Inside Social Games

A funny thing happened to Facebook’s open platform – game developers took the opportunity and ran with it, even taking over the core of the service for a while. By this fall, parts of the site had become overrun with users trying to get their friends to join them on their farm, help their mafia or help them clean their aquarium. Beyond constant stories about games in users’s news feeds, developers were making ample use of the Notification feature, jamming it full of promotions and notices of new items and features to get users to come back each day.

Facebook fought back with a roadmap of changes to help the core value of the platform, as well as a news feed that, for many users, caused links, status updates and photos with friends and family resurface to the top.

But all this didn’t treat the core issue: Facebook has become the broadest distribution platform ever for games.

• Almost every top application on Facebook is a game (see AppData for more on that)
• Users are joining Facebook in some parts of the world, like Taiwan, mostly to play games
• Users are subtly being coerced to add strangers as friends to advance in games in order to unlock new levels and items, often without going through the cumbersome process of protecting their personal profile information from these strangers

The sooner that Facebook figures out how to carve out a slice of the Facebook experience to support that, the better it will be for Facebook users and game developers.  And that doesn’t mean cracking down on developers.  It means coming up with a way to meet customer demands and still be true to the core principles of Facebook.

So, a modest proposal:

1) Create a new type of “friend” on Facebook – a “game friend”

2) By default, accepting users as a game friend only provides the sharing of information centered around that game both users have joined

a. Game Friends would not have any access to each other’s profile – users would have to specifically opt in to share such profile information

b. When a user shared an item from an application, they would be given the option of communicating only to Game Friends instead of the current default “All”

3) A new API that allows the accepting of gifts from Game Friends without the cumbersome process of individually accepting through the current requests mechanism

Ideally this allows the users more control over their personal information and allows developers to grow an application by a broader base (go add more friends without endangering your privacy) yet also have much more cost-effective communication with users that are actively interested in their product.

In fact, we’ve already seen some games try to create a set of separate identities, like “poker buddies” in Zynga’s Texas HoldEm poker game. Imagine being able to take your gaming buddies across every game without spamming the rest of your friends. Facebook is now prompting users to adjust their privacy settings to share content with Friends of Friends or Everyone, in an effort to expand the social network and help you meet others. So why not leverage games as a way to potentially do the same?

We should also note that Facebook has clearly thought about the special place that games have taken in its developer ecosystem. In its roadmap for forthcoming changes to the home page, the company shows a separate bookmark tab separate from other applications, specifically for games. Sub-menus let you see see your games and your friends games. Once you select the games page, you can also see your recent games as well as all of the games your friends are playing.

The games bookmark feature looks promising, although it doesn’t fully address the game friend problem. The future of our social networks depends on effective filters. The idea of a game friend filter could provide even clearer value to developers, users, and Facebook.

	Name	MAU
1.	FarmVille	71,523,193
2.	Café World	31,940,052
3.	Causes	31,917,896
4.	Social Interview	29,912,434
5.	Happy Aquarium	27,508,093
6.	Mafia Wars	26,857,214
7.	FishVille	25,305,412
8.	Pet Society	21,447,371
9.	Birthday Cards	21,059,336
10.	Texas HoldEm Poker	20,018,548
11.	Facebook for iPhone	19,196,532
12.	YoVille	18,977,171
13.	FamilyLink.com (formerly We’re Related)	18,450,010
14.	Farm Town	18,447,733
15.	Restaurant City	16,655,503
16.	Friends Exposed	16,316,089
17.	Roller Coaster Kingdom	15,138,618
18.	MindJolt Games	13,945,850
19.	Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones	11,732,693
20.	Mobile	11,727,134

Eric von Coelln was the vice president of marketing at Oberon Media, a leading multi-platform casual games company, and most recently the vice president of Marketing at PowerSoccer.com. He is now a New York based freelance consultant to games, e-commerce and social media companies — including some of the largest social gaming companies on Facebook. While Mr. von Coelln does write about some companies for which he has done paid consulting from time to time, this post is based on publicly available information and in our view is an unbiased analysis of the industry. You can find his blog here.