Going Casual with WildTangent CEO Alex St. John

Alex St. John is out to show there's nothing casual about making some coin with casual games. As co-founder and chief executive of WildTangent, St. John has made one of the more successful casual games companies in the industry. Prior to launching WildTangent, St. John helped create the DirectX technology at Microsoft, which revolutionized Windows multimedia. Now St. John wants to revolutionize the business of casual games. WildTangent recently announced its new micro-payment system, dubbed WildCoins, which allows customers to buy roles of virtual tokens and use them to play casual games within the WildTangent Games Network and features both in-house developed games and titles from leading publishers, such as Atari and PopCap.

Now WildTangent has added another arrow to its quiver - the company will preload its game console software on Toshiba PCs, enabling Toshiba notebook customers to download WildTangent's casual games and pay for them using WildCoins.

WildCoins goes live this summer, and Toshiba Games' Web portal is already up. St. John demonstrated WildCoins and Toshiba Games for TwitchGuru at E3 last week and explained how the two models will elevate WildTangent and casual games.

Rob Wright: What's the problem with the current casual games model?

St. John: Typically with casual games, you offer people free content until it gets to be around £10 in value, and then you start charging. We found that to be a significant challenge because only a small number of people are going to pay the full amount to own a game, and most people just aren't going to pay one or two dollars with their credit to play a casual game."

Rob Wright: What about subscription models?

St. John: Subscription models have problems, too. It caps the amount of revenue that you can make per person. And again, only a small percentage of people will pay for the subscription model. Think of it this way: would movie theatres have a subscription model where you pay a flat fee and get to see as many movie as you wanted? George Lucas would say no way because Star Wars would make much more money on its own. It's the same with casual games. Some people are willing to pay more for a certain title. So putting all games into a subscription model doesn't make sense because you're leaving money on the table.