Inside Social Games

Checking out a game in its beta phase can be dangerous, but given the iterative nature of social game design, I checked out the “newest games” tab in Facebook this week. As such, Divine Division is only a skeleton of a game for which a community and new features are planned. Whether these will actually happen, or you should be part of them, remains to be seen.

Divine Division puts you in the role of St. Peter, at the pearly gates of heaven. Your task is to sort the worthy from the wicked, the good from the evil. These are represented by little white and black souls that bounce all over the screen and you must separate by controlling the gate in the middle. As a game concept, it’s either really silly or cynical - I’m not sure which. Human souls are now bouncing around like pong pellets and the people determining our fate have a time limit and a really bland interface.

How’s the game play? You’ll get bored quickly, but that’s to be expected with a game still in the early stages. Tabs labeled “Friends top scores,” “wall of fame,” “my tournaments,” and “collection” are all pretty standard social networking elements. In order to unlock the collection element of the app, you must invite more friends. It has the pieces in place to be a social game.

The one thing the developers do well here is sell advertisements. Powered by MochiAds, an ad greets you as you start the game, shortly followed by a “yougame.com” ad from the developers, and if you beat a level, another ad between stages. In many of the tabs, the actual function of the tab is featured below an ad for other applications apparently also developed by the creators. This is not the next Peggle or Snood, but a cheap flash game that advertisers got roped into and if you’re not careful, you will too.

Gameplay: 1

Developers: 6

How big a trap: 7

The 2nd annual Virtual Goods Summit 2008 is coming October 10 in San Francisco at UCSF’s Mission Bay Conference Center. While the specific format hasn’t been set, those interested can check out last year’s lineup and agenda to get a sense of what you can expect this year. Interested sponsors can also inquire at the VGS 2008 website.

As social games start to mature, so must the revenue streams. Industry leaders Zynga, SGN, and Playfish are all experimenting with virtual goods models with early success. While advertising will always provide valuable supplementary income, digital goods sales are vital to the future of the social gaming ecosystem.

VGS 2008 promises to dive into the hard questions around making virtual goods economies work and how virtual goods are impacting social networks and social application development. Here are the conference details:

Conference overview

The Virtual Goods Summit 2008 is a one day conference focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies. This year’s conference will build on the success of last year’s event and dive even deeper into some of the key themes facing industry participants today. We’ll feature a blend of panel discussions and expert-led breakout sessions covering everything from getting started with virtual goods to maximizing the revenue opportunity around virtual goods and virtual economies.

This year’s conference will bring together leading entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, technologists, and industry participants to spend the day discussing the present and future of this exciting new space. We encourage you to join us at this year’s event and participate in what promises to be a lively conversation. We’ll spend some time discussing a number of exciting topics, including the following:

Panel topics

• Making Virtual Economies Work: Lessons from the Leaders
• Generating Real Revenue from Virtual Goods
• Virtual Goods and Social Networks
• What Users Want: Branded vs User-Generated Virtual Goods

Questions to address

• What does it take to successfully launch a virtual goods offering?
• What does it take to nurture and develop a successful virtual economy?
• Why are users embracing virtual goods?
• How are virtual goods impacting social networks?
• What strategies can developers employ to drive greater volumes of virtual goods transactions?
• How can developers tackle tricky issues around billing, payments, and fraud?

The 2008 Social Gaming Summit, co-produced by Charles Hudson and Jeremy Liew this past June, has now posted online video of the conference sessions. These are highly recommended for anyone interested in learning more about the “social gaming” space.

Check out video from the following sessions:

As the social gaming space continues to gain steam both within the social network development and game development communities, Inside Social Games will be keeping track of the top Facebook games. Here’s a  look at the Top 25 Social Games on Facebook as of today, August 3, 2008:

Notes on August 3, 2008 Rankings:

• Scrabulous, previously the 5th biggest game on Facebook, has been taken offline by its developers, the Agarwalla Brothers, after receiving a cease and desist from Hasbro. The Agarwalla Brothers have another title, Wordscraper, that has since been performing quite well.
• The removal of Scrabulous has also thrust EA’s official version of Scrabble into the ISG Top 25. Scrabble debuts this month at #21, with virtually all of its traffic coming since the Scrabulous disappearance.
• MyYearbook’s Owned, originally a clone of Serious Business’s Friends For Sale, continues to hold the top spot this month with nearly 700,000 daily active users.
• With 5 games in the list, Zynga takes the prize again the month for most games in the top 25.
• Playfish continues its dominance of the top 10, with Who Has the Biggest Brain coming it at #6, Bowling Buddies at #7, and Word Challenge at #8.
• SGN’s Nicknames is this month’s highest breakout performer, shooting all the way to #15.
• Bubble Town, YoVille, and Mob Wars were the biggest percentage gainers this month. YoVille was rewarded for its success with an acquision by Zynga two weeks ago.

This is a guest post by Christopher Mack.

Until recently, Electronic Arts was the largest developer and publisher of video games in the world. But despite the company’s staggering profits, one of their top development executives, Neil Young, recently made the decision to leave his 11 year home to lead development of mobile games for the iPhone platform with new startup Ngmoco.

With estimated iPhone sales by 2009 at around 45 million, it is no wonder that game developers see potential to create games for the platform. From a design standpoint, the capabilities of the iPhone are up there with Nintendo’s Wii and DS systems. The built in accelerometer allows for the orientation of the iPhone to be translated into game commands (allowing for innovative and intuitive game play), and the built in messaging, email, and global positioning adds further possibilities to compete, play, and socialize with not only real world friends, but people from all over the world.

Now with 3G, the iPhone is even more usable than before with faster network access, and the large touch screen provides ample opportunity for creative and intuitive design in small, casual games. However, it is the open internet and connection to real world friends that opens the doors to social gaming opportunities.

Mobile devices including the iPhone are already used in abundance for social communication amongst much of the world’s population. Recent statistics have shown that in the US 63% of people ages 18-27 use mobile text messaging, 31% of people ages 28-39, and 18% of people ages 40-49 - with over 4.7 billion text messages sent on average each month. Clearly, people use the social aspects of mobile devices. In addition, there are over 1 million java game downloads per month on average on mobile devices. There is clearly potential for a new class fo social gaming applications to emerge on the iPhone.

The iPhone’s phenomenal internet capabilities make it much better than that of other mobile devices for social/online game development.  The iPhone has the capability to locate users using GSP or cell tower triangulation, and connects to the internet both on cellular and Wi-Fi networks. With the release of the iPhone 3G, users can access GSM, EDGE, UMTS, and HSDPA networks. Just like a laptop with Wi-Fi capabilities, the iPhone will ask if you wish to connect to a network and for a password. When Wi-Fi is active, the iPhone will automatically switch to any other nearby, previously approved, networks.

And according to Google, the iPhone generates 50 times more search requests than any other mobile handset. Deutsche Telekom states that the average internet usage of an iPhone customer is over 100MBytes (30 times that of the average contract-based consumer)! This includes everything from email, chat, iTunes, YouTube, mySpace, Facebook, and virtually ever other social network people use. Clearly, the iPhone is ready for prime-time web applications.

Perhaps the biggest change in the business model for iPhone developers is the new gatekeeper: Apple. Traditionally, mobile games are payed for when they are downloaded. With the iPhone, Apple controls all application downloads through the App Store. Whether or not developers feel too much risk in developing in such a world remains to be seen. In the past, anything but a pay-per-download model for games on mobile devices has struggled - subscription based payments have only ever had limited success.

All the tools needed for the construction of great social games are already built into the iPhone, and the iPhone has already been adopted by the millions of consumers. Now it falls to the developers to build the next generation of games for a new platform. Who will becme the leader in mobile social games on iPhone?

A day after Scrabulous developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla took the game offline in the US and Canada, the team of Indian brothers has relaunched the game with a new name and board design: Wordscraper. Wordscraper uses the same UI as the old Scrabulous and is played essentially the same way Scrabble is played, but with different “bonus tiles” and board dimensions.

Meanwhile, the official version of Facebook Scrabble, developed by EA under license from Hasbro, has experienced continued growth in the first day since Scrabble’s disappearance: usage has grown to nearly 60,000 daily active users. At its peak, Scrabulous drew over 700,000 daily active users.

We’ll track the growth of both games to see whether users will migrate to Wordscraper or the official version of Scrabble.

This morning, Vindu Goel at the NYT reported that Scrabulous, the popular Facebook game and Scrabble clone, had been shut down. Just last week, Hasbro, owner of Scrabble IP in North America, filed a DMCA claim against the makers of the game.

However, it appears that the take-down was not Facebook’s doing. Instead, it was a voluntary move by the Agarwalla Brothers (see interview here) while they sort out their legal matters in North America. Scrabulous remains accessible elsewhere in the world.

> Read more at Inside Facebook

In a move that many have been expecting for a long time, Hasbro, owners of the popular Scrabble game for the past 60 years, has filed a lawsuit against the developers of the popular Facebook application Scrabulous. Scrabulous, which sports over 500,000 daily active users, is one of the most popular applications on Facebook, and was an early favorite amongst many employees at Facebook itself. Now, it’s the subject of a suit in US District Court.

According to Brad Stone at the New York Times,

“Hasbro has an obligation to act appropriately against infringement of our intellectual properties,” said Barry Nagler, Hasbro’s general counsel, in a statement. “We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property, and we are pursuing this legal action in accordance with the interests of our shareholders, and the integrity of the Scrabble brand.”

“Hasbro has always had the same two priorities,” said Mark Blecher, general manager for Hasbro Digital Media, in an interview this morning. “One is to offer a great playing authentic game for fans and the second is to protect our intellectual property. This was theft of I.P., plain and simple.”

Apparently, Hasbro and Scrabble licensee EA briefly spoke with the Agarwalla Brothers about working together, but then decided to file a motion to shut Scrabulous instead. EA recently launched an officially sanctioned version of Scrabble on Facebook a couple of weeks ago.

led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Institutional Venture Partners, and includes funding from previous investors Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group and Avalon Ventures.

As part of the investment, Bing Gordon, who recently left EA for KP, will take an active director role in building the company. Gordon, who was the co-founder and former chief creative officer of Electronic Arts, joins LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman, Brad Feld of Foundry Group, and CEO Mark Pincus on the board.

In addition Zynga is announcing the acquisition of Facebook application YoVille, which it claims is the “largest virtual world game” on social networks. YoVille’s rapid growth to 150,000 daily active users has caught the attention of many Facebook application developers recently, and it joins a number of other top (and formerly independent) Facebook game developers that have joined the Zynga fold.

What are Zynga’s plans for its $39 million war chest? “We are doubling down on social gaming, raising the production quality and scaling the infrastructure,” says Pincus. Apparently, Zynga plans to spend a lot more than most small developers have spent creating the first generation of social games.

For more, see Inside Facebook.

Large social game Zynga is announcing this morning that two new executives are joining the company.

Scott Derringer is joining Zynga as vice president of product management from Yahoo! Inc., where he served as senior director of product management. Derringer will be responsible for developing online games and will report to CEO Mark Pincus. At Yahoo!, he played a key role in developing the company’s community strategy and overhauling Yahoo! Groups

Hugh de Loayza is joining as vice president of business development and will be responsible for developer relations, mergers and acquisitions and licensing opportunities. He will report to Andrew Trader, executive vice president of sales and business development. De Loayza is a games industry veteran having served as senior director of business development for Oberon Media building partnerships with EA/POGO, United Online, Verizon, ATT, Hewlett Packard and Hasbro.