Games for Social Networks

Scott Jon Siegel has posted his slides from the recent Montreal International Gaming Summit. Excellent presentation that is essential reading for any of us working with social games. I find his approach echoes my own work on the social game design framework.

games that succeed in growing ARPU (average revenue per user) and the base of paying users will tend to skew toward direct payments, as that’s the only way users can fund their accounts.

Inside Social Games' has a writeup of its own study, citing some interesting findings from a report they are selling.

I’ve heard a few people suggest that Zynga would use this as a way to use Facebook Connect for registration without being subject to the rules of the platform. I find it highly unlikely that Facebook will be anything other than very strict with the way that people use Facebook connect. The last thing they want is to have people start to use Facebook Connect to extend the FB brand and brand promise to the web and have developers end up using it as a way to circumvent the rules of the platform.

Charles Hudson's ends with an interesting note. I was looking for FB Connect policies just the other day, and as far as I know, Facebook does not define those separately - thus, implying that anything done with the help of the reach of FB conncet should fall under the terms and policies of the platform itself. It would be helpful if they would state that more directly in the developer site.

Fantasy needs to adapt and take a page from the micro-transaction models that many online gaming companies are using. Looking solely at ad sales and sponsorships is a mistake. Fantasy sports operators should be capitalizing on their users' familiarity with the micro-transaction model and take advantage of it by implementing opportunities to spend throughout the games they play.

Scott Philip two posts highlight something that seems obvious, i.e. fantasy leagues moving on to social network apps - yet is it so obvious for such a dedicated audience? This might a specific area where FB Connect is the primary driver, rather than the app itself.

City of Eternals is fully integrated with Facebook and soon Twitter, but that doesn't mean the game is only playable within the social network. Players' Facebook profiles follow them into the vampire world, so whenever you're curious, you can click on a fellow vampire, and check their Facebook profile. This is the first time I've seen this feature in any MMO, and it brings in some new possibilities--making it much easier to socialize (and of course flirt) within the game. Wu told me City of Eternals' gender spread is 50-50 (extremely rare, compared with male-dominated MMOs), so I wouldn't be surprised if it became a major online hotspot for socializing

Hard to say anything about this before I've checked it out. Very interesting, though.

Edit: The game is at private alpha. An invite can be requested here: http://www.ohai.com/play/#mmf-f2-p31-o1

Social games to date are mostly just fancy interfaces with very little back end depth. It does not matter in Restaurant City what combination of items and menus you use in your restaurant. It doesn’t really matter what farm orientation you have in Farm Town. Most of the side quests in any RPG have no variation. Most of these games cast aside compound effects and deep design and so they are very easy for any developer to interpret into a rule set and then clone.

Tadhg Kelly's post in Inside Social games is a thorough look at the practice of cloning going on in social games business. Striking depth and accessibility in the same concept is the big game design challenge.

The big question hanging in the post-acquisition air however is just how valuable brands will turn out to be in social games.  In an environment where cloning is becoming quite commonplace, brands may offer some defensibility. 

Shanti Bergel presents another highly perceptive take on the social games space, this time in the aftermath of the Playfish acquisition by EA. He ends the post by speculating on the significance of brand value in terms of developing successful products with loyal players. Interestingly, Q Interactive's recent study backs this up, at least among female players: http://www.qinteractive.com/pressSingle.asp?rId=263&CS=&ID=1

a subset of the gaming industry that offers simple games that run across various social networks

Om Malik's article is about the EA Playfish acquisition, and worth reading as such, but it also starts with a useful, concise definition of social games from a business perspective.

For those actually in the social games space, the data point to note is the stat from Zynga that less than 3% of users buy virtual currency/goods. That is lower than many virtual worlds and MMOs, but not surprising given the scale and nature of social games (which should also have lower infrastructure and support costs than virtual worlds/MMOs)

Giff Constable rants about NY Times article on virtual goods, and spots an interesting stat about Zynga's conversion rates.

I believe that CPA/direct response style ads have a place in everyone's payment options since there are some people who wish to trade time or other types of subscriptions for the currency offered in your game or world.  

Sean Ryan has a point in his analysis. Still, as I read these posts, l do get the sense that developers and the offer aggregators are quite defensive about the scam phenomenon, and only addressing it after happily letting it fly under the radar for some time. It's a form of cognitive dissonance I am personally familiar with from the gambling industry: you want to make games that bring in the revenue and are harmless fun for the majority of the players, yet in the back of your mind you know that it's not all that rosy out there.

And, when you start thinking about the 20-80 principle - whether 20% of your customers bring in 80% of your revenue - well, you start getting uncomfortable, because you know that it is more than likely that some of those whales in the 20% are not making informed decisions; not having fun as they are supposed to be, really. Then, if someone raises the issue, as Arrington did, or let's say a legislator in the case of gambling industry, you start formulating defensive arguments and inventing CSR measures on the fly.

Furthermore, the addiction aspect - i.e. those 'some people' who are not taking the offers out of fun but out of anxiety because they just need to level up, by whatever means - is not addressed at all, because none of these 'let's play down the storm in the teacup' reactions address player motivations for taking the offers. Statistically, by average 1,5 % of any larger population is genetically in the risk group for developing a form of addiction, and therefore if we have a phenomenon with tens of millions of daily users, the tipping point towards the darker side of psychology, and business which irresponsibly exploits that weakness, will be there - at least until it is enforced to more responsible ways.

In this case, taking the responsibility does not fall only on the platform developers - oh, wouldn't that be easy and comfy for us - but for us developers as well, as we are developing the business models. This awareness of social responsibility I hope will the ultimate outcome of the storm.