Inside Social Games

If you talk to any person developing an application for the Apple iPhone you’ll often hear the same complaint, “It’s not like it used to be.” That may be a strange thing to say about a product that hasn’t even hit its second birthday, but there’s a dawning realization that it’s tough to market to a potential audience in the iTunes store without a heavy duty brand, or a viral sensation.

And it’s all about the marketing. While there’s lots to love about the iTunes experience as a customer, if you’re a publisher you only have very limited ways to connect with your audience. There’s the main page, some top ten lists, and even a bit of advertising scattered throughout the app store experience. Heck, there’s even a “What We’re Playing” list, although how you go about getting on it is something of a mystery, and it makes you wonder who “we” is actually supposed to be. But that’s it. There’s no social community to reach out to, no viral thought leaders, and no magazine or blog where you can really reach the players who “matter”.

And that’s mostly Apple’s fault, because no matter how you try and slice it, at the end of the day it’s still all their audience. Ask any third party Mac developer and they’ll tell you: once you’re in the borders of their empire your bound by all the rules and limitations that come with simply being another subject in the kingdom. And those laws can change, often, and a lot. That doesn’t often seem like a problem in those heady early days where beer, flatulence, and lighter applications are selling like hotcakes, but once the initial euphoria wears away it’s often replaced by the same cookie cutter licenses clogging the best-seller charts. Once that happens, it can become almost impossible to capitalize on the innovation that made the market seem so attractive in the first place. And when the buzz and venture capital have burned away, only the biggest remain, along with a few new brands that have managed to become established enough to sell on name alone. Meanwhile everybody else has already moved on to the next bigger better thing.

Is there a way out of the downward spiral? Possibly. But for a variety of reasons, including lack of support from Apple itself, what we’re seeing on the platform currently looks far more similar to a last generation Casual portal than a forward looking social community. Because Apple disallows Micropayments for example, the iPhone can’t power true virtual goods. And it seems that a variety of limitations on the phone as a product platform that have held back the development of a mobile multiplayer gaming experience like the one you get with Xbox live, not the least of which is the lack of any kind of official SDK out of Cupertino.

One thing that you’ve seen in the rise of the social media platforms such as Facebook and MySpace is that they’re willing to share the love in a way that Apple isn’t. If you’re going to truly connect with your audience then you need a platform partner who’s willing to let you actually try some innovative new things and directly connect with your customer from time to time. That may mean having to act as a policeman and change the rules if the exploitation get too egregious, but just as your audience will misbehave from time to time, so will your developers. And it’s better to be giving out the occasional slap on the wrist to your over-achievers than have no achievers at all.

To paraphrase McCluhan, it has to be a medium, not just a message.

Andrew Mayer is a Social Gaming and User Experience Consultant with over seventeen years of experience in the games industry.