Inside Social Games

As anyone who was at GDC last week could tell, “social gaming” was certainly one of the major themes that people were interested in talking about this year – much moreso than last year, when there was barely even a panel on it if I remember correctly. As social games continue to become more and more mainstream in the west, a lot of people are getting attracted to what appears to be the first mass market opportunity of this scale in a long time. Nevertheless, there also continue to be skeptics who see social games based on virtual goods as just a Flash in the pan. “They’re not even real games,” many people say. Is this kind of casual social gaming really here to stay?

Let’s step back and take an anecdotal look at human behavior in general. Have most people over the years (generally speaking) preferred to spend their time playing games with people they know or people they’ve just met? Although there are some important exceptions, most anecdotal evidence suggests that many more people would rather play games with friends and family than people they meet in a lobby, even if the “games” they’re playing are pretty basic, like cards or checkers.

On average days, most people who play games want to play with people they know – whether it be in the back yard growing up, in the nearby field with friends, or during game night at the house. These experiences are fun, not just because of the content of the game itself, but because of the context for social interaction with friends that they allow. Having a fun experience with friends is generally more important than in-game achievement.

So now, as what we today call “social games” proliferate across online social platforms, it should come as no surprise that millions of people are starting to play the types of games that allow casual, asynchronous interaction with friends that never played other types of online games with strangers. There are already 16 games on Facebook with more than 10 million monthly players, one (FarmVille) with over 80 million (I repeat, 80 million) monthly players – most of whom don’t identify as online gamers – and we’re still in the very early days.

Of course, there are some important exceptions to note. Some of these include:

• In skill-based games, particularly in team or clan games, players who reach a certain level of proficiency generally want to find other players of a similar skill level, no matter if they are friends are not. We see this both in the physical world in sports leagues like soccer/football, and online in examples like Counter-Strike leagues. However, in general, people who continue to play skill games often tend to be the more skilled players, i.e. are generally viewed as “hardcore,” and not representative of the average person.
• In MMORPGs, players often form strong ties with a particular group, and endeavor either individually or collectively as a guild to perform tasks that intrinsically lead to frequent interactions with strangers. (This is what the commenter “Brass Monkey” is referring to on Raph Koster’s blog post regarding this comment I made at GDC.) It’s certainly true that this is a fundamental dynamic of most MMOs, and many “social games” on Facebook at least partially share these characteristics. For example, you can interact with friends or strangers in games like YoVille.
• In gambling games, people often like to play with strangers more than friends because of the intrinsic and potentially relationship-damaging conflict that can arise from taking your friends’ money. Just as many people gamble in casinos instead of with friends when playing for high stakes, most people also even play poker games on Facebook with strangers. (Poker games are also happen to be synchronous, making it harder to find friends who are online at the same time to play with, but I think that doesn’t affect this core social dynamic.)

As gaming technology has advanced over the last 20 years, social infrastructure has lagged behind. As a result, gaming culture has become branded in many traditional senses as “anti-social” (i.e. images of a teenager in a bedroom with a headset on at a computer or a child in front of a TV are common). Now that high-fidelity online social graphs exist (Facebook being the largest and primary case), online gaming is about to become much more socialized and “normal” as these games blend entertainment and authentic, asynchronous communication with “real-life” (i.e. not just in-game) friends.

Facebook is the best platform for this blending of entertainment and communication to happen on because it is built on trusted identity and meaningful real-life connections (at least for a very large portion of its users). That’s something that gaming portals just don’t have. Over time, Facebook and other social platforms will gradually take over more and more of the “casual” gaming market, though there will of course be opportunities for carve-outs in particular game genres just as there are carve-out opportunities in particular cultures and geographies in general. But on the whole, most people want to play games with their friends most of the time, just as much now as they always have.

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There was a lot of hand-wringing by developers prior to Facebook phasing out application-based Notifications on March 1st, especially among smaller developers who relied heavily on them to remind users to come back to their game or application. Making matters worse, the new features designed to replace Notifications had their own issues:

• Proxy email messaging wasn’t fixed until over a week after Notifications disappeared (see the bug) and some developers were caught off-guard that proxy emails have a restrictions on acceptable HTML and FBML tags
• The Games Dashboard and Counters have been extremely ineffective in driving traffic (one developer shared that of 150,000 referenced visits, 1202 were from the dashboard)

Illustrating the immediate impact of the changes, one developer posted this graphic of their application’s engagement metrics, highlighting the relative impact of Notifications versus the games dashboard in driving engagement:

Clearly, no one argues that end of Notifications was going to have a huge impact on traffic, and several developers were phasing out their reliance on Notifications way before the March 1st due to them being less effective as the channel was already overwhelmed with messages. Francis Pelland, developer of several relatively small Avastar applications summed up the debates on the developer boards: “I phased out Notifications in my apps about 3 weeks ago and my DAU is significantly higher than before through creative thinking and alternative viral features. People should sit and think rather than complain. This sort of thing happens every time when Facebook makes a change and consider it to be the end of the world, make threats to quit, and say it will be the end of Facebook.”

So how are the largest developers faring in the post-Notifications world? Clearly it’s not the doomsday scenario that some feared as developers are mostly relying on email or fan page posts to replace application-to-user Notifications, while user-to-user Notifications are being facilitated through creative use of Wall Posts. Here are some highlights by top developers:

Zynga

In the two weeks since Notifications, Zynga’s titles are a mixed bag with PetVille and FishVille down 4-6%, Mafia Wars and Café World flat and YoVille and FarmVille up 3%. Zynga’s use of email is fairly sporadic and limited to a few titles:

• FarmVille and Café World have yet to send an email (based on my observations and discussions with other users). With such a large user base, the cost of email may be prohibitive compared to the effectiveness of fan page posts.
• YoVille has slowly increased its frequency from once a month at the end of 2009 to 3-4 per month and has primarily focused on new item releases.
• Since December, Mafia Wars has sent seven emails, primarily focused on new game features (holiday gift safe house in December, Bangkok expansion release in late January and the revamp of their store in February). Three of those emails have entitled the recipients to the Mafia Wars hard currency, reward points.
• Finally, PetVille sent it’s first email to users as part of the process to accept emails and unlock a pet for your PetVille pet.

Instead of relying heavily on email, Zynga has focused on innovating user-to-user communication via Wall Posts, re-focusing users from sending gifts to asking for gifts and collaborative tasks that require users to plead with friends to send items so they can complete the task.

The only games that haven’t had either consistent emails (YoVille) or the collaborative task mechanism (Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Café World), are the only two games that are down over the last two weeks (FishVille and PetVille).

Electronic Arts

Since Notifications were turned off two weeks ago, there is a noticeable split between what games have been impacted: Restaurant City is up 8%, Pet Society up 3% and Country Story down 7% while the latest titles (Poker Rivals and Gangster City) are down 23-28%.

The biggest of the former Playfish titles (Pet Society, Restaurant City and Country Story) also have been prolific email senders averaging a message every week and focused on touting new decorative items, recipes and the occasional new feature. Poker Rival and Gangster City have yet to send emails out (based on my observations) which in part can be tied to the fact that without a farm, home or any physical place to decorate, there are fewer new things happening in these games each week, making content a bit of a stretch.

CrowdStar

CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium and Happy Island have been relatively flat since the end of Notifications on March 1st. Only Happy Pets seems to have seen a marked decline (down 12%) and that may have more to do with the continual decline since rival PetVille was launched in early December.

Unlike the other developers, CrowdStar has not explicitly been collecting emails or prompting users to sign up for email Notifications. As such, the developer and has not sent any emails to date (again, based on my observations) about application updates, preferring to use fan page posts exclusively to convey new updates.

With regard to user-to-user Notifications, users in Happy Aquarium can still visit a friend’s tank and click on a button to notify that friend that their aquarium needs to be cleaned or fish need to be feed, but it appears that no notification goes out any longer and the application has not been changed to do a wall post to that friend’s wall.

Playdom

Playdom was a prolific user of Notifications up until the last minute, and while Wild Ones was up 6%, the rest of their biggest titles were either flat or down since Notifications ended March 1st: Sorority Life was basically flat, Mobsters 2: Vendetta was down 5%, Tiki Farm was down 6%, and (Lil) Farm Life was down 15%.

Emails have been fairly sporadic across titles but it looks like this is a channel they’re just beginning to experiment with:

• Sorority Life had two emails in early February around collectible gifts for Valentine’s Day, but none since
• Mobsters 2: Vendetta had one email in February touting their “gang-up” feature, then two emails last week: one providing an email-subscriber only car and the other promoting their new retail card and a potential bonus for redeeming one before St. Patrick’s day
• Tiki Farm: pushed an email (the first I’ve observed) the first week of March touting new decorations

Viral Marketing (and the Facebook Platform) Isn’t Dead

While much of the data above is based on imperfect observation, it suggests that developers can still find a way to drive engagement and viral marketing by 1) leveraging email, 2) continuing to publish engaging fan page posts and 3) innovating with ways to get users to publish to their friends and their own walls (such as the collaborative tasks). Granted managing these multiple channels is a great deal more complicated than Notifications, but it doesn’t mean Facebook as a platform is dead.

Less clear is whether the Games Dashboard can be turned into an effective application-to-user and user-to-user forum. Zynga and Playdom are experimenting with counters, but few others are seriously using the tool because it hasn’t been overly effective at driving traffic. The bottom line is that users can’t find it and/or don’t use it: Facebook didn’t heavily publicize the games dashboard during the rollout of the new homepage in early February, and developers were desperate enough to publish fan page stories in an attempt to educate their users:

Based on developer feedback that the new bookmarks in the left navigation under the Game Dashboard link are static, Facebook’s platform team updated the developer roadmap so that users will at least be able to move bookmarks around in the near future, but this doesn’t solve the fundamental design issue. I firmly believe the games dashboard is a huge opportunity, providing the potential to discover new games and find your existing ones. But further education cannot overcome the fundamental design decision to not have “games” as a persistent part of the site navigation, visible from every page in the top nav, and made useful for user and developer alike with its own notification flag.

Eric von Coelln is a casual games and MMO marketing veteran who focuses on emerging metrics in social games. He is currently a New York based freelance consultant to games and social media companies. You can find his blog here.

With each passing month, more casual gaming companies turn their attention to Facebook, despite previous success running their own sites or licensing out games (we listed off 10 reasons why last year). One of the latest to join the exodus is Big Fish Games, a noted developer of downloadable casual games.

Big Fish launched its casual MMO Faunasphere on Facebook in February. Last week, it added a second game: My Tribe, which is something like a cross between Settlers and Gilligan’s Island. After picking a desert island to play on, you start off with a small band of tattered refugees, huddled around a single hut. Your job from there is to build a civilization.

The island premise isn’t unusual for Facebook. But Big Fish has gone beyond the usual fare with the functionality of My Tribe, which actually offers a large number of distinct actions. There are huts and buildings to erect, and later upgrade. Villagers have ages and different skills, and wear clothing, created with dyes and gems, that modify their abilities. There are items to pick up, resources to harvest, and new technologies to research.

My Tribe’s complexity stands out from the beginning, when the game’s tutorial — slyly disguised as “quests” — guides the new player through each action in turn. An hour into playing, when you’ve finally run through all the initial quests, there’s still no shortage of things to do: collecting seashells, managing villagers, planting new crops, visiting a friend’s island. The game also drops a random special item every few minutes that you can search for.

The endless to-do list makes My Tribe noticeably different from the time management games that are currently available on Facebook. Developers using the FarmVille mechanic usually intend for players to dip in and out of the game multiple times throughout the day. Players frustrated with running out of energy or crops to harvest are welcome to play for longer, but it’s only easy if they pay.

With My Tribe, a player could certainly dip in — although it might take more than a couple minutes to tidy up the island. But Big Fish meant to go against the grain with its game. “It was a conscious decision to build a more in-depth game and bring that to Facebook,” says Will O’Brien, the company’s VP of social gaming. “It’s the richest experience on Facebook.”

O’Brien was encouraged by Facebook platform manager Gareth Davis’ call yesterday for “iconic games” that can provide a defining experience for the social network. “I think he’s issuing a challenge and a mandate to the social gaming industry to raise the bar,” O’Brien says.

So that’s what Big Fish is trying to do with My Tribe, a game that it originally released in 2008 as a downloadable. For Facebook, the company added social features, but didn’t dumb down many of the other features. A hardcore gamer might not find the game either complex or engaging; a lot of time is spent scrolling around the screen, picking up seashells and setting your islanders to the same task over and over.

But most Facebook games have all the depth of a rain puddle; My Tribe tries to offer more. What remains to be seen is how far players will want to go with the game — after playing through far enough, it’s possible to build an ark and move to another island with different possibilities. Whether they’ll want to go that far is the only question.

MySpace is giving social gaming a big upgrade today, adding a new set of features, and partners, that intend to make third-party gaming apps a prominent part of the service.

The integration of games into MySpace’s core interface could specifically give game engagement a big boost. “Games” has replaced “Apps” as a tab in the site’s top navigation bar. Click on it and you’ll see a revamped page called “Games & Apps,” that contains a number of new features for games. Users’ home pages also now include a “Featured Games” window on the right-hand side that shows you games that MySpace staff has recommended. And, more updates from apps will now appear within users activity “Stream” of updates, including when friends score an app from 1 to 5 stars.

Meanwhile, the “Games & Apps” tab has gotten more features intended to help users find and engage with games. On the top right-hand module of the page, you can see your friends latest activities in apps. Another part of the page, “Featured,” shows games that are handpicked for quality by MySpace staff. “Suggestions” uses an algorithm to figure out which apps might appeal to each user the most, and includes a way to sort by only game apps. These suggestions are based on factors like which kinds of games users have already played, which ones their friends have been playing, and how well the apps are ranked by users.

Developers who have built apps for MySpace already will appreciate these changes, as the company previously gave games minimal attention. Some game actions showed up in users’ streams, and games appeared within a simpler apps page. That was it.

MySpace has still been the de facto place for social game developers to go besides Facebook. While many applications have gained millions of users — see our most recent list of top 25 MySpace games for more on that — a main way to gain an audience was through advertising within MySpace’s apps page. The company’s goal with the launch today is to have social games help increase the number of users and their engagement.

It already has around 100 million monthly active users worldwide, although this number has been falling in the past year. Of its users, 28 million use apps every month, and more than half of those play games; 56% female, and 44% male. With the updates today, co-President Mike Jones says the company is aiming to get half the site’s users gaming every month.

Social games launching on MySpace today include:

• Fish Isle (IGG)
• Hoop Fever Live (TheBroth)
• Kingdoms of Camelot (Watercooler)
• Paradise Paintball (CMUNE)
• SPP Ranch (Slide)
• Warlords (BitRhymes)
• Wild Ones (Playdom)
• Zombie Revenge (DeezGames)

The company is also announcing a couple other new, related projects today. One is an iPhone app called Neon, designed for games. You can log in with your MySpace account, see notifications and app invites from friends, and respond. While you can’t play games within the app, your responses will be recorded within MySpace. For example, MySpace’s Mobsters role-playing game might tell you that you’ve gained a free gun in the game, and you can click to approve this. When you accept friends’ invites to apps, MySpace will install the app on your profile on the site. This is not the only MySpace iPhone app planned, by the way — it also has more coming for the main site, as well as for other areas it focuses on, like music and entertainment.

It also has a few service partners it’s announcing: game development tool Unity, cross-platform social feature provider ScoreLoop and cloud gaming service Groovy Cortext.

MySpace’s gaming efforts have also included more fundamental changes to its developer platform, recently coming out with an analytics API, for example, that helps developers better track user metrics. The company has, as many readers know, been going through bigger changes. The News Corp.-owned company’s chief executive, Owen Van Natta, was let go last month; with Jones and another executive, Jason Hirschhorn, becoming co-presidents. All of these executives came on less than a year ago, replacing the company’s founding executive team. The company has spent much of the last year talking about how it’s going to become more of an entertainment service, but up to this point it has been focused on other areas, like music. Games are now front and center.

Since we’ve been on the subject of classic games getting remade as social ones, there’s one “inspired” genre that has kept popping up periodically over the past months. These are social team battling games reminiscent of the Worms franchise. The first noticeable appearance was with Playfish’s Crazy Planets, and another was Playdom’s Wild Ones. However, now, the latest Worms-like game goes to a quirky turtle-slaying game from German developer Plinga called Turtle Squad.

The company’s name may have been inspired by Zynga, but Turtle Soup is nearly a clone of Worms — if you played Worms 2, then you’ve played the core of Turtle Squad. However, for those unfamiliar with the old PC title, players control a squad of five turtles, with the objective of wiping out the enemy team. Each turtle has a set number of hit points, and using a set of bizarre weaponry (i.e. a shark missile), attempt to bring all enemies down to zero.

The player and computer-controlled opponent take turns, with each choosing which turtle to move. Using basic controls (move left, right, and jump, though eventually you get tools such as a helicopter or teleporter), they can position their character (under a time limit) on uniquely designed maps, searching for the best vantage point from which to attack. From here, the player selects a weapon and fires it, but what is interesting, however, is that power (determined by holding down the fire button), direction, and angle all play a part in attack accuracy.

You see, Turtle Squad actually has fairly decent physics, as well as directional wind. Between these two factors, it is possible to curve bazooka shells, bank shot grenades, and so on. After each match the game grants you bonuses to your income based on how accurate your shooting is, as well as your average time per shot and damage per shot (determined by accuracy and weapon choice).

This money, dubbed Turtle Coins, comes in a bit useful when purchasing new weapons and tools that are unlocked in the game’s single player campaign mode. Thankfully, the task of unlocking items isn’t too frustrating as the mode is actually fairly fun, with players advancing through a number of creative levels that have increasingly difficult enemies in terms of health, numbers, and overall AI.

Regardless, once you have unlocked a weapon, you have to actually pay to research it. This actually plays into an interesting social feature where the more friends you have playing, the less time it takes to research. Unfortunately, you can only work on one development at a time, - making said expedience prudent – but likely, that is to entice further friend invites. Luckily, you can always speed things up even more by buying the weapon immediately with the virtual currency, Plinga Stars. Oddly enough, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to actually buy it. At least not in an intuitive or visible place.

As for other social features, there are the standard feed publications, but curiously, these are coupled with preset “Brags” that openly taunt people to challenge your turtle squad. In fact, that challenge mode is the next social feature, which allows you to battle the squad put together by your friends. Sadly, it looks to just be computer controlled, but does have some potential for synchronous multiplayer.

Of course, if you don’t wish to pick fights with your friends, you can always have them join your squad. All this really does is put their name and Facebook profile picture above the turtles on the battlefield, but if they play too, the character will be granted an added health bonus.

Aesthetically, Turtle Squad looks and sounds great. The visuals and animations, coupled with the high pitched turtle voices, make it a very amusing game to play (though it’s soothing to mute it from time to time). It’s especially entertaining to watch a defeated turtle turn into a can of soup. Unfortunately, this praise also brings up our biggest complaint.

The social elements and researching of weapons aside, the core game play is virtually identical to Worms 2. Beyond that, Worms was also known for it’s cartoon visual style and high pitched English voices. Granted, these turtles aren’t from the UK, but if someone playing were to walk to the bathroom, you could probably switch out the game for Worms and they wouldn’t notice.

In the end, Turtle Squad is a fun game, but hardly very original. Its social elements are really what saves the title from being a complete rip-off of the Worms franchise, but even they still have untapped potential. This isn’t to say that social developers should stop basing their titles on classic games, it’s just saying that perhaps they should truly be more inspirational rather than mere blueprints.

In November, global games publisher and developer Merscom said that it was looking for more beyond the casual space and into the social scene. Not to long ago, the company gave us a first look at the alpha rendition of its new social Facebook title, The Crazies Tower Defense. Based on the upcoming movie, the app has been deemed, by the developer, ready as ever to be seen by public eye as Merscom has more 137,000 monthly active users, according to AppData.

In a nutshell, the film is about a toxin that gets into the water supply of a small Iowa town – when is it not a small Midwestern town? – that drives its victims insane before killing them. The few sane people remaining must band together to survive and that’s where the game comes in.

Already we see Merscom’s casual roots appear in this application with its “tower defense” title. As one of the older, and more common forms of casual games, it is a fun genre, but rarely original. Nonetheless, it looks like the developers are more than aware of such issues, as this defense app has a few key differences to make it feel a bit different than the sea of others.

Unlike the hundreds of other tower defense games, The Crazies does not give the user a set path that the enemies will follow. When they start the game, they are basically told, “This is your house. This is where bad guys come from. Enjoy.” Okay, yeah, there are tutorial prompts too, but you get the point. Regardless, between the player’s house and the alleyway where Crazies spawn from, there is nothing but a big open field to start out with (there are other, unlockable maps), and it’s up to the player to build a path – with bullets.

Starting with basic pistol wielding soldiers, users plant them down in little sandbagged bunkers to automatically shoot at passing enemies. With all tower defense games, this first “tower” has limited range, damage, and no area of effect (it can only hit one enemy at a time). Luckily, the game also grants new players with a slightly-better shotgun solider and some sandbag barricades (which are used to block off where enemies move) as well.

As Crazies die, cash – referred to as “Dollars” in this game – is automatically put in your wallet, with the occasional stack of money dropping on the playing field and needing to be picked up with a click. This is your in-game currency in the sense that it is used to purchase new soldiers and ammunition during battle.

Yes, you have to buy ammunition. This is one of the other interesting elements to The Crazies Tower Defense. The more towers you have, the more bullets you use, and if you run out…. Well, let’s say it won’t end well. It truly is a simple, but interesting feature though, as it adds a bit of chaos, urgency, and resource management to the game. Of course, if you need more Dollars to afford more, you can always buy a nest egg’s worth with the virtual currency, Gold.

Purchasing Gold is fairly standard, with offers, PayPal, etc, but what makes it worth buying is that you need it to buy new soldiers (snipers, mortars, etc.) at the weapon shops as well as upgrades for them. Thankfully, Gold is earned, slowly, through in-game means (killing Crazies), so a player is never forced to make a purchase in order to continue playing.

As a social game, yet another difference puts this app over most other tower defense titles. Beyond simple leaderboards and wall posts, the game has a handful of achievements for users to try and accomplish, as well as the ability to visit a friend’s map layouts, and even gifting. Nothing says “Be My Friend” like a sack of bullets, no?

Tower defense games are an enjoyable lot, so there isn’t a whole lot to complain about here other than minor usability issues. Honestly, the only true irritation was that the price of a soldier was not displayed upon a mouse-over. Instead, you had to click it and view its entire set of stats (in a different part of the screen) to see the cost; hardly intuitive when it is grayed out (because you don’t have enough money) or time effective when there’s about 9000 Crazies at the front door. On the other hand, the game did feel a bit easy, so perhaps the latter wasn’t that big of a deal after all.

Regardless, The Crazies Tower Defense does make a few nice changes to a pretty tired genre, and we’re interested to see how effective the game is at promoting the film.

Facebook is home to endless adaptations of the games of yesteryear. Harvest Moon, Pirates, Worms and many other non-action hits from gaming’s golden days undeniably provide inspiration for new games like Zynga’s FarmVille and Mafia Wars. But there’s a seemingly-obvious title that has missed out on the historical mining: SimCity.

Why obvious? The mechanics that make FarmVille (or Harvest Moon) such a resounding success are mirrored in SimCity. The most obvious one is growth. Farms grow and change; so do cities. The difference between a cornstalk and a skyscraper is time and size, but a game can easily re-scale either to fit the screens and attention spans of players.

There’s also the popular “harvesting” mechanic. Got a bean patch? Click on it to harvest and you’ve earned virtual coins. Click on your building, and you’re also harvesting coins. The big difference is what the players — and developers — imagine.

The use of Facebook’s communication features to grow games and increase engagement also seem applicable. FarmVille lets you send farm-themed gifts to your friends, Mafia Wars requires friends to help in team goals — why can’t the same things happen in city building?

Further, either setting up a virtual garden or a city appeals to a natural, human sense of order and beauty. On Facebook, satisfying these urges goes beyond farms to restaurants, animals, theme-parks and islands. The more one considers, the stranger it seems that SimCity has been overlooked so far by Facebook’s major game developers.

Luckily, a few small, relatively unknown developers recently began tapping the classic gaming goodness of SimCity.

There are two rapidly growing games that cleave fairly closely to the original SimCity formula: building and designing an entire city for the sake of doing it well (there’s no specified end game), while managing its buildings, zones and citizens. These two are My City Life by City Life, and My Town by Broken Bulb Studios.

You can see in the two graphs at right just how quickly these games are growing. In the top graph, My City Life, released late last month, has reached about 1.75 million players, while below it My Town, which has been around about a month longer, is closer to 2.5 million players.

These two come after a number of tries by other developers. In a review a couple weeks ago, we panned My City, which also follows the SimCity mechanic; it has stalled out with fewer than a million monthly active players. Even less successful are Enercities, Metropolis and Tiny Town (click each link for our review), each of which borrows from SimCity in varying degrees.

Why are My City Life and My Town more successful? We tried them out to get an idea. First off, it should be pointed out that SimCity fans shouldn’t expect a faithful reproduction of their game. As hinted above, these games tap into the same mechanics that make a game like FarmVille successful.

In SimCity, much of the action happened on its own; zone a section of the city to be residential, for instance, and it will begin growing on its own. But keeping players engaged on Facebook is about bringing them back repeatedly for short sessions, not letting someone sit back to watch a city grow for several hours.

So all the building is done manually; homes, shops, factories and parks are all manually placed. Just as in farming games, players must return periodically to click on their buildings, gaining their revenue.

There are other differences, although many of these come down to the Facebook platform; your city isn’t very animated, for instance, because that’s tougher to pull off. And many SimCity features, like terrain or natural disasters, aren’t present. The Facebook games are, in a nutshell, far simpler. But in our view, that’s what makes My City Life and My Town successful.

Each game has one clear aim: build a town that earns you enough money to put down buildings that you want to see, whether that’s a post office or public park, and expand further. There’s in-game currency that’s used for construction, with the usual option to buy more using real currency.

The successful Facebook games have almost all been fairly simple to date, and that’s not just because of the limitations of using Flash. The original SimCity was far simpler than SimCity 4, and built up to its complexity with each installment of the series; the relatively game-inexperienced userbase on Facebook will likely go through a similar progression, pushing the games to develop more features as they grow.

But even now, players are taking their urban planning seriously. “We get hundreds of emails about My Town each day through Facebook’s contact form,” says Robert Nelson, the CEO of Broken Bulb, which is based in Scottsdale, Arizona. “We got one off-the-wall email with 141 bullet points of features the player wants to see. It’s neat to see someone invested enough to send us that list.”

Broken Bulb has had a few surprises with My Town. The studio built the game to attract large numbers of somewhat engaged players, while it thought its other title, an RPG called Ninja Warz, would be smaller but earn more from virtual goods. “We’d heard from other companies that harvesting-style games don’t earn as much,” says Nelson. “But with My Town we’ve found an exception to the rule.”

I asked Nelson why someone else hadn’t already built a successful SimCity-style game. He says he was equally puzzled, but began to find some reasons in development. For instance, landscapes in My Town are fairly permanent.

“Not picking up an object when you harvest wreaks havoc — our game looks like FarmVille, but the mechanics are totally different,” he says. “People can’t schedule the game around their life as easily, and you run the risk of people starting to think their game is getting stale.”

The solution for Broken Bulb seems to be adding areas to expand into, so that players can go from a small to a large city, or even a region with several cities. The larger and more complex the maps get, the more the game will likely resemble SimCity instead of FarmVille.

Nelson says he considers My Town the first successful city building game on Facebook, and the biggest. The question is why, when Electronic Arts, which also makes games on Facebook, has owned the license to SimCity for years. Especially now that it owns Playfish, one of the successful social game developers on Facebook.

We mentioned SimCity for iPhone over a year ago, right after it was released, but there’s no sign yet of a social-gaming modification by EA. That’s a significant oversight for the company, which usually does a pretty good job at getting value from its licenses.

But whether EA gets involved or not, SimCity and its offshoots have a long, robust life ahead of them. In fact, there’s a whole new generation that will know and love the game: a free version of SimCity was recently released on the OLPC.

Over the past couple months, we have seen Blizzard Entertainment dabble in the realm of social games and networks, from virtual goods in the massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft, to a Facebook application that publishes player accomplishments from the game, to hints to a more social Battle.net. Those hints – which first came up in September - are coming to fruition. Blizzard offered a preview of the new, improved, and social version of the online gaming service.

Founded 14 years ago with the company’s ever popular Diablo title for the PC, Battle.net has always connected gamers to an online world of multiplayer competition, chat, and leaderboards. Frankly, it is one of the oldest and most successful gaming services to date. Having evolved through the games of Starcraft, Diablo II, Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition, and Warcraft III and holding, currently, more than 12 million active accounts worldwide.

However, Blizzard feels there is still more to be done.

Essentially, Battle.net will become an “always-connected experience” where users can log on and interact within the service whether or not you are playing a solo mission (i.e. in the upcoming StarCraft II) or competing in multiplayer matches. In times past, the system was merely a means for people to play online with one another with no real sense of self, in its own right, save for some basic chat room-type features. Soon, Battle.net will allow users that prefer solo play as well as multiplayer combat will receive the same news, content, chat, and friends’ status updates.

Using StarCraft II as an example, Blizzard states that players will be able to create a single “StarCraft II Battle.net character.” This will act as their personal identity across the entire service and track everything that you do in Battle.net connected games, including win/loss records, achievements, unlockable rewards (i.e. new avatar portraits), and so on. Furthermore, since the games will be connected through Battle.net, all saved games will also be accessible to that user from any computer at any time.

The backbone of all of these new features, according to Blizzard, is “Battle.net’s social networking and communication capabilities.” This comment refers to more than just text and voice based chat systems, but actually refers to a new feature dubbed Real ID.

Using a mutual invite/acceptance method, players can form Real ID friends that will identify users “by their real name, along with any character they are logged in as.” In addition, Real ID friends will provide users with more detailed information such as what they are doing, allow for broadcast messages, and even allow cross-game chatting between, initially, StarCraft II, Battle.net, and World of Warcraft. Of course, this will carry over into future Blizzard games as well.

The new Battle.net is also going to be highly supportive of community-created content as well. In the past, users have often submitted maps for StarCraft, modified levels for Warcraft III, and so on, and as a company that has always openly supported creative user generated content, Blizzard will now grant said users a “full-featured content-creation toolkit” for their creative endeavours. The kit uses the same tools used by the StarCraft II design team to create the single player campaign. Moreover, Battle.net will incorporate another new feature called Map Publishing which will allow players to upload their creations and share them with everyone immediately.

Eventually, these creative individuals will gain even more advanced sharing capabilities, at least with StarCraft II, with a StarCraft II Marketplace. From here, anyone can browse, download, rate, comment on, and even buy mods and content should the creator desire.

The system will also have a myriad of other minor improvements, better individual and group matchmaking systems for games, leaderboard and ladder systems, and a ton more. All in all, this is a huge move and improvement for Battle.net and we expect it to be a success for Blizzard Entertainment as a whole, as well. An in-depth preview can be found here at the StarCraft II website, including an interview with Battle.net Project Director Greg Canessa.

April 20 | San Francisco

As we announced two weeks ago, Inside Social Apps 2010, our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is happening April 20th in San Francisco, one day before Facebook’s official “f8″ event. We’re excited to see all of the developers from around the world that are planning to attend!

In addition to the initial set of 20 confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps 2010, we’re also excited to announce three more speakers today: Keith Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Booyah, Ron Hirson, Co-founder and SVP Product at Boku, and Lisa Marino, CRO of RockYou. They will be joining our full list of speakers listed below.

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Adam Caplan, VP Virtual Currency, Super Rewards / Adknowledge
  
• Renata Dionello, Chief of Staff to the CEO, eBay, and former Director of Consumer Business Development, PayPal
• Eric Eldon, Editor, Inside Facebook & Inside Social Games
• George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
• Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
• Sebastien de Halleux, Founder and COO, Playfish
• Ron Hirson, Co-founder and SVP Product, Boku
• Nick Lawler, Managing Director, Maverick Capital
• Keith Lee, Co-founder and CEO, Booyah
  
• Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
• David Marcus, CEO, Zong
• Lisa Marino, CRO, RockYou
  
• Dave McClure, Investor, Founders Fund Angel and fbFund Incubator
• Rex Ng, Co-founder and CEO, 6waves
• Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications, ngmoco
• Mark Pincus, Founder and CEO, Zynga
• Shervin Pishevar, Founder and Executive Chairman, SGN
• John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
• Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network
• Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
• Jay Weintraub, Founder, LeadsCon

More speakers and a full agenda will be announced shortly.

Finally, a limited set of “early bird” tickets is now available through Friday at a special price of $279. This price will change after Friday, and space will be limited, so we encourage you to register now.

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

Three years after the Facebook Platform launched in 2007, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry. Today, social games monetizing through virtual goods have quickly become one of the hottest sectors of technology and entertainment, both in the US and around the world. Where are social apps going, and who is leading the way?

Inside Network is proud to announce our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms: Inside Social Apps 2010, happening April 20th in San Francisco, is bringing together the world’s leading entrepreneurs all in one place to discuss the future of social applications and games monetizing through virtual goods.

This will be an in-depth one day event geared toward developers on Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone, senior executives, and investors. At Inside Social Apps 2010, founders and CEOs of the top social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies will be tackling the key issues facing the industry. We’re hosting it one day before Facebook’s “f8″ event in San Francisco, so this will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the key issues facing the future of the Facebook Platform and beyond before Facebook’s official event.

Register Now

A limited set of “early bird” tickets is available through Friday at a special price of $279. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on April 20th in San Francisco!

[Editor's note: This article was co-authored by Eric Eldon.]

When Facebook began enforcing new policy changes in mid December, it was called a “philosophical approach to platform governance.” As we covered on Inside Facebook, “instead of trying to spell out all the rules in detail, it is laying out more general principles and reserving the right to make policy enforcements when its policy team deems doing so to be necessary.”

Looking at what has and hasn’t been enforced since the changes were implemented helps provide some insight into the policy team’s thinking thus far.

When is Gifting Okay?

The policy: “You must not prompt users to send invitations, requests, generate notifications, or use other Facebook communication channels immediately after a user allows access or returns to your application.”

Just about every game launched prior to the changes in December had gifts — where users send gifts to friends, in most cases to users not already playing the game — first and foremost in their viral marketing strategy. This is still still evident by the number of games where the first menu tab is “Free Gifts” or “Send Gifts.” In reviewing 98 game applications with over 100,000 daily active users (DAU), only about 20% of them did NOT have a gifts component at the start of the game (the largest was Popcap’s Bejeweled Blitz with 2.8 million DAU).

We’ve been tracking this story over the past week. When we first looked, only four games with more than 100,000 DAU four appeared to be directing users to gift prior to playing the game: Happy Farm (940,000 DAU), Farkle, (840,000 DAU), Garden World (260,000 DAU) and Las Vegas Slots (210,000 DAU).

Facebook tells us that the policy “is not at all meant to stop gifting or virality — it’s meant to prevent users from being prompted to use Facebook communication channels before engaging with the application.” The company wants “users to initiate communications and not be asked to send them right after authorization or every time the user returns to the application.”

“Our expectation is that developers are required to comply with our Principles and Policies,” it says, “and if we come across violations, developers are going to be held accountable.” As many developers have been discovering lately, Facebook won’t punish apps by blocking them completely but rather shutting down some communication channels into fixes are implemented.

Out of the four games mentioned above, three have updated their interfaces to not require gifting, and are in compliance. Garden World still directs users to gift first, but we’re not sure for how long.

Let’s look at some more examples. Titles from Playdom, like Sorority Life and Mobsters 2, are taking users to a gifts screen when you click the Jobs and Missions tabs respectively. So while not the first thing users see when they come to the application, users still must skip the gifts screen (or send items to their friends) before they can actually engage in the game. This interface is okay, Facebook says, because the gift page isn’t what users see first when they add or return to the apps.

While gifts have often been considered social spam (with some developers specifically not including gifts because they feel they are too spammy), the feature has become a very powerful way to get users to interact around a game. Still, one can imagine a gifting mechanism that is a more natural extension of the game’s social aspects.

Café World by Zynga has a Free Gifts tab positioned first among menu items and was one of the first to add a “present” icon as an overlay to the playing screen; the app recently added a “Gift of the Day” section to your friends leaderboard across the bottom — you can send gifts to earn points. This interface is not just okay but a best practice, Facebook says.

It still by default prompts you to send this gift to all of your friends (versus just your Café World friends), but by positioning your promo near the friends leader board, it underscores the behavior that users are more likely to send gifts to their friends actually playing the game.

Pet Society by Playfish has taken the other extreme, only providing gifting of items from a user’s inventory to one of their friends actually playing the game. While this most accurately reflects the typical user’s desire to send something to a friend, it wouldn’t appear to be a top-of-mind functionality that would drive retention or viral growth as it is buried within the inventory “Chest” section of the game.

Eventually, we think most developers will create a gifts functionality that lies somewhere in between the “spam everybody” and “gift to a single friend” philosophies. One way for games like Café World to begin this transition would to change the default from sending to all your friends to just the users playing the game. Then take it one step further, allowing users to filter it to go to only their “active” Café World friends (say those that have played in the last week and thus are more likely to find value in the gift messaging).

Ideally, gifting can be a jumping point for users to have more conversations in and around the game, moving it from a viral marketing tactic to a game experience enhancing transaction that boosts customer retention.

Applications Continue to Gate Content Based on Number of Users

While gifting spam has been reined in a bit thanks to policy changes implemented by Facebook back in December, the company does not yet appear to be enforcing one of the other recent policy changes.

The policy: “You must not provide users with rewards or gate content from users based on their number of friends who use your application.”

Two of the biggest games on Facebooks, Zynga’s FarmVille and Café World, continue to use the practice, leaving developers trying to figure out how to interpret this specific policy. Below, you can see the Café World restaurant expansion requires 12 neighbors and just under 1 million coins (or a user can spend 35 Café World cash – the equivalent of $7 – to unlock the feature).

FarmVille recently introduced its long-awaited 24×24 expansion, and it requires a hefty 30 neighbors (or 60 FarmVille cash – about $12) to unlock. The desirability for this expansion by some players has resulted in long pleas to friends or strangers to “add them” so they can unlock it:

Besides the written responses, we’ve anecdotally heard of friends who have had long-ago forgotten colleagues contact them by phone to request them to friend them on a game to unlock something. That’s powerful stuff.

There is a long history of game design where users can either grind through to earn rewards or pay cash to unlock the items faster – a classic tradeoff between time and money that has helped fund a great number of games.

With Facebook, the ability to virally spread is equally valuable, as a portion of new users will end up spending real cash or bringing in other users. Thus developers like Zynga prize a user who can bring 30 friends to the game initially, then continue to influence (and retain) them through posts about the game. If, as a developer, you can’t remind users with notifications – those are being phased out in a month, you might want an army of users who will post on their walls handle viral communication for you.

While there is definite economic value being exchanged here by both to a developer and the user, it creates some presumably unwanted behaviors:

It induces users to go beyond their social graph of “known” friends. If a user “adds” a stranger, it potentially exposes more personal information than a user realizes they are sharing – basically, their whole profile unless the user actively goes through multiple steps to limit access.

Users are also creating secondary accounts just to play games, distorting DAU and MAU data as well as creating potential cheating issues. Comments on developer fan page posts end up being a litany of “add me” notes, drowning out any true conversation around the content being posted

While the Facebook policy as stated would appear to be squarely focused at eliminating these undesirable behaviors, the lack of enforcement begins to make one wonder if this is as important an issue to Facebook policy team now compared to when the roadmap of changes were initially announced. Clearly some of the latest changes to user information sharing – like privacy settings — were designed to get users to open up more and expand beyond the “known” friends to “Everyone”, so maybe Facebook’s platform team is less worried about users inviting people they don’t know into their personal network.

While the gifting policy has largely been enforced, Facebook says to expect more news on gating:”Our intent is to protect the integrity of the social graph and the authenticity of relationships on the site,” the company tells us, “but we recognize that this is a complex and important topic. We plan to provide more context on this policy soon.”

In the meantime, check out Facebook’s platform policy examples and explanations page for more detail.