Spil Games confirmed as largest casual games site
269% growth in the US helps portal to leap up from 5th place in global rankings
Spil Games, based in The Netherlands, has announced that according to data from comScore it has become the largest casual games portal by traffic in the world, seeing overall growth of 75 per cent worldwide across 2008.
It began the year in fifth place, but was helped by significant growth of almost 270 per cent in the US region to boost its position, something which chief commercial officer Sidney Mock puts down to the games themselves.
"First of all we focus on high-quality game content which is easy to access - we don't require registrations to start playing, which aligns with the needs of our users," he told GamesIndustry.biz. "Secondly our portals are targeted to specific segments, including family, tweens and girls.
"Last but not least we fully localise our portals in the countries where we operate which includes the game content, language and domain. From a company perspective we preserve our entrepreneurial spirit, build our global network in such a way which is very scalable and finally we are very well connected to our users to understand their (local) needs."
The company saw year-on-year traffic rising by 113 per cent in the UK, 52 per cent in France and 19 per cent in Germany, while global revenues jumped by 125 per cent.
"Right now casual games reach approximately 40 per cent of all people online according to ComScore Mediametrix which means playing online games is getting mainstream," Mock continued. "It's a great way for people to entertain themselves in an easy way with low entry barriers - no registration, play for free.
"Spil Games will continue to focus on generating game traffic in the future, with a primary focus on developing for multi-platforms such as computers via browsers, mobiles, handhelds, netbooks, et cetera - basically, any device with internet connectivity.
"Our aim is to quickly update our capabilities to enable quick infrastructure scaling and continue to find new partners to work with to help support our expansion across platforms."
More information on Spil's strategy can be found in the recent GamesIndustry.biz interview with the company's CEO, Peter Driessen.