Inside Social Games

You are all probably aware by now of Playfish’s incorporation of in-game advertisement for their major titles when they starting working with Google back in April. You may also be aware of the integration with PayPal when they launched in-game transactions.

However, marking a new sponsorship model for the company, Playfish just announced the launch of a premium campaign with Procter & Gamble and Herbal Essences via Geo Challenge in the United Kingdom.

This new version of the game has introduced what Playfish dubs, “The Great Escape Edition” which provides players with a brand new source of game play and, as expected, advertises the new Herbal Essences range from Procter and Gamble in a rather unorthodox manner.

The game still utilizes the video ads at the end, but in addition the entire art style of the game has been changed to fully encompass the look and feel that is Herbal Essences. The new Great Escape version is full of different pinks, flowers, exotic plant life, and virtually anything else you might see in your standard Herbal Essences commercial. All of this, however, has been seamlessly integrated into the game play and art work and is 100% unintrusive to the player - unlike so many other forms of advertisement (i.e. flashing banners, pop ups, etc).

Unfortunately, those that are not in the UK are unable to play this version of the game at this time.

[via Playfish Blog]

Although it’s a huge and mature space in China, the virtual goods movement has solidified a foothold in the American gaming industry as a highly viable business means for online games. However, there is no easy task involved in the creation of a virtual goods infrastructure, and this difficulty creates a void that must be bridged before it becomes more prominent.

Knowing that a need exists, companies like Twofish seek to fulfill that need. The company has secured $4.5 million in funding which was recently announced at The Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco.

Twofish has dubbed itself a “digital resource planning solution.” Usage of the Twofish infrastructure will allow developers to easily run virtual banks, track inventory, set up an e-commerce system as they see fit, and allow player transactions in real time.

For game developers, the purpose of outsourcing is to focus more on the virtual worlds and games which they are creating, as opposed to spending time on the more tedious back end development. Furthermore, the inclusion of Twofish features can not only allow for virtual goods’ based profits, but also provide users with greater customer security, and fraud prevention.

Lee Crawford, chief executive at Twofish, also points out that the technology gives real-time data back to the developers, allowing them to track what virtual goods are being sold as well as how much revenue is being generated through the various microtransactions being made ($.25 here, $.50 there). However, it is also worth noting that a virtual goods system is not right for everyone.

Based on a blog post on VentureBeat, chief executive of Outspark (an online games company), states that you would need to make at least $200,000 in revenue before you could consider adding any market system (be it primary or secondary markets of virtual goods). Nonetheless, the idea behind Twofish still seems to hold significant merit to the folks at as Triplepoint Capital, Rustic Canyon Ventures, and Venrock.

Advertising is everywhere, so it is not too surprising to see a Six Flags game appear on Facebook. For those that may not know, the Six Flags Parks is one of the world’s largest chains of amusement parks and theme parks. The company holds 21 locations around North America that consist of theme parks, water parks, and family entertainment centers. In 2007 alone, the cumulative properties played host to around 24.9 million guests, making it the forth-most popular theme park in the world.

Suffice to say, Six Flags has the money to put into games that advertise their parks. The Six Flags game is a collection of carnival type mini-games that you would find inside most game areas while at any major theme park. Currently there are three games to be played: Block Buster, 3-Point Challenge, and Balloon Pop. Block Buster consists of throwing baseballs to, well, knock down blocks, 3-Point Challenge is a basketball shoot-out, and Balloon Pop is dart throwing.

All of the games are easy to learn and master, and do provide some quality fun that can, in fact, become addictive. You play by aiming your mouse where you want to shoot/throw and hold it down to generate power, then let go in order to release whatever you are throwing. With the exception of the dart game (which doesn’t let you generate strength when you throw), all three games use the same mechanics in similar ways.

Perhaps the best part about the game, however, are the rewards for playing. Every week, the top scoring players are eligible to win Six Flags tickets. Suffice to say, this is certainly one of the better player rewards out there. Furthermore, this provides a competitive aspect of the game, displaying the top leaderboards as well as past winners, thus giving players an idea of how much they have to score to earn those tickets.

Unfortunately, this is really the only significant social feature in the game. Beyond this competitive aspect of the game for high scores and tickets, the only other social aspect is a built in chat system. Sadly, the chat tends to be rather barren most of the time.

Overall, the Six Flags mini-games are not bad at all. They are fun and provide players with great prizes. These prizes alone add a great competitive aspect to the game and in fact does increase social usage, but beyond the display of the top scoring players, there is not much else to the social features (save the infrequently used chat system).

Despite the social short-comings, the games are still easy to learn and master, and can quickly become addictive. If you find yourself with some extra time or you want a chance to win tickets to an awesome theme park, then Six Flags comes well recommended.

Google AdSense has become one of the most widely used ad networks on the web, because it makes it really quick and easy for both advertisers and developers to begin building an ad-based business model for their web sites. Now, after months of testing and development, Google is  launching the public beta version of its AdSense for Games software.

The ad market for games is predicted by the Yankee Group to be worth $971.3 million by 2011, so it is no surprise that Google is interested in the market.

In response to the announcement, Jameson Hsu, chief executive of in-game Flash ad company Mochi Media, said, “It’s a huge stamp of approval for a major company to come in and say they believe in the online game market.” It really is a huge deal, as now it is highly likely for other major media companies to begin making a move into this market.

The new Google AdSense for Games software will be targeting Flash based games and will incorporate the ability to include ads both during and after game play. The casual Flash games space alone averages around 200 million games played per month, which creates ample opportunity for ad integration.

Google is also tauting the usability of its ad software. According to Christian Oestlien, senior product manager at Google, Google’s advertisers will be able to insert ads into games where there is an “ad request.” This request comes from the developers of a game who will be able to utilize a Flash software development kit that allows them to simply designate any point in their game where they want to place advertisements. Then once the game is live, the ads uploaded by advertisers appear where a “request” is found.

In addition to everything else, Google has partnered with a number of developers as well. One of these is Playfish, a major Flash developer within Facebook. At the end of a game session for one of their games, players will actually see one of the game characters presenting the ad as a sponsor.

However, Playfish is not alone in supporting Google’s endeavors. Other major players include Zynga, another major social game developer, and Konami, one of the largest mainstream game companies in Japan. Over a dozen other companies will include Google AdSense for Games at release, and with the millions of users that play casual games online, the number of ad impressions available quickly compounds to several hundred million.

At this time, we do not know whether Google will incorporate their ad network beyond Flash games. However, with competitors such as Microsoft’s Massive working its way deeper into this market as well, it is likely to see some significant competition in the future.

One of the hardest parts of any social gaming project is distribution and marketing. How do you get your game out there? How do you get new people to find and play it? One potential new answer is J2Play.

J2Play is a service that provides a do-it-yourself viral distribution framework that allows you to easily publish and expose your games to all social site users and generate traffic. We had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Robert Balahura, founder of J2Play, to get his perspective on the space.

Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us. So, I have to ask, how does J2Play actually work?

Game developers can go to our website to learn more and sign up. For technical details developers should visit our developer site. After sign up somebody from our organization will contact you for a chat and helps the developer to get started.

We continuously think about new viral features we can add for discovery of games and new ways for social interaction. One concept that is important that we continue to develop are the concept of native viral features and internal viral features. The concept of native viral features provides the native feeds, invites, and notifications automatically to whatever social network the user is playing on as well as a generalized api that is a write once – get all native viral features for all networks type of concept.

The internal viral features are the features that circulate the community of traffic throughout all the games that use our technology to socialize their games. We have not yet integrated some of the existing features we have such as tournaments and other type of leader board based competitions some of the existing features we have such as tournaments and other type of leader board based competitions to our social network games solution. We’ve some new social network specific features cooking but it’s too early to talk about those – stay tuned for news later this year from us!

It’s no doubt the viral distribution will increase traffic, but what are the numbers that developers usually see as far as traffic increase? Does J2Play offer anything regarding traffic increase outside the social networks, such as standard search engine optimization?

It’s still a bit early for us say as we’re just starting with our game developer partners but naturally optimizing the viral distribution will be key to be successful as a small developer using our solution and not having a big advertising budget. The key thing for us is to provide the viral distribution out of the box for developers so they don’t have to spend their time building those but can focus on developing content.

Search engine optimization and better design, discoverability of games is next on our development road map.

Let’s shift gears for a second and talk about the social content J2Play adds to existing games. You mention many “out-of-the-box” features, but you also talk about advanced features that utilize an extensive set of APIs. Some of the possibilities you have listed are features such as leaderboards, badges, and real-time multiplayer. What are some of the other features that are possible through these APIs? I’m especially curious about the more advanced ones.

We’ve full loyalty platform and are providing APIs for our tournament module soon. The J2Play solution is a full multi-player games platform so game developers can build different types of multi-player games with the platform and by developing their own game servers. That is fairly advanced stuff compared to most of the games out there now. Developers can also integrate item based microtransactions, an item-model through power ups etc. to their games. We have that from our experience working with Asian developers and content in the past years.

Can developers create their own features or customize your 10 basic ones, so long as they use a supported code language like Flash ActionScript, or C++?

Developers who decide to go with our Pro solution can customize the look and feel of the games site for social networks and do some basic customization inside Flash and C++ if they wish to do so. We think that the functionality is pretty much the same so there is limited need for customization but how people want to present functionality for consumer will vary a lot and we want to enable that.

We also see the possibility of cross-platform gaming through advanced APIs. Does this mean that I could, in theory, play a friend who is on the web from, say, my mobile?

You can do it in practice, not only in theory! We’ve had technology for this for years and it’s all working fine and available for developers to use. It would be cool to see more, especially bigger, developers to think more about the cross-media consumption of content and related content innovation. I hope that we’ll see interesting developments in this area in the upcoming years.

We all know about the ad-based business model for web games, and we can read about some of the percentages on the J2Play website, but one of the newer business models coming about is the use of microtransactions. Now, I read that you have a feature for this coming soon. Could you shed some light on what we can expect from your microtransaction system and when we can expect it?

We’ve a basic version out already now and like I mentioned earlier, have worked with Asian content with this model so the back-end is ready for this model as well as have had the cash model for say our poker game for years. We are currently customizing our solution to fit better the social networking type of use and rolling out a more advanced version with select developer partners later this year.

Certainly, you’re one of the few leading the way in furthering the social games world. In fact, you’ve just recently received a $250,000 grant from fbFund. With the favor of Facebook, what are the next steps for J2Play?

The Facebook grant and partnership enables us to move forward a little bit faster as well as focus our product development on more technically demanding, harder problems to solve areas of social games.

Well thank you for your time. Before I let you go, I do have one last question: We talked a lot about what’s coming up for J2Play, and a lot of it is actually in beta at the moment. For those that may be curious, how can they go about signing up for your beta?

They can sign up on our website and if they’ve questions before signing up developers can contact Kasra who is happy to answer their questions.

One more thing to mention, our solution is perfectly suited to flash or pc downlodable game developers who already have games built – we have an out of the box solution to ‘socialize’ their game and publish it to currently 9 social networks automatically so they can also benefit for this new channel, the social web.

Not too long ago we talked about the Raptr platform and its capabilities as a central community hub across many gaming platforms. This week, Raptr just integrated support for one of the newest and most talked about games of the year, Spore.

For those that may have been in a cave for the past few months, Spore is the latest master piece from renowned designer Will Wright and EA Games. Will Wright is also the same guy that was lead designer for other huge EA titles such as The Sims and SimCity. Spore is a massively scoped game in which you determine the evolution of a race of creatures from single celled organisms to a space faring people. However, one of the key draws to this game comes from the tag attached to it that describes Spore as a “massively single-player online game.”

Spore allows players to download content from each other through EA. You can download other player created races to inhabit the planets in your galaxy as well as can upload your own creations and track how they do in what has been described as “parallel universes” (other player’s game worlds). In addition to this, EA has created a “Spore YouTube Channel” that allows people to seamlessly showcase their galaxy to other users, and even share the evolution of their creatures using a game feature dubbed “Sporecast.”

This is where everything gets enhanced by Raptr. While Spore does not support simultaneous multiplayer, Raptr does allow tracking of your friends in real-time as they play the game. Moreover, with the massive number of people in the Spore galaxy, there is a near infinite number of possible creatures that people could create. As such, Raptr allows players to broadcast and share all of their creations, activity, and achievements through major social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. There’s even a “Spore Module” added to your Raptr profile page that contains everything you’ve created. You can even share screenshots of your creatures and allow users to watch them evolve and grow over time.

Considering the vast number of players that will be playing Spore, this is a important game addition for Raptr. Originally, the social content of Spore was planned to revolve around just the official site. Now, with Raptr, that network is expanding, and will continue to expand, to social networks all over the web.

In today’s market, we see advertisements everywhere and on everything. Marketers are always looking for new, different, and effective ways to pitch their products to the right audience, but that begs the question: given the banner blindness that exists today on the web, what does it take to stand out amongst the crowd?

One engaging approach that’s been used in the past is the creation of games that revolve around a product or service (we’ve seen Burger King do it a couple of times all ready). Marketers attempt to make free, entertaining mini-games that interest as much of the population as possible in hopes to get click-through traffic to their website or purchases of their product. This is exactly what New Balance has done with their Zip running sneaker and the Facebook mini-game “New Balance RUN-Dezvous” by Buddy Media.

The game itself is nothing earth-shattering, and it doesn’t bring anything new to the gaming world, but it is an amusing mini-game meant to drive sales for New Balance shoes. The game itself plays a lot like the old-school, Nintendo title Paperboy. You’re out for a run, and you have to dodge things like falling plants, open man holes, street barricades, and so on. It actually looks pretty good too, utilizing an interesting, surreal style of art with a strange isometric point of view. Basically, you progress through the game by running forward and avoiding obstacles until you either finish all the levels or run out of lives.

In a nut-shell there is nothing wrong nor bad about the game, it’s just been done before, and it gets repetitive rather quickly. However, it does allow for a few minutes of amusement, which seems to be all it is really meant for. It does, nonetheless, gain some longevity due to integration with AceBucks, a Facebook loyalty program that lets you purchase everything from hair gel to iPods. Not only this, but there is also a challenge mode that helps to lengthen appeal as well.

As you may have guessed, RUN-Dezvous allows you to directly challenge others to races. However, unlike many Facebook games, you can challenge not only your friends, but other random players as well, thus greatly increasing the level of competition. Unfortunately, the races are not simultaneous. As with most Facebook games, the social aspect is turn based, but the one challenged can race at any time they please. Essentially it is a “race” to see who can get the highest score and/or the farthest in the game.

Sending challenges from a Facebook game is enough to make a game social to some degree. I will admit, I am competitive, and would probably accept such a thing and get a few minutes of satisfaction from it. However, with the popularity of social networks, the potential of social and multiplayer game play is so much greater. The current model of “beat your friend’s high score” does work, but I think it’s too conservative.

In the end, RUN-Dezvous is meant to be a short mini-game whose primary purpose is to drive traffic and thus sales for their Zip sneaker. With that in mind, they have done a decent job with their Facebook game. It looks clean, has an attractive style, it’s simple to learn and play, and provides excellent amusement, if only for a short while. Furthermore, they took the time to implement the capability of challenging other players rather than only your friends, and have included ways of earning AceBucks (considering how many you need to buy stuff, any way to earn more of these is useful).

RUN-Dezvous won’t change the face of social games, but for what it’s worth, the game is well done.