ctivision Blizzard Inc.’s top rival—Northern California’s Electronic Arts Inc.—is going after the online game market in a big way, according to a recent report.
Online games for PCs are a big part of the company’s strategy, Electronic Arts Games Label President Frank Gibeau told games blog Gamasutra.
“The user base is gigantic,” Gibeau said. “PC retail may be a big problem, but PC downloads are awesome. The margins are much better.”
It’s “conceivable (online games) will become our biggest platform,” he said.
EA is testing the waters with an upcoming release of its first massively multiplayer online role-playing game, “Star Wars: The Old Republic.”
The game, which is being developed by Canada’s BioWare Corp. and published by EA, is due out this year.
“Star Wars” treads into territory dominated by Irvine’s Blizzard Entertainment Inc., the biggest player in online games and part of Santa Monica-based Activision Blizzard, itself part of France’s Vivendi SA.
EA’s turf has been traditional console games, which account for nearly three-quarters of its $3.5 billion in yearly revenue.
The console game business has been waning.
Last month, Activision pulled the plug on its “Guitar Hero” games as well as the associated “DJ Hero” and a “Tony Hawk” line of skateboarding console games.
Blizzard, a big money-maker for Activision, accounts for about $1.6 billion of Activision’s $4.8 billion in yearly sales.
In 2010, Blizzard’s “StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty” and “World of Warcraft: Cataclysm” were the best-selling PC games, according to data from Port Washington, N.Y.-based market researcher NPD Group Inc.
Those two games alone—which shattered one-day sales records—made up 14% of all PC game sales last year, the data showed.
Blizzard is the county’s biggest software maker.
In other Blizzard news, the company’s three cofounders marked the company’s 20th anniversary by ringing the Nasdaq closing bell in New York’s Times Square earlier this month.
Cofounders Mike Morhaime, Frank Pearce and Allen Adham and Activision Blizzard Chief Operating Officer Thomas Tippl were on hand.
Morhaime is Blizzard’s chief executive. Pearce is executive vice president of product development. Adham left the company some years back.
Web Polling Startup
Irvine-based startup WiseWindow Inc. is expecting to close on its first round of funding from a mixture of venture and private equity investors in the coming weeks.
The company has patents on a technology that collects opinions from around the Web by culling blog postings, tweets, comments, reviews and message board posts on a particular topic, product or industry.
Its number-crunching algorithms use the data collected to make predictions about future behaviors, sales and market share.
“Our computers go to publicly available comments on the Web and use them to forecast what consumers intend to do,” said Marshall Toplansky, president of WiseWindow. “The idea that you can actually use opinions that people are expressing online for mainstream business forecasting and decisions is an entirely new concept.”
WiseWindow helped Los Angeles-based Belkin International Inc., a maker of accessories for consumer gadgets, decide what kind of products to introduce for the launch of Apple Inc.’s iPad.
The company has a variety of customers, including automakers, airlines, healthcare companies, music labels, and consumer electronics manufacturers.
Some include WellPoint Inc., Star Alliance, Kia Motors America Inc., the Consumer Electronics Association and Walt Disney Co.’s ABC.
WiseWindow also partners with a number of big market researchers, which use its tools and add their insights to the data.
It’s expecting raise some $12 million, according to Toplansky.
WiseWindow’s technology was developed by Rajiv Dulepet, the company’s technology chief.
He patented the technology in 2007.
Dulepet is a self-proclaimed political junkie.
For the 2010 election, he and WiseWindow created the “election oracle” in conjunction with news website The Daily Beast.
The application scanned 40,000 social media sites and picked up millions of daily comments. Its predictions outperformed every human poll, the company said.
WiseWindow was started in 2009 with a small $3.6 million angel round from Chief Executive Sid Mohasseb.
Mohasseb is a past president of the Tech Coast Angels, a loose coalition of investors in Southern California.
More Broadcom
A quick follow-up to last week’s column, in which I reported that Broadcom Corp. engineer Mehdi Hatamian helped advise some Fountain Valley high school kids who were working to build a helicopter out of paper and wood.
Hatamian, Broadcom’s vice president of engineering for digital signal processor microelectronics, builds large-scale, remote control helicopter models for kicks.
The students received a first place gold medal award on the helicopter at a local edition of the Science Olympiad earlier this month.
They placed seventh place overall in the county.
