Inside Social Games

Everyone wants to be successful. Everyone has dreams of making it big one day… well, at least most do. Of course, the opportunities to do so are not always accessible or easy to come by. Sometimes they conceal themselves, and sadly, sometimes the right opportunity never arises in the first place, but this desire for success is what has driven the motivation behind most tycoon-style games.

You have seen them before: They are games that simulate some form of business in which you start out small and have build up your company or companies to profitable super-corporations. These games exist in all shapes and sizes, but for those people that wish for something in the more social and free-to-play space, then Mogul is something to check out.

The game is pretty simple: You start out with $100,000, purchase a franchise, and every hour your it earns you a salary. Once you have purchased a franchise, that’s when the actual game begins and decisions need to be made.

Four times a day, you have to deal with what is called the “To Do List,” in which you are presented with problems and business opportunities that must be resolved before it begins to affect your hourly income. Based on your answer, you receive a generated result that then affects your finances and businesses. Once you have sorted out the critical decisions, it’s time to take care of other financial burdens and opportunities.

Mogul integrates the ability to promote your holdings frequently in order to keep your business ratings, and, in turn, your hourly salary high. Furthermore, the game calls for the organization of stocked inventory and pay roll in order to keep things running smoothly as well as the ability to buy and sell various franchises.

If this sounds like a lot, don’t worry: The game includes a nice social addition for you and your friends. If it turns out that you need the help, you can recruit your friends on Facebook as partners. Once you have partners, you can then team up to purchase bigger and better businesses that “require” (new franchises have a partner requirement of one or more in many situations) more than just you to run. Nevertheless, even without partners, the game is very simple to understand as the choices you have to make are very self explanatory.

Of course, by no means is the game perfect. It is rather bland looking and could benefit from some graphical facelifts. The game is very pen and paper’ish, but if you are a fan of these kind of games, the look will hardly bother you. Other than that, the only issue is the upkeep inconsistency as it pertains to player input. The “To Do” items appear at four times a day, the business ratings players gain via promotions decrease hourly, and inventory and pay roll are daily. In order to make the most of your business, you need to check back regularly (hourly for maximum income) throughout the day in order to maximize your earnings.

With games such as Mogul, most people would normally log on for a little bit to make some changes, some decisions, check up on their success, and then come back the next day or so. However, if some issues are not resolved (such as pay roll), you do not receive any earnings until they are. This is mitigated a bit once the player gets into a sort of routine, but the idea of losing something (in this case potential profits) for not checking back constantly has a negative impact for some players. Granted, you don’t actually “loose” anything, you just earn more slowly, but the fact that anything decays can be misconstrued as such.

Nevertheless, Mogul is still an interesting game to check out if you are into either pen and paper style games or tycoon-based games. Moreover, the partner system adds a nice social feature to the application that creates some quality depth to the game’s potential.

Mogul may look a little plain, but the content is good and it’s quite easy to catch on and learn. It’ss just like mom and dad used to say: “Never judge a book by its cover.”

Dating - it’s something everyone feels they need to do, but there are so many that don’t have the time to really go out and meet people, or maybe they don’t know how, or maybe they are not confident enough. Regardless of the personal reason, the evolution of dating and flirting online has evolved by leaps and bounds due to the nature of web anonymity. However, this is not limited to simply dating sites, but many dating games and simulations as well.

In Japan, dating sims have become extraordinarily popular in their fast paced and technological culture, and like so many times before, that popularity has migrated to the United States as well. One such example of an Americanized sim is AvaPeeps FlirtNation by Digital Chocolate.

The game begins with the creation of your own personal paper doll style avatar as you customize his or her look to reflect your own. Once your avatar is created and you have registered a name, the game takes you on an immediate “first date” which is basically a tutorial level. The way it works, is you answer a few questions about what to “do” on the date, and based on the answers your “date” provides, determines how well it goes.

Of course, after the initial tutorial date, you have to go out on your own and customize your profile. In your profile you can change your clothes, your personality traits, and even select some theme music to go with your personality. Then it’s time to make the scene, as you spend AvaChips to visit various clubs, beaches, and other locations in order to meet and flirt with new people. If you successfully flirt with them, you can go out together on virtual dates (like the tutorial date) as well as send messages back and forth to each other in the hopes that a real relationship and/or friendship develops.

Currently, the game is still in its beta stages, but even now the numbers seem promising. Paul Abbassi, CTO of Digital Chocolate reports that of the initial 10,000 users, more than 25% are playing everyday, and over 10% are actively participating in the beta by sending feedback to help further improve the experience.

What is most interesting, however, is that AvaPeeps was originally a mobile game that migrated to the web space (rather than the other way around). That said, you are also capable of playing the game using T-Mobile, BOOST, Virgin, or Three (in the UK). Mobile games isn’t particularly unusual, but in this case, the game has been tied to the web version as well, allowing players to interact with each other in real time, from anywhere, regardless of whether or not they are using the web or a mobile device. And people are using this method as well: According to Abbassi, “since 2007, almost 2% of BOOST’s 4 million users have played AvaPeeps.”

Since the game is still in beta, it is still evolving as the developers receive more feedback from its users. As such, it is expected that the game will begin to incorporate more and more social gaming features native to the web space such as an avatar-goods economy. Furthermore, it is also stated by Abbassi, that AvaPeeps will also be available, in the future, for Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, and other major social networks. So far, AvaPeeps looks quite promising and the final product should be even better.

Challenge Games may be known for its Duels and Baseball Boss social games on the web - but this US election day, the company is invading the Facebook Platform.

Nobility is a new Facebook game from Challenge Games that brings the user into a medieval world - not from the perspective of the a dragon slaying hero, but rather as a noble of the royal court.

Kings and Queens, Knights and Ladies

The middle ages were a time that has fascinated minds for centuries with its almost romantic visions of heroism, chivalry, and gallantry. This compelling allure has been the inspiration behind thousands of stories that stretch from the freedom of William Wallace to the legend of King Arthur. However, it is now, with the evolution of social games that these stories can now be lived with your Facebook friends.

The game is a slow-paced (think chess speed) strategy game in which the player begins at the lowest nobility rank of “Knight” or “Lady.” The core element of the game is to work your way up to “Emperor/Empress” by recruiting vassals for your court. These vassals, however, are not some group of NPCs, but are in fact real people with the same goals as you in game, each with a rank of their own. Each rank adds more points towards your own should you manage to recruit someone, thus if you managed to recruit someone at the rank of Duke, they would be worth more than someone at the rank of Knight. Furthermore, each on of their vassals adds to your nobility standing in a pyramid like structure

Strategy & Mechanics

With the basics understood, the strategy elements now come into play. There are a finite amount of players at any given time (especially if you only play with a specific group of people), and as such players must compete for vassals. Furthermore, each of these vassals costs a certain amount of “influence” (the primary currency in Nobility) which will vary based on their rank and who they currently “serve” (whomever previously recruited them).

So why does whom they serve matter? Well, influence can also purchase gifts, defensive, and offensive items. These items can make it more difficult for other players to recruit your vassals in any number of ways, and different players will utilize different strategies in order to win. An offensive player, for example, could purchase a trebuchet (a medieval siege weapon) and attack enemy players directly in and attempt to decrease the amount of influence they have, or they could hire an assassin that would destroy their defensive items (defensive items can reduce influence of an attacker or increase the recruitment cost of your vassals). Or if a player is more passive, they could also choose to purchase gifts for their vassals, thus increasing their influence or recruitment cost.

Conclusion

At first glance, Nobility doesn’t look overly complex. However, once one gets into the game and begins to see all of the strategic and tactical possibilities, the game quickly becomes much deeper and more interesting. Above all, Challenge Games has done a tremendous job of creating a game that is very easy to learn, but difficult to master. With so many different possible strategies, this game is constantly going to evolve and change as players learn new tricks and “dirty” tactics as they vie for dominance. For anyone with a love of strategy games, Nobility is most certainly worth checking out.

The space of social gaming is constantly changing and evolving. New games come, old games go, and a few remain at the top. However, as social games reach new players on new platforms, the numbers for these games changes rather frequently.

Below are the Top 10 MySpace games by players gained over the last month for November 2, 2008.

10. YoVille - Gained 415,271 Players
This Sims style game made quite a leap this month. The game puts you in a virtual town called YoVille in which the player uses their custom made avatar to interact, live, and play with different players from all over the country.

Like in The Sims, players can collect and earn various items to decorate their house, their avatar, and overall digitally represent who they really are. With such a wide variety of things to do, and game play that is saturated with social interactivity, it is no surprise that the player base is still growing.

9. Special Forces - Gained 424,694 Players
Previously not even in the Top 25, Special Forces came by surprise. This Zynga app may be your typical social network RPG, but the premise definitely has players interested. In this game, players get to “sneak” around fighting other spy operations around the world by completing missions given to them, thus giving this genre a flavor of modern espionage warfare.

8. SuperPoke Pets - Gained 550,693 Players
Never underestimate the power of “cuteness.” SuperPoke Pets takes the prospect of caring for pets and raising them to a whole new level. By creating characters this cute, the developers definitely focused on those protective instincts everyone has deep down inside them.

These virtual pets are truly your own, as you care for them and watch them grow. Of course, no matter how big they get, they still remain just as cute, and apparently this cuteness earns SuperPoke Pets the spot at #8.

7. Vampires - Gained 557,036 Players
The dark side is gaining strength as well over 500,000 players drank the blood of their enemies this month. Yet another RPG style game set in another premise. The difference with this game of the night, is that it really encourages the formation of vampire clans, and rather than giving players items to buy, they let them earn supernatural abilities to hunt down their pray, thus deepening the suspension of disbelief (or at least as much as can be done in this style game).

Granted, if you break it down, the game is still the same as other RPGs. Blood is just money, and fangs are just guns, but 557, 036 new people seem to prefer it and have joined the ranks of those who go bump in the night.

6. Super Pets - Gained 737,558 Players
Yet another example of the power of “cute.” Like SuperPoke Pets, players can adopt themselves a pet to watch it grow. Okay, so their not quite as cute (for the record, the jury is still out on this one) as SuperPoke, but with so many various accessories in which to spoil your pet rotten with, and (dare it be said) make it cuter…. Well, as you can see it’s working.

5. Gang Wars - Gained 785,703 Players
This month’s #16 game has certainly gained some recognition with the fifth largest gain in popularity. Another RPG by Zynga; only now you find yourself fighting on the streets in, well, gang wars. Like the others, this title lets you form up a gang with your friends and take the streets by storm. Loot, pillage, and fight in this modern style RPG.

4. Street Racing - Gained 1,061,218 Players
It was a huge surprise to see Street Racing hit the #4 spot with over a million new players added this month. It’s another Zynga RPG, but it is amazing how it could gain so many new people. The game definitely appeals to the male audience with the beautiful and fast cars, but that’s not the only possible reason for improvement.

There’s also a lot more to this game than some of the previous titles. Unlike the others that were generally limited to buying new stuff, doing missions, forming groups, and battle, this game actually includes all of this plus other features such as bounty hunting, direct challenges, a banking system, and even more ways to determine winning a race (not just the car, but you have to improve driving skills as well).

3. Mafia Wars - Gained 1,163,160 Players
People do like to be bad. Mafia Wars is very similar to Gang Wars in most respects, so it is difficult to really derive major reasons for greater growth. What it really probably comes down to is that this game has been in the top two on MySpace for a while now, while Gang Wars has been more “under the radar.” The increased “visibility,” as it were, is most likely the major cause of its increased growth.

2. Mobsters - Gained 1,311,083 Players
The #1 game on MySpace this month, comes in at #2 for the largest player gain. Again, this game most likely beats out the similar titles do to its all ready existing popularity as the game play is very similar. Of course, with phenomenal movies such as The Godfather and Goodfellas, people do tend to see the “Mob” as more sophisticated than your every day crime. This perception is probably a big factor in the immersive appeal of this game.

1. Texas HoldEm Poker - Gained 1,875,619 Players
With a staggering 1, 875, 619 new players, Texas HoldEm takes this simple game to new heights. Okay, so they don’t have fancy graphics, tons of rules, or anything really different from the actual game of poker. But maybe that’s the catch? Poker is about playing the game with other people, and as one of the few games that lets people play simultaneously in real-time, that is easily the biggest contributor to why this game is so popular.

For a long time now, (Lil) Green Patch has been the number one game on Facebook, and from the success of this application has come the next iteration known as (Lil) Blue Cove. However, (Lil) Blue Cover purports to be more than just a game: every game play generated revenue that is donated towards saving our rainforests. The most recent donation went to the “Adopt an Acre” program of the Nature Conservancy.

The game itself is similar enough to its predecessor. Players start with their own little patch, well in this case a cove, in which to place all their fish and decorations. Every day, various tasks need to be done in order to keep your cove clean and safe, and you can use the money you earn (”Greenbucks”) to purchase various decorations, tools, grab bags for special rewards, and themes for your “(Lil) Blue Cove.”

Of course, as this is a Facebook application, it has to have its social benefits, and like (Lil) Green Patch, you are capable of sending fish and gifts to your friends to use in their game. In fact, you can even “visit” their cove and take care of some of the problems there (i.e. a bird is going to eat their fish, use some bread to distract it). While this sounds simple, the real beauty of it is that players can actually measure the amount they are helping the world’s rainforests.

Here, sending fish is not merely a game mechanic. For every 10 friends that receive a fish, you effectively save one square foot of rain forest from deforestation. Granted, one square foot doesn’t exactly seem like a lot, but one has to consider the huge number of people playing this game.

The growth charts for (Lil) Blue Cove has shown that in the few weeks that it has been available to the public, this game has grown from 0 to nearly 800,000 players. Perhaps, part of this is because both (Lil) Green Patch and (Lil) Blue Cove are linked to each other from within each respective game, and that players can switch back and forth between them whenever they wish. There is no denying that fans of such a popular game would not at least try a new title by the same developers. However, the cause behind it has to help a great deal too.

In this day in age where “going green” is such a huge deal in the world, there is no doubt that any opportunity for someone to help out would have a large impact. And with the vast accessibility of Facebook, (Lil) Blue Cove is a great method to reach out and help the environment.

The method is definitely working too. All ready, the community for this game has effectively saved 59,098,167 square feet of rainforests. If this is what can be accomplished in just a few weeks, imagine what the next couple months will bring. It’s about saving our world, and if playing a game will help do it, then so be it. After all… it is the only Earth we’ve got.

By their very nature, sports are meant to be social outlets for people. The spirit of competition and teamwork brings people together as one unit and through this, social bonds are established.

Such friendships have spread to the virtual world as well. There, people compete with each other in any number of game genres: Be it through cooperative, head-to-head, or tournament based play, this competition creates both rivals and friends alike.

This is the mark of a truly strong game. The social features that bring people together in competition is what makes any game, but especially a social game, worth playing. There have been many games on Facebook in which a social premise seemed lacking, but in the spirit of competition, Tennis Mania serves an ace.

At first glance, Tennis Mania looks like your standard pen and paper Facebook RPG. You start out with limited money and energy, and as you do various tasks, it drains away. You start with level one skills (backhand, forehand, footwork, and serve) and have to spend money to train them to the next level. As one might suspect, each level costs more money than the last to train in.

In order to use up energy, the player has to play tennis matches. The key word here is play. When the player chooses to start a match they can either play against their friends or choose to play against a random player (in which the computer seems to pair you up with similarly skilled people). Once you have your opponent, you have two options: Option “A” is your typical RPG option where you see both player’s stats and can “Simulate a Match.” The match is “played” and you see your result. Option “B” is where you actually play in a Flash powered game against a simulated version of your friends.

The computer plays with all the stats of your friends, and while it takes a while to get used to, quickly becomes a great deal of fun. Granted it is not quite the same as playing your friends themselves, but it is an entertaining representation of them. Of course, if you loose you may feel a bit silly, but if you win you will earn a small some of cash to spend on more training.

As would normally be expected, the game also provides other social features such as the options to issue and accept challenges from other players (you can challenge specific people or leave them open to the public). This incorporates large cash sum bets on each of the matches that can either break you or quickly make you very rich depending on your skill level, thus adding a whole new level of depth to the game that keeps players eager for new challenges.

By all means, if you haven’t given Tennis Mania a try, you certainly should. It has a number of the familiar choices that a typical Facebook RPG has, but beyond that, it offers a greater level of depth to the social and competitive nature of sports style games. The added Flash game that allows you to play virtual versions of your friends provides a tremendous amount of fun that lasts significantly longer than most Facebook RPGs and the challenge system keeps a steady stream of new goals flowing for the veteran players. This is not an app to fault on: Tennis Mania is certainly a game worth noticing.

Just in time for the World Series, Social Gaming Network has released the its 3^rd Wii-like sports title for Apple’s iPhone. Of course, considering that there have been well over 2 million downloads for iGolf and iBowl, it’s not entirely unexpected that SGN would pursue more titles in the family.

As with SGN’s other iPhone titles, iBaseball uses the built in accelerometer as the primary input control for the game. You start by pitching either fastballs or curveballs in an attempt to strike out three batters. As you might expect, you play by actually “pitching” your iPhone, and the accelerometer picks up on the speed and angle of your arm. Furthermore, the game tends to enhance each of your pitches to more “professional” speeds that average over 100 mph, so you don’t have to worry too much about hurling your phone through a window (assuming you haven’t all ready).

After you have struck out the three batters, it is your turn to bat. The batting is simple enough as you just watch the ball come down the plate and swing at the appropriate time. If you manage to connect, you will hit the ball into ground-ball, pop-fly, or line drive and based on the timing of your swing, you will either knock the ball fair or foul.

The game also allows you to challenge your friends, but as with the other titles, the challenges are asynchronous. According to CEO, Shervin Pishevar, however, head-to-head play will be coming soon.

With the development of this 3^rd Wii-like title, there has been a little bit of interesting debate about SGN’s series of sports games for the iPhone. While a large number of people do enjoy the games, more and more are beginning to request deeper game play that provides more than a few minutes of entertainment, as the initial novelty is beginning to incur some diminishing returns.

Now with three titles, a number of people are hoping to soon see improvements to each of these titles as far as competition, smoother controls, and more in depth game play (check out the touchArcade forums for some of the latest banter). Of course, at the same time, people are still hoping to see new titles as well.

Considering SGN’s track record for quality games, it is unlikely that these concerns will be ignored. Multiple improvements, as well as new games, are no doubt on the way (some are already known for sure), and with these three games serving as the backbone for SGN titles on the iPhone, the quality of new applications or even iterations of old ones is bound to be outstanding.

All that is needed now is one of those Wii-Mote rubber sleeves for the iPhone….

Top social game developer Playfish announced today that it has raised a $17 million round of financing from Accel Partners and Index Ventures. Along with Zynga and SGN, Playfish becomes the third social game developer to have raised over $20 million for the creation of a new wave of social games.

Playfish will use the money to build out its game studios around the world.  It already has offices in San Francisco, Beijing, and Norway.

As we noted last week, Playfish sports 4 of the top 10 applications on Facebook. Collectively, the company has over 10 million monthly active users on Facebook alone, though it will be moving onto other platforms soon. Playfish released its first games on MySpace in recent weeks.

“Social gaming is a significant evolution in gaming and is in some ways a return to the roots of games,” says Playfish CEO Kristian Segerstrale. “Our games are designed around social emotions – people play our games with the same people that they would play cards, play board games or go bowling with in the real world. Sharing the game experience with friends makes it more compelling and fun and results in more play time, viral distribution and better monetization potential over time.”

With the investment, Kevin Comolli from Accel Partners and Ben Holmes from Index Ventures will both join Playfish’s board of directors. Congratulations to the Playfish team for bringing more top tier investors on board.

Over time, our expectations for new games has evolved exponentially. In the beginning, it was thought that blinking pixels on a screen were the pinnacle of graphical capabilities and presentation, but as the game development industry grew beyond a garage hobby and the technology began to flourish, the graphical expectations of new titles began to rise as well.

A similar trend is happening with social games on Facebook. At first, games looked simple (and many still do). They were point and click games that most consisted of RPGs and sending gifts to friends. However, as time passed, these games followed a path similar to that of their mainstream counterparts. Now social games are beginning to incorporate cleaner graphics, stylized presentation, and fitting sound effects that once seemed home only on other platforms.

Below are the Top 10 best looking Facebook Games. Please note that this list is purely subjective, and by all means feel free to leave your opinions in the comments.

10. Bubble Town - I-play

Bubble Town is certainly one of the older games on Facebook, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve a spot on this list. The game is a simple puzzle game app in which the player shoots little bubble people at their counterparts in an attempt to clear the board before time expires.

What makes this game better looking than others, however, is not only the clean graphics, but the style incorporated with the bubble people: They fall asleep, yawn if you don’t hit them, and generally respond to what is happening around them. These are not “necessary” features, but the added style makes it stand out amongst the crowd.

9. Tennis Mania - Viral, s.r.o.

This may look like a typical Facebook RPG, but it is in fact much more than that. Yes, the RPG element is very clean and good looking, but so are a lot of other RPGs out there. What catches the eye most in Tennis Mania is the actually tennis game you can play when matched up against your friends.

This minor Flash application built into the main game adds a great deal of style to the entirety of the game and the added effort really goes a long way in improving the game as a whole.

8. KickMania! - TheBroth

Okay, graphically this game is decent. However, it isn’t simply the graphics that earn KickMania! the #8 spot. In fact, a lot of the game outside the actual kicking part is rather bland. What stands out with this app is the actual act of kicking. The rag-doll animation used when you kick your friends through the air is one of the most entertaining things to watch as they flail about, crashing through walls and across explosives. This impressive and gratifying animation earns KickMania! a solid spot on this list.

7. Stack’em - Gogogic

Simple and clean graphics: This means a lot in any game, but for Stack’em it’s the animation and comedic style that really adds to the game’s look and feel. Dropping those sheep is truly amusing to watch as they flail about helplessly and bounce about the stack as you drop them from the hands of a stylized farmer.

Not only do the sheep facial animations bring value to the table, but the sound effects and music really add a great satirical feel to the whole package.

6. Bowling Buddies - Playfish

One of Playfish’s older titles, Bowling Buddies brings clean 3D looking graphics to Facebook. What probably stands out most, however, is the stylized, almost caricature-like avatars meant to represent the player.

Granted there are better looking games out there, technically, but Playfish really encompasses an overall style and feel to this game. Everything fits and feels so colorful and animated. Even with the older looking graphics, that style really stands out in a crowd.

5. Who Has The Biggest Brain? - Playfish

These very simple cell shaded graphics go a long way in showing what can be done with flat, 2D artwork. Everything in the game has this sort of “game-show” type of feel to it that can truly be appreciated. The animations are smooth, the game is bright and cheerful, and the sound effects perfectly tie everything together.

4. YoVille - Zynga

This avatar game looks great with its isometric view and interactive environment. Because of the choice of perspective, and the time taken on the visual look, the game feels more like a desktop game than a Facebook application.

Also, with all the decorations and items you can collect and use in your virtual home, Zynga really had to put in a great deal of effort to make it all fit together fluidly. Its almost feels like an online Flash version of The Sims. Regardless, it looks great.

3. GeoChallenge - Playfish

This game is basically Who Has The Biggest Brain?, but with a newer and slightly better look. With the number of moving parts and characters, this game really feels like a bustling airport (or at least as much as a 2D Flash airport can bustle). Also, the characters are all wonderfully designed, and really create a silhouette image that you can remember long after you’ve finished the game (that’s not to say that other Playfish characters don’t stand out, this one just has more).

Of course, there is also the fact that the mini games are all highly stylized and animated. Nothing is static and everything feels alive and moving. As was said earlier in this list, this is a style choice that isn’t necessarily needed for a game, but it really makes it much better.

2. Space Movers: The Bloom Initiative - SGN

Space Movers: The Bloom Initiative was made in conjunction with the Arbor Day Foundation. It’s bright and colorful artwork, combined with multiple moving parts, memorable characters that have their own unique personality that is shown through their animations, as well as perfectly suited sounds and music truly puts this Facebook title on bar with any desktop game.

1. Lucky Strike Bowling - Large Animal Games

By far one of the most beautiful games on Facebook. This bowling game, while simple truly raises the bar on the capabilities of this space. This title easily compares with any desktop game. The graphics are a beautiful 3D rendering and the game play is filled with dynamic camera angles and perspectives.

The game also incorporates a great sense of lighting and sound that really creates the feel of a living, breathing, bowling alley. If for nothing else, it is worth checking out just to see what can be done.

This is a guest post by Andrew Chen, reprinted from his blog. For more great articles by Andrew on games, product analytics, and viral marketing, check out his blog here.

Found on YouTube: Mario and Luigi’s insightful commentary on MySpace top friends

Cultural differences are always interesting!
I got interested in the games world first as a consumer of video games, but after I worked on an unsuccessful project to monetize MySpace using ads, I got interested in the monetization potential of virtual items in social products. For the last 2 years, I’ve been wandering around on the edges of the games industry to try to cross-pollinate some of the best ideas with what I knew from the web world.

Early on, after attending the Game Developer Conference and speaking with folks from many of the top publishers and studios, it became clear that there were lots of interesting cultural differences between web folks and games folks. I wrote some of these points down a while back and I thought I’d share them.

I want to caveat that these are purely anecdotal and my own experiences, and I’m sure that I’m overgeneralizing I also think that people that come from the casual games world (and in particular flash games) are much more similar to web entrepreneurs - the aliens I talk about are mostly big packaged games people. So please share your opinions in the comments if you disagree or have another perspective.

But here are the major ones:

1. Eyeball worship vs. Game genre worship
2. Distribution vs. Content
3. Utility vs. Experience
4. Open vs. Content gating

Let’s drill into each of these…

Eyeball worship vs. Game genre worship
First off, one of the big surprises for me was that many of the folks working at big games companies like EA have a very specific type of game they want to work on. Many of the folks I talked to wanted to make so-called “hardcore games” - very rich, deep, FPS/RTS/RPG/etc packaged games that sell at Walmart, and were completely uninterested in anything else.

While I excited about building simple Web-distributed games that could be played by millions of people, for many of these folks, if it didn’t look like a game, didn’t have monsters and guns, it was uninteresting. In fact, there was a pretty derisive view of folks who make so-called casual games as lower in the food chain.

This reminds me of a project I worked on a long time ago in the video space, pre-YouTube. I had interviewed a bunch of art students at Unviersity of Washington to talk to them about publishing their videos online, and they were very uninterested. For these art students, they had such a romantic sense of what it would be like to show your work in a theater, at Cannes, that the idea of millions of people watching a 400×415 pixel player seemed completely uninteresting. Perhaps the hardcore games folks I talked to felt the same way about their work.

The analogous concept in the web world is probably that a lot of entrepreneurs only want to work on “cool” startups involving fancy technology. They are less likely to think along the edges for products targeted at different (possibly more mainstream demographics). I also think that web folks get more excited about the eyeballs factor than anything else. The more simple, stupid, and widely used something is, the better!

Distribution vs. Content
Another interesting difference was the perspectives around content. For many of the games people I met, the content is everything. How good your game is perceived to dictate its ultimate success. I think this makes sense in an industry where distribution is essentially commoditized! The big publishers have many of the same relationships, and games developers in general have been outsourcing their distribution expertise out to the publishers for the past couple decades. As a result, it seems clear that the only place to compete is in the content of the game, rather than in the distribution.

Compare this to the web entrepreneurs who have to deal with the constantly changing landscape of distribution. Many of the top Facebook apps were simpler, dumber, and better distributed than their competition, and distribution in itself can be a competitive advantage. Eric Ries recently wrote about the distribution techniques that have recently been found for the iPhone App Store - these techniques include a primitive version of SEO via the App Store search function, as well as folks who constantly release updates to their app to try to get on the New and Hot list.

And of course, ad networks, affiliates, and leadgen companies represent the logical extreme in the distribution equation. Because they are selling other peoples’ products, they focus exclusively on distribution and differentitation via novel techniques and analytics.

It’s clear that both communities have a lot to learn from each other on this one, but because of the fact that distribution is extraordinarily important in the new social network ecosystem, I think this is why we’ve seen the top games coming from Web teams rather than Games teams. (With the possible exception of Playfish!)

Utility vs. Storytelling experience
One of my favorite cultural differences is the way web folks think about the role of their products in peoples’ lives. There’s often talk about making your product as “useful” as possible, or “social utility.” In the world of utility, oftentimes the main factors that are discussed involve terms like:

• pain points
• efficiency
• productivity
• ROI
• maximizing
• etc

These terms are great, and the world is better off for having products that make us all better worker bees!

Compare this to many games discussions, like the ones I sat through at GDC, which involved concepts like:

• characters
• plots and storytelling
• mood
• music
• fun
• etc

Now, I think that the productivity-inclined have their claim to the world, as does the fun/entertainment games people. But the intersection of this, in web media, is where the fun happens. For example, is the fact that Facebook has such an efficient newsfeed system a good thing, or a bad thing? I think it depends on whether or not you feel like the process of exploring peoples’ profiles and clicking through things as a good thing or not? In the MySpace world, given the degree of customization, you might argue that it’s more game-like in the way that it encourages people to click around and explore, whereas Facebook is clearly more efficiency-oriented.

Both approaches have their advantages, of course - and there are times where I use Facebook as a utility and times when I’m using it for time-wasting. The tradeoff between the two approaches are definitely interested to think about as your product is being constructed.

Open vs. Content gating
Related to the efficiency versus experience distinction, web products are very likely to make things very open and give the users all the features upfront. It’s very rare that you constrain what the user can do, and as a result, there’s no concept of leveling or grinding. As a result, oftentimes the experience that you get at the beginning is the same as the experience you have later on.

Games, on the other hand, have a clear concept of advancement and otherwise “content gating” their users. By withholding levels, powerups, weapons, trophies, etc., it creates motivation from the user to keep on playing. They say, “just… one… more… game…!!”

The Wikipedia article on this is instructive:

The most common form of level treadmill is the practice of killing monsters for experience points. The player constantly chases after the next level in order to be able to defeat the next slightly stronger monster. The outcome of MMORPG combat tends to depend more on the character’s numerical statistics than the player’s skill. Thus there is usually little for a player to do beyond clicking an attack button until he or she wins, or is forced to flee when nearing death. So whether fighting small rats or large demons, the player is performing essentially the same actions, the only difference being the larger numbers in his or her character and the monster’s attributes. In the eyes of players, the player is essentially running forward while going nowhere, as on an exercise treadmill.

As a result of this treadmill, there is a constant pressure for players to stay engaged and retained as customers. But the flipside of this is that it’s not enough to build one product - instead you build 70 product variations, and call each one a level!

Other observations?
I’d love to hear other thoughts on this issue, and any places where I’m overgeneralizing Comment away!