Category Archives: Social Gaming

Google Buzz will nullify Facebook

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The echo chamber is abuzz with, we’ll Google Buzz. While some are negative:

But like many Google services, it lacks any imagination or compelling reasons to use it. (Starting with the name, a rip-off from Yahoo.) As a result, it’s probably not a threat to any of the services it’s trying to disrupt.

I’m a little more positive. Google Buzz relies on Google’s strengths – email and algorithms to surface your connections automatically based on who you correspond with. This is your own social network without the setup.

Won’t kill Facebook but will nullify it

The Silicon Alley Insider article asks who would make the switch to Google Buzz.

Why would they switch to this Google service when there are no compelling reasons to do so?

And if Google isn’t going to actually kill Facebook with this thing, what’s the point?

I disagree that the point is to kill Facebook. Users have been notoriously transient with their Internet use. First it was Friendster, then MySpace, then Facebook. Some say many have already moved from Facebook to Twitter. However one thing that has proven rock solid is email. Google Buzz is an instant social network, better than that it self-adjusting. People I haven’t talked with in a year will fade to the background, rather than hang around on Facebook prompting me to ponder when and why I added them.

Even today I hear, “don’t Facebook me, just send it to my email.” Email is where users return to time after time. It’s what goes at the top of their resumé. It’s the most sure-fire way to get in contact with someone besides their phone number. When users return to Gmail they’ll slowly begin to use Google Buzz and over time nullify Facebook. It won’t kill Facebook but it will take a chunk out of it.

What does it mean for social games and Flash?

I wonder what Google Buzz will mean for social games? With Facebook trying to strike a balance between virality and spam, how will Google tackle the issue?

There is also the issue of Falsh. Flash is to work on Google’s mobile OS Android, however not on Chrome OS for netbooks (and possibly tablets). Google is also a big proponent of HTML5 and pushes O3D as a direct competitor for Flash.

Social gamers aren’t looking for games

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Talk to most hardcore gamers and they don’t consider social games to be games at all. Talk with many social gamers and it’s likely they don’t consider what they’re doing a game either. So what exactly are they doing? Facebooking, that’s what.

Urban Dictionary defines Facebooking as a verb:

To check your facebook profile, search for something on Facebook or use one of its many apps.

Social games are apps, so social gaming is Facebooking. Daniel James, Co-founder and CEO of Three Rings spoke about Facebooking at a recent panel on social gaming.

They are mentally Facebooking. They are not there to play games, they are there to Facebook. And as a part of their Facebooking they are engaging with game experiences.

However that might be a little out of context as even he points out that the big question is if they think they’re playing games at all?

The big question that no one really knows yet is when someone is on Facebook are they in fact mentally, in there little mind, playing games at all?

So if the users don’t feel like they’re playing a game, can it be a game? That might be more, if a tree falls and no one is there to hear it… We could turn to some of the experts in the field of games for more help. But according to Daniel, they might not have high opinions of social games.

A lot of people, especially in the game business have a very snooty opinion about Facebook games. They describe them as basically, they won’t call them a game, “that’s not a game, I won’t call that a game, it’s a distraction” is a term I’ve heard used.

Social games are just a distraction - really?

A distraction! Now that isn’t very nice. But given all this, it isn’t too much of a stretch to assume two things:

  1. Facebook has found a captive audience
  2. Social gamers aren’t looking for games

In a way it’s a captive audience

They’re all on Facebook and they’re looking for a distraction, that makes them a captive audience. They aren’t looking as much on AOL or Yahoo! these days but they sure are on Facebook. Facebooking might be the modern form of channel surfing.

They aren’t looking for games

If they’re just Facebooking and don’t consider themselves gamers they can’t possibly be looking for games. They’re looking for a distraction, for anything. Well not everything, they seem to gravitate toward interactive entertainment. From Daniel again (I love pulling quotes from this guy):

I don’t know if that necessarily plays to the person wanting to a have a deeper more engaging, generally social experience. If they are there for distraction maybe that’s all the large scale market wants.

The opportunity is bigger than just games

What all this means is the opprotunity to experiment is huge. Everyone loves a captive audience and we know what they’re looking for – interactive entertainment. That’s a pretty broad category however. You can throw games into that, but it’s not just games. If I go to GameStop it’s likely people there are looking for games, not so much with a random sampling of people from the food court. The same is with people Facebooking, we don’t know exactly why they came to the mall but it’s safe to say it was to shop. What we don’t know is what for. So shouldn’t we try to throw everything and the kitchen sink at them?

To see the opportunity for social games as just games might be missing a whole lot. What about visual novels? Dating sims? Both are huge in Japan. I know I continually harp on how we need more story driven stuff but this seems like the perfect fit.

A friend of mine is addicted to Professor Layton. The game is a series of puzzles and for each you unlock you get more of the story. It’s nothing new but apparently my friend has been hooked by the story. So much so that she read blogs about the upcoming games in the series all the while professing that she does not like games.

People follow stories, gamers follow games.

As humans we can all follow a story; we think and learn in story. We can all play games as well but they don’t grab all of us equally. Some people love games, others can put them down at any moment. If I’m at GameStop my captive audience is looking for games, if I’m on Facebook what they’re looking for is much broader. Currently we throw games at the that captive audience. For one, it’s what’s working and bringing in profits. Second, it’s a great way to enhance sociability. However there has been little experimentation in interactive drama – outside of Japan that is. The classic example thrown around in the United States is, “Oh do you mean something like those Choose Your Own Adventure books?”

Facebook delivers a captive audience for interactive entertainment and the opportunity to experiment is huge. It goes way beyond what we’ve traditionally thought of as games.

Hollywood, meet multivariate testing

Let’s say the social gaming industry begins to experiment with interactive drama, just imagine what they could do. This is an industry built on metrics, on split testing – think of what you could do if you applied those techniques to a movie? Continuous deployment? You could start with a minimum viable product  that isn’t very good and over time evolve it into something worthy of an Academy Award. That might be stretching it, but it’s very different from the screen tests Hollywood does after shooting has ended. This would be the true digital revolution Hollywood has been waiting for.

Social gamers don’t comparison shop

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Zynga’s strategy to copy and crush the competition could be more successful than it was for even Microsoft because social gamers don’t comparison shop.

One way Zynga creates huge hits is by identifying popular games from other studios, creating a near replica, and then beating the original with a bigger marketing budget.

The fact that Zynga can do this tells you a lot about the audience for social games. Actually it reminds me a lot of the market I was working with while at Experian. More specifically their Consumer Direct division which was responsible for those sometimes cute but always annoying FreeCreditReport.com ads. As you can expect it’s a marketing company through and through, but they’re also a product company. FreeCreditReport.com is your credit report plus a service to monitor your credit. It’s just not a very good one, but neither is the competition. The reason is repeated in the conference rooms and halls like a mantra –  no one comparison shops for credit reports. Why spend money and time adding a new feature when that money can be better spent on more ads, on locking competitors out of a lucrative channel, etc.

The service has to work of course, just as Zynga’s games have to be fun but simply put – they aren’t winning because they offer a supperior user experience or novel game play. I could argue that it was very different for Microsoft when they employed the same copy and crush strategy. People did comparison shop. There were articles comparing products to one another, people would argue vehemently about which was better than the other. I never hear a word about which is the better social game.

It’s a new audience

Along the way Experian has faced much better product offerings in the credit report space, but they’ve all failed to offer much of a challenge. Experian Consumer Direct understands their audience and they should, they practically invented it. They started as a private company with a novel idea, give users their credit reports directly over the Internet. Prior to this you would only hear of your credit report when you tried to buy a car or rent an apartment. Experian dealt with car dealers and landlords, not individual consumers. But Consumer Direct went directly to the consumer through the portals like AOL and Yahoo! What they eventually discovered was a new audience - one that they learned doesn’t comparison shop.

Zynga and the other social gaming companies have done the same. Through the social networks they’ve discovered a new audience. They aren’t your typical gamer.  They’re more female and most wouldn’t consider themselves gamers. They don’t comparison shop. They aren’t going to read magazines about games, they don’t care about Gamasutra, they enjoy social games that they hear about from their friends or see in an ad.

Understand your audience

Experian Consumer Direct certainly understands their audience. Their audience uses AOL and Yahoo!, they don’t use Google Wave. They typically are not heavy Internet users. Heck, they know the percentage of their audience search for keywords like “free credit report” vs. “credit report”. They know it all the way down to which search engine they use.

I bet Zynga is learning the same thing as I write this.

Facebook squashing the virality of social games?

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Daniel James, CEO of Three Rings, had an interesting post yesterday with his predictions for social gaming in 2010. I’ve seen James speak at a few conferences and know he can always be counted on for a unique opinion. A lot of what he talks about in this post is how important Facebook is to the phenomenal growth of social games and how it will actively try and take a revenue cut for that.

He starts out by discussing some of the changes Facebook made to virality in 2009.

Virality will decline and may cease to be the major force on the FB platform. The changes that Facebook has started to implement will continue into 2010, causing a reduction in virality overall. Facebook is well-established as a great environment to acquire customers and generate revenue. By dialing down the viral component the platform will become less attractive to new developers who lack funding, but it’s not clear that Facebook cares.

Virality is the key reasons social games work otherwise they would simply be known as casual games, so if Facebook is looking to crank down on virality it’s big news for social game companies. James believes Facebook is taking such steps to try and take a cut of the revenues their platform makes possible.

Facebook takes ~50% of game revenues. The payment component is a part of Facebook taking back its rightful share of game revenues on its platform; the massive reduction in virality will be the other key component, driving paid acquisition models and more revenue for Facebook from ads, game placement, etc. Social games’ have been a bonanza because they’ve fed greedily upon FB’s extraordinary user acquisition machine, exceptional openess, and generous viral features, without necessarily returning a lot back to Facebook Inc. or the net user experience of most users. I think Facebook will change that in 2010, and I think they are quite justified in doing so. Successful social games can operate with 60%+ net margins, I think Facebook would quite like the lions share of that.

I tend to agree with much of what James is predicting, however I doubt Facebook will be as aggressive with taking a cut and believe a lot of the changes are being made more for usability.

Facebook is struggling with it’s own slowing growth

As James points out himself, Facebook has peaked and will see a flattening or decline in active audience. To add to that he also believes that daily active users (DAU) on social games have also peaked. What that says to me is that Facebook itself will be in need of growth. Social games are a big driver of  Facebook use, so to start limiting the virality is certainly dangerous. If James is right and Facebook is doing this for revenue, they must simply expect social gaming companies to step up and pay for any lost growth from the change in virality. That could be true but I doubt the ecosystem is that robust. Many of the social gaming hits are still relatively new and as James points out the whole field might have already peaked.

I think it’s a delicate balance at this moment and expect Facebook to move tentively into taking a revenue cut. Social gaming companies are already buying up tons of ads on Facebook, there is little reason to rock the boat.

Facebook has shown a history of making usability priority 1

It’s my belief that the changes to virality were made more for usability concerns than for the sake of revenue. Facebook is where it’s at today, at the top of the social network heap, because of it’s superior usability. We can all remember how annoying MySpace pages were. Zuckerberg is also very big on usability so it’s understandable that virality was a hot topic within the walls of Facebook when users began to complain about some of the tactics social games were taking. Ultimately it seems the usability proponents won out, but we’ll see if they push for more changes in the name of usability.

Social gaming companies weaning away from Facebook

Facebook is undoubtedly important to social gaming companies and exactly why they’re actively trying to limit their dependence on it. Zyenga recently launched FarmVille.com and I would expect more sites are to follow. The question is if the recent explosion of social games has found a permanent spot in the public’s heart or is still very dependent on the Facebook spigot?

Social gaming’s next big hit – dating sims

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The more I study the social gaming phenomenon the more I wonder why Zynga, Playdom, and other casual gaming companies haven’t launched a dating sim? Dating sims, also known as visual novels, are a big hit in Japan. Such a hit that a Japanese man married their girlfriend from a dating sim. Titles like Harvest Moon have even begun to crack the US market.

Dating sims seem to have a lot going for them that would make them appealing to social game makers:

  • Addictive – guy married his virtual girlfriend, need I say more
  • Require continual maintenance – most are structured around the passing of days, not unlike FarmVille
  • Ripe for virtual goods - already well established past time in Japan to buy a virtual girlfriend gifts
  • Appeal to women – It’s not just that it’s romance based, but it’s interpersonal relationships rather than a shoot’em up

So why haven’t the makers of FarmVille and Mafia Wars begun to experiment with dating sims?

One obvious reason is that dating sims aren’t exactly social. But then again what could be more about social media than a dating sim? Just play with the concept of a “social media character” a bit. The girl of your dreams could have a Facebook page. You can leave notes on her wall as part of the dating sim. The ultimate prize would be when she changes her status to in a relationship – with you. Of course others playing the game would be in direct competition for her affection, but that only adds to the simulation.

Another reason might be that social game makers think of dating sims as being too adult. Some of the titles in Japan are but the majority are more an outgrowth of the whole manga and anime culture in Japan. Where as there are a few adult oriented manga titles there are many more targeted for children. It isn’t like American audiences haven’t been exposed to teen romance novels before, anyone remember Sweet Valley High? Really what these dating sims allow you to do is deal with interpersonal relationships. In Harvest Moon you can marry but the courtship is little more than learning a character’s likes and dislikes.

As far as I can tell (not being able to play all the Japanese dating sims) it seems as if dating sims are taking over where anime left off. A natural evolution – as manga lead to anime, anime is now leading to dating sims. It brings interactivity to the storylines where games tend to be ancillary to it. Dating sims are the first truly successful form of interactive drama. They certainly seem addictive enough for someone to marry their virtual girlfriend, so why haven’t Zynga and Playdom begun to experiment with them?