1 vs 100: Video games adopt a fading business model from television

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Early last year, a team of executives and video game developers from Microsoft came to L.A. for meetings with production companies like FremantleMedia, Mark Burnett Productions and Endemol. On the face of it, the meetings were as standard as could be: Microsoft wanted to license a game show to turn into a video game.

Usually that would call for a very simple deal: Microsoft pays an advance of a few million dollars and then gives the licensor royalties on the game sales.

But Microsoft was in town hoping to create a very different type of game, which it ultimately did with a property from Endemol. As described in a story in today’s Times Calendar section, 1 vs 100 isn’t the kind of video game you purchase at Best Buy for $50 or $60 and then play at home, at your leisure, in order to live out your fantasies as a TV star who wins big bucks.

It’s a free, advertiser-supported, live event that hundreds of thousands of people can play simultaneously twice a week during a 13-week season. Essentially, it’s a video game that’s borrowing a business model from television -- the same one that’s currently being eroded by DVRs and Hulu.

That required a very different sales pitch from the Microsoft team, as game director Manuel Bronstein recalled: Endemol ‘had licensed a lot left and right. But now we wanted to make sure they understood we were trying to build something programmatic and scheduled that a lot of people would play together. Of course the reality is that we were speaking their language.’

Microsoft ended up talking Endemol’s language on deal terms as well. Though neither company would talk about the details of their partnership, a person familiar with the agreement confirmed that Endemol gets a cut of the revenue from advertising Microsoft sells in 1 vs 100 on top of a basic licensing fee, just like the company typically gets when it distributes one of its shows on the air.

Now Microsoft has an entirely new type of game on its Xbox 360 video game console. And if the initial 13-week run in the U.S. and Canada, along with pending launches in the U.K., France and Germany, is a success, 1 vs 100 probably won’t be the only live, scheduled, ad-supported video game on the Xbox or its competitors.

To find out more about how 1 vs 100 works, what it’s like to play, and how it’s changing the face of video games and TV, check out today’s story in The Times.

-- Ben Fritz