Inside Social Games

If you’re one of those people who believe golf is more luck than skill, well then welcome to the world of the Golo Golf Dice Game.

The game is essentially a dice game with a golf theme. Think Yahtzee meets plaid hats. You roll all nine dice and select the lowest numbers possible to achieve the lowest score. You can also click “bottoms up” to flip the dice (and thus hope for a better number that way). When you get dice that enable you to go one under par, a bird will fly across the screen (birdie, get it?), and if you get two under you’ll see an eagle. If you get a bogey, meaning going one or more over, a little gopher will appear to taunt you.

Despite the jokiness of the animation, the game is plenty addictive and there is some strategy. Do you roll the dice again or do you settle for a par? When should you go “bottoms up?” There’s a leaderboard, challenging, and a point system that rewards you for the better you play. You get a huge bonus for having the top score of the day or beating an opponent head to head. Though it’s nice to see yourself move up in the global rankings, I’m not sure what the incentive is to acquire points. There doesn’t seem to be a way to trade them in for prizes or open new features… at least yet.

For a golf -dice hybrid, it’s a cheeky little distraction and has some genuinely funny moments. Though the directions and strategy take some getting used to, it’s a fun adaptation of several games to a more social platform. Whether or not people will find this fun enough to want to challenge their friends remains to be seen.

Gameplay: 7

Developers: 6

Luck involved: 75%

Social game developers have a tough path to navigate. How do you make a game profitable? What makes certain social games successful, and others miserable failures? What is a social gamer and what does he/she want in a game?

Every game developer answers this question differently. In my mind, the vast majority of developers are answering these questions incorrectly and making false assumptions about their audience. It’s still very early and mistakes have been made.

Perhaps the best illustration that shows common mistakes many social game developers are making is looking at two types of stereotypical Facebook games. The one-trick flash game and the text-based RPG are two of the most imitated and flawed genres in the social gaming world - and both are doomed to short shelf lives.

The one-trick flash game is perhaps the easiest to explain. This is a game in which the developers have the limited knowledge of Flash, but don’t know how to create good game mechanics. These are usually “arcade” style games that ask you to shoot a ball, kick a basket, or kill an alien. They require little skill and get redundant quickly. They have social elements built in to challenge your friends, but aren’t necessarily social  themselves. You could play this game in your room by yourself and have a largely similar experience. Like sex, social gaming tends to get better with other people. But the most grave problem with these applications is that they are about as deep as a puddle. You can finish playing them within minutes and the game play doesn’t improve from there on.

The opposite extreme is the ever popular text-based Role Playing Game (RPG). Vampires, Ninjas, My Mob, My City, etc etc. are examples of this genre. These are games that ask you to power up your character and buy new items using the game’s unique economy - cash, ninja points, waffles, whatever. You use these tokens to buy new weapons/buildings/powers that will then be represented in text. You advance by inviting your friends and coming back to the game. These games have become the poster-child for why some people are turned off to social gaming. Some people don’t want to bug their friends to be part of their team/kingdom/city/conclave, and signing into facebook after your friends have all whored your name out to advance their RPG characters is no fun either. Thank you, so called “friends.” While some people genuinely will accept invitations and appreciate the gesture, many will ignore the invite and get miffed at the friend who sent the invitation.

These text RPGs have depth, but without animation or much skills. Most game events are rendered in text, and the best way to win is to invite friends, not employ strategy. Sure, you can try to decide if you should level up your hit points or get a new power, but these choices are virtually the only ones you have in the game. Without much designed content, save perhaps some stock photos to present your new items/powers, there is real sense of detachment with this games. Sure, text RPGs secure the developers lots of users through their viral qualities, and may make some money in the short term. But they suffer from being redundant and ultimately flash in the pan hits. Do you think people will care about these games in two years? Like Pogs, these type of applications will have their moment of popularity but will slowly go away.

To conclude, the reason why I discussed these two genres is to illustrate how games can be improved. If you want social gamers to stay in your application, give them depth. If you’re putting your application on Facebook and expect to create a community around it, don’t just toss a “your friends’ rankings” tab and expect that to satisfy the masses. Text-based RPGs provide a community and a level of depth, yes, but there is reason to question their staying power and their ability to keep players coming back for not just weeks, but months.

Developers need to be prepared for when social gamers get bored of text RPGs and one-trick flash games. Developers need to develop new and better games. Remarkably, social gamers don’t require games to follow exactly in the footsteps of traditional genres. Players also enjoy apps like Lil Green Patch, Puppies!, and various other apps with untraditional content. That’s great news for developers.

Porting console games to Facebook is a difficult thing to master, much like the primitive games they port. While very popular with old players who have grown up with Super Mario and TNMT, port applications often suffer from a raw interface and a low effort to engage the larger social community.

As a game, NES Games has nothing wrong with it. As a social game, there is much to be desired. Like many ports, the developers seem to just throw the ROM material up on the site and hope that the user figures out what to do with it.

NES Games has a lot going for it. Over a thousand NES titles, to be exact. This includes Duck Tales, the NES Game, which is the greatest game of all time. Additionally, the app has a user rating system, a tiny invite button, and a way to submit other ROMs to the list.

That said, the games are prone to crash your browser, some just don’t work, and the app suffers from a sloppy interface. It is what it is - more of a static website than a moving, breathing fiber in the social graph.

Gameplay: 10 (Duck Tales!)

Development: 3

How many games? 1440 by my count.

For a young couple living in Chile and teaching English, playing Scramble together on Facebook became an outlet for their love of word games. Tyler Richardson and his fiancée Christine play so often that Tyler came up with a brilliant idea: to propose to her in a game.

With the help of Zynga, Tyler sent her on a secret agent scavenger hunt within a special Scramble game containing the words “Will You Marry Me.”  Her mission was to decode the message before time runs out and save the world.

“I had been trying to think of a creative way to engage for a while,” said Tyler, remembering his planning process. “We like spy movies, so I decided to send her on a scavenger hunt where she would be a secret agent. The Scramble folks were nice enough to fill in a board with a ‘marry me’ message and it became a mission to decode the secret message before time ran out and she was discovered.”

How did it work out?

“I think she really liked it, at least that is what she told me!  She said yes,” Tyler grins.

The couple, who met in college at UC Santa Barbara, will be finishing their teaching stint at a community college in Conception, Chile, before they tie the knot later this year.

While players have been building their own levels and worlds for games for years, social networks offer new opportunities for “UGGC” (user generated game content) to create a new class of games which:

• Primarily contain “levels” and “worlds” created by users
• Grow more quickly since users are more likely to invite friends to play a game which they co-created
• Show better retention qualities since users are more likely to accept invitations from friends for games which their friends co-created

SGN’s new Name It is one of the first pure play games to take advantage of this idea (which SGN calls “wiki games”). Name It is a word game in which users play against their friends to think of words in 5 different categories, all starting with a given letter, before time runs out.

Since launching two weeks ago, players have already created thousands of answers and hundreds of categories. About 100,000 people on Facebook have played, and it’s growing quickly (with a 13% DAU rate).

Many other social applications (like various quiz apps) have done well on Facebook by creating a platform for users to create content and share it with their friends in a compelling, interactive way. I expect to see many more “UGGC” games succeed on Facebook in the coming weeks and months.

Large social game Zynga is announcing this morning that two new executives are joining the company.

Scott Derringer is joining Zynga as vice president of product management from Yahoo! Inc., where he served as senior director of product management. Derringer will be responsible for developing online games and will report to CEO Mark Pincus. At Yahoo!, he played a key role in developing the company’s community strategy and overhauling Yahoo! Groups

Hugh de Loayza is joining as vice president of business development and will be responsible for developer relations, mergers and acquisitions and licensing opportunities. He will report to Andrew Trader, executive vice president of sales and business development. De Loayza is a games industry veteran having served as senior director of business development for Oberon Media building partnerships with EA/POGO, United Online, Verizon, ATT, Hewlett Packard and Hasbro.

Another entry in the “Why didn’t I think of that first?” category of Facebook apps, Pieces of Flair allows you to add customizable buttons called “flair” to your Facebook collection.

When it’s working (the profile page integration isn’t quite always working for me), Pieces of Flair provides another fun way to personalize your profile and send things to friends. While not quite a “game” per se, collecting items is an addictive hobby for many.

With Pieces of Flair, you can buy from a countless selection of button designs (many are user created) or make your own. The game’s economy (which lets you purchase and send pieces of flair) functions by users sending their favorite content to someone else, inviting friends to the application, or logging on once a day.

These are basic steps and good ways of retaining users. With over 400,000 daily active users, Pieces of Flair is growing quickly, and just got acquired by major Facebook application developer RockYou.

I only wish they’d think of a clever way to sell people these buttons in physical form. I’d buy a few of the buttons that say “Save Ferris!”

Gameplay: 6?

Developers: 7

Percent Complete: 60

Jeremy Liew, Managing Director over at Lightspeed VP and thought leader in the space, did some excellent analysis recently on monthly ARPUs that several successful MMOs are experiencing. His findings:

• Second Life: $9.30/active user/month (largely due to land maintenance fees)
• Club Penguin: $1.62/active user/month
• Habbo Hotel: $1.30/active user/month
• Runescape: $0.84/active user/month

However, no data has been published from developers of “MMOs” running on social platforms. While several top Facebook game developers have been claiming “impressive numbers” from digital goods, would anyone like to predict exactly what “good” means on social networks?

SGN is announcing this morning that Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment company of Jeff Bezos, has invested in the company. The terms and size of the deal were not disclosed. The investment comes only two months after the company announced a huge $15 million Series A round from Greylock Partners, Founders Fund, Columbia Capital and Novak Biddle Venture Partners in May.

SGN says it will use the funding to “continue to push the envelope on the quality of games being produced on the social web, with the vision of connecting people in a way never experienced before.”

“We are proud to be announcing the Bezos Expeditions investment,” said Shervin Pishevar, CEO of SGN. “Mr. Bezos’ knowledge and experience lends itself to the growth and expansion of the social gaming ecosystem. His participation in our funding will allow us to continue capturing new demographics in gaming by distributing the highest quality games available on the social web.”

“SGN has the expertise to bring gaming into entirely new markets.” says Steve Campbell, CIO of Bezos Expeditions. “There’s an obvious benefit to gaining such deep traction in the social networking area.”

As a fellow investor in SGN, Greylock Partners‘ David Sze today said “SGN is a force to be reckoned with in the gaming space. We are looking forward to Bezos Expeditions joining the SGN investors group.”

Now with Bezos on board, SGN has built an even stronger investor group. David Sze is a board observer at Facebook, and Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel holds a board seat. Bezos has also made investments in Pelago (makers of Whrrl), Twitter, Kongregate, TeachStreet, Powerset (recently acquired by Microsoft), ChaCha and 37signals.

Blogger Bret Terrill, who’s been doing some totally excellent analysis of the social gaming space recently, wrote a post recently on whether cross-promotion works for games. His take:

So how do you effectively cross-promote a game?

By genre. Make sure that players of one game will actually want to play the other game. For instance, there’s a significant overlap of users between Scrabulous and Scramble because they are both word games. Yes, it’s shocking. People who like to play one word game also like to play another word game. However, they are not necessarily going to want to play Chess. Or Speed Racing.

By demographic. Courtesy of the casual game industry, we know that women like card, puzzle, word, and quiz games. And men like action and strategy games. Obviously there are exceptions, but as a general rule, these stereotypes hold. Use them to your advantage.

These make a lot of sense, but they’re also not unique to the social platform world. Are there ways that knowledge of the social graph could enhance cross promotion conversion rates significantly?

Some initial ideas:

• Synchronicity - “Your friend Jimmy is playing XXX right now. Do you want to join in?” This was a big part of what worked for us at Xfire in the beginning. (Would be a killer Facebook Chat API use case.)
• Multi-player recruiting - “Joe, Jane, and Jim will soon need a 4th player to join their group so they can achieve XXX in XXX game.”
• Endorsements - Simply applying the Social Ads concept to your game bar more explicitly

Will these get you offer some genre or demographic barriers, or will they only get you second order effects?