Inside Social Games

Playfish is one of the leading game developers on Facebook, but its latest game, Quiztastic, is getting a slow start out of the gate. Some of the company’s titles, including Country Story and Restaurant City, are still growing with roughly 5 and 12 million users respectively. Others have plateaued; the Worms-style Crazy Planets is staying steady at around 2 million.

What about the latest release, Quiztastic? With game play focused around TV game show-style quizzes created by the users themselves, this latest Playfish game has been growing extraordinarily slowly. It currently has less than 60,000 monthly users.

While we do not know the exact reason, we can make a few assumptions — most likely, the cause is the user generated content itself. Sure, it is nice to the give players creative control, but with that power comes a great deal of low quality content that, frankly, turns many off to the game as a whole. Suffice to say, Quiztastic raised a number of questions for us, so we sat down to speak with COO and Co-Founder of Playfish, Sebastien de Halleux to learn more.

In the interview below, he tells us about the company’s plans for growing Quiztastic, as well as the international growth and revenue the company is seeing.

[Inside Social Games] Thanks for talking with us again. Recent developments with Playfish have left us with a handful of questions. When last we spoke, we were talking about design, production, and specifically Restaurant City, but there are a few new things to discuss now; namely, Quiztastic. Obviously, quiz apps have been around for forever, so why create this title? What are your goals and expectations?

[Sebastien de Halleux] Quiz games have been a popular form of entertainment across many platforms, including TV, consoles and lately on social networks. However we felt that there was a strong opportunity to improve the quality of the quiz game experience on social networks. Quiztastic is an experimental title to innovate in this category and bring a high quality user experience that’s fresh and fun to a category that’s clearly enjoyed by many.

[ISG] Now, one of the prime elements of Quiztastic is user generated content. Essentially, every quiz seems to be made by a user. Why grant them so much power?

[SH] Traditionally, TV quizzes have been very hard to create because the questions need to be written for a mass audience, and there’s an art in balancing them so that they are as broadly appealing as possible. On social network, you can narrow your audience to just your friends and this gives the scope for publishing much narrower questions sets around specific interests. We know that the most knowledgeable and most creative writers are out there and we wanted to create an experience that would let them express themselves with their friends and the world at large. Think of it as a kind of crowd-sourcing model a la Wikipedia.

[ISG] Usually, surfacing user generated content (UGC) is a double edged sword. We’ve seen it already within just a short time after this game’s release. Painfully easy or hard quizzes, foreign quizzes, vulgar quizzes, which, sadly, dilute the few good ones in circulation. What are some of Playfish’s plans to blunt this issue?

[SH] As can be seen by many popular UGC driven sites, from Wikipedia to YouTube, content management in a UGC environment is far from an easy problem. We decided to take a stab at it because at Playfish our mission is to change how the world plays games and we are not afraid of hard challenges that push the innovation envelope. We fully admit that we might not get it right from the start, but we have a history of working closely with our community to create new and fun experiences and this is the road we are taking with Quiztastic. Last week we released a new version of our quiz filtering system, including better language filters, community-moderated categories and a featured quiz module to surface interesting content.

[ISG] Well, that is most certainly refreshing to hear, but here’s an addendum to my previous question. Though this isn’t a problem for Playfish specifically, it is an issue for any game that relies heavily on user made material. Player’s aren’t game designers, so more often than not, the content is not quite as fun. Do you think there is any way to really get around this issue?

[SH] True, most users are not game designers, however, most users are a fountain of knowledge in areas that matter to them. This could be South African Wines , The Simpsons or simply what happened during a recent weekend with their friends. We wanted to tap into that knowledge, even if less than 1% of users end up creating quizzes, that’s a lot of quizzes on the social audience scale.

This being said, there are also more serious uses of the app: teachers wanting a fun and easy way to introduce a subject to their students, local businesses wanting to promote their offering, regions wanting to promote themselves, magazines looking for a fun way to engage with their online audiences. For all these and many more, we are allowing deeplinking to any quiz, so that they can be posted on the wider web.

Check out this quiz on Boulder, CO for example.

[ISG] Can we expect any Playfish created quizzes in the future? And will there be an easier way to find them than the current filters?

[SH] Whilst Playfish-created quizzes are in the works, we believe that the best content will come from unexpected sources. Our focus is to make these source more easily discoverable. With recently rolled-out features such as ‘Featured Quiz’, ‘Created by your Friends’, ‘Top Rated’ we are starting to tweak our quiz discovery mechanism.

However, we believe that quiz authors will want to market their own quizzes using deep-linking to connect their intended audience (friends or otherwise) to their special creation.

[ISG] One popular game that makes heavy use of user generated content is the PlayStation 3’s Little Big Planet. The game was phenomenal, but relied heavily on UGC for longevity. In that game’s case, many players felt that moderators for content were far to strict. What is your take on such moderation?

[SH] Playfish’s approach is very different from LBP. We don’t believe in heavy central moderation, but rather in improving the relevance of quizzes much like Google treats their ads. By providing tools and algorithms to improve the relevance of quizzes, we want to ensure users can always tune in to Quiztastic and see something that interest them, in their own language. Social filters such as which quizzes are popular amongst your friends play an important role in this quest for relevance.

[ISG] So how do you feel Quiztastic is doing now? Surely a lot of the early issues were just growing pains.

[SH] It is very early days, and there’s a lots of exciting features which we are working hard on and which are not yet available, but so far we have received lots of positive feedback from our community which helps us steer and nurture this new title. One of the biggest appeal to us is that UGC driven services heavily benefit from the network effect, so watch this space.

[ISG] Okay, now there is one other topic that’s been picking at the back of my mind. Moving away from UGC and Quiztastic, Facebook is growing significantly on the international level, and to that end you have been translating a lot of your apps. Have you been making use of Facebook’s app translation tool?

Sebastien: At Playfish, we want to create the highest quality experience for friends to play together and this mean ensuring that you can play the game in your native language.

So far we support around 10 languages in our games and are adding new ones all the time. We are not at this stage using the community translation tools from Facebook, given we operate in a Flash environment, but we do get lots of help from our community to improve our own translations and suggest new ones, so we essentially tap into the same great translation power that is the Facebook community.

[ISG] How effective has that been for you?

[SH] We have an audience distribution that mirrors the Facebook audience distribution so we are very happy with the local traction our games are getting. The amazing thing is that the concept of a ‘low quality user’ no longer applies as users from traditional ‘low value’ countries actually have a similar propensity to spend their hard earned money in a game, because the price point of virtual good is affordable ($1 compared to the retail price of a video game) and delivery is guaranteed since the virtual good is delivered online (unlike a physical good). This is changing the face of e-commerce and has led us to say that there is no such thing as a low quality user, only low quality experiences.

[ISG] It’s probably safe to assume that the translations are happening due to Facebook’s global reach. How much international traffic are you seeing now (compared to before translation)?

[SH] Our traffic is split evenly around the globe: 30% Americas, 30% Europe, 30% Asia, 10% Rest of World. Our games have been localized from day 1. This is one of the benefit of having 4 offices around the globe (Playfish has offices in Beijing (China), London (UK), Norway and San Francisco). Localization goes beyond language, there is also cultural aspects to respect and adapt to. For example menus in Restaurant City, fashion trends in Pet Society and down to memory cards in Who Has The Biggest brain (which feature both sushi sets and veggie burgers). Social games are a truly global consumer phenomenon and we are setup to address it both globally and locally.

You can get a glimpse of our players in different countries here.

[ISG] Has there been any one country, region, or demographic that has been the source of the most increases (traffic wise)?

[SH] We are strongest in markets where social networks are the most mature, i.e. US and UK, but rising fast everywhere else. In less mature geographies where social networks are still nascent we see signs of people joining social networks as a way to access our games. This highlights the key role played by content in the social network ecosystem.

[ISG] What about revenue wise? What groups of people are spending more? About how much more? Assuming you can share.

[SH] See my earlier comments about propensity to spend being quite different from traditional physical goods e-commerce. Latent demand is very high around the world. There are still large challenges related to the payment layer in more remote territories, but this is an area of intense focus by many players, both global and local, so this will get addressed over time.

[ISG] Thanks for your time. One last question: we’ve seen Playfish go from simple word games to virtual worlds, and now to user generated content: So what is next for you guys?

[SH] You never know what is going to come next from Playfish and this is part of the fun. One thing I can guarantee you is that we are hard at work on making our existing games even more fun, as well as working on some amazing new projects… on which I can unfortunately not comment.