October 14, 1999
Web posted at: 4:26 p.m. EDT (2026 GMT)

In this story: Killer numbers without 'killing' Mass market appeals to advertisers RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Robin Lloyd
CNN Interactive Senior Writer

(CNN) -- It's for the cash, not the kids, that a handful of Web sites recently dedicated themselves not to splatterfests like Quake II and Unreal but to gentle, wholesome games like Hearts, backgammon and bingo.

The trend's best marker may be a recent turnabout by the former Total Entertainment Network, which abandoned its well-known name in the hard-core gaming market for an entirely new business plan and service called pogo.com which offers "casual, family-oriented" games.

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Pogo reports it has registered 4 million members since it first partnered with Excite 17 months ago. Fourteen more partners and 16 months later, pogo.com launched its own Web site.

"We had spent a couple of years and a lot of money on hardcore and determined it just wasn't growing quickly enough to support a public company, which is something we hope to be," said Garth Chouteau, pogo.com spokesman.

"Whereas the family space was growing very quickly," he said.

The move to casual gaming is being driven by the penetration of the Internet, with millions more people going online each month as computer prices drop and online service sign-ups come packaged with low-cost computers.

It takes a lot less memory to play cribbage than Kingpin.

Instead of subscriptions or pay-per-play fees, the new sites make money through advertising to a general audience.

The stickiness factor is through the roof -- the average pogo.com user spends 45 minutes at the site and users range from pimply teenagers to stay-at-home moms to semi-retired 50-somethings, Chouteau said.

"Basically what we're talking about is content that appeals to middle America and TEN found that to be a much more potential area for them than the hardcore gaming thing," said Jeremy Schwartz, who analyzes consumer technology for Forrester Research.

Killer numbers without 'killing'

TEN's abandonment of hardcore gaming probably appeals to media violence critics, but the move was purely economic, Chouteau says.

The numbers tell it all.

Segasoft's Heat.net, a hardcore site which relies on subscription fees, has about 2 million registered users and signs up 5,000 new users a day. By contrast, pogo.com has about 4 million registered users in less time and signs up about 14,000 new users daily, Schwartz said.

Of the online audience in the United States, 19 percent of households play games regularly, per a Forrester survey. Other surveys put the figure higher and show that women are nearly half the players.

"It's a much broader age demographic, it's very democratic as far as gender goes and it certainly has taken over the online game market from the hardcore gamers," Schwartz said.

Pogo.com's competitors include Gamesville.com with some 2 million members, Uproar.com with 3.5 million and Yahoo!'s games site, which tops them all, Schwartz said.

Between 8,000 and 15,000 members play at any given time, says pogo.com President Erick Hachenburg. Another competitor, Microsoft Gaming Zone, attracts an audience of comparable size.

Yahoo! has a policy of withholding visitation numbers, but it had more than 21,000 players currently online at 4 p.m. EDT on Thursday.

Mass market appeals to advertisers

The trend toward mass-market appeal for Internet gaming, rather than to teenage boys and young men, changes the face of online advertising opportunities, Schwartz said.

"By eliminating the lost vestige of their hardcore gaming route they've essentially opened themselves up to a wider group of advertisers," Schwartz said.

Advertisers like Proctor and Gamble suddenly are interested, he said.

"The kind of games that Pogo has don't exploit women in any way, they don't have any violent thing, they don't have any of those potentially negative connotations," Schwartz said.

Online ratings companies have ranked pogo.com as the stickiest networked site on the Web, which means its partner figures are included, Chouteau said.

When playing games, users are more open to ads. "Advertisers are very keenly aware of that," he said.

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