OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
The sale of the domain name Free.Games was reported on Wednesday. The domain was sold by WebQuest for $335,000.
The buyer is not yet known as the domain name is under whois privacy and nameservers have not been updated yet.
Some people wondered what the purchase price was.
So I did some digging and this is what I found.
The .Game extension, from then Rightside now Donuts,entered general availability on 21st of September 2016. The extension entered the Early Access Period (EAP) a week before that, on the 14th.
The domain was registered on the 12th of September. So what happened here?
The domain was most likely acquired by a direct deal between WebQuest and the Rightside registry.
The domain was registry reserved meaning that it wasn’t going to be available on the EAP anyway. These are some of the best domains that Donuts kept for direct deals.
This is what whois who on Free.Games on August 31st according to domaintools.com.
“This name is reserved by the Registry in accordance with ICANN Policy. This premium domain is available for purchase. If you would like to make an offer, please contact platinums@rightside.co.”
So if we consider that the first day of EAP costs about $12,000 in retail and that the domain has a low renewal rate of about $40 then we can only assume that this was at least a mid 5-figure purchase.
(Usually when paying a large sum upfront you can negotiate a better renewal price with the registry.)
.Games is not a very popular extension with only 17,115 domain registered according to Namestat.org.
There have been in total 8 sales of .games domains reported on Sold.Domains. Most were pretty cheap with the exception of video.games that was sold from the Rightside in 2017 for a reported $183,000. The buyer of video.games has not done anything with it yet.
Free.Games is now the highest sold New gTLD domain for 2019 according to Sold.Domains. See here the top 20 New gTLD sold domains of 2019.
Free.Games is ranked number 4 of the all time New gTLD sales.
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Russian tech giant Mail.ru rebranded their game-development branch as My.games last week. I think my.games was a premium-renewal domain. It might be related, and it might be not.
I explained on Namepros
Outside of the Sunrise process, .GAMES has also attracted more inbound interest in Premium and Platinum domains than any other Rightside extension prior to launch. Chad Wright, a well-known domain investor and owner of several games-related domains, has recognized the opportunity .GAMES presents to the casual, online gaming market. He recently purchased three .GAMES domains for an undisclosed six-figure sum: Free.GAMES, Shooting.GAMES, and Racing.GAMES. There’s a lot that Chad likes about .GAMES as a whole, too:
Archive from the Rightside blog https://web.archive.org/web/20170421034759/http://rightside.news/big-brands-already-interested-games
https://www.namepros.com/threads/free-games-changes-hands-for-big-bucks-in-the-years-biggest-non-com-sale-to-date.1139089/
Rightside announced that domain name investor Chad Wright purchased three .games domain names for an undisclosed six-figure sum: Free.games, Shooting.games, and Racing.games.
https://domainnamewire.com/2016/08/08/two-adult-live-domain-names-sell-280000/
And here is the source I gave people the actual Rightside blog archive as it’s no longer on the net.
Archive from the Rightside blog https://web.archive.org/web/20170421034759/http://rightside.news/big-brands-already-interested-games
Chad has many great names and many nice gaming gems. I’d be very surprised if he bought this for that amount….
Freegames.com was being pitched for 700k for months with a fully operating website on it …
Actually … more to this…
So cargames.com also links to freegames.com.
I know chad used to own cargames.com I thought freegames.com sold to another party though not a domain investor but a Netherlands based studio. However car games and freegames both link each other.
So I’m guessing it’s all the same owner which has a good chance of being Chad. The price tag I remain highly suspect of though.
Not sure why anyone that owns the full dot com would go nuts over the dot games. Better to let that build out and enjoy all that spillage traffic.
In any event there is more to this than what we are hearing.
If its free games, how would they get that dough back?
Ads?
I own myfree.games
What’s it worth?
Thanks
$0?
🤣
Thanks Konstantinos
I was going to not renew before this sale.
But what did you think free.games was worth before it sold?
Not $0. Not $335k. 5 figures.
I believe it is the highest new gTLD sale so far made by an investor (and not directly by the registry).
Congrats Chad!
By far…
Based on the current whois data and sales landers currently on the websites, it’s not clear this sale went through.