Inside Social Games

With around 8000 games and apps on the iPhone, it can be difficult to find ones worth downloading, and even then, those worth playing more than a few times. Well, if there is any one type of game (if it can be defined as such) that people visit quite often, it is the one involving virtual pets. We have seen success in such games from the simple virtual Puppy/Kitten app FooPets (by FooMojo) on Facebook to the more complex virtual pet/world Pet Society by Playfish, but Flower Garden takes the basic concepts of virtual caretaking to the iPhone.

Developed by SnappyTouch, the game was developed in about six months, and is certainly one of the more Zen titles for the iPhone. As soon as they enter the app, players plant the seeds of their choosing within their virtual garden, water them, and watch them grow. Some will begin to bloom instantly, while others will require daily care, but regardless of the type, the tactile interface is what makes this game so addictive.

With the touch of a finger, players can peruse through their potted lilies, tiger bells, and starbursts, and if something needs some care, another touch will water them up to health. Even pruning is done with a touch once you’ve selected your garden scissors. However, such cutting of flowers is not for mere management’s sake. In fact, this ties into one of the nicest of the game’s features: Virtual Gifting.

Be it for Valentine’s, a birthday, or just trying to be romantic and sensitive, you can send out virtual, hand-picked bouquets from your very own garden. Once you have cut all the flowers you desire, you can arrange the gift all with a touch or a shake, and even attach a little love note to go with it.

Rumor has it that custom flower hybrids could be on the horizon through cross-pollination. Whether or not this will happen is a bit of a moot point. While any new feature would be fantastic, Flower Garden is already a great app for any iPhone owner. The addition of new mechanics would just make it better.

It sounds a little strange when I say it out loud, but I’m not sure I’m totally happy about the current drive towards “quality” that I see happening with social platform games.  While there’s currently no shortage of new applications that are attempting to grab users with virality, status, collection, and simple activities, I’m also seeing the big developers trying to “push out the envelope” with high-end graphics and more advanced gameplay.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for quality and polish. There’s no doubt that it makes sense for the big players to start consolidating their hold over the audience, and bigger budgets are one way the front-runners can pull out ahead the rest of the pack. At the same time, there may be a limit to just how much fancy graphics and precision gameplay is going to impact a mainstream social audience.

In a great game a lot of the entertainment happens inside of the player’s head.  If we’re already charging towards making more complicated titles that the industry will quickly lose some of the positive elements that come from simplicity. And the longer load times aren’t helping anything either.

We’ve seen something similar with the way Nintendo has managed to win the current round of the console war. With both the Wii and the DS they’ve proven that given the right application of technology you only need to reach a certain level of quality before the audience decides they’re perfectly happy, at least for a while. Call it the “VHS” effect, where you can settle on a sub-par format for a few years while the users enjoy your platform without needing all the sizzle and pop.

Every time a new market opens up the first games to appear are built on traditional, time-tested play patterns. From the DS to the iPhone, from XBLA to browser games, it’s always rock-solid gameplay that shows up first, with the fancy stuff pulling up in a later bus. And it’s been true since the beginning of the medium. It wasn’t the gorgeous graphics that made pong a household name.

Sure, basic expectations have grown in the last thirty years. These days players expect a lot more from even the most basic games than just a sprinkling of pixels and some bloops and bleeps. But it’s not zero-sum either. In the wrong hands, or used in the wrong way, adding more graphical effects may just serve to confuse your audience, or make a game that has less mainstream appeal. More isn’t always better, and the audience for social games isn’t one that will necessarily appreciate a hardcore experience.

With the race to quality clearly looming, are we still in a period where there are simple new dynamics that will pull in big audiences, even if they come from a developer who doesn’t have the ability to layer on the razzle-dazzle? I think the answer to that is yes, for now…  Users are still open to games that connect them back to their status, drive their friends to play with them, and give them a strong reason to pay for content without making them feel like they’re being blackmailed.

As genres settle Players start to gain strong opinions about the games the play,  and the quality matters more and more.  You certainly wouldn’t put a new mafia game into the marketplace without a serious commitment to bigger and better.

But until the audience discovers that they’re supposed to care more what a social platform game looks like than how it plays, I’m hoping that things can stay simple for just a little while longer.

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

People are making money with social games. And according to Sarah Lacy at BusinessWeek, people close to Zynga say the company is doing north of $100 million a year in total sales.

In addition, the company recently passed RockYou to become the #1 developer on the Facebook platform by reach, according to AppData. Currently, the company leads by about half a million with 40,514,702 monthly active users to RockYou’s 40,017,268.

In total, Zynga reports a 9.5 million daily active user count and 45 million monthly active users across all networks, including Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Tagged, Yahoo!, and the iPhone. The company also says it is serving 6 billion monthly page views.

How’s the company handling the transaction volume? “We’ve found once you get into these digital-only goods and services there’s massive opportunity for fraud,” Pincus told BusinessWeek. “We couldn’t find a single company that could manage or solve that problem for us. We had to build the whole infrastructure in-house. We had to go out and get relationships with credit-card processing companies.”

Some of Zynga’s top games are Texas Hold’Em Poker, Mafia Wars, and YoVille. For more details on Zynga game stats, check out the company’s profile on AppData.

Of all casual games, there is one name that tends to stand out more than the rest: the poster child of the genre, from PopCap Games – Bejeweled. With millions of users across a multitude of platforms, this simple puzzle game has grown and evolved without measure, and with each rendition becoming slightly different and slightly better (at least in theory). One such version of the title comes for the Facebook platform by the name of Bejeweled Blitz.

If one can imagine it, Blitz is actually an even simpler version of the original versions, or more accurately a shaved down version. For those that may be unfamiliar with the Bejeweled franchise, the game is a very simple puzzle game whose basic mechanics and crisp, yet simple, production values have proven to be the basis of dozens of other small titles.

The objective is to score as many points as possible by swapping jewels of varying colors in order to make rows of the same color that consist of three or more. Doing so will remove them from the board as new ones fall to take their place, and should the newly relocated gems line up as three or more to a color, they will be removed as well. The more jewels you remove, the more points you get. You continue to do this until the game ends (sometimes it’s a puzzle, sometimes a time limit, and sometimes it goes on forever). It is these basic rules that govern Blitz, but as the name would suggest, it is a very short game.

The player is granted one minute to score as many points as possible. That’s about it, but there is some hope as the game is dubbed “beta“ (though so many Facebook titles have that tagged on them it seems to have lost its meaning, because it almost never goes away) and the one minute game is classified as the “current tournament,” suggesting new game play options may come along. As for social features, the game doesn’t use anything particularly new. Scoring more points earns you a few badges to show off in your Facebook profile, and like most social game games, when you play, your score is compared to that of your friends. Unfortunately, it is only your friends, as there is no global leaderboard system.

This makes for some exceedingly simple game play that doesn’t have a lot of options or replay value, especially considering the marathon and puzzle modes that other versions of Bejeweled offer. However, one feature that Blitz does have that comes off as positive, is that your score accumulates with each game to form a “team score.” The higher this score the better prizes you are eligible to win.

Yes, as a promotional means, PopCap, at least currently, is having drawings for prizes that range from a free game, all the way up to a free laptop. Of course, the better the prize, the more you have to play to even be entered into the drawing (100,000 points for the game, 1 million for the computer).

Prizes and give-aways are always a good tool to drive traffic, and for Bejeweled Blitz, that equates to about 1.6 million monthly uniques. If you are a fan of the franchise, then Blitz is worth a play as you might be able to win something with the countless hours that tend to be looged with such games. However, if you are looking for something new with this version, don’t get your hopes too high, because you simply will not find it here.

SuperSecret.com is a new social game that just launched a few days ago. With many virtual worlds and online games catering to older audiences, and others such as Club Penguin and Webkinz the youngest ones, SuperSecret has been designed for those in between. Within it, tweens do the one thing all kids want to do: Grow up.

Catering specifically for the 9 – 13 year-old age group, SuperSecret uses a level system that allows players to “age up” from 10 to 18. Throughout the game, players create a human avatar in order to socialize, play mini-games, and hang out within any number of  locals. However, with each “birthday,” access to new features are opened up to the respective users. At age 11 they are able to own a virtual pet, at 12 they acquire a dorm room to decorate, 16 brings the first car, and 18 allows for voting.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to say how the latter two ages are going to work, as the company has stated that players can only reach age 15 for the first couple months of 2009. Nevertheless, there still seems to be plenty to do.

SuperSecret users are able to play up to 40 different Flash games with new ones unlocking at different age groups, but beyond that, there is the more addictive feature of virtual items that are purchased with the in-game currency, “spenders.” These are used to buy everything from pets, clothes, hair styles, furniture and gifts. In addition, the game seems to be extremely social, connecting friends with an in-game cell phone.

This phone shows the status and location of any of your online friends, and even if they are offline, allows you to leave messages, set up meeting times, and even send gifts. Seeing as how SuperSecret is designed for a tween demographic as well, this feature (amongst others) are designed with safety in mind. Parents are able to set various parental controls such as chat filters, blocking players, and even play moderation.

SuperSecret says that “tweens” have been involved with development from the beginning, stating that “tweens themselves have determined what features to include and pinpointed ways to make the game better.” In addition, the company says it has established distribution partnerships with SPIL GAMES and Wild Tangent.

SuperSecret is currently using a subscription model of $4.95 a month. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but they are making a potentially dangerous move in making the game free at first but capping the age/level at 12. Once players get to the gate and have to pay the “admission fee,” many players could  be lost. This is quite the surprising choice considering this world is a prime candidate for virtual goods (just look at the success of Second Life or IMVU), but it will be interesting to see how things go for the company.

With the coming launch of the iPhone OS 3.0, developers are expecting a lot of new apps to hit the app store. In an attempt to help the up and coming developers compete, SGN has opened up some of their resources with the launch of a free cross-promotional network. Developer Punch Entertainment has signed up as a launch partner with its viral titles such as Reign of Swords.

With successful games (with Facebook Connect support) such as iBowl, Agency Wars, and Mafia: Respect & Retaliation, the network of users from SGN encompasses 12 million downloads – many potential users to see any SGN partner game.

It works through in-game banner ads. SGN users will be offered opportunities to download and play any partner game that is displayed with the incentive of points within the various SGN titles. Of course, while the team-up is free, any revenue made from a download through the system is split, but based on the acclamations of Punch Entertainment, the positive results certainly make the “cost” worth it.

“SGN has provided a great platform for us to expand our gaming applications among a larger user base,” said Punch Entertainment CEO and Founder Tobin Lent. “Gaming has proven to have a huge appeal on the iPhone and, with so many gaming apps out there, it can be overwhelming for users. This cross-promotional platform will bring entertaining games straight to the consumer.”

With the staggering changes that social network Hi5 has undergone in recent weeks, the shift to becoming social entertainment continues to evolve. Just last week, Bill Gossman, former chief executive of Revenue Science (formerly known as Audience Science), was announced as Hi5’s new CEO.

Given that Hi5 is shifting to a virtual goods/game based revenue model, Gossman seems to be a good fit. With his background from Revenue Science, he brings with him tremendous experience in not only online advertising, but behavioral targeting and audience monetization.

Along with his time at Revenue Science, Gossman’s resume also includes his experience as the CEO of Sabrix, frounder and COO/CFO of @mobile, and a former partner and current executive in residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures (a lead investor of Hi5).

Coinciding with the announcement, Ramu Yalamanchi, founder and CEO of Hi5 since 2003, has taken on the job as Chief Product Officer to make room for Gossman. In this role, the company has stated his primary responsibilities as leading product strategy and engineering organizations as the company moves into the social entertainment space. Furthermore, he will also be in charge of extending Hi5’s “micro-payments” system and “maximizing [this] revenue stream for the business.”

“It is great to have Bill joining Hi5 at this exciting stage of our business,” said Yalamanchi. “We have been incredibly successful in building a huge global audience and pioneering the social entertainment space. Bill brings highly applicable, stage-relevant leadership experience, particularly in monetizing online traffic and building scalable sales organizations, that will help take our company to the next level.”

Thus far, Hi5 is estimating around $25 million in revenue for 2009. This doesn’t seem out of the question. The introduction of Hi5 Coins, the opening of payment options with PlaySpan, mobile payments with Paymo, the increased repertoire of games from Mochi Media and now the new leadership to focus it all towards one goal. Now it is just a matter of making the pieces all work together.

Late last year, we looked at an API from Nonoba that created new payment methods for multiplayer games. Since then, this third-party development company has been hard at work. Last month, it launched its Flash games portal, bringing in around 5,000 concurrent users at peak times. But Chris Benjaminsen, the company’s co-founder, says that Nonoba remains focused primarily on APIs.

To this end, Nonoba has now created an experimental product intended to bring microtransactions to Flash games. Currently, most Flash games make most of their revenue through ads, but that will change, Benjaminsen says.

“Ads paid out $1 million dollars in something like a billion games last year — practically nothing,”  he says. “We wanted to introduce a new way of charging for things online. We wanted to build a completely open-ended payment API that you could put on any site on the Internet.”

So far, the API has been used in seven games (with more high-quality Flash titles planned for the future). Nonoba hopes virtual goods monetization will catch on in the Flash community after what Benjaminsen calls a “first big success,” seeing as how “Gaming is 70 percent imitation.”

Indeed, you can find a number of “clones” in the gaming industry, ranging from Bejeweled-like games to Call of Duty copycats. Developers sometimes fear trying something new. They often prefer to create something only slightly different in the hopes of having the same success of other games. “Nobody really wants to be the first,” Benjaminsen says.

As for Nonoba’s API, it seems pretty robust. It handles payment methods and protects against fraud, which is always a concern of both developers and end-users. It also supports PayPal, TrialPay, and most major credit cards within the U.S. The company plans to encompass a larger breadth of payments such as PayByCash.

If Benjaminsen’s contention about ad revenue models holds true, the API puts them in a prime — essentially monopolized — position.

[via Virtual Goods News]

An increasing number of iPhone applications have taken advantage of Facebook Connect recently to make their games more social. One example comes in the form of a new quiz game created by the San Francisco-based Think Top Down, which claims to have made ”the first iPhone game starring your friends.”

The game is called FriendFreak. Like a number quiz games on the market, it provides you with topics intended to improve your knowledge about your friends.

Here’s how it works: The game will present a topic such as “science” or “technology.” The player must match the image of a friend with a corresponding blurb by tapping and dragging it into the clue box. The objective is to score as many points as possible before time expires.

At the end of each round, players earn or lose points based on how well they did. They are then ranked accordingly (the first rank is “NewbieFreak,” ranging all the way up to “FriendFreak”). Each round selects up to 10 friends, but you can have various player-selected categories. This differs from most quiz games, which focus on single category concepts such as photo identification. FriendFreak, on the other had, offers eight different categories to choose from.

This iPhone game offers a bit more than others of the same genre. It’s surprising that the game is not free (though it costs a minuscule $0.99). If early reviews provide any indication, the consumers who have purchased the app have been happy with it.

Preserving the longevity of the title could be challenging for Think Top Down. As with any quiz, one can only take it a certain number of times. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since most games have a lifespan. It’s also probably one of the main reasons the game does cost something.

There are around 8,000 games currently on the iPhone platform. It’s a competitive landscape for any developer who wants his product to stand out, so developers are increasingly finding distribution through virality by adding social features. Although third-party companies such as Come2Play and J2Play have assisted developers with key aspects of social development, Scoreloop has launched a new platform for the iPhone specifically.

The Munich, Germany-based startup has recently announced a new platform for building social features into iPhone games. These features include challenging other players to asynchronous or multi-player matches, and comparing high scores. Developers won’t be limited to the iPhone; they can actually extend to social networks such as Facebook.

Like Facebook, Scoreloop has a system that supports friend invites. When it comes to challenging other players to games, it baked in an excellent matching system — meaning you will generally only play people at the same skill level as you. This system is based off of points, which players receive after they win a game. So the more points you have, the higher your “skill” is.

Players will also receive coins that allow them to play new challenges. Once they run out of coins, however, they will have to purchase more should they wish to continue playing challenge modes. When users make a purchase for the aforementioned coins, Scoreloop receives part of that revenue – this is how Scoreloop intends to make money.

The platform will publish activities within the game into communication channels on Twitter and Facebook. It will even recognize the country in which the gamer resides (and, if they desire, their city or town). This might stir up a competitive desire within the user base.

Though tailored specifically for the smaller development companies, Scoreloop does offer a possible means to compete against major developers such as Zynga, Playfish, or SGN. The platform provides social analytics, game discovery through recommendations, and even free server operations.

Considering the competition for games on the iPhone, it’s not surprising to see another platform like this appear on the scene. iPhone developers will likely give it a shot for its sharing capabilities, but we look forward to seeing how developers respond to the company’s revenue sharing model.