Social Games Aren’t All About Great Gameplay

February 17th, 2009

By Andrew Mayer

Back at the turn of the century, when just the idea of 3D games was still pretty awesome, something more fundamental was occurring. Still reeling from the dark years of CD-ROM “multimedia” before the internet took hold, the entertainment market had been flooded by scores of crappy knock-offs, badly used licenses, and endless desperate attempts to discover the next new magical “mascot” that would replace Mario and Sonic in gamers’ hearts. From out of that wasteland a cry arose from developers that quickly turned into a mighty roar: GAMEPLAY FIRST. No amount of flashy graphics or technological marvels could replace the need for a solid dynamic as the core experience. And over the last ten years we’ve followed that creed while making incredible leaps and bounds in realism and technology. It’s helped the market grow, and created a generation of gamers and developers who have a far better understanding of what a good game is.

But those days are over.

No, we’re not going back to the bad old days of Aero the Acrobat, and cheese-ball movie tie-ins; creating good gameplay remains just as important as it ever was. It just isn’t enough anymore. From flash games to core games, having a well developed dynamic should no longer be considered the high rung of the ladder you need to climb in order to reach the top. In fact, it’s one of the lowest ones.

Over the last few years any number of hardcore games have been released that have absolutely fantastic gameplay, but never got the level of polish and content they needed to compete in the marketplace. That’s because we understand the fundamentals far better than we ever did before, and now it’s time to start payng attention to other issues as well.

Of course there are still new games to be made, and awesome new dynamics to be mined. But too many people out there are still convinced that it’s purely the greatness of the idea that propels it to success. But with the rise of social media platforms not only are we seeing the nature of that assumption changing, the very idea of gameplay seems to be changing into something new.

What, after all, is the fundamental gameplay of Mob Wars and the other X-Wars games? From a traditional design standpoint the only real game action in the entire product that is when you press the “Do Job” button. Everything else is just buying stuff and getting the status you need to get you to the point that you’re allowed to do that. It’s like creating a role-playing game where you spend all your time messing with your character sheet instead of actually fighting the battle. (Someone should really make one of those.)

We’ve had the ability to click buttons on a screen for a while now, and it hasn’t turned into the fastest growing sector of the gaming industry before. That’s because Social Games are changing the rules. Sure, there are still a lot of games in the space that rely purely on good old fashioned gameplay. But when you’re reaching out to a mainstream audience, you’ll often discover that the tastes of the masses are shockingly different than any specific sub-group you care to name. And they often won’t care at all about what you think they should think is important.

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

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8 Responses to “Social Games Aren’t All About Great Gameplay”

Kriss Says:
February 17th, 2009 at 7:26 am
uhm

I’ll ignore the superior gameplay bit, but.

level of polish and content?

When has that ever translated into sales/success?

Marketing == Success

It did in the past and it does now, in social games it is just a slightly different type of marketing. “I play because my friends are playing and they spammed me till I joined in.”

Yeah the content helps and in a free/chaotic market place it can even get you to the top. However it gets you to the top by generating free marketing…

The only way content has ever helped is by generating free marketing.

The content in social games still does the same job, its just a different type of content (other people) and a different type of marketing that it generates for free.
rob fulop Says:
February 17th, 2009 at 11:11 am
It occurs to me that people play X-wars style games because such is what is offered. Most non-gamer type folks whom I’ve talked to who have played these games confess to playing for a short while, and quickly losing interest. This makes sense, as you point out, pressing DO JOB is hardly an engaging interactive activity that one wishes to do over and over again.

Xwars style games probably represent our first blush attempts to figure out a format for interactive entertainment which can be played for a few minutes a day and involves a bunch of other people doing the same thing. I think games like PARKING WARS start to move the genre forward, no doubt we’ll see a bunch of failed experiments, and will all learn a lot from what works well within the few successes.

Xwars is clearly a “success” though … and is worth deconstructing … the seemingly empty play mechanic hooks people at first, but doesn’t keep them long enough. Such is why the people behind these games put so much muscle behind urging players to bring in other players … because they know the math better than anybody … and have found that very few people stick with these games long enough to become paying customers. They reach far and wide, but fail pretty miserably at retaining. At least so far
Ted Howard Says:
February 18th, 2009 at 10:58 am
If only the title didn’t have the word “all” in it…

You state both that “good gameplay remains just as important as it ever was” and also that user actions in Mob Wars are “press the ‘Do Job’ button” and “buying stuff”. These seem to contradict each other. It seems to me that The Oregon Trail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(computer_game)) had more gameplay than most ’social games.’ Better graphics and plot to boot. You might be correct that social gaming is the “fastest growing sector of the gaming industry” but “gaming industry” often doesn’t mean games (http://www.americangaming.org/).

I’ll be happy when I’m proven wrong. When makers of ’social games’ start including gameplay that is more than pressing buttons and sending invites, I’ll use them for entertainment purposes. In the meantime, they fill a very different role than games do, offering entertainment more akin to randomly surfing the web than the entertainment offered by games.

You’re also spot on with these statements. “when you’re reaching out to a mainstream audience, you’ll often discover that the tastes of the masses are shockingly different than” and “they often won’t care at all about what you think they should think is important.” The game industry caters to the ‘hardcore’ establish customer market for valid business reasons. Nintendo’s Wii is proving popular because they targeted non-mainstream game customers, but N’s success has not translated to third party studio success (yet?).
Andrew Mayer Says:
February 19th, 2009 at 9:37 am
There is a wide gulf between the content in an X-Wars game and what you find in the average $60 X-Box game, but they both draw the player in… at least for a time.

But there is something compelling about both of these experiences.

I’d love to get some hard numbers and see exactly how many times and over how many days the average player comes back to their X-Wars experience and compare that with similar numbers on retention for Casual and Hardcore user experiences. Obviously there’s a lot more riding on being “sticky” in the social space, but it would be good to have a baseline.

I also think it’s hard to clearly define what success means in the social space. One thing that makes it confusing is that there isn’t a clear line between what the user is doing and how the experience is monetized. On Facebook that’s compounded by the fact that a small change in the TOS can wipe out your profit model overnight.

As for “Marketing == Success”, I think that at the end of the day the product has to rise to a certain level of quality in order for it to really succeed over the long term, although what quality is in any given case may not always be where we first expect it be.
Diane Lagrange Says:
February 19th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
I don’t think gameplay can be defined by the input or control method nor rendering feedback. Good gameplay can be ruined by these elements if they are badly executed, but ultimately in multiplayer games it is the rules and framework defining the player choices and outcomes that counts.
The ability to click buttons on a screen has served very well browser games such as OGame or Hattrick, which have deep gameplay retaining users for long and are indeed one of the fastest growing part of the industry (as the rapid growth of companies like Gameforge, Bigpoint, or IT territory show). There are deep and fascinating games involving only “pressing a button” – even out of traditional games context : the stock market is a good example.
Successful social games that retain their users are ultimately about great gameplay, of which the social element is an important part.
This Week’s Headlines from Inside Social Games Says:
February 22nd, 2009 at 6:26 pm
[...] Opinion: Social Games Aren’t All About Great Gameplay [...]
Tadhg Kelly Says:
February 23rd, 2009 at 10:09 am
Hi Andrew,

Interesting piece, but I think in essence wrong, and here’s why:

“It’s like creating a role-playing game where you spend all your time messing with your character sheet instead of actually fighting the battle.”

All roleplaying games are like that. The basis of the gameplay in Final Fantasy, D+D and sundry other roleplaying games is basically character customisation. It’s a drive for efficiency above all else.

Social games are no different to any other game in one important respect: They are driven by gameplay because that is where the fun is at. Fun is not really a question of production values or good controls or even clever design. It’s a product of intellectual engagement through testing.

In whatever battlefield the player is interested in, be it a football match or a chess board, horse racing or even flirting in a social situation (the ultimate game some would say), the player is invariably competing with other players or a ruleset (or both) to test themselves and their skills.

Games on social networks are no different. X-Wars games especially are no different. On our blog recently (I’m the CCO of Simple Lifeforms – a new social games company in the UK – and also a games industry vet) I wrote about “social gameplay” being an exciting are in social games. By offering easy means of communication through a network, the player is opened up to the possibility of a new social kind of test, a new kind of intellectual engagement. Social networks facilitate this sort of contact, which is what makes them different.

But a game is still a game. Let’s not fool ourselves that we’ve somehow strayed from the fundamentals as game theorists are wont to do when they start getting excited by a new arena. It is a new arena but many of the original rules still apply.

Here’s the source article of what I wrote by the way:

http://www.simplelifeforms.com/2009/01/19/what-is-a-social-game/

Tadhg
Andreas Borch Hansen Says:
March 4th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
I agree that social games aren’t all about innovative, progressive game play. However, as it evolves, it will need more innovation to keep the users’ engaged and that will probably be the most important success criteteria for developers in the future.

We also need to recognize that the fact that a game is integrated on a social network, doesn’t mean it’s a social game.