Inside Social Games

Inside Social Games is here live at GDC in San Francisco for the “Mobile Social Games – Are They As Big on Phones as They are on Social Networks?” discussion this afternoon. It’s being led by Andy Riedel, most recently of Tapatap and previously of mPath.

Andy Riedel: Everyone assumes that they’re viral, but people use virality in two different ways: you can tell people who might be genuinely interested, or you can spam people. Other axes: whether you play with strangers, or with friends. And whether it’s synchronous or asynchronous.

I will say that social games are games where the network effect is required for games to succeed. The more people you can get into your network, the better your experience. It’s not sufficient to just put a leaderboard up and show your friends’ pictures.

Texas HoldEm Poker by Zynga is the #1 game on Facebook right now. Is that a social game? Is has some social aspects, you can chat with people. But do you care who you’re playing? It’s usually strangers. Does it matter that there are more people there? Actually it may kind of hurt. I say it’s kinda social.

Pet Society by Playfish is #2, and I’d say it is.  Mob Wars, you do better the more people you get to join your clan, the same with all of them. Geo Challenge, it doesn’t necessarily help no matter how many of your friends are playing.

On mobile, we’ve been severely limited in that games don’t have address book access, and at that you have all these different phones. Now, Facebook Connect just launched support for the iPhone, but we’re missing a feature – what phones do my friends have?

The UI and connectedness issues do not solve the billing issues. Carriers will restrict your app significantly – you can long billing cycles, six month integration cycles, and the carriers will restrict your content – sometime per carrier. The App Store for Apple is a clear winner so far.

There are a couple new solutions coming out. OpenFeint is a new connection layer that connects Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace for the iPhone. However, unless the networks share more data it’s going to remain limited to the overlap between Facebook and iPhone users.

We’re now starting to see single brand verticals. iPhone, Android, Symbian, etc. My thought right now is that’s the way you should go if you’re serious about getting some traction – focus on one vertical now. What has consistently buried independent game developers historically is porting.  Set your sights a little bit lower and focus on one vertical. In particular, there’s a lot of greenfield on Android right now.  However, the turnaround time for a lot of these other platforms could be a long time, if not impossible – a week on the iPhone is pretty good.

We need a payment ecosystem for this to work too. There are a lot of developers who have built social games will millions of users and haven’t made a dime off of them.  To start, there is advertising. You can do CPM or CPA – if you want to do CPA, you can work with people like Offerpal or Greystripe. You can also do purchases, subscriptions or transactions.  Transactions are going to become a lot bigger with the iPhone 3.0 software.

I think freemium is the best way to go. You can do direct credit card payments, credit card wallets, or premium SMS. Premium SMS has been challenging because it can be scary for the consumer to opt into something with SMS, and we found that it was difficult to integrate across carriers.  Not every carrier supports premium SMS like Metro PCS, Cricket, Virgin.  When you’re designing your game, keep that in mind – it’s not going to be as simple as trying to send an SMS to people. Eventually I think you’re going to have to do something with credit cards. Bango is a good wallet that we used. You could also use notifications.

Location based apps are also interesting. You usually have your phone with you all the time, which means games can take advantage of a sense of urgency. I think games could be doing that a lot better – there’s something big that’s going to happen at 4pm, you better be there. It also makes it possible to check your notifications regularly.

You’ve gotta make things collectible – items, avatars, achievements. Mogabetown did $150 million in revenues in Japan last year, that is bigger than anything we’ve seen in the US so far. They do a mix of things – 25% offers, 25% CPC/CPA ads, 50% transactions. All Japan, all mobile only, all built on Flash Lite. It’s an avatar with social games around it.

You have to create fan buzz around right now. For example, there’s an invasion of Mafia games on the iPhone. They’re free, but you can buy upgrade packs for a few bucks.  They upsell paid apps. That will change with iPhone 3.0 – you can do in game transactions.  However, Apple is not going to allow these microtransactions for games that are free – this is a huge mistake.  I’m not sure why they think that there shouldn’t be a freemium model.  They think that free should be free.  However, it’s possible that could change.  I can already download the free app and be spammed, so I don’t get it.

Another question is building a game vs building a people finder – to fight or hook up or whatever they want to do. At Tapatap we got stuck in the middle. At mPath, we found that the bulk of our users spent their time chatting. Right now, OpenFeint is taking the approach of trying to do the community so the developer can focus on the game.

Will something like Mogabetown work in the US any time soon? Mobile Mingle has all the social features on WAP, but they can’t do all the social games because they don’t support Flash Lite.