Inside Social Games

These days, third party developers have created everything from social networking, microtransactional, and multiplayer APIs to incorporate into web games, allowing game developers to focus more on design as opposed to infrastructure or backend support. To this end a company by the name of Gameyola is looking to help developers incorporate social gaming features through its Flash based API, turning stand-alone Flash games into social, multiplayer titles.

The pitch to developers is that with the Gameyola API, developers can gain more distribution on Facebook and other social networks. Using a single line of code, the API can connect games to what the company calls its “viral distribution engine” and can distribute games both through the Gameyola portal as well as across major social networks.

Once set up, developers then merely have to submit their game to Gameyola to have it hosted using the company’s Amazon Cloud servers. The company’s games portal has approximately 7 million users across all their apps, and it is not exclusive. If developers so choose, they can also make use of MochiAds or other advertising networks.

There has also been talk of providing microtransactional API as well through the Gameyola platform, which will probably be similar to the API provided by other competing companies such as Nonoba. Unfortunately, however, the Gameyola API only supports AS2 at the moment. That isn’t to say AS3 compatibility isn’t on the way, but something to be aware of since it may not be included for a while.

Nonetheless, while the service doesn’t feel fully flushed out yet, it is on a good path. However, if they intend to compete with other third party platforms, there is a lot of work yet to be done.

Twitter is a communication platform in which millions of people share updates in 140 characters and follow what the world is doing, one tweet at a time. Considering how little can be said with such a strict limitation, the games and applications for Twitter have always been small and simple: their purpose, to spend just a minute or two with each use.

From Twitter dating games to Twitter typing games, social game developers have stretched the boundaries of the network’s core functionality. However, Tweet140 makes something out of it that seems so obvious, that it’s a wonder we haven’t seen it before.

This game does one thing: Track tweets. More specifically, it tracks the number of characters in each of your tweets and creates statistical data of posts. The object of the “game” is to get as close to 140 characters as possible, as the closer you get, the higher your score becomes.

Currently, there isn’t any point to a score beyond just your own personal gratification. Of course, it also benefits those that get a bit of satisfaction from hearing a twoosh, the sound Twitter makes every time you send a tweet that is 140 characters long. Suffice to say, twooshing and Tweet140 go hand in hand.

According to the developers, they admit that “it’s a dumb game, but we’re madly obsessed with numbers so had to build it. We also wanted to test the API.” We wonder what will be coming next!

For years, there has been a rivalry on many fronts between Microsoft and Apple. In the gaming market, the latest “win” goes to Apple, which has just poached Microsoft Xbox executive Richard Teversham.

With a 15-year history at Microsoft, Teversham most recently served as senior director of business, insights, and strategy for the Xbox home console. Before moving into that position, he served as director for platform and marketing from 2005 -2007.

Teversham didn’t just move companies; he changed his role significantly as well. From what is reported by MCV, Teversham accepted an “education-related role” at Apple’s European iPhone office. There, he will report to European VP of interactive entertainment, Chris Lewis.

Microsoft confirmed the change via a spokesman, who stated that “Richard Teversham, director of business, insights and strategy, has taken a new opportunity outside of Microsoft. A process is underway for recruiting his replacement.”

As a side note, Teversham was also on the Board of ISFE (Interactive Software Federation of Europe), a group responsible for PEGI age ratings. For now, it is unclear if he will continue those responsibilities while at Apple.

A while back we took a look at a Facebook sim game called myFarm by PlaySocial. As rudimentary as the graphics were, the game was still pretty fun for the genre.

Now, a similar game has become very popular on Facebook: Farm Town, from SlashKey.com. At first glance, it is a direct clone of myFarm. However, when given a closer look, it is not only prettier to look at but contains a great deal more depth too. In fact, it feels like myFarm has been married with Zynga’s YoVille.

Farm Town game has players building up and designing their own farm. You plow away ground, plant crops, care for animals, and place objects in order to make your farm better than all the rest. Each action you take gives you experience, which in turn unlocks new items for purchase, and you earn money by selling your crops or visiting and helping out neighboring farms (people added as friends). This is the myFarm side of the design.

As for the YoVille half, players create their own custom avatar (though it isn’t possible to change your clothes currently) and walk around a world. When players choose to leave the farm, they can visit the local inn, bank, marketplace, or realtor’s office. Upon arrival, you are immediately surrounded with other players also currently online and can talk and socialize with any of them.

Of course, this socialization does all come with a purpose (beyond the aspect of being…well… social). One of the more interesting features of this game is the ability to hire people to work for you (or visa versa). By doing so, actions around the farm can earn you a percentage (25% to be exact) more income.

Overall, Farm Town feels good, but not great. There is a lot more going on in Farm Town than myFarm, which means you end up checking on a lot of different things when you play. Who’s at the inn? Selling things at the market. Checking the store. Etc. However, the number of things you can do are outpaced by the speed of the game – meaning you can log on, check everything and still get nothing from it.

The biggest complaint about the game has been the balancing of crop harvesting, crop value, and item cost. It would seem that crops can go bad very quickly, so you have to be fairly astute with your log in habits. However, even if you do harvest your crops, a number of users feel items are too expensive (compared to earnings) to do anything significant with their virtual land. 90% of the fun in a game like this is designing your personal space, and it takes days before you can have more than a few plods of dirt on your acre (a single, tiny section of basic fence is $250, equating to half of what you start with in funding). Players, especially social/casual players, want some form of gratification right away, and it just doesn’t feel like you can do much of anything early on in this game.

Regardless of complaints, Farm Town has captivated a rather hefty number of users with a current total of over 7 million monthly active users, according to AppData. If you like YoVille and you like myFarm, then you will most likely enjoy Farm Town. It’s just a game that requires some steady play and patience to get somewhere. In time, and with a few updates, it is possible that this title will go from “good to great.”

Over 1 billion iPhone apps have been downloaded to date. As a result, many new companies have emerged to cash in on Apple’s vibrant platform.

The latest start-up to focus on helping iPhone game and app developers monetize is Medialets, which offers an ad network and analytics for iPhone apps. Like other companies, such as Greystripe, Admob, and Mobclix, Medialets is hoping to build a large chunk of its business by focusing on the iPhone.

Unlike Greystripe, however, the New York-based Medialets is not focusing solely on the iPhone; it’s also producing content for Google’s Android platform. Though not as popular as the Apple devices, the HTC Dream (G1) and its Android OS is the fourth most popular smartphone, generating 2% of all US requests.

During poor economic conditions, the decision to focus on advertising might seem risky. But Medialets seems confident that mobile ads remain relatively young, with plenty of room to grow, and investors seem to agree. The company raised $4 million in Series A funding, led by the Foundry Group with participation from DFJ Gotham and angel investor Bobby Yazdani.

Eric Litman, Medialets’ CEO, estimates that the market for mobile ads will expand during the next four years to around $300 million and $100 million for the iPhone and Android, respectively. Litman believes a majority of the apps in the future will be free, and subsidized by ads. To date, 33 percent of mobile users have never paid for a mobile game, suggesting that many developers will utilize a free-to-play model in the future.

But other revenue streams exist as well, such as virtual goods. Ads alone seems risky for developers — at least for now.

While services like Blerp are being used to create virtual worlds on top of websites, Minsh is doing the same thing, but in reverse, on top of Twitter conversations.

Currently in closed alpha, this new application lets players tweet in a fully 3D ocean with fish as avatars for other Twitter users. Simply click the chat bubbles and tweet away.

Visually, it isn’t that impressive yet, but it has potential. The fish look decent, but Minsh could add more features to the open ocean backdrop, such as barrier reefs or trenches.

Overall, as pointed out by Ralph Koster, this marriage of virtual worlds and Twitter could lead to synchronous communication in Twitter, which has typically been more asynchronous.

The possibilities are promising. Imagine implementing a global network represented by the oceans around various parts of the world, from the great barrier reefs of Australia to the chilling waters of the Bering Sea. Perhaps Minsh could add schools or pods to represent Twitter followings.

You can sign up for alpha at Minsh.net or follow them on Twitter. The next phase of testing will begin July 13th.

[via Virtual Worlds News]

While virtual goods draw around $200 million in the United States, the overall value is dwarfed by the Asian market, which is 25 times larger at $5 billion. And of course, of the most successful Asian companies monetizing through virtual goods transactions is Tencent. This publicly-traded Chinese company has been pulling in millions despite the global recession. Its last statement put total revenues at $366.4 million for Q1 of 2009.

Counting just virtual goods, Tencent saw its web-based merchandise increase approximately 28 percent quarter-over-quarter and 90 percent year-over-year to $278 million.

The company states that the increase in virtual goods revenue was due primarily to the “seasonal impact of the Chinese New year holidays and winter break for students.”

Virtual goods are not expensive, with many ranging from 10 cents to $1. For players of social and online games, they are often impulse buys, much like a Snickers bar in the check-out line. That impulse, however, adds up rather quickly when you have billions of people buying them.

Tencent also makes revenue from mobile virtual goods sales and advertisements. Mobile virtual goods sales grew by 10 percent quarter-over-quarter and 52 percent year-over-year, totaling $64 million. Ad revenue suffered, however. In quarter-over-quarter revenue, ads dropped by 30 percent to $21 million.

The company earned $1 billion last year ($719 million from virtual goods).

By this point, most people with an eye on the social gaming space know Playfish. The company, one of the top developers of innovative free-to-play social games on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and the iPhone, now has offices in London, Beijing, San Francisco, and Tromso, Norway. In addition, the company says it is profitable.

Now that the cat is out of the bag in terms of the size of the Facebook Platform transactions market, more and more companies have set their sights on Playfish even as the market is just starting to mature. We recently sat down with Sebastien de Halleux, co-founder and COO of Playfish, to get his thoughts on current dynamics in the space.

Justin Smith: Thanks for joining us, Sebastien. How does Playfish think about its platform strategy?

Sebastien de Halleux: Since the old days, the gaming model has always been attract users to where you are – first to shops, then to game portals through SEM and SEO and other marketing efforts. For the first time, with social games you can take a different approach and bring games to where people are.  It really means bringing the games to multiple communities, like Facebook, MySpace, the iPhone, and Bebo. For the first time, users don’t come to us – we go to them – you can call that “widgetized” games or whatever you want.

Our approach has always been to start on Facebook due to the growth and maturity of the channel and its clean and well-defined user experience. Since then, we have expanded to a number of other platforms, including MySpace, Bebo, Yahoo, iPhone, iGoogle.  We are tailoring our products for the different communities, i.e. customizing it for the viral channels on each. However, because we are a Flash based company, the transition for us from one environment to another has been easier.

Some communities (like Facebook) are very forthcoming with applications stats, but others aren’t. We see no reason why this information should not be accessible to everyone.

Do you think players will become more loyal to games instead of platforms?

Yes, and it’s very interesting because many games are very important in attracting new users to the platform. If you Google Playfish, you’ll notice that Playfish is mentioned on many, many blogs outside Facebook or MySpace recruiting friends to play on Facebook or MySpace.  People see the game as the activity they want to be involved in, which is very much in line with what Facebook is trying to do.

In addition, we have done a Facebook Connect integration on Pet Society, and some users like to use it because it runs in a small frame and is easier to find.  We have contests where players are submitting pictures of themselves holding Playfish signs, and the entries are flooding in.

Recently, Facebook launched chat invites, a feature largely requested by the social gaming community. Do you think platforms like Facebook are likely to coninue to add features to their platforms due to game developer requests?

This is also very interesting, because typically platforms are born independently. The console is the console, and as the developer you try to push it to the limits. Here, the platform is software, and yes there is tremendous indication that the platforms are listening to the needs of the developers and adjusting the direction of the platforms.  I cannot think of one platform that is not doing this.

The game content has become so popular, and games are pushing innovation to the limit and moving the plafforms forward. On Facebook, whether that’s chat invites or sharing or other services, game developers are showing the need for new APIs that will be valuable for the whole ecosystem and other platform applications.

Since the beginning, Playfish has bet pretty heavily technically on Flash. Why did you do that?

Part of this is heritage.  We have been using Flash for a very long time.  Flash allows for a rich and compelling experience, and we decided that we wanted to really polish the experience and make it as interactive and visually appealing as possible given the constraints.  We have always tried to push very hard in terms of making our games socially compelling as well as technically innovative.  There are actually quite a lot of small innovations in balancing what we’re doing in Flash with the constraints of lower end PCs and other platforms – like touch screen devices like the iPhone. We’ve designed our games with all of this in mind from the beginning.

One of the reasons we went with Flash because we wanted to make the game experience as approachable as possible.  Most of the games on free to play Flash portals require a client download, and some of them are huge. We wanted to make this much simpler and create something Wii-like and visually compelling.  With ActionScript3, it was a natural choice.

Finally, it makes transitioning from one platform to another easy. Most of the tweaking happens on the server side, so we don’t have to worry as much about the platform that we’re designing the client for so we can focus on the quality of the game.

There is an art to creating a game in a full screen environment, but unfortunately most PCs cannot handle high frame rate at full screen in Flash.  We’ve spent a lot of time trying to be innovative around quality by coming up with ways that make you feel like you are emotionally connected during game play.

Recently, Facebook confirmed to Inside Facebook that it is starting to test integrating its virtual currency, Facebook credits, with Platform applications. Do you think it makes sense for Facebook to be the one handling currency payments in the long run?

We think that the payment layer is going to be one of the defining enablers in making this industry a success.  We think the entire industry is at stake when solving the payment questions. There are two factors: geographic coverage and friction.

In terms of geographic coverage, typically e-commerce has only been optimized for high ticket items and geographies – the US and western Europe. Now, virtual items create demand for much lower priced items around the globe in places like southeast Asia, where happily spend money for virtual items. However, the payment solutions in those geogrpahies are fragemented at best. Typically, in the past early innovators have had to integrate hundreds of payment methods who are reinventing the wheel, but many fail.  We think that solving that problem is where the platform has unique advantages of scale.

In terms of friction, the best practices have been set by Apple and Amazon in terms of 1-click payments, which is really best done at the platform level. There, you can use any single emotional trigger to gain the user’s trust, and then use that trust in a variety of future scenarios.  At that point, the platform has the opportunity to give you 1-click payments in a variety of scenarios.  I’m not sure you can beat the platforms in terms of payment friction.

Overall, we are working closely with platforms on these kinds of problems. Our team has experience running transactional businesses, but the platforms can solve the problem once for all publishers.  PayPal probably has more value than eBay as a platform – it shows the value that solving the payment layer has for the platform. Creating a pan-regional payment platform is going to be vital.  Lots of people are trying at the moment, and I think the platforms are in the position best to do that.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with ISG, Sebastien.

No matter how well crafted your design or polished your graphics, at some point your user is going to get lost. A clear Call to Action is a way to give your the user an obvious choice when they don’t know what to do next. When done properly it can be the lighthouse in a storm, leading them to calmer, and hopefully more entertaining, waters.

It’s a term that’s probably familiar to anyone with a marketing background.  But, if you want to know more about how the “Call to Action” works in a social application, just keep reading.

Yup.  That was one right there. At its core it’s simply direct message to the reader/user/player that in order to get a certain reaction, they’re going to have to take an action first, and you see them everywhere:

• Press Start to Begin
• Click Enter to Continue
• Fight!
• Send a message to your friends
• Click anywhere to close the window

What’s astonishing is how often this simple tool is ignored, especially when you get into the strange technical corners of an interface. That doesn’t mean the user isn’t going to figure it out, but it does mean that some of your potential audience is going to give up and never come back.

If you doubt the power of this simple tool to compel your audience, just take a look at Twitter. At a fundamental level the single “What are you doing?” is all they have, but that call to action is all they need.   If you type in an answer you’re using the application properly.

Whether you’re building a website, game, or even productivity software, it’s easy to become so bogged down in the minutiae of the interface that you can forget that sometimes the easiest way to solve a problem isn’t by being clever, it’s by being obvious.

When you’re making a title for a mass-market audience it pays to think about what your call to action is on every page and in every state of the program.

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

A while back, ISG stumbled across an avatar based iPhone game that felt truly unique in its design. The app is called Funji Home, but back then, was merely a prototype. Nevertheless, months later, the company (Funji, Inc.) is launching its first version of the title today, and with it, the first avatar-based social networking app for the iPhone.

Designed in a comic book style, Funji allows players to create their own highly customized avatar and room. Like many social games, these elements can be seen by both friends and strangers alike, and with the inclusion of Facebook Connect, users can publish their creations to their Facebook feed and even change their Facebook status directly from game.

However, where Funji differentiates itself is by focusing the game on communication that has a more intimate and personal touch. The personal design of one’s avatar is part of it, but touch-screen interaction plays an important role as well (or at least has tremendous potential). For example, players can touch their avatars to move them to show off their “amazing” dance skills.

In addition, the rooms are very different than those normally seen in similar applications, including very abstract and imaginative designs (giant cupcakes, Sasquatch, pink dogs, those sort of things). Moreover, the company plans to update the game regularly with new themes such as disco and summer vacations, mini-games, and more means of self-expression.

Of all of these, the last is most interesting to us. Since the prototype previews, we have seen dancing, the tossing about of friend’s avatars by shaking the iPhone, and even a little public display of affection by kissing the phone itself (and you thought iBowl made you look strange). One can only hope that these and more creative communication tools come about in the future updates.

Thus far, the only update we know about for sure is the coming of virtual goods transactions in July. According to statements from Funji themselves, the updates will contain new characters, animations, items, and backgrounds.

Overall, it looks like Funji has a great deal of potential, and really could turn out to be something pretty amazing. Shinyoung Park, CEO of Funji, Inc. says, “Our goal is to satisfy users’ quest for self-expression and playful interaction with friends within the mobile environment.” By the looks of things, they have taken the first step towards that goal, and we will be looking forward to future updates.