Inside Social Games

We’ve been talking a lot about Slide recently, and for good reason. After staying pretty flat for months at around 20 million monthly active users, Slide’s growth started to explode a few weeks ago. Since February 14th, the company has doubled its MAU to almost 40 million, of whom over five million are daily active users.

What happened? A combination of Facebook’s redesign, plus some cross-promotion, a little advertising, and the clever use of viral features. We talked with Keith Rabois, Slide’s vice president of business development and strategy, to get some background.

FunSpace has grown the most since mid-February. On the 16th, it was still at 4.5 million MAU; today it accounts for about half of Slide’s MAU, at 21.7 million MAU. It is focused on sharing videos and other content. This is generally what Facebook wants to enable, and its own data reflects the trend.

Our regular readers will notice that around two weeks elapsed between Facebook’s design changes in early February and the explosion in growth for FunSpace. This is where Slide’s viral tactic comes in, a method Rabois describes as letting users share videos with a lot of friends in a way that follows Facebook’s developer policies.

Besides FunSpace, most of Slide’s other apps also involve content sharing, of sorts, and this may be helping them grow, too.

Cute mammal-caring games like SuperPoke! Pets, SPP Ranch! and SuperPocus, and aquarium game Top Fish are more virtual worlds than games. Slide began testing out virtual marketplaces in some of these apps in January, letting users create their own virtual goods, sell them and make money, similar to aspects of virtual worlds like Second Life and IMVU.

In January, Rabois says that users made $160,000 on their creations. To expand the model, Slide will need to manage fraud and provide creation tools but the results so far suggest that the effort would be worth it. The company already offers virtual goods creation tools, the marketplace and ecosystem features designed for user-created goods, like a method for selecting the best user creations and promoting a limited number to other users. So far, so good — we’ll be watching to see if other application developers adopt similar virtual goods marketplace.

While none of the apps are seeing nearly as much growth as FunSpace, they are all growing — partly due to cross-promotion from FunSpace, it seems. Still, SPP Ranch!’s traffic was already on the way up, according to AppData. Slide doesn’t spend much on advertising, so on top of the other reasons mentioned, the virtual goods marketplace — and the profusion of additional goods that players are getting access to — could be playing a role in drawing making the apps more popular.

Overall, Slide’s combination of content-sharing apps and virtual world-style games seems to be helping it gain more users, and monetize them. Having been one of the largest developers on Facebook since the platform launched in 2007, its reach, experience and funding — and its range of growing apps — put it in a promising position to build its business.

While many iPhone games come with social features like leaderboards, achievements, and occasional challenges help, via third-parties, the games quite often aren’t social in their own right. A creative take on pictionary, by the name of Charadium, from On5, challenges that generalization.

The game uses ngmoco’s Plus+ platform, but while that feature plays a strong role in the game’s social prowess, it is hardly the focal point. Best described as an online, multiplayer marriage of charades and pictionary, Charadium is a social app all on its own.

Using either WiFi or 3G, players connect with other app users (this can also be limited to just friends) and play against one another in full games of 15 rounds (don’t worry, there is an option for quick games too). One person will draw, and the others guess. If you’re on the guessing end, the makeshift artist will begin to draw something, pictionary-style, based on a mystery word that only they know. Given the standard iPhone keyboard, players will type their guesses until someone gets it right, earning them points.

Obviously, ease of guessing the right word often depends on the artistic prowess of the person drawing, so the game does try to help out as needed, eventually displaying how many letters are in the word, filling in letters, and auto-correcting misspelled words.

At the end of a round, a new artist is selected. In this case, the mystery word is presented to them and could be something as simple as “tea,” or more ambiguous like “emptiness.” From here, the player uses the touch screen to draw and a basic palette to change their pen color. Granted, it’s not Photoshop, but it’s enough to get the job done. Moreover, points are awarded to the person drawing based on how quickly their work is deciphered.

The Plus+ integration include in-game achievements to add further longevity (though since its multiplayer, it already has a hefty lifespan), as well as leaderboards. The game’s results can be shared with others via email, Twitter, and Facebook. You can also view game log results and your drawings at Charadium.com using a “room code” granted at the end of each game.

Frankly, the game is a ton of fun and a great adaptation on classic analog games. In fact, the only complaint to be had doesn’t even come from the design side at all. As with most online games that give any sort of user control (even something as simple as chat), there are the random, immature morons that have to come in and draw offensive and obscene content. Thankfully, you can boot them out of games, but it is still very obnoxious.

Iif you’re looking for a simple, yet extremely fun and addictive game, Charadium comes highly recommended at $0.99.

“ScamVille” Lawsuit Dropped Against Facebook: Rebecca Swift has withdrawn her potential class-action lawsuit against the social network, although she has not yet dropped her charges against Zynga. Both were in court over scams that ran on offer walls in social games. More on MediaPost.

God of War III Rages into 7-Eleven: The latest game to make use of virtual goods is the heavily anticipated console (PlayStation 3) title, God of War III. Though the game doesn’t release until mid-March, marketing in the form of Slurpee cups will be starting on February 1st. Each cup will grant the consumer a special code that will allow them to download various content such at behind-the-scenes videos, animated Kratos themes, and special armor usable within the game.

Peanut Labs Announces 11 More Publisher Partners: Peanut Labs Media, provider of monetization services via surveys, offers, and direct payments, announced this week 11 new social publisher partners. The list includes Aeria Games, Backstage Technologies, Blue Frog Gaming, Challenge Online Games, Inc., CyberStep, Gamepot USA, Inc., Large Animal LLC, Ray Flame Entertainment, Inc., SmallWorlds, Vogster Entertainment, and Zeevex. Each new partner will have access to the myriad of monetization methods Peanut Labs offers as well as making use of the turnkey platform’s sales logistics, customer support, currency conversions, optimizations, and inquiry resolutions.

Adobe Plans for iPad: Currently, one of the biggest concerns with Apple’s new iPad is that it imposes restriction that currently disallow users to access Flash-based content on the web. Frankly, this is a big issue considering that Flash content makes up most of the internet nowadays. However, Adobe’s Flash blog states that they and about 50 other partners in “the Open Screen Project are working to enable developers and content publishers to deliever on any device. ” Hopefully, this means we’ll be able to use Flash on the iPad sooner rather than later. [image via The Flash Blog]

Microsoft Downplays Virtual Currency: Despite the social movement for Microsoft, Wednesday played host to the announcement that the company would be downplaying the role of its Xbox Live virtual currency, Microsoft Points. Apparently, a number of users have been complaining about the Point pricing system, calling it “misleading.” To mitigate the issue, Microsoft will be displaying the real world currency (based on location) in tandem with the virtual currency price.

Gowalla Grants User-Generated Content: One of the key features of the location-based iPhone application, Gowalla is the prospect of trips. In a nutshell, players would have to visit various locals in order to complete a “trip” and would earn corresponding digital “pins” as a reward. However, most of these required users to go out of their way. In light of that realization, Gowalla announced a new feature that would allow it’s players to create their own trips using locations they regularly visit. Should the trip prove popular, Gowalla will promote it based on “the quality and relevancy of the trip, [and] the number of people who have completed the trip.” Afterwards, participants will be given their own custom, in-game pin artwork as a reward.

Motally Brings Mobile Analytics to iPad: Third party developers aren’t wasting any time with Apple’s new iPad. Just Thursday, mobile analytics firm, Motally announced that it will be bringing its services to the iPad. Already, it’s platform allows publishers to collect data and create analytic reports on the usage of their applications on the iPhone, but with the expanded service will now also be able to access said data through the iPad. Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg as Mottally has stated that intends to support the iPad SDK once available.

Loopt to Spin Location-Based Apps in a New Way: A new location-based iPhone app called LooptCard from Loopt may be coming soon. Using the same type of technology as apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla, this title is adding one more step to the check-in process with real world, vendor deals. Yes, these will be location based deals, but more than that Loopt is looking to get vendors to incorporate their game-like ideas of only offering deals as rewards for doing certain tasks or checking in at certain times of day. In addition to these new ideas, LooptCard is also planning, according to TechCrunch, to make direct use of Facebook’s social graph. [image via TechCrunch]

C64 for iPhone Emulator Gets a Little Social: For all those classic game lovers, the Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone is getting a little bit more social through the use of OpenFeint. Games will be receiving social features such as global leaderboards and/or achievements. Updated games within the emulator include Jupiter Lander, Lemans, Artic Shipwreck, Uridium, Nebulus, and Paradroid.

EA Considers Building or Buying Facebook Sports Apps: “We are learning an awful lot about a very different type of game experience than we are used to doing,” head of EA Sports Peter Moore tells Reuters. “You’re seeing a focus in our M&A activity being on companies that will enhance our digital strategy.”

High scores are all well and good, but sometimes it is nice to have something a little bit more to a game. While leaderboards might be good way to garner competition with other players, what about the concept of working together rather than against? This is sort of the idea Montreal, Canada-based developer ODD1 had in mind with it’s latest iPhone title Catch Me! If You Can.

Based on the classic arcade game, this app has players taking on the roll of a thief as they run through a maze of city streets collecting gold, jewels, and other riches as they avoid a trio of very persistent guards. The idea, is to collect as much loot as possible before the time limit expires and without being caught.

Should the player be captured, the level brings forth an pleasant surprise. Rather than losing, the user is placed in the role of one of the three guards. The same time limit continues to tick down, and they will not go back to being the thief until they have caught, well, the thief. Since the objective of each level is to acquire as much coin as possible, it is prudent to capture the deviant as quickly as possible.

To make things more interesting, each character type also has special abilities they can use to make their respective jobs easier. As the thief, the player can see the entire map and leap over objects. If they are one of the guards, then they only see a limited area around them and can either reveal the entire map, lay traps, or sprint, but frankly, the guy that can reveal the map seems to have gotten the short end of the stick.

The game is presented in a warm, quirky style coupled with light-hearted music, but despite how good it looks, the controls were aggravating. The movement of characters is actually controlled using a digital directional pad (like the one on a Nintendo). This hurts the game on two counts: First, since it is just a digital version of a directional pad, there is no tactile feedback when a direction is pressed, so it is more difficult to steer without looking at where you are pressing. You can’t “feel” which direction you are pressing, leading to slow reactions and frustration when trying to flee guards or catch thieves.

While this might seem like a minor point, when people have grown up accustomed to something being a certain way, that’s what they expect, and changing that just comes off as irritating. A digital directional pad is not the same thing as an analog one, and with the iPhone, there are a myriad of other control methods that could be employed (touching where you want to go, path drawing, or even tilt controls). Moreover, the emulation is backwards with the pad on the right and the buttons on the left; another key detail.

Despite the control complaints, Catch Me! If You Can did come with another saving grace. While players can play through subsequent levels in a “Story” mode, or play quick games with a “Challenge” mode, it was a feature called the “Band of Thieves” that was the most interesting. Rather than compete with other players, users actually work together. After each level, acquired gold can actually be sent to what is called the Treasure Vault; a community collective of every player’s submitted winnings. On the screen, users can see a progression bar that shows how much has been turned in, in total, as well as a percentage of their contribution.

The benefit is two-fold: Not only does the player get the social gratification of seeing how much they are doing, but when the progression bar is full, ODD1 actually releases new content. According to the developer, new content will generally be free and will consist of new levels and challenges. As it stands, it doesn’t look like users can see what others have contributed specifically, but such an added leaderboard-like feature would be very nice wish list item. Not only would you get the benefit of seeing yourself “score” higher than your friends, but the you would also get the gratification of viewing how much more you did, or did not, help the community; something that can eventually evolve into pseudo-celebrity status in more in depth online communities. Vain, it’s true, but vanity can be a powerful tool.

Of course, such status levels are highly unlikely in Catch Me! If You Can. This is generally more reserved for complex social role-playing or massively multiplayer online games. Nonetheless, the employed social technique should still prove effective, and this app does still make for an okay of a classic title – if you can get over the tough controls. Frankly, an update in this regard is desperately needed, but perhaps younger gamers will be more forgiving. Currently, the full version, costs $1.99, but a free rendition with the first three story levels and the Band of Thieves feature is also available.

BonusLevel’s iPhone app, Blockoban is a puzzle game released a couple of weeks ago that does an especially charming job at wasting your time, and maybe your friend’s time, too.

The game is simple enough. Players are presented game board with the sole objective of getting colored block A to same colored tile B. Here is the trick: This game board has a rather low amount of friction associated with it so once you slide a block – using the touch screen, of course – it keeps going until it hits something or flies off the edge (which is, obviously, a bad thing).

As the levels proceed, more and more blocks are introduced and the levels become more intricate. In fact, at later levels, such precision is needed that the initially moot feature of pinch zooming becomes critical, and the always wonderful “Undo” command a godsend. And, with new difficulties also comes new obstacles and blocks. These include elements such as sticky tiles that stop a sliding block in its tracks, circular “blocks” (for lack of a better term) that stop blocks but move when hit, and grouped blocks – represented by a rainbow (don’t ask) in the same corner – that all slide together.

Frankly, this makes the game most challenging later on, but truly adds a great deal of depth to the puzzles. What is even nicer, however, is that the game has per puzzle challenges to earn gold and silver stars by completing it in X amount of moves or less. This is further added to by the fact that this game has social integration with ngmoco’s Plus+ platform.

With Plus+ comes the ability to share achievements, and there are a fair amount, including said stars. Moreover, competitive leaderboards are associated with each of the game’s play and difficulty modes (i.e. Big Maps, Kickoff, and Time Attacks).

Beyond making use of Plus+, BonusLevel does something else that is even more curious. Blockoban is actually completely free… to try. However, don’t let the term “try” fool you. The developers actually grant the user both the tutorial and a pack of 100 free, “Kickoff,” levels. Once players get a feel for the game, and are hopefully addicted, they can, through an in-app purchase, buy an additional pack of 820 levels for $1.99. Intelligently, BonusLevel also has the option to buy a $1.99 solutions pack for all the levels as well. Go figure: an in-app strategy guide.

Honestly, the only complaint that can be had with Blockoban is that it is a little slow at loading initially, but considering the vast amount of content, that is hardly a big deal. In total, there are 920 puzzles. To add more to that, each has five different difficulty levels and there is even a map generator to randomly create new puzzles. Heck, there’s even a level editor on BonusLevel’s website to submit user creations for review and a chance to be put into future level packs.

Blockoban is a wonderful free app for any iPhone or iPod Touch owner. Everything is beautifully done, and is truly designed with the user in mind. Not only does this refer to the game play usability, but even when purchasing the full version (the extra level packs). Unlike other “Lite” games intended to demo a paid game, Blockoban really does a fantastic job at showing the user what they will be paying for, rather than grant five or so minutes of play time. If you like puzzle games, with thousands of potential puzzles and Plus+ integration, Blockoban comes highly recommended.

Everyone has certainly played games such as tag or hide-and-seek, but these are games that have more or less died with our childhood. Well, the folks over at Blowfin are looking to breathe some life back into these sorts of activities by combining them with one of the internet’s most pop culture icons, ninjas, in this iPhone title aptly named Ninjahit.

Consider Ninjahit to be a combination of the two aforementioned kid’s games, mixed with a dab of paintball. Once players register on the Ninjahit website it’s time to make some hits. The concept is simple enough, take out all other players before they take you out. Using the iPhone camera, players must hunt down opponents and get a snap shot of them without getting caught. Once you get the picture, you have “ninjahit” them and can trash (“smak”) talk them from the web page and send them the image. Assuming the victim confirms the hit, they are eliminated.

Of course, this does lead to one critical issue. Already, the core mechanic of this assassination app depends an awful lot on the honor system. Luckily, players are able to rate each other letting others know just who plays by the rules and who does not. Granted, it’s not a foolproof system, but it does at least incorporate some peer pressure to play amiably.

Despite this hiccup, the concept of the game is pretty cool, and with three different games to choose from, it really does offer something that is as fun as tag, without having the rest of society frown upon you. Moreover, with each game mode having a different level of intensity there is something for every level of ninja out there.

The least intense is easily the “Face Off” mode (which is available in the free, lite version) in which it is you versus one other person. The first player to be ninjahit loses. With a time limit of a few hours, it can be kind of fun, but it really doesn’t feel like it would be something to play often. However, if you upgrade to the full, $1.99, version, you gain access to two more modes: “The Assassin” and “Me Against the World.”

In both modes, there are an unlimited number of players allowed to join and the match can last up to seven days. In Assassin, every player receives a random target of someone in the current game from the server. No one else knows who that person is, and once you assassinate them, you get the target that they had. Suffice to say, you move down the chain until you have been killed, time expires, or are the only one left.

As fun as that sounds, the best mode is probably “Me Against the World.” This is the ultimate challenge of your sneaking skills because it is one big ninja free-for-all. Everyone is an enemy, and they could be anywhere. The winner is the last man standing.

Frankly, Ninjahit is a really cool game. Unfortunately, it does have one disheartening flaw. That is that it must be played on a smart phone. Currently, it is available on the iPhone and iPod Touch and it is stated to be in beta for Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Android. While the game is cross-platform, ask yourself: How many of your friends own one of these devices? In other social games on such devices, the play is limited to two to (maybe) four players, but Ninjahit is a game that doesn’t reach its potential without a multitude of users.

Blowfin seems to realize this as you can use the iPhone’s GPS to find and join games in progress, but it feels a little awkward to track down people you’ve never met before (stalking charges anyone?). Also, would you go up to a person in the subway and yell “tag, you’re it!?” This is a similar feeling.

In the end, Ninjahit is a fun game for friends, college students, and co-workers. It’s intense, it doesn’t fill too much time (so procrastination isn’t an issue), and it gets people off their butts. That said, though, the game feels ahead of its time. It is really cool, but in most peoples’ circle of friends, those that own something like an iPhone are often a minority. Granted, these devices are slowly becoming more common, more affordable, and more mainstream, but they are not quite there yet. Until that happens, Ninjahit will, sadly, not likely reach its full potential.

Another promising game that uses the same concept — albeit making your iPhone into a gun — is Gunman, which we’ll be taking a look at soon.

The United States Congress told the Federal Trade Commission in March to study the level of access that minors in virtual worlds have to explicit content. An FTC commission released the results earlier this week, and they generally shows what you’d expect — minors are able to access some explicit content in some virtual worlds, despite various efforts by virtual world companies to stop them.

Notably, the explicit content was mostly user generated text (chats, entries on message boards, etc).

The study surveyed a “cross-section” of 27 virtual worlds, variously focused on children, teens and adults. It found “at least one instance of either sexually or violently explicit content in 19″ of them. The sites, divided between 14 child-focused virtual worlds and 13 teen and adult virtual worlds, included well-known names like Gaia Online, Habbo, IMVU, Meez, Neopets, Runescape, Vivaty, and Zynga’s YoVille. See the tables from the report, below, including May traffic and demographic stats from comScore — and note that none of these sites are nearly as large as say, Facebook, MySpace, or many of the social games that run on them.

“It is far too easy for children and young teens to access explicit content in some of these virtual worlds,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. “The time is ripe for these companies to grow up and implement better practices to protect kids.”

Here’s the list of the recommendations that the report is giving to virtual worlds:

• Ensuring that the age-screening mechanisms virtual world operators employ do not encourage underage registration;
• Implementing or strengthening age-segregation techniques to help ensure that minors and adults interact only with their peers and view only age-appropriate material;
• Re-examining the strength of language filters to ensure that such filters detect and eliminate communications that violate online virtual worlds’ conduct standards;
• Providing greater guidance to community enforcers in online virtual worlds so that they are better equipped to: self-police virtual worlds by reviewing and rating online content; report the presence of potential underage users; and comment on users who otherwise appear to be violating a world’s terms of behavior; and,
• Employing a staff of specially trained moderators whose presence is well known in- world and who are equipped to take swift action against conduct violations.

Ars Technica has a somewhat critical article about the report, highlighting the inherent difficulty in what the FTC recommends. In terms of the access issue, kids can fake being adults and adults can fake being kids. The other, even bigger problem is that most of the problematic content came from kids themselves — not adults and not the virtual worlds.

The report, despite its aggressive take on the issue, recognizes some limitations. “Given important First Amendment considerations, the Commission supports virtual world operators’ self-regulatory efforts to implement these recommendations.” It also says that kids (and their parents) are responsible for learning how to navigate sites and stay safe.

You can download the PDF of the report, here.

AppBank is a new service that lets social network users build apps and make money from them.

With thousands of apps ranging from quizzes and gifting programs, to polls and games, Facebook has become a goliath within the social space. However, even with all the social developers out there, a large portion of those apps come from the users themselves — as seen with the success of companies like LOLapps. To this end, AppBank is looking to provide a free means for those creative individuals to earn a little extra cash, per month, for their hard work using an ad-share model.

Don’t know how to program? Not really a problem because AppBank actually has an app creator for quizzes, gifts, polls, surveys, tests, and games. Furthermore, signing up includes access to guides, tutorial videos, and templates, and claims to be exceedingly simple. The only thing users seem to need to know (beyond basic computer skills such as uploading pictures or YouTube videos) is how to fill out a W9 form for tax purposes.

Financially, this platform doesn’t seem like too bad an idea either, if you find yourself with a little extra time.

With 300 million global Facebook users, one can see just how large an audience one can encompass. Of course, AppBank isn’t foolish enough to claim you can quit your job like some late night infomercial, but rather suggests it more as a supplemental form of income for things like college books or gas money. Nonetheless, the company does state that their current top earners are making around $769 a month.

Though the number is high for your average individual, it is possible for two reasons. First, AppBank’s “crowdsourcing” model matches ads more relevantly to the application being used than your normal Facebook advertisement. Second, AppBank has a very visual dashboard that can track important analytics and user information such as sex, age, and location, allowing for more precise tuning of whom your app is tailored for.

The company is also trying to patent some of the technology it used to create the service.

The prospect of Twitter as a social gaming platform is something that’s been touched on numerous times in the past, but it wasn’t until last week that that concept really felt plausible. Author of Twitter for Dummies, Laura Fitton launched a brand new platform called oneforty that will act as an actual app store for the Twitter network.

Okay, granted, Twitter does have a directory for its apps, but this is a mere list of what can be found. What makes oneforty stand out is that any user can tag, sort, and review over 1,300 different applications such as Tweetie, Bit.ly, twitterfeed, and CoTweet. Furthermore, and like a Facebook app’s splash page, each application gets its own space where users can add comments and screenshots. Sounds a lot like a wall on a Facebook Page, doesn’t it? Of course, this page needs to be managed — thus any of its developers are able to register with oneforty and “claim” an app so they can manage its page. With this new listing of games and apps already ranked and containing user reviews, the usefulness behind it is already significant. However, oneforty is dubbed an “app store,” and as such, some form of monetization is expected to be involved.

While most Twitter apps are free, there really isn’t much to monetize from them. However, if a Twitter app does have a cost, then oneforty will keep a small share of it. In addition to this, the new platform is looking to offer premium promotional locations on the site for developers. Said placement is similar to where sponsor advertisements would be placed on most web pages. Considering the increased distribution success that has stemmed from other application directories and stores containing ratings and user reviews (iPhone, Facebook, MySpace, etc.), this cost may turn out most worthwhile.

Wrought with social mechanics, rankings, and even monetization features, oneforty marks a huge step forward for Twitter as it continues to evolve into a greater space for both games and apps.

[image via VentureBeat]

A new games portal launched on Friday for all those online gaming connoisseurs. Arcade Warfare is the name, and is a platform focused around not only those that love games, but those that love to make them as well; allowing for competitive prizes and user uploads.

As it stands, the games portal hosts over 4,000 different types of games that span every type of genre and time period. Primarily Flash or Shockwave based, titles vary from 2D fighters such as “The Incredibles,” to shooters like “3D Swat.” Perhaps most interesting, Arcade Warfare contains a myriad of older, more classic titles such as Duck Hunt, Asteroids, and Contra that are mixed together with newer, web reditions of modern games such as Call of Duty 2.

The portal certainly has a nice selection of games, but if there is any one issue with it, it is that finding a game initially is rather obnoxious. All of the games are sorted by category (action, adventure, shooter, etc.), but each category can only be browsed, and so that impressive 4,000+ games now becomes a devastating hindrance.

The problem is that virtually no user is going to browse all 4,000 games. There is no way to sort them by times played, ranking, or when it was added. Thankfully, at least there is a section for “Top Rated Games” and “Newest Additions” on the home page at least. Yes, the site does have ranking systems for games, as well as user comments, but the rankings are only on the game page, so the user has to click on each game to see if other users have said if its any good. It might seem nit picky, but with thousands of games, and around 15 or so seconds needed to load the game’s page and go back, you can only look at four games in one minute, eight games in two minutes with eight, and so on. There are roughly 48 games on one page. So, that means 12 minutes to look at all of them. The company should focus on making navigation faster. For example, it could offer a thumbnailed view of dozens of games in one page. Remember, on average, websites have under one minute to interest a user (10 seconds for the initial splash page).

In terms of social features, the site is okay. Not great, but okay. The big draw is that developers can upload games, but with its distribution problems, that is more or less shot until it becomes more user friendly. There are, however, discussions forums, site statistics, and the aforementioned comments, but none of these really stand out. Frankly, it is the friends lists and ability to earn points and win prizes that is most interesting. Even still, the former is highly unintuitive compared to something like Facebook (in the game, you friend directly from their profile pages, it seems). While you can see what games they’ve played, it is only on their profile and not in a visible location like a news feed would be. As for the latter, points and prizes: The points are earned from playing games, but at the moment no prizes seem to be available (of course, that’s probably due to it just being released a few days ago).

Overall, Arcade Warfare has a fantastic selection of games that would appeal to a very wide range of individuals. Unfortunately, it’s just too hard to find the good ones. Nonetheless, if the usability issues in question can be fixed, then this games portal could very well take off.