Inside Social Games

11 Responses to “Expert Metrics for Social Games by Siqi Chen and David King – Slides from #SGS09”

1. Social Gaming Summit: Notes, Metrics and Data | Creative Traction Says:
   June 23rd, 2009 at 7:41 pm

   [...] Expert Metrics for Social Games by Siqi Chen and David King – Slides from #SGS09 [...]

2. jason bailey Says:
   June 23rd, 2009 at 9:40 pm

   Great looking stuff. Wish I had the narrative to go along with it. Do you know if the sessions will be republished? Were the filmed or audio recorded?

   Glad these guys had the Cajones to show real numbers and metrics. It is refreshing.

3. Aymeric Says:
   June 23rd, 2009 at 10:26 pm

   Is there any tool out there that allows to monitor and run experimentations on a facebook application (or any web app) like they do?

4. Giff Says:
   June 24th, 2009 at 6:07 am

   there’s some good stuff in here, but I did laugh at the “(lifetime value – acquisition cost) = profit” formula. There’s also a few minor things called operating costs, product development costs, etc! However, I know I’m missing the talk that went along with the slides.

5. Social Gaming Summit/Mafia Wars, Money, Metrics and Michael Arrington « Content NOW Says:
   June 25th, 2009 at 1:44 pm

   [...] http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/06/23/live-notes-from-sgs09-expert-talks-on-viral-metrics-and-... Crowdsourced Summary http://www.slideshare.net/MayankDhingra/social-gaming-summit-2009 Possibly related [...]

6. Industry Perspectives: Q&A with Siqi Chen, CEO of Serious Business Says:
   July 8th, 2009 at 9:37 am

   [...] See slides from Chen’s recent presentation with David King on metrics for social games. [...]

7. Top 5 Elements for Virality of Social Games « Says:
   July 17th, 2009 at 10:46 am

   [...] and easy for them to do so. In a recent analysis, Siqi Chen of Serious Business showed that users tend to invite 16 friends at a time—the same number that Facebook allows on its friend selector widget. Game developers can make even [...]

8. Game designers, what do you need to do to get your players to pay you? « Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog Says:
   August 18th, 2009 at 10:48 pm

   [...] and David from Serious Business and Lil Green Patch gave a talk at the Social Gaming Summit about just this topic. I think another important metric is engagement (e.g. average time spent playing the game, [...]

9. Ciimo Linson Says:
   October 7th, 2009 at 3:54 pm

   Play through the letters, which describe the game that some time is necessary
   I spit my feelings, weighing too much on the heart. Writing
   Exceed the speed of my thoughts in writing. However, as soon as
   In my view, and mouth, as they have lost my words It is very close but I feel if ..

   I strongly support the idea of using metrics to fine tune game play with real live players, in much the same way that web 2.0 used metrics to fine tune user behavior. This is best practice for many social games today – Siqi and David from Serious Business and Lil Green Patch gave a talk at the Social Gaming Summit about just this topic. I think another important metric is engagement (e.g. average time spent playing the game, including multiple sessions). I believe engagement is correlated with monetization – the deeper a player is engaged with a game, the more likely they will be willing to pay. I think that this may be a better measure than retention (although I’m open to debate on this point). In many free to play games, the bulk of the money is spent in the first spike of game play, so whether they continue to return or not may not be as important as how well you hook them in the first few days that they play the game, and how addicted you can get them.

   This of course leads to questions of how you can build long term engagement, which Dan also has some suggestions for:

   Narrative, story, and cut scenes exhibit “rapid burnout”. In other words, player see them one or twice and then are bored when they see them again. Games that rely on such content have generally low retention metrics. You can mitigate this by releasing new narrative content on a regular basic to keep the product ‘fresh’, but this has a high cumulative cost.
   Linear levels or solvable puzzles also exhibit rapid burnout. Game systems that can be completed or conquered are usually one shot activities. You can layer additional challenges within each level, but often only expert players will be motivated to come back for a second play through.
   Some handcrafted content like text or static images can be refreshed cheaply: The type of handcrafted content you include makes a huge difference on the slope of your increasing costs. New text-based questions in a trivia game are relatively cheap compared to creating new God of War levels. An hour of text-based content is likely several orders of magnitude cheaper to build.
   Social content is low burnout: People will keep interacting with their friends for years. Mechanics that can tap into this often have very high retention rates. Anything that allows players to chat, share and form social identities in a community is pure gold.
   Grinding results in burnout, but it slows the process. Techniques like leveling or purchasing upgrades can dramatically increase the length of the game for very little development and design costs. Think of grinding as method of stretching, but not adding to your content. Grinding techniques only delay the inevitable. They can result in lower fun scores as people feel obligated to play, but aren’t enjoying the process of playing. Since you want people to fall in love, such a reaction can be counter productive to your goals.
   User generated content systems are low burnout: User generated content is ultimately a social system that encourages users to create consumable puzzles. The puzzles themselves may be short lived, but the community of creators can thrive for decades. This solves the problem of the linearly increasing cost of more handcrafted content by apply large numbers of people working for free.
   Algorithmic content has low burnout, but is hard to create and balance: Evergreen mechanics like Bejeweled or random map generation in Nethack keep people playing for hours. However, they are tricky to invent and balance.
   An example of a high retention game is one like Puzzle Pirates that has social (avatar, chat, guilds), grinding (levels) and evergreen algorithmic content (puzzles). There is some light narrative in the form of periodic events and very little in the form of conquerable level design. Most games have a mix of all these various types of content and successful services almost always put a portion of their reoccurring revenue towards a steady trickle of low marginal cost handcrafted content. However, a high retention game designs tend to emphasize content with less burnout

10. Ciimo Linson Says:
    October 7th, 2009 at 3:55 pm

    ++5

11. Top 5 Elements for Virality of Social Games Says:
    February 25th, 2010 at 10:21 am

    [...] and easy for them to do so. In a recent analysis, Siqi Chen of Serious Business showed that users tend to invite 16 friends at a time—the same number that Facebook allows on its friend selector widget. Game developers can make even [...]

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