing web startups. But all of a sudden they realised they were no longer the hunters but the prey. The same might happen sooner than you think in egaming. Today the majority of operators look at the explosion of social and free-to-play games in the same way the old media world looked at new internet ventures a decade ago. Some feel that it makes sense to acquire a social games studio, or experiment with free-to-play games. Others believe it makes more sense from a marketing perspective (to build a brand in the US) or even as an incremental revenue stream. They still believe social start-ups are the prey and that traditional operators are the hunters, while online
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gambling is the norm and new free-toplay games are just part of the funne