The website is free due to advertising sponsorships. Players can also sign up for Club Pogo, a subscription service that includes premium benefits and does not include advertisements. Games are played in a browser with the Java-plugin or Flash. Games load in a "room" allowing other players to join and chat.
Pogo also offers downloadable games, often "deluxe" or "to go" versions of already-released games, which can be bought and played while offline. Some of these downloadable games include chat and tokens, similar to the original games. Since 2006, Pogo.com has consistently been a top-10 Internet site for U.S. visitors when measured by time spent online.
Optigon Interactive launched a beta of the "Total Entertainment Network" in 1994. The T.E. Network, Inc, which became Pogo.com was created in 1995 from the merger of two predecessor companies, Optigon Interactive (founded by Daniel Goldman and Janice Linden-Reed) and Outland (founded by Dave King, Bill Lipa, and Alex Beltramo), in conjunction with investment from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led by partner Vinod Khosla. The original grand vision of the company was to become a hip, young version of CompuServe - a dial-up service for the MTV generation. Optigon had already launched a beta dial-in service along these lines with some simple games but also with other content. Much of the early hiring was therefore focused on editorial staff for content such as comics and music designed to appeal to that demographic and this was reflected in the grandiose name "Total Entertainment Network." The first major strategic change to come from the merger was not the decision to focus on games exclusively or even low latency games but rather the decision to abandon the dial-in model which was so successful for AOL and instead to create an internet-based service available to anyone with a TCP/IP connection. This was a dramatic step to take given that Windows95 was just about to be introduced which would have built-in support for IP as opposed to earlier Microsoft operating systems where you had to get and install your own add-on IP stack and also given that the vast majority of "internet" access at the time was still via AOL.
T.E. Network's first major service was a newly designed version of the Total Entertainment Network (TEN), which it launched in 1996. While the brand remained the same, the feature set was a subset of Optigon's version of TEN, with the addition of features related to low latency game play. T.E. Network entered additional partnerships with major game developers, and offered gamers a way to play their favorite games with other people across the country. TEN was an immediate success among the hardcore gaming community. The service's initial flagship game was Duke Nukem, and SSI's DarkSun RPG found a solid following on TEN. Ultimately the most popular title would be NASCAR Racing Online, with peak simultaneous usage of about 1700 people.
After the success of Blizzard's free Battle.net service for Diablo and their claim that offering online play as a feature of the game boosted retail sales by 10%, PC game publishers started following Blizzard's lead and offering free online game play and/or building matchmaking functions directly into the game (e.g. Quake II). This undermined the subscription business model of TEN and its strategy to be the exclusive place to play popular PC games online. In addition, TEN's revenue model suffered from the fact that its largest direct competitor Mplayer.com decided to abandon paid subscriptions and moved to a purely ad-supported free play model. With the failure of TEN to reach a critical mass of players, the company needed a new business model and offering to survive.
The company found success with its second major service: a web offering that would become pogo.com. As Internet advertising was starting to gain traction, the company decided to focus on easy-to-access and easy-to-play browser-based games that would appeal to a broad audience and attract enough unique users to drive an advertising-based business model. The corporate strategy shifted from acquiring exclusive game content to securing exclusive distribution relationship, while the client platform changed from a Windows executable to a browser-based java applet. Excite was their first partner. T.E. Network acquired Michael Riccio's WebDeck service, which offered Java-based versions of Euchre, Spades, and Hearts that ran in the popular web browsers circa 1998, to accelerate this transition.
Pogo also offers downloadable games, often "deluxe" or "to go" versions of already-released games, which can be bought and played while offline. Some of these downloadable games include chat and tokens, similar to the original games. Since 2006, Pogo.com has consistently been a top-10 Internet site for U.S. visitors when measured by time spent online.
Optigon Interactive launched a beta of the "Total Entertainment Network" in 1994. The T.E. Network, Inc, which became Pogo.com was created in 1995 from the merger of two predecessor companies, Optigon Interactive (founded by Daniel Goldman and Janice Linden-Reed) and Outland (founded by Dave King, Bill Lipa, and Alex Beltramo), in conjunction with investment from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led by partner Vinod Khosla. The original grand vision of the company was to become a hip, young version of CompuServe - a dial-up service for the MTV generation. Optigon had already launched a beta dial-in service along these lines with some simple games but also with other content. Much of the early hiring was therefore focused on editorial staff for content such as comics and music designed to appeal to that demographic and this was reflected in the grandiose name "Total Entertainment Network." The first major strategic change to come from the merger was not the decision to focus on games exclusively or even low latency games but rather the decision to abandon the dial-in model which was so successful for AOL and instead to create an internet-based service available to anyone with a TCP/IP connection. This was a dramatic step to take given that Windows95 was just about to be introduced which would have built-in support for IP as opposed to earlier Microsoft operating systems where you had to get and install your own add-on IP stack and also given that the vast majority of "internet" access at the time was still via AOL.
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The company found success with its second major service: a web offering that would become pogo.com. As Internet advertising was starting to gain traction, the company decided to focus on easy-to-access and easy-to-play browser-based games that would appeal to a broad audience and attract enough unique users to drive an advertising-based business model. The corporate strategy shifted from acquiring exclusive game content to securing exclusive distribution relationship, while the client platform changed from a Windows executable to a browser-based java applet. Excite was their first partner. T.E. Network acquired Michael Riccio's WebDeck service, which offered Java-based versions of Euchre, Spades, and Hearts that ran in the popular web browsers circa 1998, to accelerate this transition.
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