Budget
A budget is a tool that is very important to have in business. Because it can provide you a game plan not only long-term business operations but also day to day operations. If the budget is properly used then it can help businesses meet their goals, help it so it becomes much more profitable, and give it an advantage for when getting through the tough financial times. Usually it's easy to lose sight of where the company is making most of it's money from, during the chaos of day to day operations. So a well structured budget can point out what part of the business is producing the money and which one uses it , and this forces the operation to consider whether it needs dropping some parts of the business, or to expand the others. It also derives the number of cash that will be spun off or which of it will be needed to support the operations. This information is used by the treasurer so that they can plan for the companies need of funding.
Variable and Fixed Costs
Variable costs are the expenses that either rises or falls depending on the level of a companies sales. Variable cost is one of costs that make up the total cost with the other one being the fixed cost. An example is if you were to develop an app for phones the variable costs would vary with how much work would have to be done. While in development, an important varying charges are the price of the outside app designer, which can differ from $70 to as much as $300 other examples variable costs in business include raw materials, hourly production wages, sales commissions, inventory, packaging supplies and the cost for shipping. While variable cost increases and decreases with the sales the fixed costs almost never changes over a specified time frame so it doesn't matter whether how little or how much development on the product is done. The two types of fixed expenses is one for the price of renting a workplace for the time interval of the phone app development and two when buying MacBooks to help with the growth of your business other examples can be insurance, dues and subscriptions, equipment leases, payments on loans depreciation, management salaries and advertising.
Break-even Point
In business the break-even point is as the name suggests, it is a point in the level of sales where you neither make make or lose money. If you were to calculate the break-even point you would need to find out the point in which the sales revenue covers the total cost which is the variable and fixed costs combined together. For example if a bookshop had fixed costs of £5,000 a week and they buy books from publishers for an average of £5 for each of the books and sell them for an average price of £10 each how many books would they need to sell to reach the break even point? so here's how you work it out. For each of the books sold the bookshop takes in £5 more of revenue, than it pays out in variable cost:
Monitoring
Monitoring is as the name suggests, so once you have set up your budget you compare it to the confirmed figures every month so that you can identify any sort of difference and to determine what those differences are.
Regular monitoring of expenditure is an important thing because it's not just to verify expenditure against target but also to identify the ever changing patterns or conditions that need to be corrected.
One of the most famous arcade games which helped video games gain momentum in the late 1970'2 was a game called space invaders which was released in 1978 which also caused a coin shortage because of the arcades needing coins to operate. "After the first few months following its release in Japan, the game became very popular. Specialty arcades opened with nothing but Space Invaders cabinets, and by the end of 1978, Taito had installed over 100,000 machines and grossed over $600 million in Japan alone."
From the 80's to the 00's is when the video game consoles have been widely distributed and have become more popular, the most popular brands then were Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo which had released very popular game which you will only be able to play if you had the device made for it. The first generation device for Nintendo was the Color TV-Game which was only sold in Japan and sold three million units just for the first four models which means that it was 1 million unit for each of the first two models. The Color TV-Game series had the highest sales figures for the first generation of video game consoles. The three console manufacturers became dominant then because Sega pulled out of hardware manufacturing in 2001.
From the 00's till present day there will eventually be no more physical goods because the amount of content that are being digitally distributed are increasing. It is very efficient cost wise for the game publishers because there would be no need to manufacture, transport, and physically distribute the game content on disk. This method also opens up the market because gamer's are connecting more online both the developers and the publishers can watch the patterns that appear and then respond to those patterns and use it to their advantage to create a better game. This also kind of makes the gamer a part of the development team without them realizing it. Contents that are user-generated will allow the games to be developed organically. Today digital distribution has become unexceptional which triggered onlive.com to start offering cloud gaming which did not need a console but their service has been discontinued as of April 30 2015 because of Sony acquiring Onlive's patents.
There are online games known as MMO's which is the acronym for Massively Multiplayer Online games. Most of these games are free to play via the internet but some MMO games will require you to pay monthly to be able to actually play them, an example is World of Warcraft though there are games where it's free to play but your only limited to a small amount of interactivity with the games environment so a subscription will allow you to explore and gain more from the game's environment a good example for this is TERA. There are also games where you can pay once to get the full access and you won't have to pay any further expenses like how some games ask for monthly pay thought they ask you to pay upfront once other ways they gain money is if you want to buy other contents within the game itself like items and other assets to help your character. One common method companies use is to get gamer's to buy in game money with real money this is widely common in social media games like Farmville in Facebook, these ingame money's usually offer bundles like if you buy 100,000 gold you get other things with it.
Market and Industry Trends
In the games industry one of the most important trends that has being going around the games industry is the supremacy of powerful brands which ranged from phone apps to large budget console games like Grand Theft Auto V which took the total cost of 137 million dollars to develop and 128 million for the marketing having the total cost of 265 million dollars. Publishers and developers look for strong brands and companies that have the legs to support their business.
In the year 2014 going into 2015 game have been topping the gross chart on the marketplace for apps like Apple's app store and Google Play.
For both App store and Google Play games have brought in the most income compare to the other apps belonging to the other categories and according to a blog from a site called App Annie, a huge amount of Google Play's worldwide revenue was made because of gaming apps. From july to september 2014, this trend decided to continue and remain as the top grossing category in app which led participated to the growth of games' share in the overall proceeds on Google Play. The highest gross pay happened in two countries which were The United States and South Korea where games were accounted for most of the income on the platform.
The information becomes much more evident when you look at the chart for the best of 2014 which was released by Apple and out of the top 10 grossing apps throughout 2014, 9 of them were games with 1 being the only non-gaming app. And Macquarie Research revealed that in 2014 gaming apps will bring in an estimated 75% of income to the on the App Store.
As an average two of the best selling games were earning more than 1 million dollars on a daily basis on the App Store on october 0f 2014. The number 1 top grossing game was called Clash of Clans which was developed by a company named Supercell and the game had an average daily income of $1,387,620 and Candy Crush Saga developed by the company King came in second on the top grossing games with their average daily income of $1,097,578. In 2015 King's first quarter 2015 continued to demonstrate the strength of their franchise by having another one of their other games in the top 10 grossing apps, which is Candy Crush Soda Saga being ranked 9 from the top 10 and having an estimated daily revenue of $169,219 and a number of 22,729 estimated installments per day.
Intellectual Property (IP)
Intellectual Property is a term that refers to a number of well defined types of Creations of the Mind of which they are granted a set of rights that are exclusive and is well recognized which also corresponds to the fields of law. So having an idea or an invention knowing and understanding your intellectual property and how to exploit this is important. There are four main types to this which include Patents, Trademarks, copyright and registered designs.
Licensed Franchised IP
Is to give the right or the privilege. The flexibility of licensing depends completely on how big the IP and the licensor is, Traditionally contents like the storyline, marks, logos, characters and settings has the rights of approval from the licensor. An example for games would be batman because the idea was taken from a comic/film meaning that the idea for the game wasn't original, batman has been successful only because everyone already knew who the character was because he was famous and well known through films and comic books so of course people would buy the games because they know and like the character and because the games were so successful they made more and more games about him.
Serialised Original IP
Original IP games are created fro scratch although it is often inspired by other copyrighted works which is then used to build into a series. An example of a serialised original ip game is Sonic the Hedgehog the developer of the game was Yuji Naka but the developer of the character was Naoto Oshima. The one that designed the levels was Nirokazu Yashuraha. All of the Sonic the Hedgehog titles were created by the 'sonic team'. Because the idea of the game and the characters is originally theirs they have the rights to the game and it's contents.
Sources
http://www.accountingtools.com/questions-and-answers/what-are-the-advantages-of-budgeting.html
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-fixed-and-variable-costs-of-developing-a-mobile-application-i-e-an-iPhone-iPad-app
http://www.inc.com/encyclopedia/fixed-and-variable-expenses.html
http://businesscasestudies.co.uk/business-theory/finance/fixed-variable-costs-and-break-even.html#axzz3zwddsfll
http://www.12manage.com/images/picture_break_even_chart.gif
http://uparrowconsulting.com/improve-site-performance-seo/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/media/wallpapers/other?view=story-of-wow-warcraft3
https://www.playonlinux.com/en/comments-1034.html
http://neonretroarcade.com/games.html
http://westendrepairs.co.uk/other-items-we-repair/game-consoles-repair/
http://blog.abt.com/2012/10/antique-to-abt-ique-is-looking-for-video-games/
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/IevgenLeonov/20141230/233356/Trends_and_next_steps_for_mobile_games_industry_in_2015.php
http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/14/candy-crush-saga-maker-king-beats-wall-streets-expectations/
http://www.bl.uk/business-and-ip-centre/articles/what-is-intellectual-property
http://www.slideshare.net/stephlizahawkins123/serialised-original-ip-games
http://www.vectortemplates.com/raster-batman.php
http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2015/12/analyzing-comics-101-rhetorical-framing/
A budget is a tool that is very important to have in business. Because it can provide you a game plan not only long-term business operations but also day to day operations. If the budget is properly used then it can help businesses meet their goals, help it so it becomes much more profitable, and give it an advantage for when getting through the tough financial times. Usually it's easy to lose sight of where the company is making most of it's money from, during the chaos of day to day operations. So a well structured budget can point out what part of the business is producing the money and which one uses it , and this forces the operation to consider whether it needs dropping some parts of the business, or to expand the others. It also derives the number of cash that will be spun off or which of it will be needed to support the operations. This information is used by the treasurer so that they can plan for the companies need of funding.
Variable and Fixed Costs
Variable costs are the expenses that either rises or falls depending on the level of a companies sales. Variable cost is one of costs that make up the total cost with the other one being the fixed cost. An example is if you were to develop an app for phones the variable costs would vary with how much work would have to be done. While in development, an important varying charges are the price of the outside app designer, which can differ from $70 to as much as $300 other examples variable costs in business include raw materials, hourly production wages, sales commissions, inventory, packaging supplies and the cost for shipping. While variable cost increases and decreases with the sales the fixed costs almost never changes over a specified time frame so it doesn't matter whether how little or how much development on the product is done. The two types of fixed expenses is one for the price of renting a workplace for the time interval of the phone app development and two when buying MacBooks to help with the growth of your business other examples can be insurance, dues and subscriptions, equipment leases, payments on loans depreciation, management salaries and advertising.
Break-even Point
In business the break-even point is as the name suggests, it is a point in the level of sales where you neither make make or lose money. If you were to calculate the break-even point you would need to find out the point in which the sales revenue covers the total cost which is the variable and fixed costs combined together. For example if a bookshop had fixed costs of £5,000 a week and they buy books from publishers for an average of £5 for each of the books and sell them for an average price of £10 each how many books would they need to sell to reach the break even point? so here's how you work it out. For each of the books sold the bookshop takes in £5 more of revenue, than it pays out in variable cost:
The term contribution is used to describe the difference between the sales revenue for each item and variable cost for each item. That's because for each £5 it's contributing £5 to pay off the fixed costs of £5,000. This means that the bookshop will need to sell 1,000 books per week. the image below shows how the answer is made.
Monitoring is as the name suggests, so once you have set up your budget you compare it to the confirmed figures every month so that you can identify any sort of difference and to determine what those differences are.
Regular monitoring of expenditure is an important thing because it's not just to verify expenditure against target but also to identify the ever changing patterns or conditions that need to be corrected.
Business Models
Coins
From the 70's to the 80's they get from the coins used for arcades because to be able to play on an arcade you would have to use coins as a sort of fuel, each arcades require different amounts of coins to work.
One of the most famous arcade games which helped video games gain momentum in the late 1970'2 was a game called space invaders which was released in 1978 which also caused a coin shortage because of the arcades needing coins to operate. "After the first few months following its release in Japan, the game became very popular. Specialty arcades opened with nothing but Space Invaders cabinets, and by the end of 1978, Taito had installed over 100,000 machines and grossed over $600 million in Japan alone."
Consoles
From the 80's to the 00's is when the video game consoles have been widely distributed and have become more popular, the most popular brands then were Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo which had released very popular game which you will only be able to play if you had the device made for it. The first generation device for Nintendo was the Color TV-Game which was only sold in Japan and sold three million units just for the first four models which means that it was 1 million unit for each of the first two models. The Color TV-Game series had the highest sales figures for the first generation of video game consoles. The three console manufacturers became dominant then because Sega pulled out of hardware manufacturing in 2001.
Digital Distribution
From the 00's till present day there will eventually be no more physical goods because the amount of content that are being digitally distributed are increasing. It is very efficient cost wise for the game publishers because there would be no need to manufacture, transport, and physically distribute the game content on disk. This method also opens up the market because gamer's are connecting more online both the developers and the publishers can watch the patterns that appear and then respond to those patterns and use it to their advantage to create a better game. This also kind of makes the gamer a part of the development team without them realizing it. Contents that are user-generated will allow the games to be developed organically. Today digital distribution has become unexceptional which triggered onlive.com to start offering cloud gaming which did not need a console but their service has been discontinued as of April 30 2015 because of Sony acquiring Onlive's patents. 
There are online games known as MMO's which is the acronym for Massively Multiplayer Online games. Most of these games are free to play via the internet but some MMO games will require you to pay monthly to be able to actually play them, an example is World of Warcraft though there are games where it's free to play but your only limited to a small amount of interactivity with the games environment so a subscription will allow you to explore and gain more from the game's environment a good example for this is TERA. There are also games where you can pay once to get the full access and you won't have to pay any further expenses like how some games ask for monthly pay thought they ask you to pay upfront once other ways they gain money is if you want to buy other contents within the game itself like items and other assets to help your character. One common method companies use is to get gamer's to buy in game money with real money this is widely common in social media games like Farmville in Facebook, these ingame money's usually offer bundles like if you buy 100,000 gold you get other things with it.Market and Industry Trends
In the games industry one of the most important trends that has being going around the games industry is the supremacy of powerful brands which ranged from phone apps to large budget console games like Grand Theft Auto V which took the total cost of 137 million dollars to develop and 128 million for the marketing having the total cost of 265 million dollars. Publishers and developers look for strong brands and companies that have the legs to support their business.
In the year 2014 going into 2015 game have been topping the gross chart on the marketplace for apps like Apple's app store and Google Play.
For both App store and Google Play games have brought in the most income compare to the other apps belonging to the other categories and according to a blog from a site called App Annie, a huge amount of Google Play's worldwide revenue was made because of gaming apps. From july to september 2014, this trend decided to continue and remain as the top grossing category in app which led participated to the growth of games' share in the overall proceeds on Google Play. The highest gross pay happened in two countries which were The United States and South Korea where games were accounted for most of the income on the platform.
The information becomes much more evident when you look at the chart for the best of 2014 which was released by Apple and out of the top 10 grossing apps throughout 2014, 9 of them were games with 1 being the only non-gaming app. And Macquarie Research revealed that in 2014 gaming apps will bring in an estimated 75% of income to the on the App Store.
As an average two of the best selling games were earning more than 1 million dollars on a daily basis on the App Store on october 0f 2014. The number 1 top grossing game was called Clash of Clans which was developed by a company named Supercell and the game had an average daily income of $1,387,620 and Candy Crush Saga developed by the company King came in second on the top grossing games with their average daily income of $1,097,578. In 2015 King's first quarter 2015 continued to demonstrate the strength of their franchise by having another one of their other games in the top 10 grossing apps, which is Candy Crush Soda Saga being ranked 9 from the top 10 and having an estimated daily revenue of $169,219 and a number of 22,729 estimated installments per day.Intellectual Property (IP)
Intellectual Property is a term that refers to a number of well defined types of Creations of the Mind of which they are granted a set of rights that are exclusive and is well recognized which also corresponds to the fields of law. So having an idea or an invention knowing and understanding your intellectual property and how to exploit this is important. There are four main types to this which include Patents, Trademarks, copyright and registered designs.
Licensed Franchised IP
Is to give the right or the privilege. The flexibility of licensing depends completely on how big the IP and the licensor is, Traditionally contents like the storyline, marks, logos, characters and settings has the rights of approval from the licensor. An example for games would be batman because the idea was taken from a comic/film meaning that the idea for the game wasn't original, batman has been successful only because everyone already knew who the character was because he was famous and well known through films and comic books so of course people would buy the games because they know and like the character and because the games were so successful they made more and more games about him. Serialised Original IP
Original IP games are created fro scratch although it is often inspired by other copyrighted works which is then used to build into a series. An example of a serialised original ip game is Sonic the Hedgehog the developer of the game was Yuji Naka but the developer of the character was Naoto Oshima. The one that designed the levels was Nirokazu Yashuraha. All of the Sonic the Hedgehog titles were created by the 'sonic team'. Because the idea of the game and the characters is originally theirs they have the rights to the game and it's contents. http://www.accountingtools.com/questions-and-answers/what-are-the-advantages-of-budgeting.html
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-fixed-and-variable-costs-of-developing-a-mobile-application-i-e-an-iPhone-iPad-app
http://www.inc.com/encyclopedia/fixed-and-variable-expenses.html
http://businesscasestudies.co.uk/business-theory/finance/fixed-variable-costs-and-break-even.html#axzz3zwddsfll
http://www.12manage.com/images/picture_break_even_chart.gif
http://uparrowconsulting.com/improve-site-performance-seo/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/media/wallpapers/other?view=story-of-wow-warcraft3
https://www.playonlinux.com/en/comments-1034.html
http://neonretroarcade.com/games.html
http://westendrepairs.co.uk/other-items-we-repair/game-consoles-repair/
http://blog.abt.com/2012/10/antique-to-abt-ique-is-looking-for-video-games/
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/IevgenLeonov/20141230/233356/Trends_and_next_steps_for_mobile_games_industry_in_2015.php
http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/14/candy-crush-saga-maker-king-beats-wall-streets-expectations/
http://www.bl.uk/business-and-ip-centre/articles/what-is-intellectual-property
http://www.slideshare.net/stephlizahawkins123/serialised-original-ip-games
http://www.vectortemplates.com/raster-batman.php
http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2015/12/analyzing-comics-101-rhetorical-framing/