Seismic Games opens doors with $2 million in funding for the “next wave” of social games
Los Angeles-based Seismic Games has secured a $2 million first round of funding to put toward reinventing social games. The round was led by DFJ Frontier, venture capitalist Tom Matlack and had participation from a handful of unnamed investors with deep ties to the entertainment industry.
Founded by gaming industry veterans Greg Borrud (Pandemic Studios, EA), Eric Gewirtz (Pandemic Studios, Activision) and Chris Miller (Vivendi Universal), the trio have console hits like Star Wars: Battlefront, F.E.A.R and The Saboteur under their belts and are hoping those successes can be translated to Facebook. The company is one of many social gaming startups founded by former console developers hoping to pivot into social games, and faces competition from the likes of Outplay Entertainment, Row Sham Bow, LootDrop and Rumble, all of whom have AAA console talent and years of industry experience behind them.
Even as the cost of doing business increases on the platform, Seismic’s CEO Greg Borrud is confident that the combination of character driven gameplay and real-world events will make Seismic’s first game a hit when it debuts later this year. Inside Social Games had an opportunity to talk to Borrud, and while he didn’t reveal much about the company’s upcoming first game, he did reveal the development philosophy behind it.
Inside Social Games: You’ve talked a bit about creating the “next” generation of social games. What do you mean by this?
Greg Borrud (pictured, right): When we first looked at the [social gaming space] we were incredibly excited by what was there. It’s a larger audience than what we’d been making games for previously and social game companies are creating new ways of reaching their audiences and tapping into the free-to-play monetization model.
But, I think we’ve hit a point where there has to be more than analytics-based game design. The Zyngas of the world have perfected this idea of looking at how gamers play and post-launch tweaking the system to get the most out of every single user. At some point you perfect that so much that you lose the heart and the soul and the entertainment value of the game.
We want to take some of the things we’ve done when we were making console games and marry that with the analytics-based approach to game design to create a hybrid that captures all the viral marketing but gives players something new, fresh and really compelling. I see 2012 as embarking on the second wave of social games that will become deeper and more complex. Our goal is to be part of that conversation.
ISG: The cost per install (CPI) can be quite high on Facebook. What’s your plan to gain traction on the platform?
Borrud: Whenever you’re making a game, you’re thinking about user acquisition. The first thing you’ve got to do make a high quality game. If the game is great on a platform like Facebook, the game is going to spread, so we’ve put a lot of thought into how we can create a game that’s unique, different and compelling — something that people want to play and will encourage others to play. Secondly, we’ve raised some funds so we’re going to advertise. We’re going to go directly to our target audience and pull as many players over as we can with the funds that we’ve got. Lastly, the nature of the product that we’re making allows for a lot of sponsorship opportunities, and that allows us to tap into a lot of what’s happening in the world, and by drawing those things into the product, that allows us to reach new groups through their own viral networks, bringing those users into our network as well.
ISG: Sponsorship opportunities?
Borrud: This ties into our concept of tying the real world with the virtual world. As you get closer to the real world, products fit better and make that virtual world feel more real. As we introduce real-time content, we have an opportunity to grab branded products, sponsorship and promotions and infuse them into the world we’re creating. From the gamer’s perspective, it makes the world we’re creating more alive and more like what they see when they walk out the door. For sponsors it means deep integration, but not in a forced way like what’s happening in some games now.
ISG: We know you and the other founders have a lot of console experience – how are you applying that experience to social games?
Borrud: We’re trying to avoid being a hardcore product for a small group of people. We want to draw on light RPG elements but it’s from a point of making the game more compelling. We’re surprised that in social games there’s not a lot of character-based games. What we’re talking about is how to get closer to the character and how to add more customization to it so it’s even more unique. It happened in traditional gaming and I think it’s going to happen again in social gaming.
The last thing I want to do is attack a model that’s done incredibly well, but I think there’s an opportunity to take customization even further. There’s a difference between customizing my personal space and building customization around a character. A character is much more personal.
ISG: You’ve also mentioned user generated content, which isn’t something you see all that often in social games. How will this work?
Borrud: This is a cornerstone of what we’re trying to do. Facebook is user generated content and we think the game should be the exact same thing. This has been done before in console and open world games, and we want to give the player those tools so they create something new that they want to share. User generated content will be a reflection of the player into every game we make, not just our first game.
ISG: How do you plan to integrate real-time content into a social game?
Borrud: This is an opportunity we haven’t really had in traditional games, but [with Facebook] we’re communicating with the player constantly. Companies are constantly tweaking their games and we looked at this as an opportunity not only to refine the gameplay dynamic, but to start to blur the lines between what is happening in the real world versus what is happening in the virtual world. Real-time content means something’s just happened in the real world — how can that be reflected tomorrow in the game? That’s an opportunity to do something unique and different and to get players to come back to see how the game and how their character in the game is reacting to it. We’re talking about a “ripped from the headlines” feel to the game.
ISG: That reminds us of sci-fi stories, where you have characters who play online games and the characters they play become extensions of their personality and their real lives.
Borrud: That’s exactly right. People have dabbled in this, but with this audience and Facebook and everything being tweaked post release we saw it as an opportunity to bring the real world into a virtual world.
ISG: Obviously you’re focusing on Facebook, but what are your plans for other platforms?
Borrud: Facebook is a platform for us in the same way the Xbox and the PC are platforms. We develop our games as much as we can to be platform agnostic so it can move from Facebook to Google+ to an iPad with a little bit of work but without having to re-write the whole system. That said, Facebook is the predominant platform and that’s our clear number one focus. It’s got a huge number of users, a great infrastructure, a low barrier of entry and great viral components.
ISG: You mentioned iPads — are you planning to be cross platform at some point?
Borrud: You can’t just port a game over and have it be as successful. You need to think about the platform, the play styles and the play habits of people and design the game in such a way that it enhances the experience and makes sense on the platform. That’s absolutely in our plans for the future, but for a launch strategy, we’re clearly focused on Facebook.
Theme, color and style determine what the wedding will look like, and a player’s breadth of selection in each will come into consideration when choosing a wedding (or mission). Themes range from Rock’n’Roll, to Casablanca, to roses. Brides have a preferred color, but a range within that color is available – multiple reds, greens, neutrals, or browns. Styles are less specific but no less important, including laid-back, traditional, chic, eclectic, and formal.
The dependency on premium currency is moderated by the ability for players to earn an unlimited quantity of Honeys each day, beginning with sending coffee to friends. Coffee, of which 22 can be earned per day, speeds up jobs by 20 minutes each, while creating items for friends to use in weddings or to sell in shops earns an additional 22 Honeys per day. Sending friends wedding trivia from throughout the world can earn an unlimited amount of currency. Finally, friends can request that a help completing a wedding once per day; each request earns another honey. The only limitation is that no more than five Honeys per friend can be part of the player’s currency pool at any time – and the “friend” Honeys are spent first.
Some features — upgrades, new design options, and some cosmetic options for the shops — cost only Honeys. On the other hand, boosts and shop managers require the use of coin, which is difficult to obtain in significant quantities without exceptional micro-management. The only way to “purchase” coin is to trade 300 Honeys for 25,000 coin.
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We Doodle improves on social play from Charadium with both synchronous and asynchronous game play. You are still able to join games with random people — similar to the classic Pictionary game. However, Ngmoco has also incorporated a turn based system with no time limit.
You can buy different types of brushes, ink colors, backgrounds and stencils. These not only make the game easier for the artist, thus easing the core play mechanic, but really let you get creative and digitally finger paint. Stencils consist of houses, people, trees and various shapes, but before you start thinking that this takes away from the Pictionary concept, don’t worry. You’ll still be tasked with drawing words as shapeless as ever. For example, how do you draw autumn?
The number one complaint from virtually everyone playing We Doodle is the intrusive presence of ads. As a free-to-play title, advertising is understandable, but these aren’t out-of-the way banners. They are giant, full-blown ads that pop up between turns and sit there for a long time before you can skip them. Oh, and the “skip” button is conveniently placed right below the button to show more about the ad — so, have fun if you have big fingers.
ZipZapPlay started up in late 2007 to build PlayCrafter, which is still active. The short and slightly sad story about PlayCrafter is that it’s one of the better, if not the best game creation platforms that has been made. The idea was to make it as easy to create a game as it is to write a book. If Mozart needed to write a book, code a game and create music all at once, you wouldn’t have these great masterpieces. Game design is like that because you need to know multiple fields.
Why is Baking Life successful? The art style, people like to bake, a solid tech stack, tasty cupcakes — there are a lot of pieces that came together to make it popular, and a lot of lessons that came back on what did and didn’t work about the tutorial, architecture, etc. With features like the CupCake Creator, we were trying to bring a little bit of our user-generated content flavor to something we think is important in the social space: the viral aspect, making something more directly meaningful to the person you’re sending it to. We like that idea, that UGC can be powerful, but we learned some hard lessons about how not to do it early on. Now we still like to include that flavor, but you can’t make the whole thing about it.
It has been some time since we looked at anything making use of Twitter as a social gaming platform, but the browser-based role-playing title 
This is where the game begins taking shape, as players are given choices to make their escape using Dangerous, Persuasive, Shadowy, or Watchful abilities. These become the primary character stats in the game, and based on what the player chooses, different story paths will unfold.
Rewards (items) in general, earned through both opportunities and story, are quite important. There are many situations in the story where the player must accomplish some specific task(s) in order to reach new chapters (so-to-speak) such as finding a home. What is curious is that there are different means of doing so. If one is Shadowy, there are spy-like tasks to find information and pay bribes. High Persuasive skills might be used to convince someone to let them stay in their home. Or, if money is no object, then a direct purchase may be in order.
The other social mechanic is a battle system called “The Game of Knife & Candle.” Players have to actually sign up for it to attack other users or be attacked themselves, but it is not recommended for new players. The reason is that the game states that the Dangerous skill is the most important for it and should be at least at level 25. This does create a bit of an issue for some players though, as if they choose a different skill set in the story, it can be a bit difficult to raise this statistic quickly, leaving them to rely on randomly drawn opportunity cards most of the time.
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