Thoughts on the scalability of online gaming/platform companies

This post came as a very random thought after i have been hooked on watching this competition show online called Produce 101. Which is a product of Tencent , a company listed in hkex

Which sparked me to pen down some thoughts including the difference between online gaming/platform companies vs a traditional company that produces goods.


Cost

The fixed cost for traditional companies would usually be a factory, vehicles, machinery. Whereas these software companies would usually be electricity, the places where it houses it servers as well as the cost of running and maintaining these servers. The extra consumption of 1 person using an online game or service is definitely far lesser than a person purchasing goods from a traditional company. This is because the goods are likely to have far larger variable cost (example raw materials cost, cost of transporting the goods and storing them). Over more demand, there is definitely more cost savings to be found in the online companies.

This means that it is likely that these online based companies can have enhanced margins compared to a company that produces goods.

The downside to this risk will be that there is high set up cost involved and there will be needs for huge marketing to entice people to play the game and spend on it.

An example can be seen from the 2017 annual results of Ourgame (Hkex: 6899)

A quick computation of the gross profit margins indicated that surprisingly 2017 had better gross margins of 53.3% compared to 53% in 2016. However the huge decrease in revenue meant that this small improvement did not seem to matter at all and resulted in huge losses. Also we can see that the company is able to maintain solid margins despite a higher revenue(the point above)

Another point worth noting in this company will be the increase in selling and marketing expense. While it did not result in results improving this year, it will be interesting to see if this will result in the company's revenue to recover.


Fallen Legacy

Not sure if most of you remember the online games you played during your school days. For me it has to be Maplestory, i would always remember the loading screen displaying Asiasoft before it goes into the log in screen



Well do i play the game still? Nope
Does many people still play it? I guess the numbers have long ago peaked and ran into sharp decline ever since
Is the South East Asia game distributor still around? Yes, Asiasoft is still around
How has it been performing?


At the IPO Price of $12 in 2008, the company has paid out a total of 4.258 Baht worth of dividends
If one has held the shares since ipo and believe in the power of maplestory and friends, he would have lost roughly 50% of his investment.

Well Asiasoft has been unprofitable in 2014,2015,2016( was unable to read thai well and unable to sieve out previous years results). Its last dividend payment is also in November 2013, which adds up to the unprofitable story all together.

While i am not entirely sure what has led to the decline, a part of me would believe that people are switching to other games and the company as a whole has failed to retain current players and attract more.
Something beyond that will be they are unable to entice these players to spend on their games as well as the older days. These could have been all due to the advancement in technology and communications network. I remember broadband was such a privilege in the 2000s and Dota was still a game not well monetized. Now it has been monetized so well and definitely would have played some part in attracting people to play Dota 2 instead of Maplestory.

The food for thoughts i gathered here would be that 'Would this game be able to grow and attract more players?' 'Would the company be able to have new games to attract more players?' 'What is the method used to entice players to spend on it? Has it worked?'
I believe if one plays the game he would have a slight advantage over those that do not. But he will still have to answer the thoughts above as well.

Produce 101

Alright back to Produce 101, this competition allows for voting from viewers to decide 11 girls which will end up debuting as a girl group. Viewers can vote 1 time per day and purchase additional VIP Cards to increase the votes of those they support. A normal voting period for each round is probably about 10 days.




As you can see from the 1st pictures you can get 121 votes for buying 1 vip card and the person who receives ur vip card can vote 11 times as well

In the second picture you can see one of the girls(currently ranked 2nd) having 2.1 million votes in just 53 minutes of a day as the daily votes reset at 12am.

Given that 1 card of 121 votes is 18 yuan. About 17000 cards are purchased. Thats 64 000 dollars earned in just 53 minutes. The variable cost of these votes is possibly 0 or close to 0 as these are virtual items that do not have 'raw materials'. You just have fixed cost in running these servers.

Initially when the competition started i was really sceptical about whether the show will get people to vote and spend. However as the days gone on i realised that this show has pretty much turned out to be a success in generating revenue despite the huge cost involved in running the show. The 1st place had 40 million votes over a span of a week in one of the rounds.
At a conservative estimate if 30 million votes are obtained via purchasing of cards, roughly $930 000 Sgd is spent.

With regards to how this competition has brought in the revenue, i am very very amazed and impressed.

Quick Conclusion of my thoughts

-How online game/platform attract more players to play and pay as well as viewers to watch and pay is important and to me is 1 of the ways to see how well a company is run
- Games that used to be famous can lose popularity and result in the companies to be badly affected if they are unable to come up with new products that can replace these lost in revenue
- Good content is very important, just like how someone would not buy a rotten apple on display at the supermarket, one will not be willing to pay for the content/ spend money in the game or to support their idol (in the case of produce 101) if the content of the show/game is very bad and does not appeal to the potential spenders.